Tideline by Krystyna Dąbrowska

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tideline by Krystyna Dąbrowska Alice-Catherine Carls Krystyna Dąbrowska Tideline Trans. Karen Kovacik, Antonia Lloyd-Jones & Mira Rosenthal. Brookline, Massachusetts, Zephyr Press. 2022. 162 pages. KRYSTYNA DĄBROWSKA (b. 1979) has published five volumes of poetry and won prestigious prizes, including the Kościelski Prize, the first Szymborska Award in 2013, and the Literary Award of the Capital City of Warsaw in 2019. A photographer and a graduate of Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts, she recently brought Louise Glück and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill into Polish. Since her poetic debut in 2006, she has been translated in twenty languages. Her first full volume in English, Tideline includes translations from her first four poetry collections: Biuro podróży (Travel agency); Białe krzesła (White chairs); Czas i przesłona (Time and aperture); and Ścieżki dźwiękowe (Soundtracks). Many of these poems have seen prior publication: in Harper’s, Harvard Review, Brooklyn Rail, Southern Review, and Los Angeles Review, as well as in Scattering the Dark, an anthology of Polish women poets edited by Karen Kovacik. Kovacik is currently translating Dąbrowska’s fifth book, Miasto z indu (City of indium). Offering glimpses into the proverbial “it takes a village,” Tideline begs the question of how to best present an author’s work in translation. One solution retains the translators’ individual styles and allows the reader a rare opportunity to experience a simultaneous multivoiced approach to the poems. Another solution eliminates all but one filter between the original and the translation and unifies the translators’ polyphonic voices, including the differences between British English and American English. Encouraged by Zephyr’s editor, Christopher Mattison, who tightened the translations and smoothed out differences of diction and style, Tideline shows a high level of stylistic integration while retaining the essential personality of each translator—a model of collaboration. Tideline is a translation “by eight hands,” if one counts the poet’s participation. The book cover was chosen from one of Dąbrowska’s photographs that reflects both the volume’s title and the poem “Yesterday I Saw a Dog at the Tideline” in Rosenthal’s translation. Kovacik shaped Tideline’s structure, defining a loose thematic structure in four numbered but untitled sections for which she selected three dozen poems, ensuring a balance among the translators’ contributions across each section. Adding a subtle reference to the order of publication of Dąbrowska’s volumes of poetry, the eponymous title poems of her first, second, and fourth books, “Travel Agency,” “White Chairs,” and “Soundtracks,” are placed in sections 1, 2, and 4, respectively. The eponymous poem of Dąbrowska’s third volume of poetry, Time and Aperture, is echoed in the theme of the third section. Section 1 focuses on travel and water, Section 2 contains speculations about self and other, section 3 includes personal and family memories and survival, and section 4 focuses on artmaking. None of these editorial and methodical choices are explained in the volume, however, forcing the reader into active reading—frustratingly unsettling for some, fun guessing for others. How best to read? To count or feel? To deconstruct or to dive into the poems? This reviewer, for example, only noticed the translators’ initials at the bottom of each poem upon a second reading. Regardless, the poems take one straight to language, rhythm, and style. The images and alliterations, so important for a visual poet such as Dąbrowska, are felicitously translated. The translation has an unhurried, conversational feeling that smooths the terseness of some of the Polish phrasing, especially when the sentences and verses’ caesura deviate from the original. But it is the organization of the volume, and in particular the fluid, overlapping themes of the four sections, that convincingly lead the reader into Dąbrowska’s world. This organization mirrors her true poetic personality, namely her journey to the apparent simplicity that characterizes the most difficult works of art. This is indeed quite a tour de force. What emerges is a poetry suffused with the ability to notice the imperceptible, subtle, intimate origin of change and to anchor it in visual cues—a refreshing, quietly revolutionary approach. The poet describes the modes by...