Quote:

A LARGE NUMBER

Four billion people on this earth,

but my imagination is the way it's always been:

bad with large numbers.

It is still moved by particularity.

It flits about the darkness like a flashlight beam,

disclosing only random faces,

while the rest go blindly by,

unthought of, unpitied.

Not even a Dante could have stopped that.

So what do you do when you're not,

even with all the muses on your side?

Non omnis moriar—a premature worry.

Yet am I fully alive, and is that enough?

It never has been, and even less so now.

I select by rejecting, for there's no other way,

but what I reject, is more numerous,

more dense, more intrusive than ever.

At the cost of untold losses—a poem, a sigh.

I reply with a whisper to a thunderous calling.

How much I am silent about I can't say.

A mouse at the foot of mother mountain.

Life lasts as long as a few lines of claws in the sand.

My dreams—even they are not as populous as they should be.

There is more solitude in them than crowds or clamor.

Sometimes someone long dead will drop by for a bit.

A single hand turns a knob.

Annexes of echo overgrow the empty house.

I run from the threshold down into the quiet

valley seemingly no one's—an anachronism by now.

Where does all this space still in me come from—

that I don't know.

Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

In graduate school I took a course on 20th century Polish poets (Poland has produced some of the world’s best poetry in the past 100 years). It was a fantastic class. In it, I studied Wisława Szymborska, a woman whose poems were moving and full of delicate images that always cut hard. I love what little I know of her work because of it the way it pulls me toward emotion. It builds and builds and builds until I can’t help but fall with her to the other side. I amazed that her poems, which were not even written in my language can still move me so deeply.

When I heard about her death yesterday morning, I went out to the garage in search of the book of her poems that I had read and marked in the early 2000s. It was nowhere to be found. (The movers lost a box of books in our move and I’m still discovering what I’m missing.) After grieving the loss of her book with some dark chocolate, I went online to find her poems and try to remember. This was yesterday’s favorite discovery:

Under One Small Star

• 

by Wislawa Szymborska (translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak)

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.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don’t pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.
Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.
I know I won’t be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

A few words about people who have translated Wislawa Szymborska's poetry to English:

Stanislaw Baranczak is the Alfred Jurzykowski Professor of Polish Literature, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He has translated, among others, Wislawa Szymborska (with Clare Cavanagh) and Jan Kockanowski (with Seamus Heaney) into English and has published over forty volumes of English poetry in Polish translation. (2001)

Clare Cavanagh is an associate professor of Slavic languages at Northwestern University. She has translated, or co-translated with Stanislaw Baranczak, eight books of Polish poetry, most recently Adam Zagajewski’s Selected Poems and Wislawa Szymborska’s Selected Prose. Her own second book, Poetry and Power: Russia, Poland and the West, is forthcoming from Yale University Press, and she is currently writing a biography of Czeslaw Milosz. (2001)

A Few Words on the Soul

translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

BRUEGHEL'S TWO MONKEYS



This is what I see in my dreams about final exams:

two monkeys, chained to the floor, sit on the windowsill,
the sky behind them flutters,
the sea is taking its bath.

The exam is History of Mankind.
I stammer and hedge.

One monkey stares and listens with mocking disdain,
the other seems to be dreaming away --
but when it's clear I don't know what to say
he prompts me with a gentle
clinking of his chain.

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

and another translation:

Two Monkeys by Brueghel

I keep dreaming of my graduation exam:
in a window sit two chained monkeys,
beyond the window floats the sky,
and the sea splashes.
I am taking an exam on the history of mankind:
I stammer and flounder.
One monkey, eyes fixed upon me, listens ironically,
the other seems to be dozing
–and when silence follows a question,
he prompts me with a soft jingling of the chain.

Trans. Magnus Kryski

TRAVEL ELEGY

Everything's mine but just on loan,
nothing for the memory to hold,
though mine as long as I look.

Memories come to mind like excavated statues
that have misplaced their heads.

From the town of Samokov, only rain
and more rain.

Paris from Louvre to fingernail
grows web-eyed by the moment.

Boulevard Saint-Martin: some stairs
leading into a fadeout.

Only a bridge and a half
from Leningrad of the bridges.

Poor Uppsala, reduced to a splinter
of its mighty cathedral.

Sofia's hapless dancer,
a form without a face.

Then separately, his face without eyes;
separately again, eyes with no pupils,
and, finally, the pupils of a cat.

A Caucasian eagle soars
above a reproduction of a canyon,
the fool's gold of the sun,
the phony stones.

Everything's mine but just on loan,
nothing for the memory to hold,
though mine as long as I look.

Inexhaustible, unembraceable,
but particular to the smallest fiber,
grain of sand, drop of water -
landscapes.

I won't retain one blade of grass
as it's truly seen.

Salutation and farewell
in a single glance.

For surplus and absence alike,
a single motion of the neck.