The Faces of Natalia Gorbaniewska. Part 3

Encounters with Polish Poetry – with Miłosz at the Centre

Abstract

The Faces of Natalia Gorbaniewska. Part 3: Encounters with Polish Poetry – with Miłosz at the Centre

This article is the third part of a planned four-part series devoted to Natalia Gorbanevskaya – a human rights activist in Brezhnev’s USSR, journalist, poet and translator of belles-lettres, in particular Polish poetry and prose. This text attempts to describe, analyze and partially evaluate her achievements in the field of Polish poetry translation, carried out from 1973, while still in the Soviet Union, until the last months of her life in exile in Paris in November 2013. Undoubtedly, Gorbanevskaya’s most important translation achievement – not only in terms of the reception of Polish literature, but in her entire translation oeuvre – was the translation and publication of Czesław Miłosz’s Poetic Treatise in the United States in 1982. Her last translations, published posthumously in the Moscow Novy Mir monthly in December 2013, also included works by Miłosz – this time poems from the volume Wiersze ostatnie [Last Poems]. The work of the author of Poetic Treatise thus occupies a central place in Gorbaniewska’s translation activity. At the same time, Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński’s poetry played an important role in her career as a translator, marking the beginning of her forty years of consistent work on translating Polish poetry. During her mature life, working in Moscow, Paris and partly in New York – with the support of Josif Brodsky, among others – she translated the works of almost thirty Polish poets, including Czesław Miłosz, Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Kazimierz Wierzyński, Wisława Szymborska, Wiktor Woroszylski, Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz, Zbigniew Herbert, Stanisław Barańczak, Ryszard Krynicki, Jerzy Ficowski, Kazimierz Wierzyński, Jacek Kaczmarski, Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki, and Adam Zagajewski.

Natalia Gorbaniewska collected her translations of Polish poetry in the anthology “I Then Fell in Love with These Foreign Poems…” (2006), which contains both her translations and the original versions of the works, as well as in the fundamental collection My Miłosz (2012), which includes poems by the Polish Nobel Prize winner in her translations into Russian. The aforementioned article can be treated not only – as in this context – as a fragment of a biographical narrative, but also as an introduction to a systematic description and analysis of Natalia Gorbaniewska’s lyrical work, which has so far been relatively rarely undertaken in literary studies, despite its undoubted scale, originality and significance.