Showing posts with label Wislawa Szymborska. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wislawa Szymborska. Show all posts

Sunday, August 27, 2023

no longer sure

 
 
 
 




It has come to this: I'm sitting under a tree
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
It's an insignificant event
and won't go down in history.
It's not battles and pacts,
where motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides.

And yet I'm sitting by this river, that's a fact.
And since I'm here
I must have come from somewhere,
and before that
I must have turned up in many other places,
exactly like the conquerors of nations
before setting sail.

Even a passing moment has its fertile past,
its Friday before Saturday,
its May before June.
Its horizons are no less real
than those that a marshal's field glasses might scan.

This tree is a poplar that's been rooted here for years.
The river is the Raba; it didn't spring up yesterday.
The path leading through the bushes
wasn't beaten last week.
The wind had to blow the clouds here
before it could blow them away.

And though nothing much is going on nearby,
the world is no poorer in details for that.
It's just as grounded, just as definite
as when migrating races held it captive.

Conspiracies aren't the only things shrouded in silence.
Retinues of reasons don't trail coronations alone.
Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around,
but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.

The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.

So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else's but its own.

When I see such things, I'm no longer sure
that what's important
is more important than what's not.




~  Wislawa Szymborska
S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh translation 

 
 
 
 

Saturday, July 1, 2023

a few words on the soul

 
 
 
 
 
 
We have a soul at times.
No one's got it nonstop,
for keeps.
 
Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.
 
Sometimes 
it will settle for a while
only in childhood's fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.
 
It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.
 
It usually steps out
 whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.
 
For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence. 
 
Just when our body goes from ache to pain
it slips off duty.
 
It's picky:
it doesn't like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.
 
Joy and sorrow
aren't two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.
 
We can count on it
when we're sure of nothing
and curious about everything.
 
Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.
 
It won't say where it comes from
or when it's taking off again,
though it's clearly expecting such questions.
 
We need it
but apparently 
it needs us
for some reason too.
 
 
 
 
~ Wislawa Szymborska
from Monologue of a Dog 
 
 
 
 

Friday, April 22, 2022

in abundance

 
 
 

 
 
I am who I am.
A coincidence as inscrutable
as any other.
 
Other ancestors
might have been mine, after all,
then from some other nest
I would have flown,
from some other stump
I would have crawled in my shell.
 
In nature's wardrobe
there are many costumes-
spider, seagull, field mouse.
Each fits like a glove from the get-go
and is loyally worn
until it wears out.
 
I, too, had no choice,
but I can't complain.
I could have been someone 
much less singular.
Someone from a school of fish,
from an anthill, from a buzzing swarm,
 a piece of landscape thrashed by the wind.
 
Someone much less lucky,
bred for fur
or for a holiday meal,
something swimming under a cover glass.
 
A tree stuck in the earth,
with a fire approaching.
 
A blade of grass trampled by a run 
of incomprehensible events.
 
One born under a dark cloud
whose lining gleams for others.
 
But what if I had awakened fear in people,
or merely revulsion,
or merely pity?
 
 If I hadn't been born 
into the right tribe and
paths closed before me?
 
Fate has proved
benevolent so far.
 
The memory of good moments
 might not have been granted me.
 
A penchant for comparisons
might have been withheld from me.
 
I might have been myself-though without the wonder,
but that would have meant
being someone else.
 
 
 
 
 
~ Wislawa Szymborska
from miracle fair
 Nasa photo

 
 

water

 
 
 

 
 
A raindrop fell on my hand,
crafted from the Ganges and the Nile,
 
from the ascended frost of a seal's whiskers,
from water in broken pots in the cities of Ys and Tyre.
 
On my index finger
the Caspian Sea isn't landlocked,
 
and the Pacific flows meekly into the Rudava,
the one that flew in a cloud over Paris
 
in seventeen sixty-four
on the seventh of May at three in the morning.
 
There are not enough lips to pronounce
your transient names, O water.
 
I would have to say them in every language
pronouncing all the vowels at once,
 
at the same time keeping silent-for the sake of a lake
that waited in vain for a name,
 
and is no longer on earth-as it is in the heavens,
whose stars are no longer reflected in it.
 
Someone was drowning; someone dying 
called out for you. That was long ago and yesterday.
 
You extinguished houses; you carried them off
like trees, forests like cities.
 
You were in baptismal fonts and in the bathtubs of courtesans,
in kisses, in shrouds.
 
Eating away at stones, fueling rainbows.
In the sweat and dew of pyramids and lilacs.
 
How light all this is in the raindrop.
How delicately the world touches me.
 
Whenever wherever whatever has happened
is written on the waters of Babel.
 
 
 
 
~ Wislawa Szymborska
from miracle fair
 
 
 

Friday, February 11, 2022

a speech at the lost and found

 
 
 

 
 
 
I lost a few goddesses on my way from south to north,
as well as many gods on my way from east to west,
Some stars went out on me for good: part for me, O sky. 
Island after island collapsed into the sea on me.
I'm not sure exactly where I left my claws,
who wears my fur, who dwells in my shell. 
My siblings died our when I crawled onto land
and only a tiny bone in me marks the anniversary. 
I leapt out of my skin, squandered vertebrae and legs,
and left my senses many many times.
Long ago I closed my third eye to it all,
waved it off with my fins, shrugged my branches.
 
Scattered by the four winds to a place that time forgot,
how little there remains of me surprises me a lot,
 a singular being of human kind for now,
who lost her umbrella in a tram somehow.
 
 
 
 
 
~ Wislawa Szymborska
from miracle fair 
 
 
 

Monday, November 23, 2020

the word

 
 
 
 

 
 
 
When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.




– Wislawa Szymborska
 Polish Poet (Born July 1923)/Nobel Literature Prize 1996


Tuesday, October 13, 2020

view with a grain of sand





We call it a grain of sand
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it it's no different than falling on anything else
with no assurance that it's finished falling
or that it's falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural,
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it,  its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that's just our simile.
The character's invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.





~ Wislawa Szymborska
translated by Stanislaw Baraniczak and Clara Cavanagh



Wednesday, July 1, 2020

my apologies






My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. 
 My apologies to necessity in case I'm mistaken. 
 Don't be angry, happiness, that I take you for my own. 
 May the dead forgive me that their memory's but a flicker. 
 My apologies to time for the quantity of world overlooked per second. 
 My apologies to an old love for treating a new one as the first. 
 Forgive me, far-off wars, for carrying my flowers home. 
 Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. 
 My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the abyss. 
 My apologies to those in train stations for sleeping soundly at five in the morning. 
 Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing sometimes. 
 Pardon me, deserts, for not rushing in with a spoonful of water. 
 And you, O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage, 
staring, motionless, always at the same spot, 
 absolve me even if you happen to be stuffed. 
 My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs. 
 My apologies to large questions for small answers. 
 Truth, do not pay me too much attention. 
 Solemnity, be magnanimous toward me. 
 Bear with me, O mystery of being, for pulling threads from your veil. 
 Soul, don't blame me that I've got you so seldom. 
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere. 
 My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and woman. 
 I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me, since I am my own obstacle. 
 Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and then labor to make them light. 






~ Wislawa Szymborska
translated by Joanna Trzeciak
photo by agencja gazeta





Tuesday, June 30, 2020

on the value of not-knowing







All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power

 by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, 
and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes,
 but they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them
 once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else,
 since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge
 that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain
 the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases,
 cases well known from ancient and modern history, 
it even poses a lethal threat to society.

This is why I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. 

It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include 
the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth 
hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” 
the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground 
like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up 
and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie
 never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up
 teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families,
 and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job.
 But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, 
not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits
 are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness 

and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering,
 of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure
 that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses
 pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun
 to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know;
 whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got 
reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short,
 bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else
 we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

But “astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, 

after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally 
acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. 
Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se 
and isn’t based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, 

we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary
 course of events” … But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed,
 nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it.
 Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, 
not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.




 ~  WisÅ‚awa Szymborska
 art by Salvador Dalí from a rare edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland


 

Monday, June 29, 2020

so much of Everything








Reality demands
we also state the following:
life goes on.
At Cannae and Borodino.
at Kosovo Polje and in Guernica.

There is a gas station 
in a small plaza in Jericho,
and freshly painted
benches near Bila Hora.
Letters travel
between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,
a furniture truck passes
before the eyes of the lion of Chaeronea,
and only an atmospheric front advances
toward the blossoming orchards near Verdun.

There is so much of Everything,
that Nothing is quite well concealed,
Music flows
from yachts at Actium
and on board couples dance in the sun.

So much keeps happening, 
that it must be happening everywhere.
Where not a stone is left standing,
there is an ice-cream truck
besieged by children.

Where Hiroshima had been,
Hiroshima is again
manufacturing products
for everyday use.

Not without its draws is this terrible world,
not without its draws
worth our waking.

In the fields of Maciejowice
the grass is green
and on the grass is - you know how grass is -
transparent dew,

Maybe there are no fields but battlefields,
those still remembered,
and those long forgotten,
birch groves and cedar groves,
snows and sands, iridescent swamps,
and ravines of dark defeat
where today, in sudden need,
you squat behind a bush.

What moral flows from this? Probably none.
But what really flows is quickly drying blood,
and as always, some rivers and clouds.

On the tragic mountain passes
the wind blows hats off heads
and we cannot help-
but laugh.




~ Wislawa Szymborska
from miracle fair
translated by Joanna Trzeciak



 

Thursday, June 6, 2019

I'm working on the world






I’m working on the world,
revised, improved edition,
featuring fun for fools,
blues for brooders,
combs for bald pates,
tricks for old dogs.

Here’s one chapter: The Speech
of Animals and Plants.
Each species comes, of course,
with its own dictionary.
Even a simple “Hi there,”
when traded with a fish,
make both the fish and you
feel quite extraordinary.

The long-suspected meanings
of rustlings, chirps, and growls!
Soliloquies of forests!
The epic hoot of owls!
Those crafty hedgehogs drafting
aphorisms after dark,
while we blindly believe
they are sleeping in the park!

Time retains
its sacred right to meddle
in each earthly affair.
Still, time’s unbounded power
that makes a mountain crumble,
moves seas, rotates a star,
won’t be enough to tear
lovers apart: they are
too naked, too embraced,
too much like timid sparrows.

Old age is, in my book,
the price that felons pay,
so don’t whine that it’s steep:
you’ll stay young if you’re good.
Suffering doesn’t insult the body.
Death? It comes in your sleep,
exactly as it should.

When it comes, you’ll be dreaming
that you don’t need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.
Only a death like that. A rose
could prick you harder, I suppose;

you’d feel more terror at the sound
of petals falling to the ground.
Only a world like that. To die
just that much. And to live just so.
And all the rest is Bach’s fugue, played
for the time being
on a saw.




~ Wislawa Szymborska
translated by S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh





When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.

– Wislawa Szymborska Polish Poet (Born July 1923)/Nobel Literature Prize 1996



Excerpt from her Nobel Lecture
December 1996

Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating “I don’t know.” Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that’s absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their “oeuvre” …

The Poet and the World by Wislawa Szymborska
©THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 1996

with thanks to https://mybanyantree.wordpress.com/


Wednesday, May 22, 2019

nothing's a gift





Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan.
I'm drowning in debts up to my ears.
I'll have to pay for myself
with my self,
give up my life for my life.

Here's how it's arranged:
The heart can be repossessed,
the liver, too,
and each single finger and toe.

Too late to tear up the terms,
my debts will be repaid,
and I'll be fleeced,
or, more precisely, flayed.

I move about the planet
in a crush of other debtors.
some are saddled with the burden
of paying off their wings.
Others must, willy-nilly,
account for every leaf.

Every tissue in us lies
on the debit side.
Not a tentacle or tendril
is for keeps.

The inventory, infinitely detailed,
implies we'll be left
not just empty-handed
but handless too.

I can't remember
where, when, and why
I let someone open
this account in my name.

We call the protest against this
the soul.
And it's the only item
not included on the list.



Wislawa Szymborska
translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh




Wednesday, May 1, 2019

among the multitudes










I am who I am.
A coincidence no less unthinkable
than any other.
I could have different
ancestors, after all.
I could have fluttered
from another nest
or crawled bescaled
from another tree.

Nature's wardrobe
holds a fair
supply of costumes:
Spider, seagull, fieldmouse.
each fits perfectly right off
and is dutifully worn
into shreds.

I didn't get a choice either,
but I can't complain.
I could have been someone
much less separate.
someone from an anthill, shoal, or buzzing swarm,
an inch of landscape ruffled by the wind.

Someone much less fortunate,
bred for my fur
or Christmas dinner,
something swimming under a square of glass.

A tree rooted to the ground
as the fire draws near.

A grass blade trampled by a stampede
of incomprehensible events.

A shady type whose darkness
dazzled some.
What if I'd prompted only fear,
Loathing,
or pity?

If I'd been born
in the wrong tribe
with all roads closed before me?

Fate has been kind
to me thus far.

I might never have been given
the memory of happy moments

My yen for comparison
might have been taken away.

I might have been myself minus amazement,
that is, someone completely different.


~ Wislawa Szymborska
 from Poems, New and Collected

 

Friday, May 4, 2018

possibilities






I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here
to many things I've also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.


–Wislawa Szymborska
excerpt from Nothing Twice, 1997
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
 
 
 

Friday, March 27, 2015

clouds






I’d have to be really quick
to describe clouds -
a split second’s enough
for them to start being something else.

Their trademark:
they don’t repeat a single 
shape, shade, pose, arrangement.

Unburdened by memory of any kind, 
they float easily over the facts.

What on earth could they bear witness to? 
They scatter whenever something happens.

Compared to clouds, 
life rests on solid ground, 
practically permanent, almost eternal.

Next to clouds
even a stone seems like a brother, 
someone you can trust, 
while they’re just distant, flighty cousins.

Let people exist if they want,
and then die, one after another:
clouds simply don't care
what they're up to
down there.

And so their haughty fleet
cruises smoothly over your whole life
and mine, still incomplete.

They aren't obliged to vanish when we're gone.
They don't have to be seen while sailing on. 




–WisÅ‚awa Szymborska
from Monologue of a Dog
Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh translation


Monday, January 7, 2013

circus animals





Bears are stomping in perfect time.
A lion jumps through flaming hoops.
A whip cracks and the music grinds.
A monkey rides a bike in a yellow suit.
A whip cracks and the animals turn their glance.
Dogs dance in carefully measured movements.
An elephant walks with a pitcher in perfect balance.

Myself, I'm quite embarrassed, I, a human.

People didn't enjoy themselves that day.
You wouldn't know it from the clapping hands
though one hand elongated by a whip
cast a striking shadow on the sand.



~Wislawa Szymborska
from miracle fair
translation by Joanna Trzeciak





Sunday, January 6, 2013

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 side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

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

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

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

We'll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about 
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
 sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here 
must make way for 
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.




~ Wislawa Szymborska
from miracle fair
translation by Joanna Trzeciak


Monday, April 2, 2012

a note






Life is the only way 
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it's not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble on a stone,
end up drenched in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

and to keep on not knowing
something important.





~Wislawa Szymborska
from Monologue of a Dog