In Paris, my poetry almost never...
two volumes were published in French translation,
but what I write and what other Polish poets write
although not just Polish poets but poets in general,
the majority of European poets, 
American poets – is not poetry to the French.
They have a different aesthetic model
which has its origins in Mallarmé,
a hermetic kind of poetry
which is pure and which under no 
circumstances reflects politics or history.
There's an anecdote which illustrated this very well.
Maja had started to translate my poetry into French
because she speaks it very well,
but she needed someone who would check her translation,
a native French speaker.
By coincidence, we met a poet who said,
'Fine, give me a few of these translations
and I'll cast my eye over them and I'll see
if we can work together. We can meet up after a week'.
A week went by and we did meet up with him
and he said, 'I'm sorry,
but I really don't like these poems.
They're scandalous'.
For instance, there was a poem there 
called 'Szopenhauer płacze' ['Schopenhauer's Crying']
and the first line of this poem lists 
the dates when Schopenhauer lived.
The French poet said it was absolutely unacceptable
for dates to appear in a poem since 
poetry is immortal and eternal
and time doesn't come into poetry as poetry
is an antidote to time
and that by introducing time, the poem is ruined.
He refused to be involved.
This was all amusing, it wasn't a tragedy
but it showed me that I was in a land
in which my poetry wasn't going to be appreciated.
But surprisingly, this didn't upset me
because these were the first...
we were still in the first Parisian years and I was still...
I was still working a great deal,
going for a great many walks,
but then the very prosaic problem arose
of how I was to make a living
because my poetry wasn't providing me with any income.
For a while, I was translating several 
books from French into Polish
for Polonia Books, a publisher based in London
which paid quite a decent fee for translations.
I translated three books:
'Conversation with Aron', 'Widz i uczestnik' 
['The Spectator and the Participant'];
a story by Volkoff, Vladimir Volkoff,
and – I forget its title – a volume of the diaries of Eliade.
These were all translations from French.
But, well, these were only temporary solutions,
not permanent ones.
However, miraculously, by some miracle,
a volume of an English translation of my poems
appeared in one of the best American publications,
and this came about because Józef Brodski liked them.
Brodski could read Polish very well,
he didn't want to speak it because he made errors
but he read without difficulty and he recommended me
to his publisher in New York, and after about a year,
year-and-a-half, they published a volume
which was very well received in the States.
