Dear Editor,
My experience with Zbigniew Herbert is, I suspect, much like the majority of readers who have struggled over the years simply to find the work of this great poet. The narrative detailed by Michael Hofmann in the May issue of Poetry ["A Dead Necktie"] is reminiscent of my own: the inquiries to book dealers, the compulsion to rescue unread copies, the frustration at the general inaccessibility of this major twentieth-century writer. For all the similarities in our background as readers, however, I feel confident that Herbert's longtime advocates will find less agreement with Hofmann's vituperative review of Alissa Valles's new translation of the Collected Poems.

Hofmann begins his dismissal of Valles by introducing her as an unknown poet, someone who (according to Hofmann's "vague and unattributable and thirdhand" gossip) has won the contract to translate Herbert through some hinted-at combination of connivance and nepotism. Though he makes a halfhearted attempt to disown his "snobbish impulse," the ad hominem introduction is a rhetorical gesture unworthy of his argument. It is also, on a factual level, untrue: Alissa Valles is not only an accomplished translator (into Dutch and English, from Russian and Polish), but a celebrated poet in her own right. Publishing under the name Alissa Leigh, she was the recipient of this magazine's most prestigious award for younger poets, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, and has appeared in at least four issues of Poetry, beginning in June 2002.

Hofmann's response to the translations is, I'm sorry to say, no more reliable. His review ridicules Valles's assertion that "great poets deserve many translators"; Hofmann suggests that alternatives lead only to "clutter, distraction, waste" or, worse, the illusion that we have discovered the poet's true voice through "triangulation." Yet Hofmann acknowledges that his relation with Herbert has been produced through this very process: he has read the poems only in available translations in English and German. I have no problems with this fact; it is the purpose of translation to make literature otherwise unavailable accessible to us. But given his admission, I do mistrust the authoritativeness—and the virulence—of his pronouncements about the tonal qualities of Herbert. He speaks of Valles's translations as "disasters" and points to their "awful twanging," then asserts that "the original (I'm quite sure) is . . ."—what? Well, vastly different from Valles's, at least.

All he's truly proven is that his appreciation of Herbert derives from the versions he knows, which is to say, primarily from the intermediation of John and Bogdana Carpenter. But what is merely preference, after all, does not qualify him to pass judgment upon another version. As a reader of Herbert, I am deeply grateful for Valles's delivery of two additional books of previously unavailable poems, and admire her renditions for their linguistic ingenuity and ardor, and for their precision (for example, her eschewing of the Carpenters' occasional propensity to rewrite Herbert, their tendency to produce metaphors where none exist in the original). We can speculate that these are traits that Zbigniew Herbert would appreciate.

At this point, the choice is not between the Valles version and the Carpenters' version; it is between the Valles version and no version. With his stockpile of out-of-print volumes, Hofmann may have preferred the latter. I, however, feel immense gratitude that a wide audience has gained the opportunity to know this monumental poet through Alissa Valles's beautiful translations.


Todd Samuelson
Houston, Texas



Dear Editor,
I applaud Michael Hofmann's review of Alissa Valles's Zbigniew Herbert translations. What he says supports my own dismay, but more importantly, I think it's a masterpiece of literary reviewing—highly intelligent and informed, thoughtful and insightful. He couldn't have deployed his argument more compellingly and effectively: his reluctance to be critical, and his delay of the damning examples, make his conclusions completely credible.

I also learned a great deal about translation from reading a review by someone so deeply and intimately familiar with the process himself. Though I agree with Hofmann that Valles "doesn't write even passably good English," and am shocked by how often she simply misuses words and mistakes one for another (which right off should have disqualified her from translating anyone, let alone someone as important and complex as Herbert), I might well have made some of the same choices she did—using an apostrophe instead of "of"; in general making things concise, tight. That's a high value in American English, and one I often have to call attention to as an editor of other writers' works. But now I see how easy it is to do it unthinkingly, reflexively, without a deep enough understanding of the poet's work. Hofmann's review makes clear just how deeply the Carpenters do understand Herbert's work, and he's right that the differences in verb tense and article choice have startlingly profound effects. He makes clear exactly why and how these translations are a disaster. If there were a Pulitzer for reviews, I think this should get it.


Sharon Bryan
Clinton, Washington



Dear Editor,

Michael Hofmann describes the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert:

There was a novelty, a surprise, an unpredictability, an ongoing untangling as one read....The poem remade itself—squeezed itself out as of a tube—before one's very eyes. It is like reading something still wet, not set, not combed.

In my opinion, Michael Hofmann is also describing the prose of his essay. Incomparable!

James R. Wilson
San Francisco, California



Dear Editor,

Zbigniew Herbert is a peerless poet. As such, I cannot overesteem Michael Hofmann's review of his Collected Poems. Herbert lost much in Valles's hands. From word choice to meter, Valles added noise where Herbert's muted voice was called for. This voice comes through in the Carpenters' translations, and one can only hope that they are at work on their own Collected. Hofmann reminds us that we can no longer take for granted Seamus Heaney's assessment of Herbert in translation—that "what convinces one of the universal resource of Herbert's writing is just this ability which it possesses to lean, without toppling, well beyond the plumb of its native language."

Jeff Frank
Plainfield, New Jersey



Dear Editor,

I found Michael Hofmann's impassioned essay-review on the 
translations of the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert an exhilarating introduction to someone new to me. The only Herbert I have known till now was my old friend George. Now there's this Pole, clearly a master whose work I will have to find, and certainly in earlier translations. Hofmann's furious intensity of language in his praise for Herbert and in his wrenched sadness about the new translation struck me as compellingly persuasive. It's downright exciting to read commentary by someone who holds strong beliefs about what makes good poetry and is not shy about expressing them, someone who cares as deeply as Hofmann does about what matters.

Phyllis Hoge Thompson
Coral Gables, Florida



Dear Editor,

The translation of poetry, as we all know, poses a fundamental question: since the poet's own words are what make the poem what it is, in what sense can a translator claim that his or her quite different words are in fact the same poem? Unless the reader can read the original language, he must take the translation on faith. Hence I was tempted to ask, about April's Translation Issue, whether it would not have been worthwhile, for those readers who know at least one foreign language, to have printed the original poems on facing pages. But perhaps not; the translators' notes were a partial compensation.

But now I find in the May issue a lengthy review of a translation of the Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert, and that review was written by someone who says (nonchalantly? shamefacedly?), "I can't ... read Polish," while at the same time he has the chutzpah to assert that two Polish Nobel laureates are "of, as I see it, manifestly lesser gifts and importance." But how on earth could he see it—or hear it or feel it or understand it?

I hope that in the future you will be able to find reviewers who, if not linguistically competent, are at least modest enough to realize their limitations.

Elias L. Rivers
Coral Gables, Florida



Dear Editor,

I know Michael Hofmann about as well as he knows Polish, which is to say, in translation; but I do know Peter Dale Scott, and not primarily as a Canadian diplomat, nor as a translator of Zbigniew Herbert's, but as the poet who wrote Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror (1988), a remarkable book-length poem that fuses autobiography and political analysis unlike anything else in twentieth-century American poetry. If Hofmann doesn't know who Peter Dale Scott is, it's not because his work is obscure, nor obscured—the whole trilogy, 
of which Jakarta is the first installment, is published by New Directions. I recommend it to Hofmann and other readers of Poetry who might not know it; the poem announces its relevance in the title, and is no lie.

Joshua Weiner
Washington, DC



Writing as not only an avowed fan of Morri Creech's Field Knowledge, but also as a graduate student of comparative literature frightened to death by the paths that criticism and poetry have taken over the last few decades, I cannot help but respond to Ange Mlinko's discussion of Creech's new book ["Exchange: Pure Products," May 2007]. Mlinko is not only a voice from the stands speaking in unison with all that is current and clichÃd in the realm of both poetry and criticism, but her response is an absolutely shocking display of what she herself is criticizing. She has responded to an "old-fashioned" text by citing the most old-fashioned of artists. Ashbery is her paradigm of contemporary poetry? Who else could be more canonical?

It also seems strange to me that, according to Mlinko, "[Creech's] engagement with ‘the past' is specifically ... mid-century, Anglo-American formalism," given that Traherne, Marvell, Keats, Arnold, Wordsworth, and Milton are not quite "mid-century." Or does Creech not "engage" them?

Dafydd Wood
Austin, Texas



Dear Editor,

Although I liked the idea of two critics from two different schools of poetry arguing over books, your recent staged battle between David Yezzi and Ange Mlinko fell into that same old bloated diatribe. Before even reading it, I had a feeling it would be one Language poet fighting with one "traditional" poet, and, of course, Yezzi didn't like the experimental Girly Man and Mlinko thought the Hecht-like Creech was too boring. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard this argument, I wouldn't have to beg for fellowships. It seems to me that what this boils down to is just the right to say "I told you so" in a hundred years. Maybe Charles Bernstein will survive the ages, maybe Morri Creech will—who knows. At the moment it may be fun to argue about it, but this debate just seemed like a "Letters to the Editor" section, wearing a bowtie.

Jordan Rome
Yonkers, New York



Dear Editor,

In the exchange between Ange Mlinko and David Yezzi, Yezzi writes from the assumption that Primo Levi committed suicide in 1987.

Levi's "suicide," though believed in by many biographers, has been called into question by the research of Diego Gambetta, which is well represented in a thorough, even-handed article that appeared in the Boston Review in the summer of 1999, and in an equally persuasive postscript in the spring of 2005.

Many people believe that suicide was the appropriate, even inevitable, response to Levi's Auschwitz experience, despite both lack of evidence in his case and the low percentage of suicides among camp survivors. Their argument should be shelved with Adorno's notorious assertion that after Auschwitz there should be no poetry.

Judith Arcana
Portland, Oregon