WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

(Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław

Barańczak)
Born in 1923, she made her debut with a Socialist Realist collection
titled That's What We Live For in 1952. (The manuscript was initially
considered not ideologically correct enough, and its publication dragged
on for years.) Her second collection) Questions Put to Myself, came
out in 1954. It is in the semantic hiatus between these two titles that we
can catch the first glimpse of the genuine Szymborska, who reached her
maturity with her third collection, in 1957, Calling Out to Yeti. The
youthful self-confidence of the first book's title gives way to self-doubt;
perhaps most significant, the plural "we" is replaced with the singular,
"myself."
In one of the very few interviews Szymborska has given in the course
of her career, she said that in her early writing she tried to love
humankind instead of human beings. One might add that the esthetics of
Socialist Realism demanded love for nothing less than humankind while
at the same time, ironically, narrowing the multidimensionality of human
life down to just one, social, dimension; it is Szymborska's focus on the
individual that allows her to view human reality in all its troublesome
complication.
The most extraordinary thing about her achievement is that, in some
mysterious and enviable way, the uncompromising profundity of her
poems never prevents them from being accessible. Over the past decade
her popularity in Poland has reached staggering proportions; some
of her recent poems, like the amazing and moving Cat in an Empty
Apartment (in which the absence of someone who is dead is presented
from the perspective of the house pet he left behind), have already
acquired the status of cult objects among Polish readers. As a rule,
a poet's popular appeal is a commodity purchased in exchange for some
concessions, for the poet's renunciation of at least a part of what
constitutes the natural complexity of his or her self. In contrast, Szymborska
seems to be endowed with an almost superhuman ability to be
complex yet comprehensible, ambitious yet approachable, individualistic
yet involved.
If this secret can be explained, it will have to do with Szymborska's
being wise enough to realize that what attracts people to poetry today
is not its potential for making statements but rather its art of asking
questions. The model of inquiry or self-inquiry, of asking "questions
put to myself as well as others, makes its presence felt with striking
frequency and insistence throughout her entire work. In the concluding
part of her poem The Century's Decline she uses a surprising yet apt
adjective to denote the specific quality that marks all the "questions"
she asks:
"How should we live?" someone asked me in a letter.
I had meant to ask him
the same question.
...[T]he most pressing questions
are naive ones.
The accessibility of Szymborska's poetry stems from the fact that the
"pressing questions" she keeps asking are, at least at first sight, as "naive"
as those of the man in the street. The brilliance of her poetry lies in
pushing the inquiry much farther than the man in the street ever would.
Many of her poems start provocatively, with a question, observation or
statement that seems downright trite, only to surprise us with its
unexpected yet logical continuation. What can be more banal than noting
that nothing happens twice? And yet the next three lines, by pursuing this
thought to its end, offer a startling view of human existence:
Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.
Similarly, the title poem in Szymborska's latest collection, The End and
the Beginning (1993), opens with a statement that sounds so disarmingly
trivial that it seems not to contain any revelation at all:
After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick
themselves up, after all.
Yet the "naive question" implied in this poem concerns no less
pressing an issue than the meaning of human history — or perhaps the
senselessness of it. What makes this poem typically Szymborskian is that
its initial naiveté almost imperceptibly moves to another plane. The action
of "cleaning up the mess" turns, by metaphoric equation, into the process
of forgetting. Just as you must remove the rubble after the war, you must
remove the remembrance of human evil; otherwise, the burden of living
would be unbearable. But this means that we never learn from history. Our
ability to forget makes us, at the same time, repeatedly commit the same
tragic blunders.
The typical lyrical situation on which a Szymborska poem is founded
is the confrontation between the directly stated or implied opinion on an
issue and the "naive question" that raises doubt about its validity. The
opinion not only reflects some widely shared belief or is representative of
some widespread mind-set, but also, as a rule, has a certain doctrinaire ring
to it: the philosophy behind it is usually speculative, anti-empirical, prone
to hasty generalizations, collectivism dogmatic, and intolerant.
Szymborska's finest point is that it is the very dogmatism of the
opinion that prompts the naiveté of the question. Being dogmatic, the
opinion is naturally self-confident and categorical as well, and may end up
patching its logical, moral etc. holes by resorting to blatant oversimplifications,
unjustified generalizations, and blindly optimistic (or blindly
pessimistic) predictions. Such patches, particularly easy to discern, almost
invite the irony of the skeptical individualist. Thus, Szymborska's notion
of the function of the poet: the poet should be a spoilsport. The poet
should be someone who calls any bluff and lays bare any dirty trick in the
game played by the earthly and unearthly powers, where the chief
gambling strategy is dogmatic generalization and the stakes are the souls
of each and every one of us.
Stanisław Barańczak
October, 1996
The End and the Beginning
After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove

the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

Someone has to trudge

through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.

Someone has to lug the post

to prop the wall,
someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.

No sound bites, no photo opportunities,

and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.

The bridges need to be rebuilt,

the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.

Someone, broom in hand,

still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.
But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who’ll find all that
a little boring.

From time to time someone still must

dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.

Those who knew

what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.

Someone has to lie there

in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.
p. 1993

An Unexpected Meeting

We treat each other with exceeding courtesy;

we say, it’s great to see you after all these years.

Our tigers drink milk.

Our hawks tread the ground.
Our sharks have all drowned.
Our wolves yawn beyond the open cage.

Our snakes have shed their lightning,

our apes their flights of fancy,
our peacocks have renounced their plumes.
The bats flew out of our hair long ago.

We fall silent in midsentence,

all smiles, past help.
Our humans
don’t know how to talk to one another.
p. 1962
Children of Our Age

We are children of our age,

it’s a political age.

All day long, all through the night,

all affairs—yours, ours, theirs—
are political affairs.

Whether you like it or not,

your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.

Whatever you say reverberates,

whatever you don’t say speaks for itself.
So either way you’re talking politics.

Even when you take to the woods,

you’re taking political steps
on political grounds.

Apolitical poems are also political,

and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And though it troubles the digestion
it’s a question, as always, of politics.

To acquire a political meaning

you don’t even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,

or a conference table whose shape

was quarreled over for months:
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?

Meanwhile, people perished,

animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.
p. 1986
Cat in an Empty Apartment

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.
Nothing has been moved,
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

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.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet has been examined.

Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,

just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.
p. 1993
View with a Grain of Sand

We call it a grain of sand,

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

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.

It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,

but the view doesn’t view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,

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

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless

in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.

The wind ruffles it, its only reason being

that it blows.

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

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.

But that’s just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.
p. 1986
C. P. CAVAFY
(Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn)

C. P. CAVAFY was born in 1863 into a well-to-do Greek mercantile

family in Alexandria, Egypt. After his father's death and the beginning
of the family's financial difficulties, the young Cavafy moved
with his mother and brothers to England, where they spent the
period 1872-7 in Liverpool and London. Apart from three years in
Constantinople from 1882 to 1885. he spent the rest of his life in
Alexandria, where he worked, until his retirement in 1922, as a senior
clerk in the Irrigation Department, living alone (after the departure
of his brother Paul in 1908) in a relatively large apartment near
the centre of the city. He visited Greece on only four occasions. He
began publishing poetry in periodicals in 1886, but abandoned many
of his early poems, and self-publication gradually became his prefcn'cd
means of disseminating his work. By the time of his death in
1933 his poetry was widely known-though the subject of much
controversy-throughout the Greek-speaking world and beyond.

THE CITY
You said: “I’ll go to some other land, I’ll go to some other sea.
There’s bound to be another city that’s better by far.
My every effort has been ill-fated from the start;
my heart—like something dead—lies buried away;
How long will my mind endure this slow decay?
Wherever I look, wherever I cast my eyes,
I see all round me the black rubble of my life
where I’ve spent so many ruined and wasted years.”
You’ll find no new places, you won’t find other shores.
The city will follow you. The streets in which you pace
will be the same, you’ll haunt the same familiar places,
and inside those same houses you’ll grow old.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t bother to hope
for a ship, a route, to take you somewhere else; they don’t exist.
Just as you’ve destroyed your life, here in this
small corner, so you’ve wasted it through all the world.
[1894; 1910]
WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS
—What is it that we are waiting for, gathered in the square?

The barbarians are supposed to arrive today.

—Why is there such great idleness inside the Senate house?

Why are the Senators sitting there, without passing any laws?

Because the barbarians will arrive today.

Why should the Senators still be making laws?
The barbarians, when they come, will legislate.

—Why is it that our Emperor awoke so early today,

and has taken his position at the greatest of the city’s gates
seated on his throne, in solemn state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians will arrive today.

And the emperor is waiting to receive
their leader. Indeed he is prepared
to present him with a parchment scroll. In it
he’s conferred on him many titles and honorifics.

—Why have our consuls and our praetors come outside today
wearing their scarlet togas with their rich embroidery,
why have they donned their armlets with all their amethysts,
and rings with their magnificent, glistening emeralds;
why should they be carrying such precious staves today,
maces chased exquisitely with silver and with gold?

Because the barbarians will arrive today;

and things like that bedazzle the barbarians.

—Why do our worthy orators not come today as usual

to deliver their addresses, each to say his piece?

Because the barbarians will arrive today;

and they’re bored by eloquence and public speaking.

—Why has this uneasiness arisen all at once,

and this confusion? (How serious the faces have become.)
Why is it that the streets and squares are emptying so quickly,
and everyone’s returning home in such deep contemplation?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.

And some people have arrived from the borderlands,
and said there are no barbarians anymore.

And now what’s to become of us without barbarians.

Those people were a solution of a sort.

[1898; 1904]
Ithaca

As you set out on the way to Ithaca

hope that the road is a long one,
filled with adventures, filled with discoveries.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
Poseidon in his anger: do not fear them,
you won’t find such things on your way
so long as your thoughts remain lofty, and a choice
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
savage Poseidon; you won’t encounter them
unless you stow them away inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up before you.

Hope that the road is a long one.

Many may the summer mornings be
when—with what pleasure, with what joy—
you first put in to harbors new to your eyes;
may you stop at Phoenician trading posts
and there acquire the finest wares:
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and heady perfumes of every kind:
as many heady perfumes as you can.
Many Egyptian cities may you visit
that you may learn, and go on learning, from their sages.

Always in your mind keep Ithaca.

To arrive there is your destiny.
But do not hurry your trip in any way.
Better that it last for many years;
that you drop anchor at the island an old man,
rich with all you’ve gotten on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.

Ithaca gave you the beautiful journey;

without her you wouldn’t have set upon the road.
But now she has nothing left to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca didn’t deceive you.

As wise as you will have become, with so much experience,
you will understand, by then, these Ithacas; what they mean.
[1910; 1911]
WALLS
Without pity, without shame, without consideration
they’ve built around me enormous, towering walls.

And I sit here now in growing desperation.

This fate consumes my mind, I think of nothing else:

because I had so many things to do out there.

O while they built the walls, why did I not look out?

But no noise, no sound from the builders did I hear.

Imperceptibly they shut me off from the world without.
[1896; 1897]

The God Abandons Antony

When suddenly, at midnight, there comes the sound

of an invisible procession passing by
with exquisite music playing, with voices raised—
your good fortune, which now gives way; all your efforts’
ill-starred outcome; the plans you made for life,
which turned out wrong: don’t mourn them uselessly.
Like one who’s long prepared, like someone brave,
bid farewell to her, to Alexandria, who is leaving.
Above all do not fool yourself, don’t say
that it was a dream, that your ears deceived you;
don’t stoop to futile hopes like these.
Like one who’s long prepared, like someone brave,
as befits a man who’s been blessed with a city like this,
go without faltering toward the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the entreaties and the whining of a coward,
to the sounds—a final entertainment—
to the exquisite instruments of that initiate crew,
and bid farewell to her, to Alexandria, whom you are losing.

[1910; 1911]
DEREK WALCOTT
Derek Walcott was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, the West Indies, on January 23,
1930. His first published poem, “1944” appeared in The Voice of St. Lucia when he
was fourteen years old, and consisted of forty-four lines of blank verse. By the age of
nineteen, Walcott had self-published two volumes, Epitaph for the Young: XII
Cantos (Barbados Advocate, 1949) and 25 Poems (1948), exhibiting a wide range of
influences, including William Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. He later
attended the University of the West Indies, having received a Colonial Development
and Welfare scholarship, and in 1951, he published the volume Poems.

In 1957, Walcott was awarded a fellowship by the Rockefeller Foundation to study

the American theater. He published numerous collections of poetry in his lifetime,
most recently The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2014); White Egrets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010); Selected Poems (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2007); The Prodigal: A Poem (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004);
and Tiepolo’s Hound (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).

The founder of the Trinidad Theater Workshop, Walcott also wrote several plays
produced throughout the United States: The Odyssey: A Stage Version (1992); The
Isle is Full of Noises (1982); Remembrance and Pantomime (1980); The Joker of
Seville and O Babylon! (1978); Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other
Plays (1970); Three Plays: The Last Carnival; Beef, No Chicken; and A Branch of the
Blue Nile (1969). His play Dream on Monkey Mountain won the Obie Award for
distinguished foreign play of 1971. He founded Boston Playwrights’ Theatre at Boston
University in 1981.

Walcott’s first collection of essays, What the Twilight Says (Farrar, Straus & Giroux),
was published in 1998.

About Walcott’s work, the poet Joseph Brodsky said,

For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the
English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems
without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He
gives us more than himself or “a world”; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in
the language.

Walcott’s honors include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the T. S. Eliot Prize,

the Montale Prize, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and, in 1988, the Queen’s
Medal for Poetry. In 1992, Walcott became the first Caribbean writer to receive the
Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 2015, he received the Griffin Trust for Excellence in
Poetry’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He was an honorary member of the American
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Derek Walcott died on March 17, 2017, in Saint Lucia.

The Sea Is History
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil,

heavy as chaos;
then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,

and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.

Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,

as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets

of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.

Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,

leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,

and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands

out there past the reef's moiling shelf,
where the men-o'-war floated down;
strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.
It's all subtle and submarine,
through colonnades of coral,

past the gothic windows of sea-fans

to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,
blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

and these groined caves with barnacles

pitted like stone
are our cathedrals,

and the furnace before the hurricanes:

Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills
into marl and cornmeal,

and that was Lamentations—

that was just Lamentations,
it was not History;

then came, like scum on the river's drying lip,

the brown reeds of villages
mantling and congealing into towns,

and at evening, the midges' choirs,

and above them, the spires
lancing the side of God

as His son set, and that was the New Testament.

Then came the white sisters clapping

to the waves' progress,
and that was Emancipation—

jubilation, O jubilation—
vanishing swiftly
as the sea's lace dries in the sun,

but that was not History,

that was only faith,
and then each rock broke into its own nation;

then came the synod of flies,

then came the secretarial heron,
then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,
fireflies with bright ideas
and bats like jetting ambassadors
and the mantis, like khaki police,

and the furred caterpillars of judges

examining each case closely,
and then in the dark ears of ferns

and in the salt chuckle of rocks

with their sea pools, there was the sound
like a rumour without any echo

of History, really beginning.

p. 1979

The Saddhu Of Couva

When sunset, a brass gong,
vibrate through Couva,
is then I see my soul, swiftly unsheathed,
like a white cattle bird growing more small
over the ocean of the evening canes,
and I sit quiet, waiting for it to return
like a hog-cattle blistered with mud,
because, for my spirit, India is too far.
And to that gong
sometimes bald clouds in saffron robes assemble
sacred to the evening,
sacred even to Ramlochan,
singing Indian hits from his jute hammock
while evening strokes the flanks
and silver horns of his maroon taxi,
as the mosquitoes whine their evening mantras,
my friend Anopheles, on the sitar,
and the fireflies making every dusk Divali.

I knot my head with a cloud,

my white mustache bristle like horns,
my hands are brittle as the pages of Ramayana.
Once the sacred monkeys multiplied like branches
in the ancient temples: I did not miss them,
because these fields sang of Bengal,
behind Ramlochan Repairs there was Uttar Pradesh;
but time roars in my ears like a river,
old age is a conflagration
as fierce as the cane fires of crop time.
I will pass through these people like a cloud,
they will see a white bird beating the evening sea
of the canes behind Couva,
and who will point it as my soul unsheathed?
Naither the bridegroom in beads,
nor the bride in her veils,
their sacred language on the cinema hoardings.

I talked too damn much on the Couva Village Council.

I talked too softly, I was always drowned
by the loudspeakers in front of the stores
or the loudspeakers with the greatest pictures.
I am best suited to stalk like a white cattle bird
on legs like sticks, with sticking to the Path
between the canes on a district road at dusk.
Playing the Elder. There are no more elders.
Is only old people.

My friends spit on the government.

I do not think is just the government.
Suppose all the gods too old,
Suppose they dead and they burning them,
supposing when some cane cutter
start chopping up snakes with a cutlass
he is severing the snake-armed god,
and suppose some hunter has caught
Hanuman in his mischief in a monkey cage.
Suppose all the gods were killed by electric light?
Sunset, a bonfire, roars in my ears;
embers of brown swallows dart and cry,
like women distracted,
around its cremation.
I ascend to my bed of sweet sandalwood.

p. 1979

A City's Death By Fire

After that hot gospeller has levelled all but the churched sky,
I wrote the tale by tallow of a city's death by fire;
Under a candle's eye, that smoked in tears, I
Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire.
All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales,
Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar;
Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales
Torn open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire.
By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked, why
Should a man wax tears, when his wooden world fails?
In town, leaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths;
To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath
Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails,
Blessing the death and the baptism by fire.

[1948-1960]

A Far Cry From Africa

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa, Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?
Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilizations dawn
>From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands

Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?

[1948-1960]

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
p. 1976