Encounter then returned them with the explanation that they were instead going to publish Miłosz’s translation of Elegy of Fortinbras, as they did in August, 1961. This was an excellent way to learn a language: the Polish words used by Herbert in his poetry-niepokój (unrest), milość (love)-still remind me vividly of those first lessons! While still in Poland, and before I met Miłosz, I had a group of seven Herbert translations accepted by Encounter magazine. My first translations with her were simultaneously lessons in learning Polish. While I was in Poland he had only published two small books.Īlthough at this point I was barely competent in Polish, I immediately recognized the originality, power and importance of the poems she showed me.

When she learnt in our second lesson that I was a poet, she showed me the work of her friend, Zbigniew Herbert. Peter Dale Scott: By great good fortune, when I arrived in Warsaw in 1959 to work as a Canadian diplomat, I hired a Polish tutor-M., an intelligent lively woman whose name I have forgotten. How did you become aware of Herbert’s poetry? In this interview, he talks with Cynthia Haven about his meetings with Herbert and what it was like to translate the poet’s “suggestive expanses of the unspoken” into English.Ĭynthia Haven: You were perhaps the first to translate Zbigniew Herbert into English, two years before you began working with Miłosz on Postwar Polish Poetry, the anthology that brought Polish poetry to the attention of the West. Scott eventually collaborated with Czesław Miłosz on the 1968 Selected Poems. He is also one of the earliest translators of Zbigniew Herbert into English. His many nonfiction books include The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007). As a poet, he is best known for his three-volume trilogy Seculum, beginning with Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror, which was inspired by the 1965 massacre in Indonesia of perhaps a million people, in which he believes the United States played a role.

Peter Dale Scott has worn many hats: he is a poet, former diplomat, professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and an influential and provocative author. You can find James Marcus’s introduction to the poet over here.-Editors Cynthia Haven interviews Peter Dale Scott, one of the earliest translators of the work of Zbigniew Herbert.

Postwar Polish Poetry by Czesław Miłosz