by Candace Barrington

Exactly a decade ago, I shared the opening lines of Marcin Ciura’s translation of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles into Polish. Since that time, I’ve obtained both a copy of the translation and completed an interview with Marcin (which we conducted via email and he generously agreed could be made public). In addition to a fabulous discussion about dealing with polysemy and unclear antecedents (Question 5), Polish prosody (Question 6), and twenty-first century audiences (Question 7), the interview includes two bonus stanzas from Chaucer’s “An ABC” and a shout-out to Hades’ song “Alone Walkyng.” Today seems a good time to share the book images and the interview.

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[The following interview silently amends broken internet links.]

Question 1. What brought you to translating this text? Have you translated other texts? Do you write in genres other than translation?

Perhaps more instructive is the story of how I got into translation. A long time ago, young, shy, and full of ideals, I was madly in love with a girl as nerdy as me. She had another suitor who was sending her his translations of Giambattista Marino. When she showed me his letter, I said “he changed the rhyme pattern and turned a Petrarchan sonnet into a French one”. No wonder she dumped me.

I guess it was this trauma that made me start translating Baudelaire’s “Flowers of Evil”. A mere five years later, I perfected the first poem. My wife had read it online before we knew each other and she still likes it. That’s already something.

As to the Parlement, it was an accident at work. One day, the internal network went down but the Internet worked fine. Since I had nothing better to do, I figured out I could translate something. Javier Kohen, a colleague of mine, had “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne” as his gmail status so I decided to give Chaucer a try. By the time the outage was over, I had finished the first stanza.

When I found no previous translations of the Parlement into Polish, I took up the second stanza, where the bookworm narrator proclaims his theoretical knowledge of love, and I already knew it was going to be a funny story, something I did not expect from a medieval author. I was reading the story stanza by stanza as I worked on them so I never knew what would happen next. At first, I was doing it once in a blue moon, the more so that I often misunderstood the original. Even though I revised the text again and again, you can still notice some disregard for accuracy in its beginning. Only after a dozen stanzas or so, I discovered the online Middle English Dictionary, bought Brewer’s critical edition, and focused more seriously on the task.

I do not think I have enough fantasy to write on my own, except in C++. On the other hand, translating texts without rhymes poses too little of a challenge to me.

Polish translation of lines 309–315 for the Valentine’s day post:

Bo działo się to właśnie w święto Walentego,

Gdy każdy ptak przybywa w to miejsce na gody,

Olbrzymi zgiełk czyniły skrzydlate narody,

A ziemia i powietrze, i drzewa, i wody

Mieściły wszech gatunków takie zatrzęsienie,

Żem ledwie znalazł miejsce na nóg postawienie.

Question 2. Next, I’m interested in how Polish and English fit into your linguistic background. Is Polish your native language? If not, how did you acquire it? How did you learn English? Do you read regularly in English for pleasure?

Yes, Polish is my mother tongue. I would not venture to translate poetry into a language I do not know intimately. I learned my English at school, along with Russian, which was mandatory at that time. I can also read French and Spanish, though I lost the ability to communicate in them.

I mostly quit reading books back when I was a student. The last novel I read in English was “First Contract” by Greg Costikyan, a few years ago. I use English at work on a daily basis, though.

Question 2 Follow-up. You mentioned that you learned English and Russian in school. Were both languages mandatory at that time? When was that? Is eitherone mandatory now?

You learned Russian from the sixth grade on, and another language, usually English, in high school, i.e. from the ninth grade. I was in high school from 1988 to 1992. Kids a year younger than me could already choose any two languages in high school, for instance English and French or German. As far as I know, now almost every kid learns English from the first grade.

Question 3. Were you (or are you now) familiar with Chaucer’s other literary works, such as The Canterbury Tales? If so, can you tell me about your exposure to his work? Is Chaucer an author university students generally read in their literature courses? (On a side note, do you know how your colleague came to have the Chaucerian quote as his gmail status? Is Chaucer an author widely read in Poland?)

I feel embarrassed to come across as a barbarian but I have read nothing else by Chaucer. Actually, almost nothing. I managed to translate two stanzas from “An ABC”:

ACH, wszechwładna królowo pełna łaskawości,

która całemu światu udzielasz ochrony,

by go zbawić od grzechu, od trosk, od żałości,

o panno nad pannami, kwiecie niesplamiony,

do Ciebie się uciekam, w błędzie pogrążony!

Nieś mi pomoc i ulgę, pani miłościwa;

zlituj się, kiedy proszę, niedolą zgnębiony,

bo okrutny przeciwnik nade mną wygrywa.

BEZUSTANNIE twe serce taką dobroć chroni,

że nie mam wątpliwości — tyś mym wspomożeniem.

Tak prawe jest twe serce, że nie możesz stronić

od proszących o pomoc z uczciwym sumieniem.

Szczodrobliwie obdarzasz pełnym powodzeniem,

o spokoju siedzibo i ciszy przystani.

Siedmiu łotrów zajętych jest za mną gonieniem;

nim ma łódź się rozbije, wspomóż, jasna pani!

before I found out that Przemysław Mroczkowski had translated the entire poem. In Poland, as far as I know, only students of English literature have to read Chaucer’s works, and even their general course is limited to selections from “The Canterbury Tales”. I am afraid no publisher would accept my translation due to its low readership. This is why I self-published it and distributed it among my friends. It makes a good gift.

Javier, who incidentally is an Argentinian living in Poland, says: “I probably found the quote online while looking for more information on Chaucer. Initially I got interested in him and early English literature through Hades’ song ‘Alone Walkyng’, whose lyrics are attributed to Chaucer. As for the quote, I thought it applied perfectly to my job as a software engineer. Especially the modern meaning of the word ‘art’.”

Question 4. Which text did you use as your base text? A Middle English version? A Present Day English version? Can you tell me which editions?

I used mainly “The Parlement of Foulys”, a Middle English version edited by D. S. Brewer and published by Manchester University Press. It has extensive endnotes and a good glossary. As far as I remember, I deviated from it only once, when I assumed the variant “she couchede hem” rather than “she touchede hem” in v. 216.

Question 5. Can you tell me about some of the challenges of reading and translating Middle English? For instance, I’d be interested in how you choose which meaning to translate when you encountered a Middle English word with multiple meanings.

I learned to check every word in a dictionary after my first version of “and to myn bed I gan me for to dresse” (v. 88) read “I began to dress to sleep”. I struggled with deciphering the proper sense of some passages, for instance “but, ‘God save swich a lord’—I sey na moore” (v. 14) or “menyth but a maner deth, what weye we trace” (v.54), but I think I finally got them right.

I did not follow a fixed pattern of dealing with multiple meanings. Here are four cases of word ambiguity, each resolved in a different way. In “the syke met he drynkyth of the tunne” (v. 104), I pulled out my artistic license and evaded the dilemma by making the syke “a greedy person” for the sake of rhyme. In “the hardy assh” (v. 176), I wrote “always strong” to fill the meter. In “and of the Craft that can & hath the myght / to don be force a wight to don folye” (v. 220–221), belonging to the passage that Chaucer borrowed from “Teseida”, I consulted the Italian original, which has “l’Arti” (Arts) for Craft. In “the ielous swan” (v. 342), I chose the meaning “angry” following Brewer’s commentary that cites Vincent of Beauvais’s “Speculum Maius”.

Twice had I problems with determining the referent of “that”. My first version of v.379–381 awkwardly attributed the knitting of “hot, cold, heuy, lyght, moyst & dreye” to Nature instead of almyghty lord. Luckily, I fixed this before the printing. In “fond I Venus & hire porter Richesse, / that was ful noble & hautayn of hyre port” (v. 261–262), I reasoned that the latter verse describes not Venus but Richesse who—thought I—inherited her feminine gender from French. What I overlooked is that Chaucer would have referred to a feminine Richesse as a porteresse. Since he used a masculine noun “porter”, my interpretation must be wrong and the verse in fact describes Venus, but I realized this too late. The misattribution is evident in the printed version because Majątek (Wealth), my rendition of Richesse, is masculine in Polish.

Question 6. In Parlement, Chaucer uses a 7-line rhyme royal stanza with iambic pentameter lines (that is, lines 1 & 3, 2, 4 & 5, and 6 & 7 rhyme, and the lines generally have 10 syllables with alternating stresses). How much of this were you able to carry over to Polish? (When I look at the lines, it appears that you use the rhyme royal pattern, but I’m not certain how they sound.) Are any of these features—rhyme, meter, and fixed stanzas—standard in Polish poetry?

Yes, traditional Polish poetry knows both rhyme, meter, and fixed stanzas. The difference is that in Polish, a syllable-timed language, the meter is based mainly on the number of syllables per verse rather than on metrical feet like in English, a stress-timed language.

I wrote in thirteen-syllable verse with feminine rhyme and a caesura after the unstressed seventh syllable, a meter widely used in Polish poetry since medieval times. It fits the natural rhythm of the language so well that few people noticed when film director Marek Koterski made the characters in his movies speak its blank version.

You can get a feeling of its melody from Marcel Weyland’s English translation of “Pan Tadeusz”, a Polish epic by Adam Mickiewicz:

She in brush, print, or music proved just as discerning;
Tadeusz was dumbfounded at such sum of learning.
In fear of her derision, his heart beating faster,
He stuttered like a schoolboy before his form master.
Luckily, teacher pretty and not too severe:
His neighbour quickly fathomed the cause of his fear,
Began talk on less taxing of topics and stories,
Spoke of rural existence, its tediums and worries…. (Book One, lines 660–667)

Taking into account that English text slightly expands when translated into Polish, the thirteen-syllable verse corresponds well to Chaucerian iambic pentameter: I rarely had to remove details from the story or add to it.

In order to discuss the rhymes, let me first present Polish prosody in a nutshell. As usual, a rhyme consists in a match of the stressed vowels and sounds that follow them, for instance “ujrzałem-uncjałem” or “sprawy-ciekawy”. Agreement of preceding sounds is not a defect (“przeniewierce-poniewierce”) and homonyms are fine (“radarada”). For a hundred years, it is acceptable to follow the rhyming sounds with extra consonants. I freely used such inexact rhymes, like “nie wiem-gniewie” or “duszachprzymusza”. In some cases, I adopted a relaxed rule that permits the rhyming of similar consonants, like in “starania-oszałamia”.

An important condition is that both rhyming parts should not be identical inflectional endings. Otherwise you get a so-called grammatical rhyme, deservedly frowned upon as trivial. To illustrate this, here is the birds’ roundel (v. 680–692), first as a doggerel based on the verb ending “-ają”, then in a much better version where the “-ur-/-ór-” part of the “-ury/-óry” rhyme (different spellings, same pronunciation) belongs to the stems:

1.

Witaj nam teraz, lato, ze swym pięknym słońcem.

Zimowe niepogody już się rozwiewają

I długie czarne noce szybko uciekają!

O święty Walentynie, w górze mieszkający,

Tak dla ciebie ptaszyny małe świergotają:

[…]

Mają ważne powody radość sprawiające,

Bo wszystkie z nich swojego towarzysza znają,

A kiedy się obudzą, błogo zaśpiewają.

2.

Witaj nam teraz, lato, ze swym pięknym słońcem,

Coś na dobre rozwiało w puch zimowe chmury

Oraz mrok długich nocy wygnało ponury!

O święty Walentynie, w górze mieszkający,

Tak dla ciebie śpiewają małych ptaszyn chóry:

[…]

Mają ważne powody radość sprawiające,

Bo każdy z nich szczęśliwie zakończył konkury.

Jutro będą wesoło śpiewać po raz wtóry.

Since I followed the pattern of rhyme royal with its threefold rhymes, quite often I was unable to come up with non-grammatical rhymes while preserving the sense. With respect to rhyming, I regard the request of the seed-fowl to the turtledove (v. 575–581) as the rock-bottom fragment of my translation. I am not wild about the last stanza either. As an excuse, let me quote the polite opinion of a fellow programmer and poetry translator in one, Daniel Janus: “I see the accumulation of grammatical rhymes as a nod towards Polish Renaissance when they prevailed, like in Jan Kochanowski’s poetry, yet were far from triteness, brawny, and loaded with emotions, like your verses”.

Question 7. As you were translating who was your imagined audience? How did that audience shape the translation?

Well, I assumed an educated 21st-century reader. This helped me to weed out variants with bizarre archaisms I would not understand myself without a note. Speaking of notes, in my opinion, you can well enjoy the Parlement without knowing from which Valence Venus’s couercheif comes in v. 272 or who Aleyn from v. 316 was, so my edition gets by without a commentary.

Real audience influenced the text no less. As a fan of typography, I planned to adopt pre-19th-century Polish spelling, which used “i” or “y” instead of “j” and long “ſ” for non-final “s”. It was a close call. We could be talking about “Seym ptaſi” now. But test readers of my translation, most notably Witek Jarnicki and my wife Kinga Jęczmińska, convinced me to abandon this superficial device. With hindsight, I am grateful to them. Cleaned from these obstacles, the text reads surprisingly smoothly, I dare say.