Just over two years before the collapse of Soviet Communism, the TLS published a set of four poems by the Polish poet Piotr Sommer, translated by the author and the English poet D. J. Enright. Translation might be said to lie at the heart of Sommer’s work: as well as collaborating on translations of his own poetry with poets such as Enright, Douglas Dunn and John Ashbery, Sommer is an eminent translator into Polish of the work of, among others, Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara and John Berryman. Yet his poems often seem concerned with what resists translation, with the numinous and the unsayable that lie just beyond their everyday domestic surfaces.

As August Kleinzhaler writes in his introduction to Sommer’s career-spanning collection Continued (2005), "boundaries are continually being crossed . . . Sommer is very much the poet as double-agent, working both sides of the border and travelling incognito". It is in what Sommer calls these "intermeanings", rather than in the social and political upheavals that the previous generation of Polish poets – Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert – had addressed more explicitly, that Sommer locates the real human drama. Although the title – "Identity Card" – suggests what the milkwoman really wants to see when she asks for the "receipt", the strength of the poem lies in the fact that it never completely lifts into parable or allegory, but continues to oscillate uneasily and unnervingly between the banal and the terrifying.

D. J. Enright (1920–2002) had seventy-three poems published in the TLS between 1950 and 1990. His characteristic understatement and irony make him one of Sommer’s most effective translators, consistently good at capturing a tenor he describes as "low-key and terse. Irony is there, but it keeps its head down . . . . Obliquity is the rule".

Ausweis

At four in the morning
the milkwoman was knocking,
in plain clothes, threatening
she wouldn’t leave anything for us,
at most would remove the empties,
if I didn’t produce the receipt.

It was somewhere in my jacket,
but in any case I could tell
what the outcome would be:
she’d take away yesterday’s curds,
she’d take away the eggs and the cheese as well,
she’d take our flat away from us,
she’d take away our child.

If I don’t produce the receipt,
if I fail to find the receipt,
the milkwoman will cut our throats.

PIOTR SOMMER (1987)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "Dream Song 1" by John Berryman, click here.

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