dwutygodnik - strona kultury

BY Irena Grudzińska-Gross

A very close friend of mine needed a poem to include in her blessing at the wedding of her daughter.  The bride grew up bilingual so my friend wanted a poem written in Polish, but with an English language version

In contemporary American customs poetry is a solemn addition to the ceremonies accompanying turning points of life, especially weddings and memorial services.  Friends and relations write odes and epithalamiums (wedding poems), but also borrow those already written, making their words fresher by using the old ones.  Poetry is a sign of certain loftiness, of language marking extraordinariness of the situation it adorns. A poem says: this occasion is not prosaic. And there is a lot of good poetry around, a lot of felicitous expressions asking to be reused. But these words need to be custom-fitted. It is the speaker who needs to find them congenial to her own speech pattern or temperature of feelings.

A very close friend of mine needed a poem to include in her blessing at the wedding of her daughter.  The bride grew up bilingual – Polish/English – so my friend wanted a poem written in Polish, but with an English language version as the wedding ceremony took place in Manhattan and the overwhelming majority of guests (a great many of them Tamil, some from India, some from Malaysia) would not know the language of the original. It was an emergency, and she appealed to me, a poetry fan. I did find some very good Polish epithalamiums, though Polish poets only rarely write about or for happy marriages. But there are two contemporary Polish poets for whose poetry I immediately reached, because they write love poetry about their wives: Adam Zagajewski and Stanisław Barańczak. (In order not to sound like a naïve reader, I should say: two poets whose “poetic addressees” seem to be their wives.) There is an especially beautiful wedding poem (dedicated to some friends) written not long ago by Adam Zagajewski. It was excellently translated into English by Clare Cavanagh, and one part of it said, very fittingly for the occasion:

Only in marriage do love and time,
eternal enemies, join forces.
Only love and time, when reconciled,
permit us to see other beings
in their enigmatic, complex essence,
unfolding slowly and certainly, like a new settlement
in a valley or among green hills.

The mother of the bride loved that poem, but she is a highly specialised and sophisticated statistician, and, among poems proposed by me, she found Stanislaw Barańczak’s Probablitistic madrigal the most congenial. It is not a wedding poem, but a great love poem written with a typical Barańczakian combination of playfulness and lyricism. The problem was that we could not find its English language version. Under duress, I translated some lines of it, and the statistician mother-of-the-bride found them satisfying. She included these lines into her blessing and read them in both languages at the wedding ceremony. It was not the only poem read then, but it was the only one related to the profession of the speaker – it expressed the great luck one has in the statistically unlikely meeting of that perfect person you want to spend your life with. Here are the relevant parts:

And chances were like a quadrillion to one
That places would be different and nothing done;
That you would live here but in a future era
Or you live now not here but in Canberra.

And chances were like a quadrillion to one,
That times will be different and nothing done;
That you lived close but in a former era,
Or you live now but in Peru or Canberra.