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Branka Babic

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RE: Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel-prize winning Polish poet, dies at 88
4/3/2012 11:49:59 AM




Hitler's First Photograph

And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?
That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers' little boy!
Will he grow up to be an LL.D?
Or a tenor in Vienna's Opera House?
Whose teensy hand is this, whose little ear and eye and nose?
Whose tummy full of milk, we just don't know:
printer's, doctor's, merchant's, priest's?
Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander?
To a garden, to a school, to an office, to a bride?
Maybe to the Burgermeister's daughter?

Precious little angel, mommy's sunshine, honey bun.

While he was being born, a year ago,
there was no dearth of signs on the earth and in the sky:
spring sun, geraniums in windows,
the organ-grinder's music in the yard,
a lucky fortune wrapped in rosy paper.
Then just before the labor his mother's fateful dream.
A dove seen in a dream means joyful news--
if it is caught, a long-awaited guest will come.
Knock knock, who's there, it's Adolf's heartchen knocking.

A little pacifier, diaper, rattle, bib,

our bouncing boy, thank God and knock on wood, is well,
looks just like his folks, like a kitten in a basket,
like the tots in every other family album.
Sh-h-h, let's not start crying, sugar.
The camera will click from under that black hood.

The Klinger Atelier, Grabenstrasse, Braunau.

And Braunau is 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.
A history teacher loosens his collar
and yawns over homework.


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Branka Babic

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RE: Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel-prize winning Polish poet, dies at 88
4/3/2012 11:54:26 AM

A Word on Statistics

A WORD ON STATISTICS

by Wislawa Szymborska
(translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)

Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.

Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.

Always good,
because they cannot be otherwise:
four — well, maybe five.

Able to admire without envy:
eighteen.

Led to error
by youth (which passes):
sixty, plus or minus.

Those not to be messed with:
four-and-forty.

Living in constant fear
of someone or something:
seventy-seven.

Capable of happiness:
twenty-some-odd at most.

Harmless alone,
turning savage in crowds:
more than half, for sure.

Cruel
when forced by circumstances:
it’s better not to know,
not even approximately.

Wise in hindsight:
not many more
than wise in foresight.

Getting nothing out of life except things:
thirty
(though I would like to be wrong).

Balled up in pain
and without a flashlight in the dark:
eighty-three, sooner or later.

Those who are just:
quite a few, thirty-five.

But if it takes effort to understand:
three.

Worthy of empathy:
ninety-nine.

Mortal:
one hundred out of one hundred –
a figure that has never varied yet.


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Branka Babic

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RE: Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel-prize winning Polish poet, dies at 88
4/4/2012 7:34:21 AM
Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska in 1996, the same year she won the Nobel Prize in literature. Szymborska, who was born in 1923, died Wednesday in Krakow, Poland.
Enlarge Czarek Sokolowski/AP

Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska in 1996, the same year she won the Nobel Prize in literature. Szymborska, who was born in 1923, died Wednesday in Krakow, Poland.

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February 2, 2012

The path to international fame as a poet generally doesn't involve writing short poems about sea cucumbers. Yet for the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize in 1996 and died Wednesday, the little things — onions, cats, monkeys, and yes, sea cucumbers — turned out to be very big indeed.

A popular writer in Poland for many years, Szymborska became a reluctant international literary celebrity after her Nobel win.

Szymborska is an ironist. But in her work, irony becomes playful, almost whimsical. She thinks of the poet as an acrobat who moves, as she puts it, with "laborious ease, with patient agility, with calculated inspiration."

Szymborska's poems generally focus on everyday subjects or situations, and her tone stays firmly in the middle ground. She doesn't rant; she calmly assesses. She's a poet of dry-eyed, athletic precision: an acrobat, as she says, not a powerlifter. Here is how she begins a poem called "Under One Small Star" (all quotations are from translations by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh):

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.

And the poem concludes:

Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

Yet if Szymborska's touch is gentle, it can still burn or freeze. Consider her sea cucumber (or "holothurian") poem, which is called "Autotomy." The poem begins:

In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees.

It violently divides into doom and salvation,
retribution and reward, what has been and what will be.

An abyss appears in the middle of its body
between what instantly becomes two foreign shores.

Life on one shore, death on the other.

The sea cucumber can become two parts, one living, one dead. Szymborska compares this to the way in which writers have long argued that when they died, their work would live on — granting them a kind of immortality. But Szymborska is skeptical. She doesn't think anyone exists outside of time, or that writing poetry is a matter of falling on the right side of an abyss. As she puts it in the poem's conclusion:

Here the heavy heart, there non omnis moriar
Just three little words, like a flight's three feathers.

The abyss doesn't divide us.
The abyss surrounds us.

The ending of the poem could seem grim. After all, she's suggesting that there is, in the end, no way to cheat time. But if that's the case — if we can't continually evade death — then this is at least something we all share. It's no surprise that her poem is dedicated to the memory of one of her friends.

Szymborska has now fallen into the very abyss that she wrote about with such understated passion. And yet it's hard not to think that, with all her delicate power, she somehow still walks on air above us.

David Orr's most recent book is called Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry.

(found here )

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Branka Babic

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RE: Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel-prize winning Polish poet, dies at 88
4/17/2012 5:58:27 AM



Negative

Negative

Against a grayisch sky

a grayer cloud
rimmed black by the sun.

On the left, that is, the right,

a white cherry branch with black blossoms.

Light shadows on your dark face.

You'd just taken a seat at the table
and put your hands, gone pray, upon it.

You look like a ghost

who's trying to summon up the living.

(And since I still number among them,

I should appear to him and tap:
good night, that is, good morning,
farewell, that is, hello.

And not grudge questions to any of his answers

concerning life,
that storm before the clam).

translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak
and Clare Cavanagh

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Branka Babic

713
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RE: Wislawa Szymborska, Nobel-prize winning Polish poet, dies at 88
4/17/2012 6:00:58 AM

Hunger Camp At Jaslo

Write it. Write. In ordinary ink
on ordinary paper: they were given no food,
they all died of hunger. "All. How many?
It's a big meadow. How much grass
for each one?" Write: I don't know.
History counts its skeletons in round numbers.
A thousand and one remains a thousand,
as though the one had never existed:
an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle,
an ABC never read,
air that laughs, cries, grows,
emptiness running down steps toward the garden,
nobody's place in the line.

We stand in the meadow where it became flesh,
and the meadow is silent as a false witness.
Sunny. Green. Nearby, a forest
with wood for chewing and water under the bark-
every day a full ration of the view
until you go blind. Overhead, a bird-
the shadow of its life-giving wings
brushed their lips. Their jaws opened.
Teeth clacked against teeth.
At night, the sickle moon shone in the sky
and reaped wheat for their bread.
Hands came floating from blackened icons,
empty cups in their fingers.
On a spit of barbed wire,
a man was turning.
They sang with their mouths full of earth.
"A lovely song of how war strikes straight
at the heart." Write: how silent.
"Yes."


Translated by Grazyna Drabik and Austin Fli

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