Authors: Wislawa Szymborska
what I'd been looking for so long.
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I woke up.
Looked at my watch.
The dream took not quite two and a half minutes.
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Such are the tricks to which time resorts
ever since it started stumbling
Reciprocityon sleeping heads.
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There are catalogs of catalogs.
There are poems about poems.
There are plays about actors played by actors.
Letters due to letters.
Words used to clarify words.
Brains occupied with studying brains.
There are griefs as infectious as laughter.
Papers emerging from waste papers.
Seen glances.
Conditions conditioned by the conditional.
Large rivers with major contributions from small ones.
Forests grown over and above by forests.
Machines designed to make machines.
Dreams that wake us suddenly from dreams.
Health needed for regaining health.
Stairs leading as much up as down.
Glasses for finding glasses.
Inspiration born of expiration.
And even if only from time to time
hatred of hatred.
All in all,
ignorance of ignorance
To My Own Poemand hands employed to wash hands.
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Best case scenarioâ
you'll be, my poem, read attentively,
discussed, remembered.
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Worst comes to worst,
only read.
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A third optionâ
actually written,
but tossed into the trash a moment later.
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The fourth and final possibilityâ
you slip away unwritten,
Maphappily humming something to yourself.
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Flat as the table
it's placed on.
Nothing moves beneath it
and it seeks no outlet.
Aboveâmy human breath
creates no stirring air
and leaves its total surface
undisturbed.
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Its plains, valleys are always green,
uplands, mountains are yellow and brown,
while seas, oceans remain a kindly blue
beside the tattered shores.
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Everything here is small, near, accessible.
I can press volcanoes with my fingertip,
stroke the poles without thick mittens,
I can with a single glance
encompass every desert
with the river lying just beside it.
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A few trees stand for ancient forests,
you couldn't lose your way among them.
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In the east and west,
above and below the equatorâ
quiet like pins dropping,
and in every black pinprick
people keep on living.
Mass graves and sudden ruins
are out of the picture.
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Nations' borders are barely visible
as if they waveredâto be or not.
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I like maps, because they lie.
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they spread before me a world
Translator's Afterwordnot of this world.
Szymborska addresses a late verse to a poem that may itself be “tossed into the trash a moment later.” Most of her poems ended their careers in just this way, according to longtime friends: they never made it as far as the printed page. Szymborska herself never compiled her own Collected Poems. But the various Polish Selected Poems over the years suggest what such a volume might have looked like. She continued to winnow the work even after it had appeared in one collection or another. The purely comic worksâthe limericks, the “nursery rhymes” (
rymowanki
), the “eavesdroppings” (
posÅuchaÅce
), and so onâwere kept strictly segregated from the poems proper. We've followed her lead in this.
She also excluded most of her early poetry. Here too we've followed her lead. Marina Tsvetaeva speaks of “poets with a history and poets without a history.” Szymborska was a poet with a history in Tsvetaeva's sense. It took her three volumesâan unpublished postwar collection and two Socialist Realist volumes from the early fiftiesâto become the poet WisÅawa Szymborska, or so her own editing suggests. We have translated all the early poems that she continued to include in one Selected Poems after another. And we have translated virtually all the poems from her published collections beginning with
Calling Out to Yeti
(1957), with the exception of a very few poems that Szymborska herself conceded were untranslatable. “You're lucky,” she said about one of them, “you only wasted three weeks on it. It took the Dutch translator six months to give up.”
I began this project many years ago with my beloved friend, teacher, and mentor, the magnificent poet StanisÅaw BaraÅczak. I've had to finish it without him. In recent years his health has not permitted him to continue the collaboration that has been one of the great joys of my life. As I worked on alone, I asked myself continuously, “Would it be good enough for StanisÅaw?” I hope so.
You don't work so long on a poet without accruing a great manyâgenerally wonderfulâdebts. Our extraordinary editor, Drenka Willen, took a chance on a little-known poet with an unpronounceable name several years before the Nobel Prize made Szymborska famous. She did it because she loved the poems, which Charles Simic first gave her in our English incarnation. Drenka's critical acuity and her boundless sympathy for translators have buoyed us through the decades. How would I have made it through this volume without Drenka's intelligence, her patience, her perfect pitch? I'll never know. Several friends whom I met when I first met Szymborska herself, in Stockholm in 1996, have been invaluable guides through the years. MichaÅ Rusinek, Tadeusz Nyczek, Krystyna and Ryszard Krynickiâall have aided, abetted, and assisted me in more ways than I can name. I'm indebted, too, to Larry Cooper's meticulous editing in the final stages of this project.
I could name many others. But I'll conclude with just a few. The first is my best friend, our most ruthless critic, and our biggest fan, the dear and splendid Ania BaraÅczak. Then there are Mike and Martin Lopez. My son Martin was two when I met WisÅawa, and for many years I gave them the same presents. He outgrew them. She never did.
An old friend once inscribed his scholarly book on Szymborska's poetry as follows: “To WisÅawa, without whom this book could not have been written.” Here is my variation on his theme: “To WisÅawa, without whom this book would not exist. Thank you.”
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ÂâClare Cavanagh
Poems translated by Clare Cavanagh
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Once we had the world backwards and forwards . . . ; Leaving the Movie Theater; Comic Love Poem; Black Song; In Trite Rhymes; Circus Animals; Questions You Ask Yourself; Lovers; Key; Night; Hania; Flagrance; Moment of Silence; Rehabilitation; I hear trumpets play the tune . . . ; Midsummer Night's Dream; Dream; Poem in Honor; A Note; Pursuit; Nothingness unseamed itself for me too . . . ; The Old Turtle's Dream; Military Parade; Apple Tree; Consolation; The Old Professor; Perspective; The Poet's Nightmare; Distraction; 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
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Poems translated by Clare Cavanagh and StanisÅaw BaraÅczak
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Nothing Twice; Buffo; Commemoration; Classifieds; To My Friends; Funeral (I); Brueghel's Two Monkeys; Still; Greeting the Supersonics; Still Life with a Balloon; Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition; An Effort; Four
A.M.
; Atlantis; I'm Working on the World; 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; Water; Synopsis; In Heraclitus's River; Conversation with a Stone; 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; 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; 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; Under One Small Star; A Large Number; Thank-You Note; Psalm; Lot's Wife; Seen from Above; Experiment; Smiles; 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; In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself; Life While-You-Wait; On the Banks of the Styx; Utopia; Pi; 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; 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; 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; Absence; ABC; Highway Accident; The Day AfterâWithout Us; An Occurrence; The Courtesy of the Blind; Monologue of a Dog Ensnared in History; An Interview with Atropos; Labyrinth; Greek Statue; In Fact Every Poem; 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
ABC,
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Absence,
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A Byzantine Mosaic,
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A Contribution to Statistics,
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Across the country's plains,
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A dead beetle lies on the path through the field,
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A drop of water fell on my hand,
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Advertisement,
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A few clods of dirt, and his life will be forgotten,
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A few minor changes,
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A Few Words on the Soul,
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A Film from the Sixties,
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After every war,
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Against a grayish sky,
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A gale,
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Aging Opera Singer,
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A great joy: flower upon flower,
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Alack and woe, oh song: you're mocking me;,
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A Large Number,
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A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth,
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Alive,
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Allegro ma Non Troppo,
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A Medieval Miniature,
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