A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth

Reading poetry in translation necessarily means missing some of the rhythm and acoustic effects achieved by the poet in the original form. Great translators balance rendering meaning, tone, and form when they reinterpret a poet’s work in a new language. Barańczak and Cavanagh not only translated Szymborska’s work; they interpret the works of many other Polish poets as well. A longstanding team with a proven understanding of the nuances of the poet and of the language, their translation is as faithful to the experience of “A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth” as is possible in English.

The poem’s free verse varies between longer lines with four to five stressed syllables and shorter lines with two stressed syllables. More than half of the lines in the poem begin with a trochaic foot. Polish poets often favor trochaic meter because the stress in many Polish words falls on the next-to-last syllable. That effect might be difficult to sustain throughout the poem in English, but lines like “manifests a willingness to travel” (Line 13) and Lines 23 and 24, beginning with “Mr. Newton” and “Let him look,” begin with trochaic feet, preserving some