Map

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

From UNPUBLISHED COLLECTION

Once we had the world backwards and forwards . . .

Leaving the Movie Theater

Comic Love Poem

Black Song

From WHY WE LIVE

In Trite Rhymes

Circus Animals

From QUESTIONS YOU ASK YOURSELF

Questions You Ask Yourself

Lovers

Key

CALLING OUT TO YETI

Night

Hania

Nothing Twice

Flagrance

Buffo

Commemoration

Classifieds

Moment of Silence

Rehabilitation

To My Friends

Funeral (I)

I hear trumpets play the tune . . .

Brueghel's Two Monkeys

Still

Greeting the Supersonics

Still Life with a Balloon

Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition

An Effort

Four A.M.

Midsummer Night's Dream

Atlantis

I'm Working on the World

SALT

The Monkey

Lesson

Museum

A Moment in Troy

Shadow

The Rest

Clochard

Vocabulary

Travel Elegy

Without a Title

An Unexpected Meeting

Golden Anniversary

Starvation Camp Near Jaslo

Parable

Ballad

Over Wine

Rubens' Women

Coloratura

Bodybuilders' Contest

Poetry Reading

Epitaph

Prologue to a Comedy

Likeness

I am too close . . .

The Tower of Babel

Dream

Water

Synopsis

In Heraclitus's River

Poem in Honor

A Note

Conversation with a Stone

NO END OF FUN

The Joy of Writing

Memory Finally

Landscape

Family Album

Laughter

The Railroad Station

Alive

Born

Census

Soliloquy for Cassandra

A Byzantine Mosaic

Beheading

Pietà

Innocence

Vietnam

Written in a Hotel

A Film from the Sixties

Report from the Hospital

Returning Birds

Thomas Mann

Tarsier

To My Heart, on Sunday

The Acrobat

A Paleolithic Fertility Fetish

Cave

Motion

No End of Fun

COULD HAVE

Could Have

Falling from the Sky

Wrong Number

Theater Impressions

Voices

The Letters of the Dead

Old Folks' Home

Advertisement

Lazarus Takes a Walk

Snapshot of a Crowd

Going Home

Discovery

Dinosaur Skeleton

Pursuit

A Speech at the Lost-and-Found

Astonishment

Birthday

Interview with a Child

Allegro ma Non Troppo

Autotomy

Frozen Motion

Certainty

The Classic

In Praise of Dreams

True Love

Nothingness unseamed itself for me too . . .

Under One Small Star

A LARGE NUMBER

A Large Number

Thank-You Note

Psalm

Lot's Wife

Seen from Above

The Old Turtle's Dream

Experiment

Smiles

Military Parade

The Terrorist, He's Watching

A Medieval Miniature

Aging Opera Singer

In Praise of My Sister

Hermitage

Portrait of a Woman

Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem

Warning

The Onion

The Suicide's Room

Apple Tree

In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself

Life While-You-Wait

On the Banks of the Styx

Utopia

Pi

THE PEOPLE ON THE BRIDGE

Stage Fright

Surplus

Archeology

View with a Grain of Sand

Clothes

On Death, Without Exaggeration

The Great Man's House

In Broad Daylight

Our Ancestors' Short Lives

Hitler's First Photograph

The Century's Decline

Children of Our Age

Tortures

Plotting with the Dead

Writing a Résumé

Funeral (II)

An Opinion on the Question of Pornography

A Tale Begun

Into the Ark

Possibilities

Miracle Fair

The People on the Bridge

THE END AND THE BEGINNING

Sky

No Title Required

Some People Like Poetry

The End and the Beginning

Hatred

Reality Demands

The Real World

Elegiac Calculation

Cat in an Empty Apartment

Parting with a View

Séance

Love at First Sight

May 16, 1973

Maybe All This

Slapstick

Nothing's a Gift

One Version of Events

We're Extremely Fortunate

MOMENT

Moment

Among the Multitudes

Clouds

Negative

Receiver

The Three Oddest Words

The Silence of Plants

Plato, or Why

A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth

A Memory

Puddle

First Love

A Few Words on the Soul

Early Hour

In the Park

A Contribution to Statistics

Some People

Photograph from September 11

Return Baggage

The Ball

A Note

List

Everything

COLON

Absence

ABC

Highway Accident

The Day After—Without Us

An Occurrence

Consolation

The Old Professor

Perspective

The Courtesy of the Blind

Monologue of a Dog Ensnared in History

An Interview with Atropos

The Poet's Nightmare

Labyrinth

Distraction

Greek Statue

In Fact Every Poem

HERE

Here

Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets

An Idea

Teenager

Hard Life with Memory

Microcosmos

Foraminifera

Before a Journey

Divorce

Assassins

Example

Identification

Nonreading

Portrait from Memory

Dreams

In a Mail Coach

Ella in Heaven

Vermeer

Metaphysics

ENOUGH

Someone I've Been Watching for a While

Confessions of a Reading Machine

There Are Those Who

Chains

At the Airport

Compulsion

Everyone Sometime

Hand

Mirror

While Sleeping

Reciprocity

To My Own Poem

Map

Translator's Afterword

Translation Credits

Index of Titles and First Lines

Read More from Wisława Szymborska

About the Author

Footnotes

All works by Wisława Szymborska

copyright © The Wisława Szymborska Foundation

 

www.szymborska.org.pl

 

English translation © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

 

All rights reserved

 

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

 

www.hmhco.com

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN
978-0-544-12602-2

 

e
ISBN
978-0-544-12777-7
v1.0415

 

All translations in this edition were made by Clare Cavanagh or Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak

 

 

 

 

FROM

 

UNPUBLISHED COLLECTION

 

1944–1948

* * *

 

 

 

Once we had the world backwards and forwards:

—it was so small it fit in two clasped hands,

so simple that a smile did to describe it,

so common, like old truths echoing in prayers.

 

History didn't greet us with triumphal fanfares:

—it flung dirty sand into our eyes.

Ahead of us lay long roads leading nowhere,

poisoned wells and bitter bread.

 

Our wartime loot is knowledge of the world,

—it is so large it fits in two clasped hands,

so hard that a smile does to describe it,

so strange, like old truths echoing in prayers.

 

 

Dreams flickered on white canvas.

The moon's husk glimmered for two hours.

There was the melancholy song of love,

a happy journey's end and flowers.

 

After the fairy tale, the world is hazy, blue.

The roles and faces here are unrehearsed.

The soldier sings the partisan's laments.

The young girl plays her songs of mourning too.

 

I'm coming back to you, the real world,

crowded, dark, and full of fate—

you, one-armed boy beneath the gate,

you, empty eyes of a young girl.

 

 

I wear beads around my neck.

Every day's a day of joy

sustained by the touch

of unforeseen events.