Table of Contents
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From UNPUBLISHED COLLECTION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
Identifi
cation
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
eISBN 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.
Leaving the Movie Theater
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.
Comic Love Poem
I wear beads around my neck.
Every day’s a day of joy
sustained by the touch
of unforeseen events.
I only know the rhythm
to a melody so soft
that if you ever heard it,
you’d have to hum along.
I exist not in myself,
I’m an element’s function.
A symbol in the air.
Or a circle on the water.
Each time your eyes open,
I leave faithfully behind
your earth, your fire.
Black Song
The long-drawn saxophonist, the saxophonist joker,
he’s got his system for the world, he does fine without words.
The future—who can guess it. The past—who’s got it right.
Just blink those thoughts away and play a black song.
They were dancing cheek to cheek. When someone dropped.
Head struck floor to the beat. They danced by him in time.
He didn’t see the knees above him. Pale eyelids dawned,
plucked from the packed crowd, the night’s strange colors.
Don’t make a scene. He’ll live. He must have drunk too much,
the blood by his temple must be lipstick. Nothing happened.
Just some guy on the floor. He fell himself, he’ll get himself up,
he made it through the war. They danced on in cramped sweetness,
revolving fans mixed cold and heat,
the saxophone howled like a dog to a pink lantern.
FROM
WHY WE LIVE
1952
In Trite Rhymes
A great joy: flower upon flower,
the branches stretch in pristine blue,
but there’s a greater: today’s Tuesday,
tomorrow will bring mail from you,
and still greater: the letter trembles,
strange reading it in spots of sun,
and still greater: just a week now,
now just four days, now it’s begun,
and still greater: I kneel on top
and make the suitcase lid shut tight,
and still greater: the train at seven,
just one ticket, thanks, that’s right,
and still greater: rushing windows,
with view on view on view on view,
and still greater: dark and darker,
by nighttime I will be with you,
and still greater: the door opens,
and still greater: past the door,
and still greater: flower on flower.
—Ohhh, who are all these roses for?
Circus Animals
The marching bears hit all their notes,
the lion jumps through flaming hoops,
chimps ride their bikes in yellow coats,
the whip cracks and the trumpet toots.
The whip cracks, animal eyes leap,
an elephant strides, pitcher on his head,
dogs minuet with cautious feet.
We humans should be better bred.
So this was the great circus trip:
applause cascaded, just as planned,
an arm made longer by a whip
cast its sharp shadow on the sand.
FROM
QUESTIONS YOU ASK YOURSELF
1954
Questions You Ask Yourself
What do a smile and
handshake hold?
Do your greetings never
keep you as far
apart as other people
sometimes are
when passing judgment
at first glance?
Do you open each human
fate like a book,
seeking feelings
not in fonts
or formats?
Are you sure you
decipher people completely?
You gave an evasive
word in answering,
a bright joke in place of openness—
how do you tally your losses?
Stunted friendships,
frozen worlds.
Do you know that friendship,
like love, requires teamwork?
Someone missed a step
in this demanding effort.
In your friends’ errors
do you bear no blame?
Someone complained, advised.
How many tears ran dry
before you lent a hand?
Jointly responsible
for the happiness of millennia,
don’t you slight
the single minute
of a tear, a wince?
Do you never overlook
another’s effort?
A glass stood on the table,
no one noticed
until it fell,
toppled by a thoughtless gesture.
Are people really so simple
as far as people go?
Lovers
In this quiet we can still hear
what they were singing yesterday
about the high road and the low road . . .
We hear—but we don’t believe it.
Our smile doesn’t mask our sorrow,