The poems of Wislawa Szymborska

CHILDREN OF OUR AGE



We are children of our age,

it's a political age.



All day long, all through the night,

all affairs--yours, ours, thiers--

are political affairs.



Whether you like it or not,

your genes have a political past,

your skin, a political cast,

your eyes, a political slant.



Whatever you say reverberates,

whatever you don't say speaks for itself.

So either way you're talking politics.



Even when you take to the woods,

you're taking political steps,

on political grounds.



Apolitical poems are also political,

and above us shines a moon,

no longer purely lunar.

To be or not to be, that is the question.

And though it troubles the digestion,

it's a question, as always, of politics. ...{excerpt, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, from the Polish}

ARCHAEOLOGY Well, my poor man, seems we've made some progress in my field. Millennia have passed since you first called me archaeology. I no longer require your stone gods, your ruins with legible inscriptions. Show me your whatever and I'll tell you who you were. Something's bottom, something's top. A scrap of engine. A picture tube's neck. An inch of cable. Fingers turned to dust. Or even less than that, or even less. Using a method that you couldn't have known then, I can stir up memory in countless elements. Traces of blood are forever. Lies shine. Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light. If I want to (and you can't be too sure that I will). I'll peer down the throat of your silence, I'll read your views from the sockets of your eyes, I'll remind you in infinite detail of what you expected from life besides death. ... {excerpt}

The End and the Beginning


After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.




Someone has to push the rubble
to the sides of the road,
so the corpse-laden wagons
can pass.




Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.




Someone must drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone must glaze a window,
rehang a door.


Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.




Again we'll need bridges
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up. ... {excerpt}

[translated by Joanna Trzeciak]

Photograph from September 11



They jumped from the burning floors—
one, two, a few more,
higher, lower.


The photograph halted them in life,
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.


Each is still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden.


There’s enough time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets. ... {excerpt}

Explaining Szymborska's work, translator Stanislaw Baranczak noted in New York Times Book Review: "The typical lyrical situation on which a Szymborska poem is founded is the confrontation between the directly stated or implied opinion on an issue and the question that raises doubt about its validity. The opinion not only reflects some widely shared belief or is representative of some widespread mind-set," Baranczak added, "but also, as a rule, has a certain doctrinaire ring to it: the philosophy behind it is usually speculative, anti-empirical, prone to hasty generalizations, collectivist, dogmatic and intolerant."

Her name is Wislawa, not Wistava. The thing is that polish has a voice marked with l, with a dash on upper part of it, so it looks like t. It's pronounced almost as w.

To ex ponto: So that letter is not a t...it is an l. But it is pronounced like w. Thanks, I never did feel comfortable with that spelling.

Poetry-
but what is poetry anyway?
More than one rickety answer
has tumbled since that question first was raised.
But I just keep on not knowing, and I cling to that
like a redemptive handrail. -- Wislawa Szymborska Poetry

Poems: New and Collected, 1957-1997

Wislawa Szymborska

Translated by Stanislaw Baránczak and Clare Cavanagh

Harcourt Brace, $27


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


by Frances Padorr Brent

"For good or bad-- as is always the case with translation-- the work of the Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska has undergone sea changes as it has been conveyed to English. Removed from its original culture where attenuating circumstances would be tacitly understood and separated from the variegated nuance of the Polish voice, the poetry causes the reader to become a collaborator in a process of being re-imagined." -- http://www.bostonreview.net/BR23.3/brent.html

A Photograph of a Crowd

In a photograph of a crowd
my head seventh from the edge,
or maybe four in from the left
or twenty up from the bottom;


my head, I can't tell which,
no more the one and only, but already one of many,
and resembling the resembling,
neither clearly male nor female;


the marks it flashes at me
are not distinguishing marks;


maybe The Spirit of Time sees it,
but he's not looking at it closely;


my demographic head
which consumes steel and cables
so easily, so globally,


unashamed it's nothing special,
undespairing it's replaceable;


as if it weren't mine
in its own way on its own; ... {excerpt, translated by Joanna Trzeciak}

THE JOY OF WRITING



Why does this written doe bound through these

written woods?

For a drink of written water from a spring

whose surface will zerox her soft mussle?

Why does she lift her head; does she hear

something?

Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,

she pricks up her ears beneath my findertips.

Silence--this word also rustles across the page

and parts the boughs

that have sprouted from the word "woods."



Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,

are letters up to no good,

clutches of clauses so subordinate

they'll never let her get away.



Each drop of ink contains a fair supply

of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind

their sights,

prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment

surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.



They forget that what's here isn't life.

Other laws, black on white, obtain.

The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,

and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,

full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.

Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.

Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,

not a blade of grass will bend beneath that

little hoof's full stop.



Is there then a world

where I rule absolutely on fate? ... {excerpt}



Wislawa Szymborska

COLORATURA

Poised beneath a twig-wigged tree,
She spill her sparkling vocal powder:
Slippery sound silvers, silvery
Like spider's spittle, only louder.

Oh yes, she Cares (with a high C)
For Fellow Humans (you and me);
For us she'll twitter nothing bitter,
She'll knit her fitter, sweeter glitter,
Her vocal cords mince words for us
And crumble croutons, with crisp crunch
(lunch for her little lambs to munch)
Into a cream-filled demitasse.

But hark! It's dark! Oh doom too soon!
She's threatened by the black bassoon!
It's hoarse and coarse, it's grim and gruff,
It calls her dainty voice's bluff--
Basso Profundo, end this terror,
Do-re-mi mene tekel et cetera!

You want to silence her, abduct her
To our chilly life behind the scenes?
To our Siberian steppes of stopped-up sinuses,
Frogs in all throats, eternal hems and haws,
Where we, poor souls, gape soundlessly
Like fish? And this is what you wish?

Oh nay! Oh nay! Though doom be nigh,
She'll keep her chin and pitch up high! .....


{excerpt}

From Poems: New and Collected

INTERVIEW WITH A CHILD

The Master hasn't been among us long.
That's why he lies in wait in every corner.
Covers his eyes and peeks through the cracks.
Aces the wall, then suddenly turns around.

The Master rejects outright the ridiculous thought
That a table out of sight goes on being a table nonstop,
That a chair behind our backs stays stuck in chairlike bounds
And doesn't even try to fly the coop.

True, it's hard to catch the world being different.
The apple tree slips back under the window before you can blink.
Incandescent sparrows always grow dim just in time.
Little pitchers have big ears and pick up every sound.
The nighttime closet acts as dull as its daytime twin.
The drawer does its best to assure the Master
It holds only what it's been given.
And no matter how fast you open the Brothers Grimm,
The princess always manages to take her seat again.

"They sense I'm a stranger here," the Master sighs,
"they won't let a new kid play their private games."

Since how can it be that whatever exists
Can only exist in one way,
An awful situation, for there's no escaping yourself,
No pause, no transformation? In a humble from-here-to-here?
A fly caught in a fly? A mouse trapped in a mouse?
A dog never let off its latent chain? ...


{excerpt}

Wislawa Szymborska

Sunday, September 14, 2008
3:44 PM

From Poems New and Collected

LAUGHTER

The little girl I was--
I know her, of course.
I have a few snapshots
From her brief life.
I feel good-natured pity
For a couple of little poems.
I remember a few events.

But
To make the man who's with me
Laugh and hug me,
I did up just one silly story:
The puppy love
Of that ugly duckling.

I tell him
How she fell in love with a college boy;
That is, she wanted him
To look at her.

I tell him
How she once ran out to meet him
With a bandage on her unhurt head,
So that he'd ask, oh just ask her
What had happened.

Funny little thing.
How could she know
That even despair can work for you
If your're lucky enough
To outlive it.

...........

It'd be better if you
Went back where you came from.
I don't owe you anything,
I'm just an ordinary woman
Who only knows
When to betray
Another's secret.

Don't keep staring at us
With those eyes of yours,
Open too wide
Like the eyes of the dead. {excerpt}

"How to (and how not to) Write Poety" http://poetryfoundation.org/features...html?id=178592

From her Nobel Prize speech: -- "It's not accidental that film biographies of great scientists and artists are produced in droves. The more ambitious directors seek to reproduce convincingly the creative process that led to important scientific discoveries or the emergence of a masterpiece. And one can depict certain kinds of scientific labor with some success. Laboratories, sundry instruments, elaborate machinery brought to life: such scenes may hold the audience's interest for a while. And those moments of uncertainty - will the experiment, conducted for the thousandth time with some tiny modification, finally yield the desired result? - can be quite dramatic. Films about painters can be spectacular, as they go about recreating every stage of a famous painting's evolution, from the first penciled line to the final brush-stroke. Music swells in films about composers: the first bars of the melody that rings in the musician's ears finally emerge as a mature work in symphonic form. Of course this is all quite naive and doesn't explain the strange mental state popularly known as inspiration, but at least there's something to look at and listen to.

But poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens ... Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?

I've mentioned inspiration. Contemporary poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually exists. It's not that they've never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It's just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don't understand yourself.

When I'm asked about this on occasion, I hedge the question too. But my answer is this: inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."

There aren't many such people. Most of the earth's inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn't pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there's no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes.

And so, though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings."