My mother awards herself credit for what she terms my "artistic bent"—at this point, a nice way to describe my toolbox of personality disorders. For letting me, as a toddler, wallow in piles of books while she sat before her easel in City Park. For being moral and sophisticated enough to ban "Little Black Sambo" from my bedtime reading. For subscribing to Highlights and helping me write my first published work, a letter to the creators of the "Doctor Fate and Hourman" comic books (which, now that I think about it, was a letter of complaint—one might say I've been working toward this moment all my life). The "artist" in me, she's always claimed, descends from my Desforge roots—is derived exclusively from the sap from her family tree. All I inherited from the Ford né Gniech side, according to Miss Willa, was my nappy hair and my inexplicable love of consonants.
As with most matters, she's wrong. My father didn't read for pleasure—nothing about English provided him pleasure, and Polish lit was nearly impossible to come by in New Orleans—but in his mind was a storehouse of remembered Polish verse: Mickiewicz, Witwicki, Slowacki, all the nineteenth-century Romantics. On nights when my mother was "away" (hospitalized, primarily, or taking night-school classes in Japanese pen-and-ink drawing or Advanced Bridge, or communing with her revolving cast of "best" friends who would invariably "turn" on her), he would lie next to me at bedtime and recite reams of lilting, beautifully incomprehensible poems: Gdybym ja byla słonecykiem na niebe, Nie świecilabzm, jak tzlko dla ciebie. For me, it was lingual white noise, those Polish consonant endings like evanescent static, whispers of shhh, the rise and fall of octosyllabic verses rocking me to sleep as pitching seas lull a sailor. Perhaps he felt he had nothing else to give me—he could no more decipher a volume of Uncle Remus than he could a Greek bible—or perhaps (my preference) he relished those sparse and covert moments when he could speak his mother tongue freely, and could share it with me. Miss Willa, convinced he was lamenting his life with her whenever he spoke Polish, and piercingly ashamed of his Polack origins, forbade his speaking it in the house. By this time he had quit his exterminator job and was working at an automotive shop on Poydras Street—because it specialized in imports, my mother tended to refer to him as a "Rolls-Royce specialist"—and beside me at night he smelled of motor sludge and cigarettes and whatever acidic solvents he scrubbed his hands with so that my mother wouldn't fuss about his oil-encrusted fingers. My fond memories of him are few: He worked, he ate, he enjoyed the Lawrence Welk Show for the polkas though any moving images sufficed, he fixed the sink when it was leaking and tended to the fireplace on Christmas morning while my mother buzzed about the living room demanding to be told the day was perfect. But in those dark, poem-strewn moments he was nothing short of magical—a wizard conjuring forth my dreams with his clandestine and incantatory language.
Without stretching the matter too far, you could say that poetry raised me. By the time I hit adolescence, my father was a gray shadow passing soundlessly through the house, the ghost of a martyred handyman, and my mother remained, as before, a case for a psychological bomb squad. They were less parents than cellmates and we all privately marked off the days of our confinement. My father won this grim contest by dying when I was fifteen—the victim of an unexpected heart attack that struck him in his sleep. For so sudden a death, and at such a pregnable age for me, it was a strangely unemotional passing. He was only forty-eight but his death felt like that of a nursing-home patient who'd been bedridden and cancer-racked for years: an act of mercy, a gift rather than a theft. I don't remember even crying at his funeral. I felt as if I was waving goodbye as he embarked upon a new and better adventure. Send me a postcard, Tata. Be brave.
In any case, I found myself nearing manhood with scant instruction on living, so for lessons I turned to books, and in books of poetry—particularly those of Baudelaire, Keats, Neruda, Lorca, Yeats, the Beats—I discovered the life I thought I wanted: heart-fueled, reckless, close to the bone, earthly existence set to a rolling, overspilling boil. Let me say upfront that this is no way to read poetry. When Neruda writes about how great it would be "to go through the streets with a green knife letting out yells" until you die of the cold, he does not intend for you to take him literally. The dearth of green knives in your neighborhood cutlery emporium ought to be clue number one, but just you try explaining that to a vulnerable seventeen-year-old. Because I loved the way words & images bounced through my head when I read poetry, the way it impelled my life as nothing else did, revved it like a floored gas pedal, I began writing it.
I won't afflict you with the subsequent details of my C.V., which are boring even to me. Suffice it to say that I experienced some degree of "success" in my thirties, almost all of it due to poems I'd written in my twenties, and while those years did feature a fun and dizzying burst of acclaim & minor awards & tweedy/boozy hoopla—I remember thinking This is it, the Byronic jackpot when a pair of lithe & giggly female grad students showed up unannounced at my door one night, bearing a fifth of vodka and a book of poems they wanted me to sign—it all quickly fizzled out. One of the girls awarded me an unsolicited handjob but her manner was so clinically lackluster—I felt as if I was having a pimple squeezed—that I stopped her partway through, complaining of a stomachache. When she inquired if it might be gas the night sunk that much further. I milked my brief limelight for what I could—fellowships, grants, community-college readings—but, as I was unable to sustain the momentum (i.e., having bankrupted my cache of youthful poems), my sell-by date soon passed. "I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker," Eliot wrote, and, oh Tom, I know the sight. I don't want to draw the line too rigidly here, or assign sentimental blame, but the fact remains: All the "success" that I had stemmed from the fevered work of my twenties, from the poems I wrote pre-Stellas. By the time anyone noticed the fire, it had already burned down to ashes. Despite my sweaty efforts, I was never again able to match the tone & quality of those early, fumbling, greasy, howl-at-the-moon poems. I was a confessional poet who no longer wanted to confess. Sometimes, when I read my work in public, I felt like a stand-in—an acquaintance presenting the works of a deceased poet, like Kenneth Koch at Frank O'Hara's memorial service reading O'Hara's grand, sweet poem about talking to the sun. "This was the work of a great poet," Koch told the crowd. Immodest words to that effect would run through my head as I read: This is the work of a great poet. Such a shame that he's gone. A few hours later would find me plastered at some professorial cocktail party, saying pbbbbt when anyone would ask what I was currently working on. After a while only the misfit male grad students fell for my drunk poet routine but they're easy marks anyway. They'd feed me vodka till five A.M., hoping for a tragic Dylan Thomas moment—a pickling they could eulogize.
I went to Poland in 1989, in those heady months when the Iron Curtain was being drawn back from Europe. It was a poet's exchange program for which Alojzy nominated me, and, typifying their history, the Poles got the short end of the stick: me. On second thought, though—scratch that. I've been far too glib already. My time in Poland deserves better. I was supposed to stay for five months but squeezed out more than a year, and even now my memories of it blend and blur: blissfully late late nights in Krakow's candlelit cellar barrooms, drinking bison-grass vodka and chainsmoking those awful Mocne cigarettes and talking capital-A Art with students and poets and on-the-brink novelists and with my omnipresent friend Grzegorz, a crazed, Santa-bearded Crakovian sculptor who disturbingly worked in the nude—all of them contagiously fizzing, crackling, bursting with newly unleashed ambitions—in short, late nights of talking ideas with people for whom words & ideas mattered, who had been held captive for so many long years by a single well-intentioned but awful idea, who believed in ideas because their every waking moment thus far in life had been shackled to a bad one and who were now casting about, freely & deliriously, for a new idea, for one that would lift them from the ruck of their history. Down in those cellars I witnessed warmhearted fistfights and boozy, table-pounding declarations and long-private dayd
reams being traded like baseball cards. For Jan, a poet jaded by what he called the "incompetence" of art in Poland, the dream was to write like a swarm of wasps: finally, that is, to sting. A young philosophy student—Pawel, I think was his name—wanted to open a French restaurant, though he had never tasted French cuisine outside Proust. Grzegorz, on the other hand, longed to someday leave a yellow rose at the Dakota apartment where John Lennon was murdered, and, while he was in New York, to "fuck a powerful Negress."
And then, also, the long sweet quietudes: the hours of those gray-drizzled or snow-muffled mornings that I devoted to learning my father's language, speaking aloud to myself in my seedy little apartment on the lovably foul Ulica Czysta (which translates, inappropriately, to Clean Street) and with my elderly, pince-nez-wearing tutor, Albert; and to rummaging through Poland's literature like a mad pirate sinking his arms elbows-deep into treasure, ransacking the Jagiellonian library so thoroughly that even the night watchmen knew me by name. Polish lit is often derided as hermetic, too history-steeped and insular, but I suspect being raised in the South immunized me to this. It seemed natural to me for literature to obsess over defeats and the long fingers of the past. (I was partial to lost causes even before I became one.) As for my ex officio duties, I wrote madly, like the tousle-headed writers depicted in movies tossing pages over their shoulders, and while the poems seemed gorgeous and muse-kissed at the time, it was all, I saw later, well-intentioned dreck—the moment & themes were too big for me. I wrote one poem about some children I saw applauding the arrival of housepainters at an unidentified building; at that hinge of history, in this paint-peeling city, even housepainters bore a messianic glow. Yet the poem, like an unfocused photograph, failed to capture the true pith of it all. Maybe all poems fail in that way. An ode to Venus can hardly rival the sensations of Venus's skin against yours, the press of her naked thigh on yours. It's all secondhand. Black dots on paper that are so intrinsically uninteresting that even a bored dog can't be cajoled into sniffing them.
I'd be remiss, though, if in presenting this slideshow of Poland I neglected to mention poor Margaret. ("Poor Margaret": This is how she's titled in my mental Rolodex, saddled with that adjectival goiter.) She was technically my first wife since Stella and I never officially tied the knot. (We were too cool for that.) I married Margaret on the basis of a single one-night stand and a subsequent torrent of letters: an inadvisable courtship, to be sure. We met at a cocktail reception for foreign art-types at the residence of some communist bureaucrat—a subminister of kultury or somesuch. A fat man with the pinched red face of an infant and such a stink to his breath that you could smell his laughter from across a crowded room. He was also unbearably pompous which was why, aside from the limitless vodka that kept floating my way, I found myself wandering his house secretly tucking meatball canapés into various drawers and cabinets. A decidedly undiplomatic gesture, I know, but the image of that overripe baby sniffing sourly through his house, a few days hence, amused me to no end.
It was Margaret who caught me. She was an art historian visiting from Connecticut, ten years my senior, a bit thick in the haunches but attractive in a wallflowery way. I found her round little eyeglasses fetching, and too her easy, salty laughter. Also that she thought my meatball-sabotaging charming. She said she had a soft spot for "rogues" which made me wince because I'd never heard anyone say that word sincerely aloud. "Well shiver me timbers," I responded, insincerely. Except that she did, in fact, sincerely shiver my timbers a few hours later, when we ended up back at my apartment shredding one another's clothes. I was about to write "like teens in a basement" but then it occurred to me that, despite their hormones, teens rarely do that. It's middle-aged people, desperate to crank up the volume on their fading lives, who do that. In any case she actually ripped my shirt open, the airborne buttons going ping against the walls. Once we were in bed she paused to confess, meekly but not primly, that it had been "a long time" since she'd been with a man. I brought her face close to mine and told her, "It's okay. I've never even been with a man." Most likely I cadged that from a movie but so what? She laughed that salty laugh and thereafter things went wonderfully, sleeplessly haywire. She was so vocal that when my landlord, an elderly widower, encountered me in the street the next morning, after I'd taken Margaret to the station to catch a train to Warsaw, he dropped his loaf of bread to applaud. Grounds for a marriage? Survey says: X. I'll skip the rest of the story, an epistolary tale for the most part. The marriage was so brief that I think I used the same bath towel for its entire duration.
All of which is a long and perhaps overrevealing roadmap of how I went from poet to translator. My first translations were favors for the pals I'd made in Krakow: exercises in friendship, more or less. It was sweetly satisfying, however, to place their poems in American journals—and in a way that I'd never felt when publishing my own work, I felt generous to the audience, as if I was bequeathing something of value to them, rather than, as I felt with my poems, coughing something on them. What's more, I felt freed from the minefields of my own authorial persona; in my translating I aspired to invisibility, and invisibility felt like emancipation. I also found, somewhat to my surprise, that I actually savored the work, was tickled by the process: I enjoyed untying all the Gordian knots, piecing together the lingual puzzles, dressing and redressing the words & phrases in my own native garb. And, too, there was something liberating about the imperfection built into the craft. The act of translation is one of approximation. A translation can approach the art in its source language but never quite touch it; close proximity is all, the nearness of its hot breath. As a translator, I could never hope to clone, say, the rose that is a poem—my work could only yield, to paraphrase Nabokov, a thorny cousin to the rose. "What a translator tries for," the great John Ciardi wrote back in the '60s, "is no more than the best possible failure." For someone who'd made a life's habit of failing, this sentiment held a balmy appeal. The best possible failure. By the time I started translating, it was all the epitaph for which I could hope. Fail, fail again. Fail better. Am I failing now? Yeah, silly question. Go ahead, you bastards, laugh all you want.
***
On that note, dear American Airlines, let's check in with Walenty. But let me warn you: My friend Alojzy has engineered a plot twist that I'm not sure I can fully swallow. The pensione to which the Bear—now a capitalized bear, for whatever reason, a full-blown Niedźwiedź—delivered Walenty turns out to have been the family home of the waitress from the train station café. Small world, no? And the beastly, old-looking, loogie-lobbing woman who runs the joint? Alas, that's her mama. This strikes me as too facile a coincidence—I mean, why have Walenty encounter the girl (whose name is Francesca, FYI, though nicknamed Franca) at the train station at all? Why not have introduced her the following morning, at breakfast—with the same cup of coffee and the same dreamy exchange? My vague guess is that Alojzy might be trying to suggest a kind of lining up of the stars (in Walenty's head, that is), invoking a sense of fatedness. Seems like a misstep to me, however. If at first the plot evoked—albeit faintly, and with much more somber intent—the early parts of Nabokov's Pnin (although, on second thought, the louder echo is of Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight), now it's channeling Spanish-language soap operas. ¿Es su mama?! ¡Ay dos mio! But then again I abandoned my belief in fate or anything invisible years ago. It wasn't fate, after all, that caused a businessman in Long Island, driving home from the train station (this was in the news a few weeks back), to crash head-on into a car being driven by his teenaged son. It was the two fishbowl-sized martinis he drank after work plus the tall-boy Budweiser he downed on the train.
Regardless, it's Alojzy's damn book. I just untangle the consonants. Here goes:
She was worried that he would tire but he insisted he was fine; he wanted to walk, he told her, to walk and to walk and to walk. And so they did, into the old cittá vecchia and up the steep ascending lanes, past fish markets and confectionaries and cramped, airless little bookshop
s and shops selling lampshades and linens and others selling sausages and dried mushrooms and the roasted coffee beans that perfumed the narrow streets. The pockmarks of sniper bullets freckled some of the buildings and there were rows of empty, shuttered shops that must have been owned by Trieste's Jews before the Germans had vanished them; Walenty turned away from these sights, however, refusing to admit them, locking them out. In these moments his pace quickened and Franca confusedly struggled to follow. They did not speak of the past, and often, like elderly couples, they didn't speak at all. They finished at the waterfront where, sitting on the quay, they shared a local variety of cake that Franca called presnitz and watched the Adriatic in its implacable blue stillness. Across the bay were terraced vineyards and a white castle and nearby an old man in a cotton suit was transferring the scene onto the canvas propped upon his easel. His lips were moving constantly and it appeared he was conversing with his colors. Walenty noticed the absence of flags on the flagpoles which momentarily swelled his heart. He asked aloud, "Where am I?" Taking his hand in hers, Franca smiled and called him foolish. "You are in Trieste," she said.
A perfect ending, you might think. Cue an accordion serenata and the closing credits ("The text in this book was set in Livingstone, the only typeface designed by..."). Except, of course, that it's not the end. It never is.
Dear American Airlines Page 9