Selected Poems
by Cyprian Kamil Norwid, translated by Adam Czerniawski, introduction by Bogdan Czaykowski
96pp, Anvil Press, £7.95

In our era of homogeneity in everything, including literary celebrity, the publication by Anvil of this slim volume of translations of a Polish poet presents the English reader with a rare opportunity. Here's a famous name, on a par with Lermontov's or Browning's, yet it can be dropped with every expectation of silence and a blank stare in reply. "Norwid? Who he?" Why, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, 1821-83, peer of Mickiewicz, friend of Chopin, part of the Polish school curriculum.

It is equally rare, in the English-speaking world, to come across a work of translation that is a labour of love, a painstakingly crafted instrument that resonates with the melody and the mystery of the original, rather than a factory-made music box. Adam Czerniawski has been working on his English Norwid since he was a schoolboy, publishing his versions in magazines from the 1950s onward. He translated only what came - only as much as he could - never aiming for monumentality or completeness. These are telltale signs of a conscientious translator of poetry, and the translations collected here are an exercise in sensitivity and precision. Useful as they ever are, these qualities are indispensable in approaching Norwid.

There comes a moment in the life of a culture when it produces a literary figure whose means and meanings are of the future. It is wrong to suppose that all genius has this visionary quality, for while Shakespeare may endure for eternity, his thought belonged to his own epoch as easily and naturally as double glazing belongs to ours. In fact, such voices are the rarest aberrations, genius's albinos. William Blake was one, Emily Dickinson another. Russia never had a visionary until the 20th century, although it is fair to say that every one of her great poets since Aleksandr Blok set out to address not contemporaries but the generations to come in what, providentially, would become their language.

It is almost the rule for the visionary to live and die in the full darkness of fame, with much the same obscurity that distinguishes their displaced sensibility from those of their contemporaries, however brilliantly gifted. Norwid is no exception. Since his early 30s, Bogdan Czaykowski writes in his introduction to this book, Norwid "tried for the rest of his life to convince readers that he had something important to say, and that his poems charted a new direction in Polish poetry, as he claimed in his Vade mecum ... But the volume was not published until 1953 and, to augment the irony, not in Poland but in Tunbridge Wells." Not until the 20th century did Norwid's achievement become part of the cultural reliquary of his homeland.

Hardly surprising, for the quality of being obscure was indeed something of a vade mecum for Norwid. His work has something about it that suggests sparsely moonlit ancient ruins, labyrinthine and hermetic, like the dark architectural fantasies of Piranesi:

... I passed a colonnade of boredom

Long and straight - also hallways of whims

And a cemetery of giants moving drowsily

Beneath cobble stones ... ("The Source")

That Norwid's "inherent obscurity", as Jerzy Peterkiewicz has reasoned, "results not so much from the allusive and metaphorical congestion of his style but rather from the didactic emphasis which, aiming inward, almost ceases to be didactic", sounds unconvincing to me. Norwid was cryptic, and proud of it: "He complains my speech is dark - / Has he ever lit a taper?" the poet demands in "Obscurity", anticipating, by nearly three-quarters of a century, Marina Tsvetaeva's epochal disdain: "I should not mind in which tongue / Not understanding me is better!"

"Laconic and elliptical" are the words Czaykowski chooses to describe Norwid when comparing him to Emily Dickinson, his contemporary and, like him, an autodidact and an anachronism. The comparison is indeed irresistible, both in terms of both poets' message-in-a-bottle, time-capsule consciousness and their almost-maniacal insistence on equating syntax with thought and feeling: "Sing in triumphant chorus / Your praises unto God - / I? - could spoil your song: / have seen blood! ..."

At times the condensation of syntax, pushing to lift a comma into the realm of pure metaphysics, becomes audible, like a compressor pump going at full blast: "The past - is now, though somewhat far: / Behind the dray a farm, / Not something somewhere / Never known to man!"

"Norwid's poetry, whatever the analogies with other poets," writes Czaykowski, "is sui generis. And so was Norwid himself, a wholly idiosyncratic person, who cultivated idiosyncrasy not because he wanted to, but because it was thrust upon him by his marginalisation. And it was precisely this perspective, questioning and reverent at the same time, that lay at the bottom of his ironic mode, in fact of his poetics."

But Norwid isn't all jagged moonscapes and cryptograms of the soul. Some of his verse, like Dickinson's, is easily accessible. Yet a curious spirit always hangs over it, safeguarding the poet's fundamental originality, like the inexplicable scent of violets when one pulls out a drawer. "My Country" is an example of this. Here Norwid's poetry attains a grandeur that, like Chopin's music, is not achieved by deploying a hundred-strong orchestra equipped with kettle-drums, but through the use of certain cross-border harmonies that make the listener proud to be a native of Europe and a product of her culture:

Those who say my country means:

Meadows, flowers and fields of wheat,

Hamlets and trenches - must confess

These - are her feet. [...]

No nation fashioned or saved me;

I recall eternity's span;

David's key unlocked my lips,

Rome called me man.

There is something of this in the fragment of a prose memoir included in the book. "He looked very beautiful, as always," wrote Norwid of Chopin, "displaying in the most mundane movements something of perfection, something of a monumental outline ... something which either Athenian aristocracy could have adopted as a cult during the most beautiful epoch of Greek civilisation - or that which an artist of dramatic genius portrays, for instance, in classical French tragedies."

It is this longing for nobility, not merely of sentiment, but also of sound and gesture, that I think underlies the Norwid utterance, much as it does Blok's, Mandelstam's and Akhmatova's. "Of the things of this world only two will remain, / Two only: poetry and goodness", Norwid prophesied in the final poem in this collection. In the last century the history of Russia and Eastern Europe has shown us that his prophesy was more or less right on the money.

· Andrei Navrozov's books include The Gingerbread Race (Picador).