`Draw Up Exact Accounts'

On Saturday, a student studying English in Kraków, Poland, asked me to send her lines from the English translation of Zbigniew Herbert’s “Mr Cogito on the Need for Precision.” I had cited another portion of the five-page poem in a post last September, using Alissa Valles’ translation in The Collected Poems: 1956-1998. Perhaps I was abetting a cheater but out of love for Herbert I transcribed them and sent them to her in an e-mail. She had asked for “5 lines that mean more or less that WE MUST KNOW/ COUNT PRECISELY / CALL THEM BY THEIR NAMES/PROVIDE THEM FOR THE JOURNEY/WITH (...) THE RING OF JUSTICE -- this is obviously my literal translation of the Polish lines.” Here are the lines, including those before and after, in Valles’ translation:

"ignorance about those who are lost
undermines the reality of the world

"casts us in the hell of appearance
the diabolical net of the dialectic
which says there is no difference
between substance and the specter

"we must therefore know
draw up exact accounts
summon them by name
ready them for the road

"in a clay bowl
millet poppyseed
an ivory comb
arrowheads
a ring of fidelity

"amulets"

I don’t read Polish but I’m struck by the evocative smoothness of Valles’ version compared to Marta’s. “COUNT PRECISELY” may be a literal trot but “draw up exact accounts” suggests the grim iciness of an actuarial table. This clinical quality runs throughout the poem, starting with the opening lines:

“Mr Cogito
is disturbed
by a problem in the field of applied mathematics”

And so forth. Herbert’s poem juxtaposes the scientific method with the elusiveness of the human heart. An hour after Marta’s e-mail arrived from Poland, my wife’s brother and family showed up for pizza. My sister-in-law is an ornithologist with a Ph.D. in biology from Berkeley, and I’ve wanted her help identifying the birds inhabiting the shrubs in front of our house. She knew immediately: dark-eyed juncos, also known as Oregon juncos – a species I had never seen before because I’ve never lived on the West coast. I consulted the invaluable “All About Birds” web site at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and found this precise description:

“The `Oregon junco’ is boldly marked blackish and brown, with a distinct dark hood, and is found in the western half of the continent.”

Scroll down to the fourth photo from the top to see the one closest in appearance to the birds singing outside my window as I write. These compact, nervous birds are even more elegantly beautiful than the photo suggests. Play the Cornell recording of their songs, and the fourth is the sound I’ve heard them make – an emphatic, unmusical click-click-click.

Birds show up infrequently in Herbert’s poems. One of the funniest is a satirical prose poem, “Hen,” that nicely echoes the repetitive, metronome-like clicking of the Oregon junco, while taking a swipe at mediocre versifiers. Here’s Valles’ version, dedicated to Marta in Kraków:

“The hen is the best example of what living constantly with human leads to. She has completely lost the lightness and grace of a bird. Her tail sticks up over her protruding rump like a too large hat in bad taste. Her rare moments of ecstasy, when she stands on one leg and glues up her round eyes with filmy eyelids, are stunningly disgusting. And in addition, that parody of song, throat-slashed supplications over a thing unutterably comic: a round, white, maculated egg.

“The hen brings to mind certain poets.”