Untranslatable Treasures: An Interview with Antonia Lloyd-Jones on the Poetics of Polish

padalec_stanislaw_lem_burdzynska_magda_6.jpg, default, Still from the animation ‘The Adventures of the Blindworm: An Orthographic Short Story by Stanisław Lem’, illustrations by Magda Burdzyńska, concept a

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For most English speakers, Polish is the linguistic equivalent of a black diamond ski slope – perilous, exhilarating, and best approached with humility and a helmet. For Antonia Lloyd-Jones, one of the most celebrated translators of Polish literature into English, that challenge was part of the allure. What began with a modest phrase book and the word kochać – to love – became a lifelong affair with a language as rich in poetry as it is in pitfalls.

In the following conversation with Culture.pl, Antonia Lloyd-Jones reflects on her decades-long relationship with Polish – a language that has tested her wit, patience and imagination in equal measure. From her first faltering attempts during the final days of martial law to her current tussles with words like trumniaki (coffin shoes, if you please), her anecdotes reveal both the absurdities and the delights of linguistic devotion. With her characteristic humour and precision, she unpacks the hidden music of Polish, its gendered grammar, its poetic bird names, and its untranslatable idioms – reminding us that every language, like every love affair, is an exercise in beautiful misunderstanding.

Agnes Dudek: What first drew you to the challenge of learning Polish, with its reputation as one of the hardest languages in Europe?

Antonia Lloyd-Jones: I graduated in Russian and decided to learn Polish with the aim of becoming a journalist after spending time in Poland at the tail end of martial law in 1983, when friends of my own age were facing limited opportunities and a grim future. As a recent Oxford graduate with no such restrictions, I felt I had a mission to tell others about what was happening to young people in Poland.

'Ashes and Diamonds' by Jerzy Andrzejewski, photo: Northwestern University Press

I started reading Teach Yourself Polish while I was there. The first word in the book was kochać (to love), and I took that to heart. Knowing Russian made it easier for me to teach myself Polish, though they’re on different planets in my mind nowadays. Anyway, I love learning languages, it’s fun, not work. I bought Polish novels and their translations, and compared them, and went to lots of subtitled Polish films. One of the first books I read was Ashes and Diamonds by Jerzy Andrzejewski, in which the Polish hard-line communist characters use Wy (You) as a polite form of address, rather than Pan/Pani (Mister/Miss). Without realising that only hard-line communists used it, the next time I went to Poland I got into trouble by addressing someone as Wy. I thought I was being polite but I was being deeply offensive.

First encounters with Polish

AD: Which aspect of Polish did you find most difficult to master – was it grammar, pronunciation, or something more elusive, like rhythm or humour?

ALJ: I love the grammar, though the fact that I haven’t had formal training in Polish means that I make comical mistakes, for which I blame the influence of deeply ingrained Russian (not my own ignorance, of course). The hardest thing is the accent, but as long as I’m understood, I don’t mind having a British accent. Accents are attractive – we all have one, in our own language too. For example, cab drivers in Poland ask where I’m from, and fail to guess, so sometimes I say I’m from Fredonia. I wish my comprehension was better – sometimes the performers on Polish TV speak too fast and I get lost. I listen to a lot of Polish audiobooks and that has helped, but I’ll be learning Polish for the rest of my life. I can’t say I’ve mastered it, but the same goes for English – I’ll be learning that forever too.

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Still from the animation ‘Pani Twardowska’, illustrations by Magda Burdzyńska, concept and screenplay by Mikołaj Gliński, co-editor and narration by Adam Żuławski, produced by Culture.pl / Adam Mickiewicz Institute, photo: IAM

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AD: Was there anything about Polish that you unexpectedly found easy or natural, despite its fearsome reputation?

ALJ: You asked about the rhythm, and that’s not hard, because it has its own music, set by the stress on the penultimate syllable (as in Italian). That was a relief after Russian and its wandering stresses. Non-Poles think Polish words look unspellable, but once you realise that you pronounce each letter, it’s less alarming. English spelling is full of traps because many of the letters are pronounced in unexpected ways. Polish only has three main tenses, while English has 12, which also makes life easier.

AD: Did you ever encounter a rule, expression, or construction in Polish that struck you as absurd or impossible to grasp – and if so, how did you come to terms with it?

ALJ: I was surprised when I reached the page in Teach Yourself Polish that told me men in the plural have their own grammatical endings. What a sexist language, I thought! Women and animals and things are lumped together in terms of grammar. But I was amused when I discovered that in the phrase ‘Auntie and the dog went to the park’, the verb is poszli, which has a masculine personal ending – Auntie’s humanity combines with the dog’s masculinity to pull off this satisfying coup.

AD: Do you feel Polish in a different part of yourself than English – for example, in how it uses the mouth, breath or memory? Or do you feel that speaking Polish gives you access to a different self – perhaps even a different worldview?

ALJ: I do feel like a slightly different person in Polish. Having to be careful with the grammar of my sentences makes me think harder about what I want to say, so sometimes I speak quite slowly. People are always jumping in to finish my sentences for me, assuming I don’t know the words, but most of my pauses are for thought about ideas rather than vocab. But sometimes (usually in front of an audience) I can hear a mean voice in my head saying, ‘I know you know that word but I’m not going to let you have it!’

Polish language play: humour, untranslatables & everyday mysteries

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Antonia Lloyd-Jones on stage during the Booker event in Wrocław, celebrating Olga Tokarczuk as the first Polish winner of the International Man Booker Prize, Wrocław, 2018, photo: Krzysztof Ćwik / AW

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AD: Is there a Polish word or phrase you’ve encountered that still keeps you awake at night – one that resists translation no matter how many times you try?

ALJ: I can never decide if nothing is translatable, or everything is translatable. Nothing keeps me awake permanently, but there will be words in whatever I’m working on that torture me. Lately it’s the word trumniaki, which appears at the start of Zyta Rudzka’s Only Those with Teeth Can Smile, which I’m now translating. Of course it’s not a regular Polish word anyway, but – based on the word trumna, meaning ‘coffin’ – describes the shoes worn by a corpse in its coffin, or ugly shoes that look as if that’s what they’re for. So far I have no idea how to convey the grim horror of this word. Ask me again when I get to the final page.

AD: Have you ever come across a Polish word or phrase that made you laugh out loud – either because of how it sounds, or because of the cultural associations behind it?

ALJ: The first time I came across the noun chujwico was in a story by Wojciech Kuczok, but I didn’t laugh immediately because I couldn’t understand it. Strangely enough it’s not in any of my dictionaries, not even PWN’s excellent slang dictionary by Maciej Czeszewski. I looked at it every which way. Of course I could see the chuj (dick) bit of it, but the wico eluded my tiny mind. So I asked a Polish friend who explained that a chujwico is a chujwico! Essentially a fuck-knows-what, an unidentifiable item. I laughed when the scales fell from my innocent foreign eyes.

AD: Are there simple, everyday Polish expressions that turn out to be surprisingly difficult to render in English?

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'Kamienice' in Bolesławiec, photo: Jan Włodarczyk / Forum

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ALJ: Lots. I find the word kamienica impossible – it’s not just a house, and the usual dictionary suggestion ‘tenement’ is plain wrong (in the US, a tenement is a slum, and no one would use that word in the UK or any other English-speaking country to describe a kamienica). It’s a big residential house with several apartments, so is it what we call an apartment house? Not really, because that’s generally much bigger. Terraced house? Not necessarily. I don’t think English has a perfect equivalent. (When this interview was first published, I received a kind message from the eminent journalist and writer Neal Ascherson, who reminded me that in Scotland the word 'tenement' is an accurate translation for the Polish word kamienica, and that Scottish cities feature apartment houses, called tenements, that copied French 16th-century architectural style, and are similar to the Polish ones in design.)

Another tricky word is chłop – in Polish, the reader knows at once that this person lives in the country and perhaps works in agriculture. But in my mind the equivalent word in the dictionaries, ‘peasant’, conjures up a mediaeval image of an indigent yokel. In modern English, it’s derogatory to call someone a peasant. But ‘farmer’ isn’t right either, or ‘villager’. Explaining these very Polish concepts usually involves invisibly winding in some extra words.

The poetic & cultural heart of Polish

AD: Is there a Polish word you think has a particular kind of beauty or poetry – whether in sound, meaning or imagery?

ALJ: Polish is an extremely musical language, it’s no wonder there are so many Polish poets because it’s full of lyrical words. I love the Polish common names for birds, for instance. Szmaragdolotki – it means parakeets, but literally ‘emerald-flight-feathers’, and the word sounds beautiful. Raniuszki – long-tailed tits, but it sounds like ‘early-morning’ creatures. Kopciuszki – redstarts, but it sounds like ‘little sluts’. I could go on.

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Birds in the Main Market Square in Kraków, photo: Martin Dimitrov / Getty Images

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AD: Do you think there are words or idioms that reveal something essential about Polish culture – things you couldn’t fully understand without speaking the language?

ALJ: You could say that about some of the expletives derived from Catholic culture. ‘Matko!’ for instance, short for ‘Matka Boska’. I suppose the Irish, another Catholic nation, might say ‘Mother of God!’ but not just ‘Mother!’ on its own. I once gave my very Welsh surname to a receptionist at a Polish hospital, whose immediate response was ‘Jezus Maria!’ To which I said: ‘I wszyscy Święci!’ (‘And all the Saints!’).

But for the culture hidden behind Polish words, I recommend a book called Quarks, Elephants and Pierogi by Mikołaj Gliński, Matthew Davies and Adam Żuławski. It explains a great deal about Polish culture and the Polish language through 100 carefully chosen words. There’s an explanation of the fine pagan names of the months in Polish, where only two (marzec – March, and maj – May) are Latin-based, while all the others describe the weather at that time of year. These words have ancient roots and, as the authors point out, reveal the importance of nature, agriculture and the weather to their Slavic ancestors. Right now it’s listopad meaning ‘leaf-fall’ – much more romantic than ‘November’. And fancy having months that are flowery, maggoty, frozen, linden, shives (the refuse left over from flax processing), to name a few (respectively, our April, June, February, July and October).

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Cover from the book 'Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words', text: Mikołaj Gliński, Matthew Davies, Adam Żuławski, illustration and book design: Magdalena Burdzyńska, published by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2018, photo: Grażyna Makara / Culture.pl

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AD: Have you seen certain Polish words evolve in meaning during your time translating? For example, words that were once old-fashioned or niche but now have taken on new life?

ALJ: The example that springs to mind is małpa, which hasn’t changed its meaning, but has acquired a new, additional one. It has always meant a monkey, but now it’s also what in English is called an ‘at sign’, because @ looks like a monkey sitting on its tail. (To show my age, there was no such thing when I started translating.) How shamefully unpoetical we are in my language! I love the image of a monkey sitting on its tail. I wonder if any other languages have given this banal modern symbol an imaginative name?

Translating Polish: pleasures, challenges & favourite words

AD: What’s the most satisfying Polish word or phrase you’ve ever found a solution for in English?

ALJ: Nie mój cyrk, nie moje małpy. I first met it in Zygmunt Miłoszewski’s crime novel A Grain of Truth. It’s so perfect and so obvious what it means that I immediately translated it literally, as ‘Not my circus, not my monkeys’, rather than ‘not my problem’ or some other dull English equivalent. Later when The Sunday Times asked me, along with other translators, for a Polish phrase to go on a list they were publishing for International Translation Day, I told them ‘Not my circus, not my monkeys’. And since then I’ve heard people saying it in the UK as if it’s an English phrase.

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At work on a translation, photo: Michał Mitoraj / Forum

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AD: Have you noticed Polish words that change their ‘character’ when used in English translations – almost as if they gain or lose something in the process?

ALJ: Twisting your question a bit, the only example I can think of is the name of the town in Małgorzata Lebda’s novel Voracious, which I translated last year. The town it’s based on is Stary Sącz, but she renames it ‘Stary Sad’, which in Polish means ‘Old Orchard’. But I like the strange accident produced by reading it through English eyes, as ‘stary sad’, or ‘starry sad’, both of which fit the tone of the book, which is lyrical, full of imagery, and tells the sad but beautiful story of a gradual death. There’s also a lot of looking and observing in the narrative, so staring isn’t out of place. A pure coincidence can produce poetry.

AD: Do you have a ‘favourite’ Polish word – not necessarily because it’s hard to translate, but because you love its sound, meaning or the memories attached to it?

Thumbnail — Exhibition of illustrations from 'Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi' by Magdalena Burdzyńska at Clapham Library, London, 28 September 2019, photo: Dagmara Smolna

ALJ: I’m fond of Polish onomatopoeia, words like trzask, zgiełk, zgrzyt, brzęk, chrzęst, which look and sound like road accidents. They’re hard to translate because the English equivalents seem rather weak by comparison: crack, crash, snap, bang, crunch and so forth don’t have the same force, at least not to my ear. Though thwack is a reasonable contender.

AD: If a non-Polish reader wanted to learn just one or two Polish words to sense the flavour of the language, which would you recommend? Or, what would you tell someone beginning to learn Polish today about how to approach the language without being overwhelmed?

ALJ: For an English speaker, the first step to overcoming fear of the language is to realise that, although Polish uses the Roman alphabet, most of the letters are pronounced differently from in English. For instance, once you know that c sounds like ts, sz is like sh and cz like ch, ą is like on in French, ę is like in in French (e.g. vin), ł is like w, w is like v and so on, the words stop looking quite so unfamiliar. As soon as you’re over that bump, you can fearlessly move on to words like źdźbło (a blade of grass), chrząszcz (a cockchafer) and krnąbrność (intractability, nomen omen). Good luck!

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