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Map: Collected and Last Poems
A new collected volume from the Nobel Prize–winning poet that includes, for the first time in English, all of the poems from her last Polish collection
One of Europe’s greatest recent poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize–winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. Her elegant, precise poems pose questions we never thought to ask. “If you want the world in a nutshell,� a Polish critic remarks, “try Szymborska.� But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew.
Carefully edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, the poems in Map trace Szymborska’s work until her death in 2012. Of the approximately two hundred and fiftypoems included here, nearly forty arenewly translated; thirteen represent the entirety of the poet’s last Polish collection, Enough , never before published in English.
Map is the first English publication of Szymborska’s work since the acclaimed Here, and it offers her devoted readers a welcome return to her “ironic elegance� ( The New Yorker ).
One of Europe’s greatest recent poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize–winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. Her elegant, precise poems pose questions we never thought to ask. “If you want the world in a nutshell,� a Polish critic remarks, “try Szymborska.� But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew.
Carefully edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, the poems in Map trace Szymborska’s work until her death in 2012. Of the approximately two hundred and fiftypoems included here, nearly forty arenewly translated; thirteen represent the entirety of the poet’s last Polish collection, Enough , never before published in English.
Map is the first English publication of Szymborska’s work since the acclaimed Here, and it offers her devoted readers a welcome return to her “ironic elegance� ( The New Yorker ).
464 pages, Hardcover
First published April 7, 2015
234 people are currently reading
1,621 people want to read
About the author
Wisława Szymborska
207books1,512followersWisława Szymborska (Polish pronunciation: [vʲisˈwava ʂɨmˈbɔrska], born July 2, 1923 in Kórnik, Poland) is a Polish poet, essayist, and translator. She was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. In Poland, her books reach sales rivaling prominent prose authors—although she once remarked in a poem entitled "Some like poetry" [Niektórzy lubią poezję] that no more than two out of a thousand people care for the art.
Szymborska frequently employs literary devices such as irony, paradox, contradiction, and understatement, to illuminate philosophical themes and obsessions. Szymborska's compact poems often conjure large existential puzzles, touching on issues of ethical import, and reflecting on the condition of people both as individuals and as members of human society. Szymborska's style is succinct and marked by introspection and wit.
Szymborska's reputation rests on a relatively small body of work: she has not published more than 250 poems to date. She is often described as modest to the point of shyness[citation needed]. She has long been cherished by Polish literary contemporaries (including Czesław Miłosz) and her poetry has been set to music by Zbigniew Preisner. Szymborska became better known internationally after she was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize. Szymborska's work has been translated into many European languages, as well as into Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese.
In 1931, Szymborska's family moved to Kraków. She has been linked with this city, where she studied, worked.
When World War II broke out in 1939, she continued her education in underground lessons. From 1943, she worked as a railroad employee and managed to avoid being deported to Germany as a forced labourer. It was during this time that her career as an artist began with illustrations for an English-language textbook. She also began writing stories and occasional poems.
Beginning in 1945, Szymborska took up studies of Polish language and literature before switching to sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. There she soon became involved in the local writing scene, and met and was influenced by Czesław Miłosz. In March 1945, she published her first poem Szukam słowa ("I seek the word") in the daily paper Dziennik Polski; her poems continued to be published in various newspapers and periodicals for a number of years. In 1948 she quit her studies without a degree, due to her poor financial circumstances; the same year, she married poet Adam Włodek, whom she divorced in 1954. At that time, she was working as a secretary for an educational biweekly magazine as well as an illustrator.
During Stalinism in Poland in 1953 she participated in the defamation of Catholic priests from Kraków who were groundlessly condemned by the ruling Communists to death.[1] Her first book was to be published in 1949, but did not pass censorship as it "did not meet socialist requirements." Like many other intellectuals in post-war Poland, however, Szymborska remained loyal to the PRL official ideology early in her career, signing political petitions and praising Stalin, Lenin and the realities of socialism. This attitude is seen in her debut collection Dlatego żyjemy ("That is what we are living for"), containing the poems Lenin and Młodzieży budującej Nową Hutę ("For the Youth that Builds Nowa Huta"), about the construction of a Stalinist industrial town near Kraków. She also became a member of the ruling Polish United Workers' Party.
Like many Polish intellectuals initially close to the official party line, Szymborska gradually grew estranged from socialist ideology and renounced her earlier political work. Although she did not officially leave the party until 1966, she began to establish contacts with dissidents. As early as 1957, she befriended Jerzy Giedroyc, the editor of the influential Paris-based emigré journal Kultura, to which she also contributed. In 1964 s
Szymborska frequently employs literary devices such as irony, paradox, contradiction, and understatement, to illuminate philosophical themes and obsessions. Szymborska's compact poems often conjure large existential puzzles, touching on issues of ethical import, and reflecting on the condition of people both as individuals and as members of human society. Szymborska's style is succinct and marked by introspection and wit.
Szymborska's reputation rests on a relatively small body of work: she has not published more than 250 poems to date. She is often described as modest to the point of shyness[citation needed]. She has long been cherished by Polish literary contemporaries (including Czesław Miłosz) and her poetry has been set to music by Zbigniew Preisner. Szymborska became better known internationally after she was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize. Szymborska's work has been translated into many European languages, as well as into Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese.
In 1931, Szymborska's family moved to Kraków. She has been linked with this city, where she studied, worked.
When World War II broke out in 1939, she continued her education in underground lessons. From 1943, she worked as a railroad employee and managed to avoid being deported to Germany as a forced labourer. It was during this time that her career as an artist began with illustrations for an English-language textbook. She also began writing stories and occasional poems.
Beginning in 1945, Szymborska took up studies of Polish language and literature before switching to sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. There she soon became involved in the local writing scene, and met and was influenced by Czesław Miłosz. In March 1945, she published her first poem Szukam słowa ("I seek the word") in the daily paper Dziennik Polski; her poems continued to be published in various newspapers and periodicals for a number of years. In 1948 she quit her studies without a degree, due to her poor financial circumstances; the same year, she married poet Adam Włodek, whom she divorced in 1954. At that time, she was working as a secretary for an educational biweekly magazine as well as an illustrator.
During Stalinism in Poland in 1953 she participated in the defamation of Catholic priests from Kraków who were groundlessly condemned by the ruling Communists to death.[1] Her first book was to be published in 1949, but did not pass censorship as it "did not meet socialist requirements." Like many other intellectuals in post-war Poland, however, Szymborska remained loyal to the PRL official ideology early in her career, signing political petitions and praising Stalin, Lenin and the realities of socialism. This attitude is seen in her debut collection Dlatego żyjemy ("That is what we are living for"), containing the poems Lenin and Młodzieży budującej Nową Hutę ("For the Youth that Builds Nowa Huta"), about the construction of a Stalinist industrial town near Kraków. She also became a member of the ruling Polish United Workers' Party.
Like many Polish intellectuals initially close to the official party line, Szymborska gradually grew estranged from socialist ideology and renounced her earlier political work. Although she did not officially leave the party until 1966, she began to establish contacts with dissidents. As early as 1957, she befriended Jerzy Giedroyc, the editor of the influential Paris-based emigré journal Kultura, to which she also contributed. In 1964 s
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March 31, 2025
Called the �Mozart of poetry� but with �the fury of Beethoven� when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, Polish poet Wisława Szymborska has left quite the lasting legacy (and if you were wondering, its pronounced “vees-WAH-vah�). One of only 19 poets to receive the award since it began in 1901—a distinction she shares with another Polish poet, , who was a friend and influence on her work—Szymborska has crafted an incredible body of work full of wit that balances darkness with charm in a way that is often as empowering as it is introspective. Translated into over 40 languages worldwide, English speakers can enjoy her work through the efforts of translators and , such as here in Map: Collected and Last Poems, a tome of text just brimming with brilliance from across her highly decorated career. Szymborska has long been a favorite poet, one I picked up on in college proud to find a poet so well regarded from Poland where my grandparents are from (note my last name, we’re pretty Polish my friends) and I was even holding a copy of in my hands when it came on NPR that she had passed away. This huge volume is a favorite that sits on my shelf, often pulled down and flipped through, and I would highly recommend spending some time basking in her beautiful words.
The Three Oddest Words
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 non-being can hold.
Born in 1923, Szymborska spent most of her life living in Krakow, Poland. Her poetry often hones in on quiet, introspective life and domestic affairs writ large against a landscape of history, such as the Second World War and the Soviet occupation of Poland. �After every war / someone’s got to tidy up,� she writes in her poem . When war came to Poland, Szymborska continued her studies in underground classrooms and worked as a railroad laborer to avoid being sent to Germany for forced labor. While she initially adhered to party standards in her work, Szymborska would be critical of the Soviet party and befriended many dissidents and frequently communicated with the intelligentsia outside Eastern Europe. Her blend of the personal and individual cast against history to be universally felt is a particular charm in her works, one in which the Nobel Committee praised her for stating she writes
There is a blissful accessibility to her work that doesn’t sacrifice depth or beauty and she is a poet I would recommend to anyone, even those just looking to get their foot in the door of the poetry world (my staple gateway poet recommendations at work tend to be Mary Oliver, Jane Hirshfield, Audre Lorde, Charles Simic, and Ada Limon). There is a signature bemused flair for the human condition that seeps into each poem that makes us consider our place in the universe and the happenstance of chance that brought us here. �I know nothing of the role I play / I only know it’s mine. I can’t exchange it,� she writes in the poem , a humorous look at life as if it were a stage play where we all wish we "could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance, / or repeat a single Thursday that has passed! / But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen," and we all must carry on. The link between the past, present and future is often tied tightly within her poems. In a very existential way, Szymborska describes us as being a product of our choices and pasts, a unique chance of actions that created us out of the infinite possible selves.
It's 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,
whose 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 a marshal's fieldglasses might scan.
—Fdz
Death looms large like a shadow over much of her work which often nestles into an introspective acceptance of our inevitable fate. While Szymborska is fond of showing humans as fragile, temporary, and sometimes rather insignificant in the face of eternity., there’s also a sense of empowerment in this acceptance. The poem for instance is one of the most optimistic poems about death I have encountered, illustrating Death as a bumbling employee of his trade that �does the job awkwardly� and �can’t even get the things done / that are part of its trade: / dig a grave / make a coffin / clean up after itself� reminding us that each breath we take is a victory against Death:
�Whoever claims that it's omnipotent
is himself living proof
that it's not.
There's no life
that couldn't be immortal
if only for a moment.
Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.
In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you've come
can't be undone.�
I love how Szymborska places the living on the winning side of the war with death. But we often see the absence death leaves, such as in the heartwrenching poems The Suicide’s Room or the �visibly offended paws� of the where she writes:
�Die—you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here
but nothing is the same.�
Life and death comingle in her words much as humor and sorrow, joy and darkness spiral into this great mess we call life that comes alive in her poetry.
�Let the people who never find true love
Keep saying that there’s no such thing.
Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.�
dz True Love
I love when Szymborska talks about love. It’s always so endearing and cuts right into my heart. I love the poems of Lovers� where �when we sleep / We dream of parting / But it’s a good dream, / It’s a good dream, / Since we wake up from it� and the idea of waking to the face of the one you love is the best feeling in the world. And then there is my favorite, Love at First Sight which was even published as an illustrated book and always warms my heart.
Love At First Sight
They’re both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
Since they’d never met before, they’re sure
that there’d been nothing between them.
But what’s the word from the streets, staircases, hallways �
perhaps they’ve passed by each other a million times?
I want to ask them
if they don’t remember �
a moment face to face
in some revolving door?
perhaps a “sorry� muttered in a crowd?
a curt “wrong number� caught in the receiver?
but I know the answer.
No, they don’t remember.
They’d be amazed to hear
that Chance has been toying with them
now for years.
Not quite ready yet
to become their Destiny,
it pushed them close, drove them apart,
it barred their path,
stifling a laugh,
and then leaped aside.
There were signs and signals,
even if they couldn’t read them yet.
Perhaps three years ago
or just last Tuesday
a certain leaf fluttered
from one shoulder to another?
Something was dropped and then picked up.
Who knows, maybe the ball that vanished
into childhood’s thicket?
There were doorknobs and doorbells
where one touch had covered another
beforehand.
Suitcases checked and standing side by side.
One night, perhaps, the same dream,
grown hazy by morning.
Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.
It’s so cute, right? I love the final stanza, the book of events having a whole world of possibilities awaiting them. And all the times they may have met before, leading this love at first sight to feel like perhaps they’ve always known one another.
Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.
With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.
dz
While this great poet passed away in 2012 at the age of 88 of lung cancer, she has left a lasting legacy of poetry and thought for us to enjoy. Map is an amazing collection and gives us all the joys, sorrows, laughs, loves and losses of her work.
5/5
The Three Oddest Words
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 non-being can hold.
Born in 1923, Szymborska spent most of her life living in Krakow, Poland. Her poetry often hones in on quiet, introspective life and domestic affairs writ large against a landscape of history, such as the Second World War and the Soviet occupation of Poland. �After every war / someone’s got to tidy up,� she writes in her poem . When war came to Poland, Szymborska continued her studies in underground classrooms and worked as a railroad laborer to avoid being sent to Germany for forced labor. While she initially adhered to party standards in her work, Szymborska would be critical of the Soviet party and befriended many dissidents and frequently communicated with the intelligentsia outside Eastern Europe. Her blend of the personal and individual cast against history to be universally felt is a particular charm in her works, one in which the Nobel Committee praised her for stating she writes
�poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.�
There is a blissful accessibility to her work that doesn’t sacrifice depth or beauty and she is a poet I would recommend to anyone, even those just looking to get their foot in the door of the poetry world (my staple gateway poet recommendations at work tend to be Mary Oliver, Jane Hirshfield, Audre Lorde, Charles Simic, and Ada Limon). There is a signature bemused flair for the human condition that seeps into each poem that makes us consider our place in the universe and the happenstance of chance that brought us here. �I know nothing of the role I play / I only know it’s mine. I can’t exchange it,� she writes in the poem , a humorous look at life as if it were a stage play where we all wish we "could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance, / or repeat a single Thursday that has passed! / But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen," and we all must carry on. The link between the past, present and future is often tied tightly within her poems. In a very existential way, Szymborska describes us as being a product of our choices and pasts, a unique chance of actions that created us out of the infinite possible selves.
It's 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,
whose 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 a marshal's fieldglasses might scan.
—Fdz
Death looms large like a shadow over much of her work which often nestles into an introspective acceptance of our inevitable fate. While Szymborska is fond of showing humans as fragile, temporary, and sometimes rather insignificant in the face of eternity., there’s also a sense of empowerment in this acceptance. The poem for instance is one of the most optimistic poems about death I have encountered, illustrating Death as a bumbling employee of his trade that �does the job awkwardly� and �can’t even get the things done / that are part of its trade: / dig a grave / make a coffin / clean up after itself� reminding us that each breath we take is a victory against Death:
�Whoever claims that it's omnipotent
is himself living proof
that it's not.
There's no life
that couldn't be immortal
if only for a moment.
Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.
In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you've come
can't be undone.�
I love how Szymborska places the living on the winning side of the war with death. But we often see the absence death leaves, such as in the heartwrenching poems The Suicide’s Room or the �visibly offended paws� of the where she writes:
�Die—you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here
but nothing is the same.�
Life and death comingle in her words much as humor and sorrow, joy and darkness spiral into this great mess we call life that comes alive in her poetry.
�Let the people who never find true love
Keep saying that there’s no such thing.
Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.�
dz True Love
I love when Szymborska talks about love. It’s always so endearing and cuts right into my heart. I love the poems of Lovers� where �when we sleep / We dream of parting / But it’s a good dream, / It’s a good dream, / Since we wake up from it� and the idea of waking to the face of the one you love is the best feeling in the world. And then there is my favorite, Love at First Sight which was even published as an illustrated book and always warms my heart.
Love At First Sight
They’re both convinced
that a sudden passion joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is more beautiful still.
Since they’d never met before, they’re sure
that there’d been nothing between them.
But what’s the word from the streets, staircases, hallways �
perhaps they’ve passed by each other a million times?
I want to ask them
if they don’t remember �
a moment face to face
in some revolving door?
perhaps a “sorry� muttered in a crowd?
a curt “wrong number� caught in the receiver?
but I know the answer.
No, they don’t remember.
They’d be amazed to hear
that Chance has been toying with them
now for years.
Not quite ready yet
to become their Destiny,
it pushed them close, drove them apart,
it barred their path,
stifling a laugh,
and then leaped aside.
There were signs and signals,
even if they couldn’t read them yet.
Perhaps three years ago
or just last Tuesday
a certain leaf fluttered
from one shoulder to another?
Something was dropped and then picked up.
Who knows, maybe the ball that vanished
into childhood’s thicket?
There were doorknobs and doorbells
where one touch had covered another
beforehand.
Suitcases checked and standing side by side.
One night, perhaps, the same dream,
grown hazy by morning.
Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.
It’s so cute, right? I love the final stanza, the book of events having a whole world of possibilities awaiting them. And all the times they may have met before, leading this love at first sight to feel like perhaps they’ve always known one another.
Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.
With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.
dz
While this great poet passed away in 2012 at the age of 88 of lung cancer, she has left a lasting legacy of poetry and thought for us to enjoy. Map is an amazing collection and gives us all the joys, sorrows, laughs, loves and losses of her work.
5/5
July 15, 2024
Ode to Wisława
Dear Wisława Szymborska
It’s silly I know
To try to write verse for
One dead long ago
Your dark eyes have been gone
Since the year twenty-twelve
Their sockets lie empty
Like empty bookshelves
Your ears they have also
Long turned into dust
The conch shell machinery
Of hearing’s but lost
Your ten fingers are bone now
On no feet do you walk
Your nose smells no roses
And your tongue cannot talk
That despotic-like organ
The one in your skull
Slick gooey magician
Who played tricks on us all
Even that charmer is drained
Of its singular power
Its function reduced
To growing a flower
And how about your heart
(Was it only a pump?)
It’s so hard to believe
It will no longer pump
The swift blood that went travelling
From your head to your toes
Via veins in your hand
Scribbling poems or prose
Yes your heart is gone too
Dissolved disappeared
Like a sun in the distance
By thick darkness smeared
But silly as it may seem
My dear dead poetess
I address you these lines
And this much I confess
Though you're dead I don't think about
Mortality
Though you're dead your voice lives on
Inside of me
I can hear it in the rustling
Of small leaves in the wind
Or in the rumble of lorries
On the streets of my mind
Your voice is the voice of my thoughts
And those of my neighbour
Who makes jewellery out of dead wood
In his bedroom next-door
Read
May 8, 2016Wislawa is a kindred soul in that she views the world askance and deeply understands its ironies. Where she veers from other poets is her gentle amusement with it all. Maybe she feels bitter, sarcastic, angry, etc., but she keeps it under wraps and instead couples irony with charm, an appealingly odd couple indeed. She has a knack for comparisons, too. What's metaphor? Quite a bit, in Wislawa's view.
The collection gets stronger over time, with very few works chosen from early collections. This is cheering news for new poets, for it shows that even poets good enough to get published are works in progress, getting stronger with each collection.
Two of my favorites are fairly well known works, "A Contribution to Statistics" and "The Joy of Writing":
A Contribution of Statistics
Out of a hundred people
those who always know better
-fifty-two
doubting every step
-nearly all the rest,
glad to lend a hand
if it doesn't take too long
-as high as forty-nine,
always good
because they can't be otherwise
-four, well maybe five,
able to admire without envy
-eighteen,
suffering illusions
induced by fleeting youth
-sixty, give or take a few,
not to be taken lightly
-forty and four,
living in constant fear
of someone or something
-seventy-seven,
capable of happiness
-twenty-something tops,
harmless singly, savage in crowds
-half at least,
cruel
when forced by circumstances
-better not to know
even ballpark figures,
wise after the fact
-just a couple more
than wise before it,
taking only things from life
-thirty
(I wish I were wrong),
hunched in pain,
no flashlight in the dark
-eighty-three
sooner or later,
righteous
-thirty-five, which is a lot,
righteous
and understanding
-three,
worthy of compassion
-ninety-nine,
mortal
-a hundred out of a hundred.
thus far this figure still remains unchanged.
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 xerox her soft muzzle?
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 fingertips.
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?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?
The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.
Nice, no? Very nice. Among other favorite titles I wrote down:
"Miracle's Fair"
"Some People Like Poetry"
"Hatred"
"May 16, 1973"
"Among the Multitudes"
"The Three Oddest Words"
"A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth"
"Early Hour"
"Photograph from September 11"
"An Idea"
"To My Own Poem"
The collection gets stronger over time, with very few works chosen from early collections. This is cheering news for new poets, for it shows that even poets good enough to get published are works in progress, getting stronger with each collection.
Two of my favorites are fairly well known works, "A Contribution to Statistics" and "The Joy of Writing":
A Contribution of Statistics
Out of a hundred people
those who always know better
-fifty-two
doubting every step
-nearly all the rest,
glad to lend a hand
if it doesn't take too long
-as high as forty-nine,
always good
because they can't be otherwise
-four, well maybe five,
able to admire without envy
-eighteen,
suffering illusions
induced by fleeting youth
-sixty, give or take a few,
not to be taken lightly
-forty and four,
living in constant fear
of someone or something
-seventy-seven,
capable of happiness
-twenty-something tops,
harmless singly, savage in crowds
-half at least,
cruel
when forced by circumstances
-better not to know
even ballpark figures,
wise after the fact
-just a couple more
than wise before it,
taking only things from life
-thirty
(I wish I were wrong),
hunched in pain,
no flashlight in the dark
-eighty-three
sooner or later,
righteous
-thirty-five, which is a lot,
righteous
and understanding
-three,
worthy of compassion
-ninety-nine,
mortal
-a hundred out of a hundred.
thus far this figure still remains unchanged.
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 xerox her soft muzzle?
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 fingertips.
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?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?
The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.
Nice, no? Very nice. Among other favorite titles I wrote down:
"Miracle's Fair"
"Some People Like Poetry"
"Hatred"
"May 16, 1973"
"Among the Multitudes"
"The Three Oddest Words"
"A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth"
"Early Hour"
"Photograph from September 11"
"An Idea"
"To My Own Poem"
Read
February 18, 20238/10
For me, poetry happens, if it happens at all, on first sight. The first line is enough to do it: it can create a lifelong passion, a never ending reverence; or it can throw that poem on the heap of ashes that is relegated to memory's death. No in between for love.
There are times enough in this fine collection that Wislawa Szymborską has achieved that mark: those are the poems of acute insight into the heart and soul: the hurt, the consolation, the compassion.
Other poems are filled with ironic twists, and are gleefully unrepentant for revenge. Such twists and turns. I love when a poet surprises me with her candour, her outspokenness, her honesty.
What I appreciate most in her work is that nothing is conventional: the humour, the disdain, the pity, the anger, the acceptance: all these qualities receive a new "washing up" and delivery. What you expect to be sorry about, and what you expect to be angry about all gets turned on its ear and you find your own conventions and accepted truths getting a proper tongue lashing.
A worthy contender for returning to, occasionally, when the world gets a bit rough with you.
Some of my favourites. (The bold is the title in which the poem first appeared.)
Calling Out To Yeti (1957)
Classifieds 32-33
Moment of Silence 34
Funeral (I) 39-41
Salt (1962)
Museum 62
Vocabulary 69
Without A Title 72
Starvation Camp Near Jaslo 76
Ballad 78-79
No End Of Fun (1967)
Memory Finally 111-112
Family Album 115
The Railroad Station 118-119
Could Have (1972)
Could Have 155
Old folks Home 163
A Speech At the Lost and Found 176
Under One Small Star 192
A Large Number (1976)
Lot's Wife 203
Life While You Wait 228-229
The People on the Bridge (1986)
On Death, Without Exaggeration 246-247
In Broad Daylight 250-251
Our Ancestors' Short Lives 252-253
Tortures 260-261
The End and the Beginning (1993)
The End And The Beginning 286-287
Cat In An Empty Apartment 296-297
Séance 300-301
Love At First Sight 302-303
Moment (2002)
First Love 335
A Contribution To Statistics 341-342
Some People 343
Return Baggage 345-346
Lot's Wife
They say I looked back out of curiosity.
But I could have had other reasons.
I looked back mourning my silver bowl.
Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.
So I wouldn't have to keep staring at the righteous nape
of my husband Lot's neck.
From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead
he wouldn't so much as hesitate.
From the disobedience of the meek.
Checking for pursuers.
Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed His mind.
Our two daughters were already vanishing over the hilltop.
I felt age within me. Distance.
The futility of wandering. Torpor.
I looked back setting my bundle down.
I looked back not knowing where to set my foot.
Serpents appeared on my path,
spiders, field mice, baby vultures.
They were neither good nor evil now -- every living thing
was simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic.
I looked back in desolation.
In shame because we had stolen away.
Wanting to cry out, to go home.
Or only when a sudden gust of wind
unbound my hair and lifted up my robe.
It seemed to me that they were watching from the walls of Sodom
and bursting into thunderous laughter again and again.
I looked back in anger.
To savor their terrible fate.
I looked back for all the reasons given above.
I looked back involuntarily.
It was only a rock that turned underfoot, growling at me.
It was a sudden crack that stopped me in my tracks.
A hamster on its hind paws tottered on the edge.
It was then we both glanced back.
No, no. I ran on.
I crept, I flew upward
until darkness fell from the heavens
and with it scorching gravel and dead birds.
I couldn't breathe and spun around and around.
Anyone who saw me must have thought I was dancing.
It's not inconceivable that my eyes were open.
It's possible I fell facing the city.
====
For me, poetry happens, if it happens at all, on first sight. The first line is enough to do it: it can create a lifelong passion, a never ending reverence; or it can throw that poem on the heap of ashes that is relegated to memory's death. No in between for love.
There are times enough in this fine collection that Wislawa Szymborską has achieved that mark: those are the poems of acute insight into the heart and soul: the hurt, the consolation, the compassion.
Other poems are filled with ironic twists, and are gleefully unrepentant for revenge. Such twists and turns. I love when a poet surprises me with her candour, her outspokenness, her honesty.
What I appreciate most in her work is that nothing is conventional: the humour, the disdain, the pity, the anger, the acceptance: all these qualities receive a new "washing up" and delivery. What you expect to be sorry about, and what you expect to be angry about all gets turned on its ear and you find your own conventions and accepted truths getting a proper tongue lashing.
A worthy contender for returning to, occasionally, when the world gets a bit rough with you.
Some of my favourites. (The bold is the title in which the poem first appeared.)
Calling Out To Yeti (1957)
Classifieds 32-33
Moment of Silence 34
Funeral (I) 39-41
Salt (1962)
Museum 62
Vocabulary 69
Without A Title 72
Starvation Camp Near Jaslo 76
Ballad 78-79
No End Of Fun (1967)
Memory Finally 111-112
Family Album 115
The Railroad Station 118-119
Could Have (1972)
Could Have 155
Old folks Home 163
A Speech At the Lost and Found 176
Under One Small Star 192
A Large Number (1976)
Lot's Wife 203
Life While You Wait 228-229
The People on the Bridge (1986)
On Death, Without Exaggeration 246-247
In Broad Daylight 250-251
Our Ancestors' Short Lives 252-253
Tortures 260-261
The End and the Beginning (1993)
The End And The Beginning 286-287
Cat In An Empty Apartment 296-297
Séance 300-301
Love At First Sight 302-303
Moment (2002)
First Love 335
A Contribution To Statistics 341-342
Some People 343
Return Baggage 345-346
Lot's Wife
They say I looked back out of curiosity.
But I could have had other reasons.
I looked back mourning my silver bowl.
Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.
So I wouldn't have to keep staring at the righteous nape
of my husband Lot's neck.
From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead
he wouldn't so much as hesitate.
From the disobedience of the meek.
Checking for pursuers.
Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed His mind.
Our two daughters were already vanishing over the hilltop.
I felt age within me. Distance.
The futility of wandering. Torpor.
I looked back setting my bundle down.
I looked back not knowing where to set my foot.
Serpents appeared on my path,
spiders, field mice, baby vultures.
They were neither good nor evil now -- every living thing
was simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic.
I looked back in desolation.
In shame because we had stolen away.
Wanting to cry out, to go home.
Or only when a sudden gust of wind
unbound my hair and lifted up my robe.
It seemed to me that they were watching from the walls of Sodom
and bursting into thunderous laughter again and again.
I looked back in anger.
To savor their terrible fate.
I looked back for all the reasons given above.
I looked back involuntarily.
It was only a rock that turned underfoot, growling at me.
It was a sudden crack that stopped me in my tracks.
A hamster on its hind paws tottered on the edge.
It was then we both glanced back.
No, no. I ran on.
I crept, I flew upward
until darkness fell from the heavens
and with it scorching gravel and dead birds.
I couldn't breathe and spun around and around.
Anyone who saw me must have thought I was dancing.
It's not inconceivable that my eyes were open.
It's possible I fell facing the city.
====
January 17, 2018
Wislawa Szymborska was born in Poland in 1923. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1996. Clare Cavanagh was awarded the PEN Translation Prize for her work on Szymborska's poetry along with Stanislaw Baranczak.
I'm not able to pronounce the author's name or know but the surface features of her homeland. But I can tell you that reading the two hundred fifty poems in this collected volume of her work was accessible to me. Her knowledge of being human in this world is universal and luminous.
"Her surprise of fresh perception make her the enemy of all tyrannical certainties. Hers is the best of the Western mind-free, restless, questioning." New York Times Book Review
First Love
They say
the first love's most important.
That's very romantic,
but not my experience.
Something was and wasn't there between us,
something went on and went away.
My hands never tremble when I stumble on silly keepsakes
and a sheaf of letters tied with string
---not even ribbon.
Our only meeting after years:
two chairs chatting
at a chilly table.
Other loves still breathe deep inside me.
This one's too short of breath even to sigh.
Yet just exactly as it is,
it does what the others sill can't manage:
unremembered,
not even seen in dreams,
it introduces me to death.
Wislawa Szymborska died in 2012. MAP is the Collected and Last Poems of this extraordinary poet.
I'm not able to pronounce the author's name or know but the surface features of her homeland. But I can tell you that reading the two hundred fifty poems in this collected volume of her work was accessible to me. Her knowledge of being human in this world is universal and luminous.
"Her surprise of fresh perception make her the enemy of all tyrannical certainties. Hers is the best of the Western mind-free, restless, questioning." New York Times Book Review
First Love
They say
the first love's most important.
That's very romantic,
but not my experience.
Something was and wasn't there between us,
something went on and went away.
My hands never tremble when I stumble on silly keepsakes
and a sheaf of letters tied with string
---not even ribbon.
Our only meeting after years:
two chairs chatting
at a chilly table.
Other loves still breathe deep inside me.
This one's too short of breath even to sigh.
Yet just exactly as it is,
it does what the others sill can't manage:
unremembered,
not even seen in dreams,
it introduces me to death.
Wislawa Szymborska died in 2012. MAP is the Collected and Last Poems of this extraordinary poet.
August 2, 2019
Szymborska's poetry 5/5; especially since 1976 (A Large Number and later collections)
Baranczak & Cavanagh's translation 4.5/5 - with a few exceptions, superior to the alternative translations I've read (Trzeciak, Czerniawski, Kryński & Maguire)
This is the complete collection of all published and select unpublished poems. Reading Szymborska's poems often felt like a fascinating discovery of her profound and deeply humane thoughts or questions that almost deceptively hide behind the simplicity and lightness of her narrative style. Even if I couldn't fully relate to a poem, which was rare and mostly the case with some of her earlier poetry, it would still have memorable lines.
Some of my favorites:
The End and the Beginning
The Three Oddest Words
Under One Small Star
Life While-You-Wait
Photograph from September 11
Seen From Above
The Suicide's Room
Thank-You Note
Among the Multitudes
On Death, without Exaggeration
Writing Résumé
Love at First Sight
Parable
Brueghel’s Two Monkeys
A Contribution to Statistics
An Idea
To My Own Poem
... and many more.
"Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.�
(from Love at First Sight)
Baranczak & Cavanagh's translation 4.5/5 - with a few exceptions, superior to the alternative translations I've read (Trzeciak, Czerniawski, Kryński & Maguire)
This is the complete collection of all published and select unpublished poems. Reading Szymborska's poems often felt like a fascinating discovery of her profound and deeply humane thoughts or questions that almost deceptively hide behind the simplicity and lightness of her narrative style. Even if I couldn't fully relate to a poem, which was rare and mostly the case with some of her earlier poetry, it would still have memorable lines.
Some of my favorites:
The End and the Beginning
The Three Oddest Words
Under One Small Star
Life While-You-Wait
Photograph from September 11
Seen From Above
The Suicide's Room
Thank-You Note
Among the Multitudes
On Death, without Exaggeration
Writing Résumé
Love at First Sight
Parable
Brueghel’s Two Monkeys
A Contribution to Statistics
An Idea
To My Own Poem
... and many more.
"Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.�
(from Love at First Sight)
September 2, 2018
Poems of a Lifetime
It turns out that I already owned a Szymborska anthology, in a bilingual edition from 1981 with translations by Robert A. Maguire, that my father-in-law brought back from Poland. I am ashamed to say I never read it, put off by the cheap Soviet-era printing and a vague sense that the poet would probably be "important," but not enjoyable. Big mistake! As this new collection proves, Szymborska is thoroughly entertaining throughout, at times even hilarious. Her importance is confirmed by the award of the Nobel Prize in 1996, but it would have long been clear from her themes: love, art, history, life and death, the mystery of existence, and, though with a very subtle touch, the politics of a troubled nation in troubled times. Perhaps because both are Nobel laureates whose work has been celebrated in volumes spanning entire lifetimes, I was also reminded of by Tomas Tranströmer, though Szymborska is a less private figure, and her poems are more approachable.
Though I do not know a word of Polish, I am lost in admiration for translator Clare Cavanagh, working sometimes with Stanislaw Baranczak, sometimes alone. In an afterword, she notes that she has translated a handful of early poems, plus Szymborska's most recent collection, Enough (2012), and each of the ten collections in between, beginning with Calling Out to Yeti from 1957. So this is essentially the complete collected works—with the exception of some light verse and a few poems deemed (with the poet's agreement) to be untranslatable. I find myself wondering why this would be, and suspect that these are poems whose wordplay in Polish has no equivalent in English. As I compare Maguire's earlier selection with Cavanagh's, I find that Maguire leaves out almost everything that depends on clever rhymes or puns—but it is precisely these that Cavanagh gets so marvelously. Look at her translation of these two stanzas from "The Onion":
The onion, now that's something else.I have been dipping into this collection for the past week, but there are over 250 poems here, and it would be impossible to absorb all of them in even a month. But it has been fascinating to catch traces of the poet's evolution. Were she William Blake, you might call the early Calling Out to Yeti her "Songs of Innocence"; here is the opening of the poem "Flagrance":
Its innards don't exist.
Nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.
Our skin is just a cover-up
for the land where none dare go,
an internal inferno,
the anathema of anatomy.
In an onion there's only onion
from its top to its toe,
onionymous monomania,
unanimous omninudity.
So here we are, the naked lovers,But seven years later, in Salt, she has moved to "Songs of Experience":
lovely, as we both agree,
with eyelids as our only covers
we lie in dark, invisibly.
I am too close for him to dream of me.It is interesting to see Szymborska return to similar themes over the years. The idea, for example, that life only happens in the moment, with neither rehearsals nor repeat performances:
I don't flutter over him, don't flee him
beneath the roots of trees. I am too close [...]
too close. I hear the word hiss
and see its glistening scales as I lie motionless
in his embrace. He's sleeping,
more accesible at this moment to an usherette
he saw once in a traveling circus with one lion
than to me, who lies at his side.
Nothing can ever happen twice.I find the last of these wonderfully consoling.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.
["Nothing Twice," 1957]
You'd be wrong to think that it's just a slapdash quiz
taken in makeshift accommodations. Oh no.
I'm standing on the set and I see how strong it it.
The props are surprisingly precise.
The machine rotating the stage
has been around even longer.
The farthest galaxies have been turned on.
Oh no, there's no question, this must be the premiere.
And whatever I do
will become forever what I've done.
["Life While-You-Wait," 1976]
There's no life
that couldn't be immortal
if only for a moment.
Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.
["On Death, Without Exaggeration," 1986]
The Nobel Committee has had a history of somehow eliding the criteria for the Peace and Literature prizes. So many of their laureates have not merely been great writers, but prophets who have spoken truth to power, standing up against oppressive regimes. And certainly Szymborska, who came to adulthood during the Second World War, then saw her country sealed off behind the Iron Curtain, would have had much to speak out against. What is striking, though perhaps not surprising, is how subtly she does it. There is one poem about a concentration camp, another about a terrorist bomber, another about the futility of man-made boundaries. There is one from 1986 that begins, "We are the children of our age, / it is a political age," and goes on to describe the politicization of every aspect of life in her country. A poem from 1972 called "Dinosaur Skeleton" is a satire; each of its eleven stanzas begins with an escalating form of address�"Beloved Brethren," "Esteemed Comrades," "Honored Dignitaries," and so on—while the descriptions that follow of the beast itself get increasingly more flowery yet pointed. But she is always aware of the existence of evil, and man's tendency to hide it. So let me end with a complete poem, "In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself," succinct, yet with a sting in its tail:
The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands,
they'd claim their hands were clean.
A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right?
Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they're light.
On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is number one.
October 5, 2016
Szymborska should have as many readers as Beyonce has listeners, as the Super Bowl has viewers, as a Kardashian has Twitter followers. No knock on any of them but the wit, wisdom, beauty, and subtle power of Szymborska’s poetry deserves not just a global poetry audience but a global audience period. And over time she will have that, but she deserved such a readership in her lifetime, and, more importantly, we could all benefit from her work now and needn’t wait any longer to engage with this supple and inspiring artist.
The first poems in the collection were published in 1944 and the last poems in 2011. A long career and a life that began ten years before the Nazis took power in Germany and so saw the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland, the horrors of war and Holocaust, the decades of Stalinism in control of Poland, and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. From the first poem in the book: “Our wartime loot is knowledge of the world, / --it is so large it fits in two clasped hands, / so hard that a smile does to describe it, / so strange, like old truths echoing in prayers.� From the last, the book’s title poem: “In the east and west, / above and below the equator-- / quiet like pins dropping, / and in every black pinprick / people keep on living. Mass graves and sudden ruins / are out of the picture�. I like maps, because they lie. / Because they give no access to the vicious truth. / Because great heartedly, good-naturedly / they spread before me a world / not of this world.�
Szymborska notices with an acuity that is beyond impressive. You read her and you think: wise, compassionate, insightful, hopeful in human nature, skeptical of all else. She writes about life large and small and when she writes large, the small is in it, and when she writes small, the large is in it. Her poems are simple, direct, but sharply nuanced. One full sample:
Our Ancestors� Short Lives
Few of them made it to thirty.
Old age was the privilege of rocks and trees.
Childhood ended as fast as wolf-cubs grow.
One had to hurry, to get on with life
before the sun went down,
before the first snow.
Thirteen-year-olds bearing children,
four-year-olds stalking birds� nests in the rushes,
leading the hunts at twenty�
they aren’t yet, then they are gone.
Infinity’s ends fused quickly.
Witches chewed charms
with all the teeth of youth intact.
A son grew to manhood beneath his father’s eye.
Beneath the grandfather’s blank sockets the grandson was born.
And anyway they didn’t count the years.
They counted nets, pods, sheds, and axes.
Time, so generous toward any petty star in the sky,
offered them a nearly empty hand
and quickly took it back, as if the effort were too much.
One step more, two steps more
along the glittering river
that sprang from darkness and vanished into darkness.
There wasn’t a moment to lose,
no deferred questions, no belated revelations,
just those experienced in time.
Wisdom couldn’t wait for gray hair.
It had to see clearly before it saw the light
and to hear every voice before it sounded.
Good and evil�
they knew little of them, but knew all:
when evil triumphs, good goes into hiding;
when good is manifest, then evil lies low.
Neither can be conquered
or cast off beyond return.
Hence, if joy, then with a touch of fear;
if despair, then not without some quiet hope.
Life, however long, will always be short.
Too short for anything to be added.
There are so many worthy poems: Lot’s Wife, Moment, Photograph from September 11, Teenager, Vermeer, The Terrorist He’s Watching, A Contribution to Statistics, A Little Girl at the Tablecloth, Snapshot of a Crowd, Beheading, A Moment in Troy, Moment of Silence…because there are so many indelible verses ripe with lines and images, twists or turns, that will follow you after you have closed the book, a wry presence in your conscience, a gentle reminder of humanity’s grace, a subtle prod against complacency, credulity, indifference, and self-importance. Map encompasses her long career and is one of those books one is never done reading. Indeed, not long after I finished my hardcover copy, I bought an e-copy and downloaded it onto my phone and am re-reading even now. It is that good and more even than I can effectively say. It is the book of Psalms for the 20th and 21st centuries.
The first poems in the collection were published in 1944 and the last poems in 2011. A long career and a life that began ten years before the Nazis took power in Germany and so saw the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland, the horrors of war and Holocaust, the decades of Stalinism in control of Poland, and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. From the first poem in the book: “Our wartime loot is knowledge of the world, / --it is so large it fits in two clasped hands, / so hard that a smile does to describe it, / so strange, like old truths echoing in prayers.� From the last, the book’s title poem: “In the east and west, / above and below the equator-- / quiet like pins dropping, / and in every black pinprick / people keep on living. Mass graves and sudden ruins / are out of the picture�. I like maps, because they lie. / Because they give no access to the vicious truth. / Because great heartedly, good-naturedly / they spread before me a world / not of this world.�
Szymborska notices with an acuity that is beyond impressive. You read her and you think: wise, compassionate, insightful, hopeful in human nature, skeptical of all else. She writes about life large and small and when she writes large, the small is in it, and when she writes small, the large is in it. Her poems are simple, direct, but sharply nuanced. One full sample:
Our Ancestors� Short Lives
Few of them made it to thirty.
Old age was the privilege of rocks and trees.
Childhood ended as fast as wolf-cubs grow.
One had to hurry, to get on with life
before the sun went down,
before the first snow.
Thirteen-year-olds bearing children,
four-year-olds stalking birds� nests in the rushes,
leading the hunts at twenty�
they aren’t yet, then they are gone.
Infinity’s ends fused quickly.
Witches chewed charms
with all the teeth of youth intact.
A son grew to manhood beneath his father’s eye.
Beneath the grandfather’s blank sockets the grandson was born.
And anyway they didn’t count the years.
They counted nets, pods, sheds, and axes.
Time, so generous toward any petty star in the sky,
offered them a nearly empty hand
and quickly took it back, as if the effort were too much.
One step more, two steps more
along the glittering river
that sprang from darkness and vanished into darkness.
There wasn’t a moment to lose,
no deferred questions, no belated revelations,
just those experienced in time.
Wisdom couldn’t wait for gray hair.
It had to see clearly before it saw the light
and to hear every voice before it sounded.
Good and evil�
they knew little of them, but knew all:
when evil triumphs, good goes into hiding;
when good is manifest, then evil lies low.
Neither can be conquered
or cast off beyond return.
Hence, if joy, then with a touch of fear;
if despair, then not without some quiet hope.
Life, however long, will always be short.
Too short for anything to be added.
There are so many worthy poems: Lot’s Wife, Moment, Photograph from September 11, Teenager, Vermeer, The Terrorist He’s Watching, A Contribution to Statistics, A Little Girl at the Tablecloth, Snapshot of a Crowd, Beheading, A Moment in Troy, Moment of Silence…because there are so many indelible verses ripe with lines and images, twists or turns, that will follow you after you have closed the book, a wry presence in your conscience, a gentle reminder of humanity’s grace, a subtle prod against complacency, credulity, indifference, and self-importance. Map encompasses her long career and is one of those books one is never done reading. Indeed, not long after I finished my hardcover copy, I bought an e-copy and downloaded it onto my phone and am re-reading even now. It is that good and more even than I can effectively say. It is the book of Psalms for the 20th and 21st centuries.
August 22, 2023
Stunning. Everyone needs some Wisława Szymborska in their life.
September 9, 2018
"I like maps, because they lie.
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they spread before me a world
not of this world."
- Map, by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanaugh.
This book, Map: Collected and Last Poems is my introduction to her work, but as the name implies some of her last work. It's a hefty collection of over 400 pages and about 220 poems. Many beg for re-reading, and I've journeyed through this Map collection all month for #witmonth.
Basking in the glow of Szymborska's words, and grateful that I've stumbled across her work, and that she was so prolific in her lifetime with both poetry, prose, and essays.
*Women in Translation month 2018
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they spread before me a world
not of this world."
- Map, by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanaugh.
This book, Map: Collected and Last Poems is my introduction to her work, but as the name implies some of her last work. It's a hefty collection of over 400 pages and about 220 poems. Many beg for re-reading, and I've journeyed through this Map collection all month for #witmonth.
Basking in the glow of Szymborska's words, and grateful that I've stumbled across her work, and that she was so prolific in her lifetime with both poetry, prose, and essays.
*Women in Translation month 2018
Read
June 22, 2024Look, I tried to get into Szymborska when I was younger. And I just couldn’t do it. There was just something a little saccharine, mildly reeking of artifice, with perhaps a touch of the Robert Frost mediocrity, Slavic edition. And, aside from a few real beauties (“Travel Elegy� stands out), my suspicions were confirmed. I honestly don’t know why people like her so much. Can any of you bastards give me any insight?
February 9, 2022
I feel honored in a way to have been able to take the journey through Szymborska’s life’s work, the experience of the collection is better than any single poem.
February 11, 2021
"The hour between night and day.
The hour between toss and turn.
The hour of thirty-year-olds.
The hour swept clean for roosters' crowing.
The hour when the earth takes back its warm embrace.
The hour of cool drafts from extinguished stars.
The hour of do-we-vanish-too-without-a-trace.
Empty hour.
Hollow. Vain.
Rock bottom of all the other hours.
No one feels fine at four A.M.
If ants feel fine at four A.M.,
we're happy for the ants. And let five A.M. come
if we've got to go on living."
Four A.M.
Wisława Szymborska
***
"Map: Collected and Last Poems" was my first real attempt to get to know Szymborska. To read a poem here and there, online and/or in an anthology, doesn't give you a true connection with a poet - it can create a connection (a true connection) with a poem, with a universe that starts in the first words/verses and collapses in the end, but I feel that I can only get a strong feeling of true connection once I've read a significant part of a poet's work. I saw her name once, twice, read a little here and there, and the empathy I felt led me to this book. She might not become my favorite poet, but this first steps allowed me to discover poems that I now hold next to my heart.
The hour between toss and turn.
The hour of thirty-year-olds.
The hour swept clean for roosters' crowing.
The hour when the earth takes back its warm embrace.
The hour of cool drafts from extinguished stars.
The hour of do-we-vanish-too-without-a-trace.
Empty hour.
Hollow. Vain.
Rock bottom of all the other hours.
No one feels fine at four A.M.
If ants feel fine at four A.M.,
we're happy for the ants. And let five A.M. come
if we've got to go on living."
Four A.M.
Wisława Szymborska
***
"Map: Collected and Last Poems" was my first real attempt to get to know Szymborska. To read a poem here and there, online and/or in an anthology, doesn't give you a true connection with a poet - it can create a connection (a true connection) with a poem, with a universe that starts in the first words/verses and collapses in the end, but I feel that I can only get a strong feeling of true connection once I've read a significant part of a poet's work. I saw her name once, twice, read a little here and there, and the empathy I felt led me to this book. She might not become my favorite poet, but this first steps allowed me to discover poems that I now hold next to my heart.
August 26, 2018
Szymborska is a major poet of our times. Her work which I've only been able to read in translation is brilliant and at least in translation seems beautiful. I wish I could memorize her poems!
This is a volume to read and read again. Which I will.
This is a volume to read and read again. Which I will.
November 26, 2016
In his short story “On Exactitude in Science,� Jorge Luis Borges imagines a guild of Renaissance cartographers so committed to precision that they created a 1:1 scale map where “the kingdom was the size of the kingdom.� Later cartographers found such obsessiveness absurd and destroyed the map, but its fragments littered the realm, “providing shelter for beggars and animals.� In the title poem of her collection Map: Collected and Last Poems, Wislawa Szymborska writes:
I like maps, because they lie.
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they spread before me a world
not of this world.
I believe her, but only partly. In this remarkable, final collection, Szymborska (who died in 2012) proves herself as clear-headed as that later generation of cartographers, yet equally capable of creating lyric poems that seem worlds unto themselves, worlds that offer shelter to the most marginalized, weak, and mute members of society.
It came as something of a surprise in 1996 when Szymborska received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Though known in Polish literary circles and through her Samizdat contributions, she lacked the public profile of her countryman, the poet Czeslaw Milosz, who received the Nobel Prize in 1980, or of Zbigniew Herbert, who was viewed as the next Polish poet likely to receive the honor. Nevertheless, Szymborska earned the Nobel with a relatively modest body of poetry, one that is less baroque and immediately political than Milosz’s and less classical and bitingly ironic than Herbert’s, but which is by turns curious, empathetic, accessible, unflinching in the face of suffering, and astonished in the face of creation. In the years that followed, she has become one of the most popular poets in English, “My identifying features / [of] rapture and despair� (“Sky�) translated in a syntactically clear and accessible style by the team of Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak (more on them later).
What, then, distinguishes Szymborska’s poems, most of which are only a page or two in length? For one, they are deeply philosophical, speculating on universal matters in the simplest language. Reflecting on human existence in “Nothing Twice,� Szymborska writes of how “the sorry fact is / that we arrive here improvised / and leave without the chance to practice.� The philosophy never becomes leaden, though, thanks to Szymborska’s self-deprecating attitude, which can be as cleansing as a glass of seltzer water or of sulfuric acid. In “Seen from Above,� she addresses our belief that human lives matter more than nonhuman ones—“Important matters are reserved for us, / for our life and our death, a death / that always claims the right of way”—while in “In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself,� she notes, “On this third planet of the sun / among the signs of bestiality / a clear conscience is number one.� Yet Szymborska effervesces, too, her irony balanced with whimsy and surprise that nevertheless offer great insight; in “A Large Number,� she writes of her own imagination, “It’s bad with large numbers. / It’s still taken by particularity,� while in “Bodybuilders� Contest,� she wryly observes of one participant, “Onstage, he grapples with a grizzly bear / the deadlier for not really being there.�
Szymborska’s poems share many qualities with good prose: a sense of story, multiple points of view, memorable images and phrases, and unexpected insights into the human condition. She writes poems that invite us to consider the world from the perspective of a cat whose owner has died, of a royal couple in a Byzantine mosaic, and of the infant Hitler. She rarely writes of herself—Szymborska’s “I� is the universal “I,� and one can easily identify oneself with the speaker of a poem—but instead directs her attention outward, into the historical and biological world we inhabit.
Her descriptions can range from the ornate—as in “Commemoration,� when she describes a swallow as “calligraphy, / clockhand minus minutes, / early ornithogothic, / heaven’s cross-eyed glance”—to the arrestingly simple, as in “Hitler’s First Photograph,� when she describes Hitler’s hometown of Braunau as
a small but worthy town�
honest businesses, obliging neighbors,
smell of yeast dough, of gray soap.
No one hears howling dogs, or fate’s footsteps.
In our era of “self-expression� and gratuitous avant-gardism, when much poetry vainly admires its own emotions and linguistic pyrotechnics, such outwardness and engagement with the world, which are hallmarks of epic and lyric poetry alike, seem miraculous, though perhaps they shouldn’t. As Szymborska herself muses in “Miracle Fair�: “The commonplace miracle: / that so many miracles take place.�
It shouldn’t surprise us that Szymborska has become so popular in the United States. We have poets like Mary Oliver who offer hymns of praise to the beauty of the natural world, and we have poets like Carolyn Forché who address the realities of political oppression and create poems that bear witness to suffering. But we have no poet who addresses the burdens of history the way Szymborska does: not self-centered, stoic but empathetic, with an unflinching consideration of the impact of war on the human body and on the everyday lives of those who endure it. In “Reality Demands,� she observes that “Perhaps all fields are battlefields, / those we remember / and those that are forgotten,� while in “Hatred,� she writes,
Let’s face it:
[hatred] knows how to make beauty.
The splendid fire-glow in midnight skies.
Magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns.
Nor do we have a poet who looks so clearly at the natural world, from the microscopic to the cosmos itself, whose reflections on the physical law of entropy become meditations on Death, and whose musings on the lives of stars and paramecia alike reveal to her the wholeness of existence. “A drop of water fell on my hand, / drawn from the Ganges and the Nile,� she writes in “Water,� finding in that common, life-giving element a principle that links existence together: “Someone was drowning, someone dying was / calling out for you. Long ago, yesterday.� Szymborska speaks for those without voices, for insects and for plants, finding kinship with them but also honoring their alienness; in “The Silence of Plants,� she writes:
The same star keeps us in its reach.
We cast shadows based on the same laws.
We try to understand things, each in our own way,
And what we don’t know brings us closer too.
It is, finally, our shared mortality that brings us closer; our loneliness as individuals makes us a community: “When the night is clear, I watch the sky,� says “The Old Professor,� “I can’t get enough of it, / so many points of view.�
Lest my appreciation of Szymborska’s poetry seem too partial, let me note that reading her collected poems (which includes all of her work save three early volumes in a Social Realist vein and those very few poems Szymborska herself deemed untranslatable), I found some weaknesses I hadn’t noticed when reading her individual volumes. In her earlier works, Szymborska’s treatment of romantic relationships occasionally verges on sentimentality, as in “Flagrance,� when she says of a moth fluttering over her and her lover, “I didn’t see, you didn’t guess, / our hearts were glowing in the night.� Yet such lapses are rare. More disappointing is the surprising flatness of language in her last two books, where the diction proves less precise and the phrasings less memorable than one might expect from Szymborska. One learns from the “Translator’s Afterword,� that Stanislaw Baranczak had become too ill to work on these translations, and that Clare Cavanagh completed most of them on her own. It appears that it is the tension born of collaboration, and not the skill of one translator, that has made Szymborska so interesting and accessible for English readers.
Perhaps we ought not hold Cavanagh wholly accountable for the flatness of these later poems, since they themselves sometimes betray a flatness of subject matter. In her later work, Szymborska wrote a number of poems about the experience of writing poems, a recursive move that was once exciting but is now deplorably de rigeur, perhaps accounting for the struggles of contemporary poetry to remain relevant to non-poets. Does one really want to read the imagined dialogue between the author and her unwritten poem in “An Idea,� where the poet asks, “Tell me a little more about yourself,� and the poem “whispered a few words in my ear�? Which words, one asks? None other than these words, it appears. Perhaps those who appreciate koans may enjoy this sound of one hand clapping.
And yet, there are moments when Szymborska’s reflections on poetry and on culture in general shake the reader to the core. In “Photograph from September 11,� Szymborska looks at an image of people falling from the burning World Trade Center towers, observing that “The photograph halted them in life, / and now keeps them / above the earth toward the earth.� In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, some public intellectuals questioned the capacity of art to address such violence. Szymborska, it seems, has no patience with such navel-gazing. She reaches out to the victims-“Each is still complete, / with a particular face / and blood well hidden”—using the photograph to come as close as possible to the experience, to enter into their being, and then allowing poetry to save them and, in so doing, save us all: “I can do only two things for them� / describe this flight / and not add a last line.�
I urge you to read and reread Wislawa Szymborska’s Map: Collected and Last Poems. Do not let death add a last line.
I like maps, because they lie.
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they spread before me a world
not of this world.
I believe her, but only partly. In this remarkable, final collection, Szymborska (who died in 2012) proves herself as clear-headed as that later generation of cartographers, yet equally capable of creating lyric poems that seem worlds unto themselves, worlds that offer shelter to the most marginalized, weak, and mute members of society.
It came as something of a surprise in 1996 when Szymborska received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Though known in Polish literary circles and through her Samizdat contributions, she lacked the public profile of her countryman, the poet Czeslaw Milosz, who received the Nobel Prize in 1980, or of Zbigniew Herbert, who was viewed as the next Polish poet likely to receive the honor. Nevertheless, Szymborska earned the Nobel with a relatively modest body of poetry, one that is less baroque and immediately political than Milosz’s and less classical and bitingly ironic than Herbert’s, but which is by turns curious, empathetic, accessible, unflinching in the face of suffering, and astonished in the face of creation. In the years that followed, she has become one of the most popular poets in English, “My identifying features / [of] rapture and despair� (“Sky�) translated in a syntactically clear and accessible style by the team of Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak (more on them later).
What, then, distinguishes Szymborska’s poems, most of which are only a page or two in length? For one, they are deeply philosophical, speculating on universal matters in the simplest language. Reflecting on human existence in “Nothing Twice,� Szymborska writes of how “the sorry fact is / that we arrive here improvised / and leave without the chance to practice.� The philosophy never becomes leaden, though, thanks to Szymborska’s self-deprecating attitude, which can be as cleansing as a glass of seltzer water or of sulfuric acid. In “Seen from Above,� she addresses our belief that human lives matter more than nonhuman ones—“Important matters are reserved for us, / for our life and our death, a death / that always claims the right of way”—while in “In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself,� she notes, “On this third planet of the sun / among the signs of bestiality / a clear conscience is number one.� Yet Szymborska effervesces, too, her irony balanced with whimsy and surprise that nevertheless offer great insight; in “A Large Number,� she writes of her own imagination, “It’s bad with large numbers. / It’s still taken by particularity,� while in “Bodybuilders� Contest,� she wryly observes of one participant, “Onstage, he grapples with a grizzly bear / the deadlier for not really being there.�
Szymborska’s poems share many qualities with good prose: a sense of story, multiple points of view, memorable images and phrases, and unexpected insights into the human condition. She writes poems that invite us to consider the world from the perspective of a cat whose owner has died, of a royal couple in a Byzantine mosaic, and of the infant Hitler. She rarely writes of herself—Szymborska’s “I� is the universal “I,� and one can easily identify oneself with the speaker of a poem—but instead directs her attention outward, into the historical and biological world we inhabit.
Her descriptions can range from the ornate—as in “Commemoration,� when she describes a swallow as “calligraphy, / clockhand minus minutes, / early ornithogothic, / heaven’s cross-eyed glance”—to the arrestingly simple, as in “Hitler’s First Photograph,� when she describes Hitler’s hometown of Braunau as
a small but worthy town�
honest businesses, obliging neighbors,
smell of yeast dough, of gray soap.
No one hears howling dogs, or fate’s footsteps.
In our era of “self-expression� and gratuitous avant-gardism, when much poetry vainly admires its own emotions and linguistic pyrotechnics, such outwardness and engagement with the world, which are hallmarks of epic and lyric poetry alike, seem miraculous, though perhaps they shouldn’t. As Szymborska herself muses in “Miracle Fair�: “The commonplace miracle: / that so many miracles take place.�
It shouldn’t surprise us that Szymborska has become so popular in the United States. We have poets like Mary Oliver who offer hymns of praise to the beauty of the natural world, and we have poets like Carolyn Forché who address the realities of political oppression and create poems that bear witness to suffering. But we have no poet who addresses the burdens of history the way Szymborska does: not self-centered, stoic but empathetic, with an unflinching consideration of the impact of war on the human body and on the everyday lives of those who endure it. In “Reality Demands,� she observes that “Perhaps all fields are battlefields, / those we remember / and those that are forgotten,� while in “Hatred,� she writes,
Let’s face it:
[hatred] knows how to make beauty.
The splendid fire-glow in midnight skies.
Magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns.
Nor do we have a poet who looks so clearly at the natural world, from the microscopic to the cosmos itself, whose reflections on the physical law of entropy become meditations on Death, and whose musings on the lives of stars and paramecia alike reveal to her the wholeness of existence. “A drop of water fell on my hand, / drawn from the Ganges and the Nile,� she writes in “Water,� finding in that common, life-giving element a principle that links existence together: “Someone was drowning, someone dying was / calling out for you. Long ago, yesterday.� Szymborska speaks for those without voices, for insects and for plants, finding kinship with them but also honoring their alienness; in “The Silence of Plants,� she writes:
The same star keeps us in its reach.
We cast shadows based on the same laws.
We try to understand things, each in our own way,
And what we don’t know brings us closer too.
It is, finally, our shared mortality that brings us closer; our loneliness as individuals makes us a community: “When the night is clear, I watch the sky,� says “The Old Professor,� “I can’t get enough of it, / so many points of view.�
Lest my appreciation of Szymborska’s poetry seem too partial, let me note that reading her collected poems (which includes all of her work save three early volumes in a Social Realist vein and those very few poems Szymborska herself deemed untranslatable), I found some weaknesses I hadn’t noticed when reading her individual volumes. In her earlier works, Szymborska’s treatment of romantic relationships occasionally verges on sentimentality, as in “Flagrance,� when she says of a moth fluttering over her and her lover, “I didn’t see, you didn’t guess, / our hearts were glowing in the night.� Yet such lapses are rare. More disappointing is the surprising flatness of language in her last two books, where the diction proves less precise and the phrasings less memorable than one might expect from Szymborska. One learns from the “Translator’s Afterword,� that Stanislaw Baranczak had become too ill to work on these translations, and that Clare Cavanagh completed most of them on her own. It appears that it is the tension born of collaboration, and not the skill of one translator, that has made Szymborska so interesting and accessible for English readers.
Perhaps we ought not hold Cavanagh wholly accountable for the flatness of these later poems, since they themselves sometimes betray a flatness of subject matter. In her later work, Szymborska wrote a number of poems about the experience of writing poems, a recursive move that was once exciting but is now deplorably de rigeur, perhaps accounting for the struggles of contemporary poetry to remain relevant to non-poets. Does one really want to read the imagined dialogue between the author and her unwritten poem in “An Idea,� where the poet asks, “Tell me a little more about yourself,� and the poem “whispered a few words in my ear�? Which words, one asks? None other than these words, it appears. Perhaps those who appreciate koans may enjoy this sound of one hand clapping.
And yet, there are moments when Szymborska’s reflections on poetry and on culture in general shake the reader to the core. In “Photograph from September 11,� Szymborska looks at an image of people falling from the burning World Trade Center towers, observing that “The photograph halted them in life, / and now keeps them / above the earth toward the earth.� In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, some public intellectuals questioned the capacity of art to address such violence. Szymborska, it seems, has no patience with such navel-gazing. She reaches out to the victims-“Each is still complete, / with a particular face / and blood well hidden”—using the photograph to come as close as possible to the experience, to enter into their being, and then allowing poetry to save them and, in so doing, save us all: “I can do only two things for them� / describe this flight / and not add a last line.�
I urge you to read and reread Wislawa Szymborska’s Map: Collected and Last Poems. Do not let death add a last line.
June 28, 2022
Szymborska is wise and witty, and wise and witty about being wise and witty. Her perspective, or willingness to observe from places others may not consider (like "The Old Professor"...something, she admits, she has learned) is what gives her such a charming, timeless, piercing, playful intelligence. It is also why I think she is so successful with poems about animals ("Monologue of a Dog" "Cat in an Empty Apartment" "An Old Turtle's Dream" "Chains") and the inhuman ("Conversation with a Stone," "Yeti," "View with a Grain of Sand," "Clouds" the hypothesized beings in "Maybe All This," and "One Version of Events"). As I read I thought a few times back to Munro's "Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You." Szymborska similarly loves to play with language and twist a key phrase within its context to draw attention to that which we assume, take for granted, etc. without any good reason ("Everything," "Three Words," etc.). I kept thinking about how Szymborska might have dealt with "Something I've Been Meaning To Tell You." Maybe the title of that story would become the title of a poem. She would talk about what those words mean, what sin they'd allow one to commit, she'd go through every angle! And then you would realize maybe three stanzas in the ironic tone she was using.
Helen Vendler has a great quote about Szymborska: "Each line in a poem—and each white space in a poem—must be weighed for the new imaginative information they bring."
As Cavanagh says, Szymborska is often instructive. There are many poems that do this for me but I note "Hard Life With Memory." And as Cavanagh also says, Szymborska has quietly written some deeply touching poems (whether about love or not). I underline "Teenager" from the same volume which comes right before Hard Life With Memory, they speak to each other.
A great line from "Possibilities" is "I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky," which I think captures Szymborska's position quite well. It's nothing against Dostoyevsky, and in fact I get the feeling that Szymborska and he have a shared psychological/philosophical acuity/insightfulness, but an indication of a certain road travelled. Szymborska is one of those writers who, when read, helps one to speak a bit better. Kierkegaard is one of those writers for me too. I have been thinking a lot about the infinite resignation required to transcend to faith from Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling," and I think I subconsciously recognized a similar movement in Szymborska's view of humanity...something which has dignity and weight because it is in tension or even direct opposition to the previous state. If not for the movement through the previous state the end result would be trivial, vacuous, a mockery. But this is the reason why I appreciate Szymborska and find her to have such a great humanity!
Helen Vendler has a great quote about Szymborska: "Each line in a poem—and each white space in a poem—must be weighed for the new imaginative information they bring."
As Cavanagh says, Szymborska is often instructive. There are many poems that do this for me but I note "Hard Life With Memory." And as Cavanagh also says, Szymborska has quietly written some deeply touching poems (whether about love or not). I underline "Teenager" from the same volume which comes right before Hard Life With Memory, they speak to each other.
A great line from "Possibilities" is "I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky," which I think captures Szymborska's position quite well. It's nothing against Dostoyevsky, and in fact I get the feeling that Szymborska and he have a shared psychological/philosophical acuity/insightfulness, but an indication of a certain road travelled. Szymborska is one of those writers who, when read, helps one to speak a bit better. Kierkegaard is one of those writers for me too. I have been thinking a lot about the infinite resignation required to transcend to faith from Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling," and I think I subconsciously recognized a similar movement in Szymborska's view of humanity...something which has dignity and weight because it is in tension or even direct opposition to the previous state. If not for the movement through the previous state the end result would be trivial, vacuous, a mockery. But this is the reason why I appreciate Szymborska and find her to have such a great humanity!
February 1, 2017
A 'Thank You' Note
There is much I owe
to those I do not love.
The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.
Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.
My peace be with them
for with them I am free,
and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.
I don't wait for them
from window to door.
Almost as patient
as a sun dial,
I understand
what love does not understand.
I forgive
what love would never have forgiven.
Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.
My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.
And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map.
It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon.
They don't even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.
'I don't owe them anything',
love would have said
on this open topic.
There is much I owe
to those I do not love.
The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.
Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.
My peace be with them
for with them I am free,
and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.
I don't wait for them
from window to door.
Almost as patient
as a sun dial,
I understand
what love does not understand.
I forgive
what love would never have forgiven.
Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.
My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.
And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map.
It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon.
They don't even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.
'I don't owe them anything',
love would have said
on this open topic.
January 31, 2018
For some reason this collection struck me as more bitter and world weary than some of her shorter books. The 4 stars are because I am depressed enough already by the local national events and I don't ( selfishly ) want to be reminded as to how far down things can go. Szymborska survived ww II and the communist government in Poland . She is as witty and clever as ever
January 24, 2024
i think it's impossible to translate a poem and make it even half as good as the original. while szymborska and her writing is easily worthy of five stars, reading some of the original poems with my mum really made me realise how english seems to ruin them. oh well if only i could speak every language ever so that i could read everything in its original form 💔💔
April 7, 2017
Szymborska’s poems aren’t always my cup of tea, but often enough they’re a glass of fine champagne. I toast her Nobel prize! I love her humor and her worldview, but usually prefer poems that are more compressed. Luckily, this means I appreciated her more as the book went on. That’s always good news for a poet, when you watch them get better and better over time, from 1944-2011. My favorites of the excerpted books are The People on the Bridge (1986), Here (2009), and Enough (2011).
I especially enjoyed Szymborska’s spine-tingling poems like “The Terrorist, He’s Watching�:
“The bomb in the bar will explode at thirteen twenty.
Now it’s just thirteen sixteen.
There’s still time for some to go in
and some to come out.�
We watch what the terrorist sees from a safe distance. Some are lucky, but there’s always some poor soul who “goes back in for his crummy gloves.�
Another expertly creepy poem is “Hitler’s First Photograph�:
“And who’s this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?�
The poem wonders what baby will be when he grows up. As the camera is clicked, “No one hears howling dogs, or fate’s footsteps.�
One of my favorite poems is “Cat in an Empty Apartment,� that begins
“Die � you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?...
Nothing seems different here,
but nothing is the same�.
Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too�.
Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should.�
I’ve been that cat. Haven’t you?
I especially enjoyed Szymborska’s spine-tingling poems like “The Terrorist, He’s Watching�:
“The bomb in the bar will explode at thirteen twenty.
Now it’s just thirteen sixteen.
There’s still time for some to go in
and some to come out.�
We watch what the terrorist sees from a safe distance. Some are lucky, but there’s always some poor soul who “goes back in for his crummy gloves.�
Another expertly creepy poem is “Hitler’s First Photograph�:
“And who’s this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?�
The poem wonders what baby will be when he grows up. As the camera is clicked, “No one hears howling dogs, or fate’s footsteps.�
One of my favorite poems is “Cat in an Empty Apartment,� that begins
“Die � you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?...
Nothing seems different here,
but nothing is the same�.
Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too�.
Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should.�
I’ve been that cat. Haven’t you?
July 15, 2024
Here lies, old-fashioned as parentheses,
the authoress of verse. Eternal rest
was granted her by earth, although the corpse
had failed to join the avant-garde, of course.
The plain grave? There's poetic justice in it,
this ditty-dirge, the owl, the burdock. Passerby,
take out your compact Compu-Brain and try
to weigh Szymborska's fate for a half a minute.
October 3, 2017
Some gems in here. But I have realized that I am not a fan of translation. The music of translated poetry seems to be always a little bland. Szymborska maintains an artful tension of seriousness and humor that merits respect. I am, however, very much looking forward to opening up Kipling now. There are not many things as delicious as poetry in ones own language. I imagine that if I spoke and read Polish that this would have been even better.
May 1, 2015
Great collection of poems including my favorite Symborska:
Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition, Four A.M.;
Parable, Ballad, Over Wine, Dream, Conversation with a Stone;
Soliloquy for Cassandra;
Advertisement, Discovery, In Praise of Dreams, Under One Small Star;
Thank-You Note, Possibilities; A Note, List;
and new gems like Someone I've Been Watching for a While and Hand.
Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition, Four A.M.;
Parable, Ballad, Over Wine, Dream, Conversation with a Stone;
Soliloquy for Cassandra;
Advertisement, Discovery, In Praise of Dreams, Under One Small Star;
Thank-You Note, Possibilities; A Note, List;
and new gems like Someone I've Been Watching for a While and Hand.
January 1, 2016
Honestly I never get tired of these poems. I read them again and again. I have dog-eared so many pages in this collection. I feel very lucky just to be able to hold this book in my hands.
January 14, 2022
When a poet can take a simple onion into the highest heights of poetry, you know she is really good. Collected a lot of powerful lines and thought-provoking stanzas from Ms. Wislawa Szymborska. She is a gem of a discovery.
And about the onion. Here.
The Onion
The onion, now that’s something else.
Its innards don’t exist.
Nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.
Our skin is just a coverup
for the land where none dare go,
an internal inferno,
the anathema of anatomy.
In an onion there’s only onion
from its top to its toe,
onionymous monomania,
unanimous omninudity.
At peace, of a peace,
internally at rest.
Inside it, there’s a smaller one
of undiminished worth.
The second holds a third one
the third contains a fourth.
A centripetal fugue.
Polyphony compressed.
Nature’s rotundest tummy
its greatest success story,
the onion drapes itself in its
own aureoles of glory.
We hold veins, nerves, and fat,
secretions� secret sections.
Not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections.
And about the onion. Here.
The Onion
The onion, now that’s something else.
Its innards don’t exist.
Nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.
Our skin is just a coverup
for the land where none dare go,
an internal inferno,
the anathema of anatomy.
In an onion there’s only onion
from its top to its toe,
onionymous monomania,
unanimous omninudity.
At peace, of a peace,
internally at rest.
Inside it, there’s a smaller one
of undiminished worth.
The second holds a third one
the third contains a fourth.
A centripetal fugue.
Polyphony compressed.
Nature’s rotundest tummy
its greatest success story,
the onion drapes itself in its
own aureoles of glory.
We hold veins, nerves, and fat,
secretions� secret sections.
Not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections.
December 7, 2020
Reading through Szymborska’s poetry is like parsing through the mind of a quiet but deeply observant life, the mind of someone perched high enough to see people as they are, yet buried low enough in the ground to uncover the darkest understanding of death and humanity’s inhumanity. Her many-paged Map is now and will forever be a reference for shared solace in every honest respect, pages and poems to be revisited again and again as the clouds change above and below every generation that hopes for something better, something better from our shared existence than the horrors we keep repeating. Wislawa Szymborska was a Polish teenager when Hitler invaded her country, though she rarely speaks of that time or those years with any kind of prose or narrative; only through lines and verses that briefly uncover her response to atrocities repeated, far beyond the age of Hitler or her own experience as a child.
July 21, 2020
This review says it best:
"To readers who never think to trespass down the poetry aisle of the bookstore; to those who point to the arbitrariness and obfuscation rampant in contemporary poetry as proof that the literary emperor has no clothes (and little regard for the harried, hard-working souls who do), I happily offer two words in rebuttal: Wislawa Szymborska."
"To readers who never think to trespass down the poetry aisle of the bookstore; to those who point to the arbitrariness and obfuscation rampant in contemporary poetry as proof that the literary emperor has no clothes (and little regard for the harried, hard-working souls who do), I happily offer two words in rebuttal: Wislawa Szymborska."
January 3, 2018
My love of polish artists will ruin me, I tell ya
March 17, 2020
Be my ever-questioning, wise grandma—dear Wislawa.
August 17, 2020
Beautiful, sad poetry w a touch of bright humor for dark times.
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