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It turns out that I already owned a Szymborska anthology, in a bilingual edition from 1981 with translations by Robert A. Maguire, that my father-in-law brought back from Poland. I am ashamed to say I never read it, put off by the cheap Soviet-era printing and a vague sense that the poet would probably be "important," but not enjoyable. Big mistake! As this new collection proves, Szymborska is thoroughly entertaining throughout, at times even hilarious. Her importance is confirmed by the award of the Nobel Prize in 1996, but it would have long been clear from her themes: love, art, history, life and death, the mystery of existence, and, though with a very subtle touch, the politics of a troubled nation in troubled times. Perhaps because both are Nobel laureates whose work has been celebrated in volumes spanning entire lifetimes, I was also reminded of THE GREAT ENIGMA by Tomas Tranströmer, though Szymborska is a less private figure, and her poems are more approachable.
Though I do not know a word of Polish, I am lost in admiration for translator Clare Cavanagh, working sometimes with Stanislaw Baranczak, sometimes alone. In an afterword, she notes that she has translated a handful of early poems, plus Szymborska's most recent collection, ENOUGH (2012), and each of the ten collections in between, beginning with CALLING OUT TO YETI from 1957. So this is essentially the complete collected works -- with the exception of some light verse and a few poems deemed (with the poet's agreement) to be untranslatable. I find myself wondering why this would be, and suspect that these are poems whose wordplay in Polish has no equivalent in English.Read more ›
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Everything’s mine but just on loan, nothing for memory to hold, though mine as long as I look.
These are the first lines of the short poem, “Travel Elegy --37 lines long—which is about memory, one of Szymborska’s recurrent themes. But it is a poet’s memory, which remembers details and the details reconstruct historic wholes: events, people and places now long gone. It wasn’t all she was but Szymborska was one of the preeminent poets of memory in our modern age. Some of her poems have grand historic dimension –“Starvation Camp Near Jaslo”, for instance. Some are closer to our everyday experience, but no less poignant for that –because memory is loss, that’s all it is, loss remembered but lost still.
There are the phrases! Szymborska coined some of the most apt and unforgettable phrases in modern poetry. She calls Rubens’s models “O fatty dishes of love!”, compares them “their skinny sisters” in medieval illustrations. (“Rubens’ Women”) The problem here, of course, is that I’m not reading Szymborska, I’m reading her translator, Clare Cavanagh. The above phrases probably translate literally, or almost so, from the original Polish, but it gets trickier in some of the rhymed poems, “Bodybuilders’ Contest”, for instance, with these two pairings:
The king of is he who preens and wrestles with sinews twisted into monstrous pretzels.
An audacious pairing –“wrestles” with “pretzels”—and the last two lines:
The mammoth fist he raises as he wins is tribute to the force of vitamins.
I admire it but in Polish, what were the rhyming words? Were they “wrestles” and “pretzels,” “wins” and “vitamins”?Read more ›
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Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012) was awarded the Nobel Laureate in Literature in 1996 for her contributions to poetry for her style and lyricism. She was the fourth Pole and the first Polish woman to earn this prestigious honor behind Henry Sienkiewicz, Czeslaw Milosz, and Wladyslaw Reymont.
This book is a collective anthology (1944-2011) of her poetry ranging from unpublished poetry collection from 1944 to 1948 at the end of World War II to the rise of communism. Her unpublished poem, "Once We Had The World Backwards and Forwards," displays her genius for observation.
Her poetry anthology also includes two poems from "Why We Live" in 1952; three poems from "Questions You Ask Yourself" in 1954; thirty six poems from "Calling Out to Yeti" in 1957; forty four poems from "Salt;" forty one poems from "No End of Fun" in 1967; thirty seven poems from "Could Have;" thirty six poems from "A Large Number;" thirty nine poems from "The People on the Bridge" in 1986; thirty five poems from "The End and The Beginning" in 1993; thirty one poems from "Moment;" twenty seven poems from "Colon;" twenty seven poems from "Here" in 2009; and fifteen poems in "Enough."
If I have one criticism of this lovely anthology, it is the lack of biography about Wislawa Szymborska. To a new reader, her biography would help understand the poetry. Wislawa was a fascinating poetess. In fact, Wislawa Szymborska was the Polish Poetess and Poland's national treasure and unofficial poet laureate. In understanding her background, readers would understand her life especially living during World War II, Communism, and life in Poland.Read more ›
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