Two Voices with Poet and Translator Fanny Howe on A Wall of Two

"My work on a translation for seven years has been part of a long fixation, which I hope to put to rest here." This was the bold statement with which Fanny Howe began her Two Voices presentation on the book of Holocaust poetry, A Wall of Two.

A Wall of Two is one of the few books that could truly merit such a portentous beginning. The poetry in it was produced "at the center of an anti-miracle," as Howe put it in her introduction to the collection, written by Polish sisters Henia and Ilona Karmel in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Howe continues, "[the poems] were produced in that stretch of time in the twentieth century when something that couldn't happen did."

Howe started out by giving an evocative description of the camps in which the poems were composed, describing them as both "sacred" and "marked off as ones where God did not appear." She also discussed the youth of Henia and Ilona and their amazing struggles to survive in the camps, reading the poem "To the German People," which is reproduced in part below:

To the German people

Are you asleep or what
Blind
Can't hear
That's "The Marseilles"
And the crash of the world
Falling down
Heat it
It means freedom is coming
I bet you want that too
A red star on Soviet tanks
Life returning while you sleep
Wake up, people of Germany, get ready
Step in time to "The Marseilles"
You better revive your hearts and souls
As if the love of your life was coming home . . .

Howe then went on to discuss the seven years she spent translating and "adapting" the poems. "I can say that I might never have taken on the job of editing and translating A Wall of Two if I had known how deeply it would affect me," she said, "and if I had not known one of the authors as well as I did." She overcame both lexical translation challenges as well challenges dealing with the long road across 50 years and two continents that the poems took in reaching her pen. Howe elegantly summed this up, saying, "The wrecks I was given to work on were equal to the devastation of the poets' lives. And so in a certain way I was involved in a reconstruction process that was also a mortal struggle."

Howe also recounted the sisters' horrible struggles in the camps, as well as their inspiring lives after the camps. Though exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust and left permanently disfigured by their time in the camps, the sisters went on to become successful writers (in English, as they forswore the use of Polish after writing the poems).

All in all, this was a poignant and powerful conclusion to a successful 2010-11 Two Voices events season, an event that reaffirmed the power of literature in the face of anything. As Howe said of the sisters, "they were determined to see their writing as poetry," Howe said of the sisters. Henia in particular believed that "transforming an experience from a prose description into verse would increase its worth, in a nearly supernatural sense." it is this power of literature that comes across in Howe's presentation and, we hope, all of our Two Voices offerings.