Cultural references and meaning constructed through playing with idioms make Dariusz
Sośnicki’s poem untranslatable into English, even if the translator were to take
any number of liberties. One of the main culprits here is the word rzecz, or thing in
Polish, and the adjective rzeczowy, derived from thing, yet meaning matter-of-fact.
The reference to szkiełko i oko – the eye and the glass – comes from a poem by the Romatic poet Adam Mickiewicz and has functioned as an idiom in Polish nearly
two centuries. Trying to find an English equivalent could turn into a wild goose chase.
Adam Wiedemann’s poem, while quite challenging to the translator, can be rendered
fairly accurately and with a minimum of loss. From a translator’s perspective, the
word games in this poem are more clement than in Sośnicki’s, although once again
the word rzeczy causes problems. The Polish idiom oddać rzeczy do pralni literally
means to take things to the cleaners, while it’s understood that things means clothes.
In the poem, however, it’s not merely clothes that are to be cleaned, and this polysemy
is crucial to its meaning.
