I tried to be reasonable and systematic in my choice of poems to translate. I formed a grand rational plan: I would sift through Bolesław Leśmian’s poems and find a representative sample of his poetry, searching for manageable-looking poems to fill in the gaps in my existing translations — and thinking twice before tackling big, bold, untranslatable poems.
And then, of course, I fell in love with the first big, bold, untranslatable poem which met my eye. Here’s my translation — accompanied by a gaggle of reasons to love the poem it tries to capture. (Polish original here.)
The Snow
I recall that briskly scintillated frost,
And the heavy hanging of white on each bough
And the ceaseless swirling of the snow, tree-tossed,
And that sense of sparkling along with the snow.A mound here, knoll — there — so the snow would pile,
Heaping mops of hair onto trees so well,
And it blinded eyes, tickled chin and smile,
Floated — paused in void — and fluttered and fell.I recall that low, half-derelict home.
Past the windowpanes — yarns in colored dance.
Who was it that lived there? A man or a gnome?
I was young. The snow’s white curtained the expanse.I touched my hand to pane, despite pangs of fear.
I felt — excess magic! — a lavish trace, a trail.
With that hand I’d touched my books and my gear,
And nurse — she would use it for her fairy tales.My heart froze. My hands carried this enchanted trace
To the snowy silence, which fell and liked itself.
The snow stopped — and years passed, enough to erase
The traces which lead you back towards yourself.How I yearn today, when I know my pain,
To stand there just like then, by that window frame,
To see that very snow white the world again —
That snow which floats and flutters and falls just the same.Oh, the hopeless dreamer! With what tears I’d peer
Through the windowpane to claw my youth from frost —
With what strength I’d cradle… that face — toiled, dear —
In those hands — past, childish, and forever lost!
On the surface, the poem has a straightforward, even clichéd, structure: a childhood scene — a magical encounter — an adult’s dream of return. But all is not as it seems; look more closely, and the dream splinters into something much stranger than simple nostalgia.
Excess Existence
Why does the narrator want to return to childhood? He yearns for something about the child’s perspective, the perspective which sees
that briskly scintillated frost,
And the heavy hanging of white on each bough
And the ceaseless swirling of the snow, tree-tossed,
And that sense of sparkling along with the snow.
For the little boy, images accumulate as briskly as snow. In breathless wonder, he sees this and that and still so much more! (Poetry, the translator’s bane: even a repeated “and” can be part of the message…) It’s an enchanted perspective, joyful and full — which takes in everything as part of itself and sparkles along with the snow.
Sixteen years after “The Snow,” Leśmian published “From Childhood Years” — another poem which starts with remembering. That poem inhabits the child’s point of view even more fully:
And now — the run back home — back home through the grass
And up the stairs which love my footsteps’ frenzied pass…
And the room, overflowed with spring and with swelter,
And this strewn-about body. The widowpane’s shelter
Brushed by lips… Journey — into nothing, empty glassy distance –
And that keen, boundless, with all its might — existence!
Existence is what the narrator envies the child for.
In The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, psychologist Alison Gopnik suggests that children are literally more conscious than adults. Adults have the capacity for selective attention: when we focus on something (like the task of writing a blog post) the rest of the world (including the goats bleating outside our windows) seems to disappear. (If you haven’t seen it already, check out the basketball attention test for a stunning illustration of the phenomenon.) Focus means an increase of brain activity related to a given task and an inhibition of activity in areas not related to the task. Gopnik calls this the “spotlight consciousness:” we can throw a concentrated beam of light on individual things — and aspects of things — but everything else is plunged in darkness.
But we aren’t born this way — this inhibitory ability develops throughout our childhood. A child’s attention means increased brain activity in the relevant area, but not decreased activity in other areas. When a preschooler, seeing Ellie looking at a framed photo, is prompted about Ellie’s mental state, she’ll say “yes” both to “is Ellie thinking about the people in the picture?” and to “is Ellie thinking about the frame?” Gopnik calls this the “lantern consciousness,” diffusing a light over the whole world.¹
In this way, a child’s world really might be richer than ours.
A Lavish Trace
Between the scene of childhood snow and the adult nostalgia, there is a magical encounter with a windowpane. The little curious boy touches a pane of glass and is transformed by a lavish, magic “trace.”
What is this trace— and what is the transformation? I have a hypothesis, but I don’t want to spoil the puzzle quite yet. So, before I give you my interpretation, here are three clues from the poem.
- The house the boy is looking into holds colorful yarn.
- It’s the house of a “man or a gnome.”
- Immediately after receiving the “trace,” the little boy becomes aware that his hands are the very hands which touched his books and his nurse.
I think the last clue gives the game away. What the little boy discovers when he touches the windowpane is the fourth dimension: his status as a being in time. His hands receive a “trace” marking them as the very same hands as those which held books in the past and which will do so in the future.
And, of course, books are no idle prop here. Along with a sense of temporal identity, the boy receives a vocation, a sense that some aspects of himself define him more than others. His hands are marked because with the gift of time comes the responsibility of action. He can no longer just sparkle along with the snow, living in a series of complete but disconnected moments. He must keep faith with his past self.
Here, too, developmental psychology is strikingly relevant. We aren’t born with the knowledge that we are temporally extended beings — instead, we make this startling discovery — or, perhaps, creation — sometime between the ages of three and four.
In one experiment which shows this, preschoolers were videotaped as they played. During the course of the game, the experimenters placed a sticker on the children’s foreheads. As soon as the game stopped, they played the video back to each child. When the four-year-olds saw the sticker on the screen, they touched the forehead to see if it was still there. But the three-year-olds didn’t do this. Instead, they would mention the sticker in the third person, saying “Johnny has a sticker on his forehead” rather than “I have a sticker on my forehead” — and not do anything about their own foreheads.
At the begining of Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust describes a “magic lantern” which projects a shifting series of images onto the surrounding space. At the age of three, our consciousness might be just such a lantern — as we’ve seen, it diffuses a uniform light all over its surroundings and consists of a disconnected series of images.
Sometime between the ages of three and four, the images this lantern produces begin to coalesce into a continuous film. In one developmental sweep, children start telling stories about their temporally extended selves, imagining their future, spontaneously recollecting their past, and recognizing themselves across different times. This is the lavish gift the young Leśmian received: an invisible sticker to carry on his hand, marking him as one and the same… as himself.
There is a startling shift in the fifth verse: almost as soon as the “trace” is introduced, years are glossed over and the trace is lost. The role of the snow shifts dramatically in this verse too. In the opening sections, snow is a discovery and a benign force. By the end of the fifth verse, it is (we may presume) the force which covers and erases.
If we take the projection in the first verse — the idea that the little “sparkling” boy can be identified with the snow — seriously, this metaphor of the erasing snow provides a revelation. What does it mean to forget? What do memories get buried under, if not more memories, more experiences, more self? The snow of the self is simultaneously a force which covers and discovers, a shifting, accumulating substance which always carries the same blank color.
Through the Windowpane
“The Snow” and “From Childhood Years” both feature a windowpane. In the later poem, we follow the young Leśmian as he runs home through his garden, up the steps “which love [his] footsteps’ frenzied pass,” and into his bedroom, where he kisses the window pane. As we’ve seen, the whole scene is sketched in a dense series of nouns:
And the room, overflowed with spring and with swelter,
And this strewn-about body. The widowpane’s shelter
Brushed by lips… Journey — into nothing, empty glassy distance –
And that keen, boundless, with all its might — existence!
The transparent glass serves as a simultaneous metaphor for nothingness and for existence — which, after all, is that perfectly blank property. But there’s more: I think it’s no coincidence that the motif of the window recurs in these two poems about memory. It’s easy to imagine ourselves peeking in through the window, viewing the bedroom scene from the outside — startled to find the little boy blowing us a kiss through the glass. Like memory, the window allows us to see into this room of the past — but it also keeps us out, signifies that we’re no longer there.
Reading this image back into “The Snow” places the narrator inside the “half-derelict home,” peeking out at the little boy through the glass. Indeed, we should expect the adult narrator to inhabit such a house; “The Snow” is the last in a series of poems whose narrator laments his failure to support his family with his writing.
What did the little boy see through the windowpane? Might he have caught a glimpse of his unhappy future? Or — of the white-robed Fates weaving their tapestries out of “yarns in colored dance”?…
The Gnome
Placing the adult narrator in the derelict home gives rise to another discovery:
Who was it that lived there? A man or a gnome?
Who was it who asked this question? The verse starts in the older narrator’s voice, with “I recall.” We could be excused for thinking that he’s just jogging his memory here. But in the next line, it’s as if he’s apologizing for this flight of fancy and imputing it to his younger self: “I was young.”
And yet the whole poem is a flight of fancy. Right until the last verse, the narrator is a “hopeless dreamer.” (“Dreamer” is a highly imperfect translation; the Polish “śniarz” is a now-archaic word which meant both “dreamer” and “dream-interpreter” — and which, equally tellingly, bears a striking phonetic affinity to “śnież,” a morpheme for… snow.) This gives us reason to think he half-believes that the inhabitant of the dilapidated house — that is, Leśmian himself — really is a gnome.
In fact, Leśmian (who was only 155 cm — 5'1" — tall) had a penchant for imagining himself as a diminutive, hybrid creature. The story of “Znikomek” — whose name is made up of a morpheme for insignificance and a diminutive suffix; I’ve imperfectly rendered it as “Triflet” — is the most telling of these. (One of the reasons to think the poem is autobiographical is a line in which we’re told that Triflet was simultaneously in love with two girls — paralleling Leśmian’s 20-year-long extramarital affair...) It starts like this:
In being’s shaded disarray, one Triflet, rambling, spring-stepped, strays.
One of his eyes — as brown as ground, the other — blue as sky,
He doesn’t see the world the same, but different through each eye –
And he can’t tell which world is real — and which is just — his gaze?
Like the gnome of “The Snow,” Triflet shifts between adult and childlike perspectives, between dreams and dark reality:
Within his breast, two souls concealed: one roams the heavens without aim –
The other — wastes away on earth.
Most tellingly:
And in his hands — excess existence, and night-crumbs in his eyes!
Sixteen years after “The Snow,” Leśmian creates an alter ego who holds excess existence in his hands. This casts doubt on the idea that he ever really lost the “trace,” that he ever misplaced the child’s enchanted vision.
Indeed, in many respects the adult narrator’s “dream” is already true. Look at all the ways in which the adult still is the little boy. The attributes of his childhood, apart from the vague “gear” (“sprzęty;” more accurately: furniture or implements), consist of books and his nurse’s fairy tales — which are also the attributes of his current poetic trade. If that’s the trace on his hands, the thing he should have kept faith with, then he has never really lost those “traces which lead you back towards yourself.”
And the snow? In what sense has he “lost” the snow?
That snow which floats and flutters and falls just the same.
Notice: it’s not “the snow that would float and flutter and fall just the same” — it’s the snow that does. In the isolated context of that single line, the snow is allowed to remain unchanged, as full of excessive modes of being as it desires.
In fact, all the “woulds” in the last two verses (except, perhaps, the final “childish” hands) are things the adult Leśmian not only could do, but things he’s arguably doing in the very act of writing the poem.
A Strange Nostalgia
When the narrator yearns “to stand there just like then,” we might expect him to mean one of two things. He might be hoping to return to that childhood scene as an adult, merely to experience the physical setting of his memory, adorned with qualitatively similar snow. Or he might be dreaming of literally becoming his childhood self, of literally reliving the events he’s currently only remembering.
Those are the two options we might expect — but the image we’re given in the last verse is neither of these two dreams. Or, rather, it’s a curious mix of both.
The first half of the verse is consistent with the first dream: that of returning to the scene as an adult.
Oh, the hopeless dreamer! With what tears I’d peer
Through the windowpane to claw my youth from frost —
After all, if you were restored to the condition of a child, you wouldn’t be peering through that windowpane with tears or trying to claw out the youth you still (or rather, since we’re imagining time-travel: already) had. This is an adult’s perspective, not a child’s. But in the last two lines, something bizarre happens.
With what strength I’d cradle… that face — toiled, dear —
In those hands — old, childish, and forever lost!
Leśmian seems to be aiming at the second dream: he tries to imagine himself in his youthful body, with those “childish” hands. But even in his dream, the transformation is incomplete. He gives himself the adult’s “toiled” face. Trying to return to childhood, he instead creates a hybrid: an old man’s face attached to a boy’s small hands.
In other words: a gnome.
A Question
Why does the narrator want to return to childhood? As we’ve seen, it can’t be to regain the child’s capacity for excess existence, which he still has. What he wants, I think, is not to receive something from childhood, but to return the gifts of adulthood.
A child living in fantasy and in the moment is a happy sight. An adult doing the very same thing is a gnome: a sad, absurd creature. Leśmian can and does run off to sparkle with the snow — but when he does, he is letting go of the threads that tie him to his past and future selves, including ties of responsibility to his family.
“The Snow” finds Leśmian on the verge of despising the fourth dimension, of returning the gift he received on that snowy day. And yet he never quite embraces the nostalgic dream of the return to childhood.
The adult narrator is less of a gnome than a question — the question of his own status. Is he a man or a gnome? A later work entitled “The Poet” gives an answer — of sorts — which is equal parts flippant and frightening.
The word expert — God himself floats through those heavens, past the border
Of delusions, gazing at our poet — who puts words in order.
He sees the bard’s inability to make a decent living
And the diligence with which he chases phantoms. With misgiving
God peers in the poet’s cottage. To His horror, it’s in odious
Ruin, while the writer pens in sinful frenzy a melodious
Poem. And God wanderingly leans upon the silver lining
Of a nearby cloud with swanlike, ruffled feathers. Now, reclining
On the swan’s back, he looks at the dream-strayed poet. Time to reckon:
God waves one hand in a blessing, while the fist’s clenched on the second!
Yearning for the Impossible
In the first poem of The Meadow, the volume which contains “The Snow,” Leśmian describes the “drownee of green,” who had felt
The need to tour in spirit through greenness in itself.
Then the demon of greenness seized him with the breeze
Of omniforest. He found him neath some trees
And he lured him with bloomings’ ceaseless virtuosity
And charmed with misembodyings’ scented ruinosity,
And beckoned with his lips, which panted ever grinless,
And tempted ever deeper — inside that greenest greenness!
This is the dream of communing with nature, of entirely losing yourself in the beauty of the external world. The little boy in “The Snow,” who sparkles with the snow, has the power to do this with ease. But in “The Drownee,” full communion with nature is presented as a form of death.
And so, for an adult, it is. To return to his childhood absorption would be to reject the gift of the fourth dimension, to give up his responsibility to his family, to shatter into a thousand disconnected moments.
To be given a past is to be given the impossibility of return. To know that you are identical with your past self is to know that there is a thread connecting you to that self, a constantly unrolling, ever longer thread.
The four-year-old discovers a way of being identical to himself which is different from just being. He learns to be not just conscious, but self-conscious. When Leśmian dreams of standing there, in his childhood scene, “just like then” now that he “knows his pain,” he wishes that the little boy had realized just what a gift his non-self-consciousness had been. But that’s an impossible wish: to be consciously grateful for your non-self-consciousness is already to be self-conscious. The little boy was grateful for his communion with the sparkling snow in the only way possible: simply by sparkling.
The narrator’s dream in the last verse is one of “flattening” or projecting himself, transforming cross-temporal identity into concurrent self-identity. He wants to shorten the thread connecting himself and the little boy down to a point: to be the little boy and the old man — at the same time.
Leśmian’s dream is, ultimately, one of fitting two distinct moments inside a single instant. It’s a dream not just of an impossibility — but of a manifest absurdity. And yet, for just one moment, Leśmian lets us experience this absurdity as a real tragedy.
[1] As further evidence for the claim that babies are more conscious than us, Gopnik also mentions that it takes a relatively higher concentration of anesthetic to knock out a baby than an adult.
