On Translating Halina Poświatowska 

In January 1945, when Halina Poświatowska was nine years old, she hid with her family in a damp basement as the Red Army liberated her hometown of Częstochowa. By the time the family emerged three days later, the young girl had developed an illness that would eventually become a then-incurable heart condition (endocarditis and a mitral valve defect). It’s thus no surprise that the heart—both as an abstract source of love and as a physical organ—is central to her poetry.

Poświatowska’s poems evince a keen awareness of the fact that her life would be brief. When she writes “my heart is an autocrat,” it’s clear that she means this quite literally—her heart ruled her life. As a young adult, Poświatowska’s doctor told her that she could not run or dance. Her mother advised her not to fall in love. She did all of these things anyway, though not without great suffering. In her memoir, she recalls going to a dance and collapsing afterward, unable to breathe; only after she had rested for a few days was she able to get on with her life. Later, while in convalescence at a city hospital, she met another heart patient, the young filmmaker Adolf Poświatowski. They fell in love and got married—and he died the following year, succumbing to illness.

Despite these tragedies, Poświatowska’s poems are not exactly tragic. There’s a touch of cheekiness and joy. There’s playfulness and a love of life set against the specter of death. Poświatowska cuts a romantic figure in the Polish imagination, and in Poland her poems continue to be set to music, while her work—four books of poetry, a memoir, and a book of letters—has remained in print for decades.

We took some liberties with these translations, as all translators do. For example, where Poświatowska writes, “moje serce jest władcą absolutnym,” which could be translated as “my heart is the absolute ruler,” we chose “autocrat” instead, as we could not resist the contemporary resonances of the word. Our translation choices were also informed by the sonic sensibility, since “autocrat” ends on a stronger syllable than “ruler” and is thus a bit closer to the sound of the original Polish. In “(will the world die a little),” according to the rules of Polish grammar, “the world” is a masculine noun, so it receives masculine pronouns, even though it is understood that the world is not literally male. This means, in Polish, you hear both “it” and “him” at the same time, while in English, you have to make a choice. We went with the personifying “he” and “him,” hoping to deepen the sense of longing which is present throughout all of Poświatowska’s poetry.

Both poems are from her final book, Jeszcze jedno wspomnienie (“One More Memory”), which was published in 1968, the year after she died of a failed heart operation at the age of thirty-two.