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Branka Babic

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RE: Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel-prize winning Polish poet, dies at 88
3/27/2012 4:16:22 AM

CLOCHARD

In Paris, on a day that stayed morning until dusk,

in a Paris like -

in a Paris which -

(save me, sacred folly of description!)

in a garden by a stone cathedral

(bit built, no, rather

played upon a lute)

a clochard, a lay monk, a naysayer

sleeps sprawled like a knight in effigy.

If he ever owned anything, he has lost it,

and having lost it doesn't want it back.

He's still owed soldier's pay for the conquest of Gaul -

but he's got over that, it doesn't matter.

And they never paid him in the fifteenth century

for posing as the thief on Christ's left hand -

he has forgotten all about it, he's not waiting.

He earns his red wine

by trimming the neighborhood dogs.

He sleeps with the air of an inventor of dreams,

his thick beard swarming towards the sun.

The gray chimeras (to wit, bulldogryphons,

hellephants, hippopotoads, croakodilloes, rhinocerberuses,

behemammoths, and demonopods,

that omnibestial Gothic allegro vivace)

unpetrify

and examine him with a curiosity

they never turn on me or you,

prudent Peter,

zealous Michael,

enterprising Eve,

Barbara, Clare.

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Branka Babic

713
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RE: Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel-prize winning Polish poet, dies at 88
3/27/2012 6:44:23 PM
Richard Threlkeld Wislawa Szymborska Jan Groover

Wislawa Szymborska


The Szymborski Family grave where Wislawa Szymborska's cremated remains were interred during short funeral ceremony.

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Branka Babic

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RE: Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel-prize winning Polish poet, dies at 88
3/27/2012 6:47:54 PM

ALLEGRO MA NON TROPPO


Life, you're beautiful (I say)
you just couldn't get more fecund,
more befrogged or nightingaily,
more anthillful or sproutspouting.

I'm trying to court life's favor,
to get into its good graces,
to anticipate its whims.
I'm always the first to bow,

always there where it can see me
with my humble, reverent face,
soaring on the wings of rapture,
falling under waves of wonder.

Oh how grassy is this hopper,
how this berry ripely rasps.
I would never have conceived it
if I weren't conceived myself!

Life (I say) I've no idea
what I could compare you to.
No one else can make a pine cone
and then make the pine cone's clone.

I praise your inventiveness,
bounty, sweep, exactitude,
sense of order – gifts that border
on witchcraft and wizardry.

I just don't want to upset you,
tease or anger, vex or rile.
For millennia, I've been trying
to appease you with my smile.

I tug at life by its leaf hem:
will it stop for me, just once,
momentarily forgetting
to what end it runs and runs?

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
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Branka Babic

713
1352 Posts
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RE: Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel-prize winning Polish poet, dies at 88
4/3/2012 11:27:40 AM
wislawa-szymborska-nb20

A Film from the Sixties

This adult male. This person on earth.
Ten billion nerve cells. Ten pints of blood
pumped by ten ounces of heart.
This object took three billion years to emerge.

He first took the shape of a small boy.
The boy would lean his head on his aunt's knees.
Where is that boy. Where are those knees.
The little boy got big. Those were the days.
These mirrors are cruel and smooth as asphalt.
Yesterday he ran over a cat. Yes, not a bad idea.
The cat was saved from this age's hell.
A girl in a car checked him out.
No, her knees weren't what he's looking for.
Anyway he just wants to lie in the sand and breathe.
He has nothing in common with the world.
He feels like a handle broken off a jug,
but the jug doesn't know it's broken and keeps going to the well.
It's amazing. Someone's still willing to work.
The house gets built. The doorknob has been carved.
The tree is grafted. The circus will go on.
The whole won't go to pieces, although it's made of them.
Thick and heavy as glue sunt lacrimae rerum.
But all that's only background, incidental.
Within him, there's awful darkness, in the darkness a small boy.

God of humor, do something about him, okay?
God of humor, do something about him today.

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Branka Babic

713
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RE: Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel-prize winning Polish poet, dies at 88
4/3/2012 11:36:00 AM

WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA: The grand Polish poetess— is a rare uncontroversial Nobel laureate for literature.

The Nobel-winning Polish poet won the literature prize in 1996 and wrote about the nature of the soul, totalitarianism and death with beguiling clarity and a sense of wonder. "She is able to capture the pointlessness and sadness of life, but somehow still be affirmative," filmmaker <a class="taxInlineTagLink" id="PECLB004228" title="Woody Allen" href="/topic/entertainment/movies/woody-allen-PECLB004228.topic">Woody Allen</a> said in a rare <a class="taxInlineTagLink" id="0100000004593864" title="Documentary (genre)" href="/topic/arts-culture/genres/documentary-%28genre%29-0100000004593864.topic">documentary</a> about Szymborska. She was 88. <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-wislawa-szymborska-20120203,0,4342780.story"><span class="center_label">Full obituary</span></a><br> <br> <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-2011notables-gallery,0,155600.photogallery"><span class="center_label">Notable deaths of 2011</span></a>
( Janek Skarzynsk I/ AFP / Getty Images )
"She is able to capture the pointlessness and sadness of life, but somehow still be affirmative," filmmaker Woody Allen said in a rare documentary about Szymborska.

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