Cyprian Norwid at the Grand Piano

THE POLISH POET Cyprian Norwid—though he is known to his compatriots as an artist of the highest eminence and read by schoolchildren in Poland almost universally, and is, more generally speaking, a poet of Western-canonical significance to whom scholars often compare Hopkins and Browning, and even more insightfully Dickinson and Pound—is unfortunately an obscure poet in the English-speaking world. Though Jerzy Peterkiewicz, Burns Singer, and Christine Brooke-Rose together supplied a serviceable translation of Norwid’s work in 2000, and Adam Czerniawski published last year his more-than-serviceable translation in a second edition, it is at last Danuta Borchardt’s new translation of Norwid, with the original text presented side-by-side with facing-page translations into English, through which English-speaking readers should familiarize themselves with this authentically strong poet. It is Borchardt, with his faithfulness to Norwid’s idiosyncrasies and his fluent music, who best conveys Norwid’s fierce originality, his condensations of thought and elliptical ironies. If there are less ambiguous or less obscure English translations of Norwid, Borchardt’s is still the most lucid and moving.