Celebrating the Poetry of Wislawa Szymborska

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.

From Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, written by Wislawa Szymborska and translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. Copyright © 1997 by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. Used by permission. All rights reserved 

Wislawa Szymborska: Transcending the Obvious with Thought 

Tell all the truth but tell it slant," that conspiratorial whisper from Emily Dickinson, packed with the idea of truth's plurality and the punch of the word slant, is a useful quotation with which to begin a discussion of the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska. However, I believe my initial question upon first reading this poet: "Is this a nice Polish woman or an extra-terrestrial?" is a good start too. Both the Dickinson quote and my initial question address a predominant, unmistakable feature of Szymborska's poems: the slanted angles and multiple points of view with which she approaches her subjects. The Dickinson quote, like many a Szymborska poem, is both straightforward and subversive. It recognizes subversion as most effective when performed quietly; messages are passed along covertly and fewer people get hurt, although that might not have been precisely what Dickinson had in mind. My initial question, like many a Szymborska poem, is essentially a joke based on juxtaposition, but that should recommend it, not dismiss it. Comedy works when it is based in reality: the comic mask doesn't wear a smile; it's the mask of tragedy with the corners of its mouth forced upward. To this collage of an introduction, and Ms. Szymborska is a collagist, let's allow Ms. Szymborska a moment to chime in with her own quotation: Montaigne's adage, "See how many ends this stick has!" which she calls "an unsurpassable model of the writer's craft and a constant encouragement to transcend the obvious with thought" (Krynski & Maguire 3).

* * *  

In poem after poem, Szymborska takes the plain white light of a supposition and refracts it into its rainbow parts, examines each color, each thread. In doing so she stages "little insurrections of sense and sanity, and moral reckoning" (Barber) and brings to light small amazements, odd possibilities, cold realities. By "repeatedly shifting perspective, Szymborska's poetry embraces the modernist position that all views are partial and restricted, all truths relative."   (Hirsch)

SOURCE:   http://www.mezzocammin.com/timeline/timeline.php?vol=timeline&iss=1900&cat=20&page=szymborskA

Stephanie Doty
Women’s Issues Matter

April 16, 2014
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