Mark Tardi : The Calligraphy of Listening

folio : Three from Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland
, edited by Mark Tardi

 

 

 

Sixteen years ago, I embarked on a Fulbright to Poland, and it’s no exaggeration to say that changed the course of my life. I’ve now lived one-third of my life outside of the United States and connected with the city of Łódź––a place that literally means “boat”––which has helped keep me afloat during times both jubilant and turbulent. So, in many respects, Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland––from which excerpts by Anna Adamowicz (trans. by Lynn Suh), Maria Cyranowicz (trans. by Małgorzata Myk), and Hanna Janczak (trans. by Katarzyna Szuster-Tardi) are being shared with you––is a testament to the numerous gusts that sailed me forward.

In different ways (or perhaps waves, to extend the boat metaphor), the three Polish women poets presented here offer dynamic disruptions of surface in their poems. For Anna Adamowicz, the biological and technological are in dialectic; for Maria Cyranowicz, poems are an active site of contestation––of myriad forms of hegemony, psychic suffering, and survival; and for Hanna Janczak, casually reconfigured grammar is activated to recalibrate the quotidian. These are poems and poets “biting down on the skin of the world” (Adamowicz), redolent of “the rain /of laughter and song” (Cyranowicz), flowing down in artful erosion “[l]ike on a statue in a niche carved into a cliff face” (Janczak).

Acclaimed poet, publisher, and translator Rosmarie Waldrop has “often asked myself why I go on translating [the poetry of others’] instead of concentrating exclusively on writing my own poetry. The woes of the translator are all too well known: little thanks, poor pay, and plenty of abuse.” It’s a question I’ve asked myself over the years, too. Perhaps the best answer I can give at this moment is: being constantly talked at is exhausting. Endless tweets, reels, memes, posts and comments, outrages, the epic waterfall of content. In contrast, poetry translation is radical listening, gratitude for the gift of soft pedaling and stepping outside of our own egos, at least for a little while. And, I hope, you’ll find that Lynn Suh, Małgorzata Myk, and Katarzyna Szuster-Tardi have focused their poetic sonars to offer exquisite calligraphies of listening.

 

 

 

 

Mark Tardi [photo credit: Joanna Głodek] is a writer and translator whose recent awards include a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Translation fellowship. He is the author of three books, most recently, The Circus of Trust (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017), and his translations include Unsovereign by Kacper Bartczak (above/ground, 2024), The Squatters’ Gift by Robert Rybicki (Dalkey Archive Press, 2021) and Faith in Strangers by Katarzyna Szaulińska (Toad Press/Veliz Books, 2021). Recent writing and translations have appeared in Poetry, MAYDAY, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, Interim, ANMLY, Full Stop, and in the anthologies, The Experiment Will Not Be Bound (Unbound Edition Press, 2023) and Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland (Litmus Press, 2024). He is on faculty at the University of Łódź.