Translator's Introduction to Three Poems from Newton's Orange — Web Exclusive
By Margret Grebowicz
Polish poet Ewa Lipska was born in 1945 and began writing in high school. She studied painting in college but decided that language was her proper medium and made her poetic debut in 1961. She worked as poetry editor for the publishing house Wydawnictwo Literackie for ten years. In 1975-76, she visited the University of Iowa as a fellow of the International Writing Program. She spent 1983 in West Berlin as a fellow of the Deutscher Akademisches Austausch Dienst. 1991 to 1997 was her longest period away from Poland, during which she lived in Vienna and worked at the Polish embassy as director of the Polish Institute. Since 1997, she has lived in Kraków but travels to Vienna often and is a member of both the Polish and the Austrian PEN Clubs. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN Club's Robert Graves award and the award of the city of Kraków, and a two-time nominee for the Nike, Poland's most prestigious award for a volume of poetry.
In a recent audio interview on her website, Ewa Lipska presents a curious inversion of the typical relationship between author and translator. Rather than the translator's existence depending on the author's, it is the author whose being is sustained by her translators. "They are our heroes. Without them, we don't exist. I have been saying lately that in my next incarnation I will be a pianist!"
Indeed, Lipska's work has matured in a deep and complex relationship to translation, since the 1979 collection of her work in Hungarian. At present, there are over twenty foreign language collections. But in spite of her adaptability to languages like Catalán and Albanian, translation remains something enigmatic and powerful for Lipska, something she never takes for granted. These days, she describes translators as mad acrobats facing impossible tasks. "They really are like circus performers walking a tightrope. . . . There are many formulations that are simply untranslatable, that do not work at all in another language. . . . To translate poetry, to suffer like that, and then to get paid peanuts for it, one must be insane."
The irreducibly hyphenated nature of the translation relation (linguistic and cultural), the undecidability of the conjunction /separation between author and translator, the curious "us" it engenders—these are among the central problems of her work. The present poems are from her most recent volume, Newton's Orange (2007), where she continues to trouble these themes in the context of unified Europe, of globalization, democratization, today's wars and legacies of wars.
Margret Grebowicz specializes in feminist and critical race theories read through the lens of contemporary European thought. She is especially interested in the production of knowledge after modernity. She has published articles and book chapters on Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Donna Haraway, Antonio Negri, Emmanuel Levinas, Catherine MacKinnon, and Paul Feyerabend, among others. She is the editor of two anthologies, SciFi in the Mind's Eye: Reading Science Through Science Fiction and Gender After Lyotard, the co-editor of Still Seeking an Attitude: Critical Reflections of the Work of June Jordan, and currently at work on a co-authored book on the recent work of Donna Haraway, to be published by Columbia University Press. She is also an active literary translator from her native Polish.