Stockholm
TRANSLATORS’ NOTE
This book includes, in English translation, virtually all of Wisława Szymborska’s poetic work to date, beginning with her third collection, Calling Out to Yeti, which she herself considers her actual debut, and ending with her most recent poems published thus far only in the literary press. Calling Out to Yeti has been presented here in an ample selection. From the other six volumes, eight poems unfortunately had to be omitted (three from Salt, two from Could Have, and three from A Large Number) because of specific unsurmountable problems of a technical nature involved in the translation of each.
Compared with our earlier publication, View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems by Wisława Szymborska (Harcourt, Inc., 1995), which consisted of 100 poems, this enlarged collection presents 64 more, most of them never translated into English before.
We take this opportunity to extend our belated thanks to Charles Simic, Helen Vendler, and Drenka Willen, without whose encouragement and help View with a Grain of Sand and, by the same token, this book might never have come into being. Special thanks go to our enthusiastically supportive families, Anna M., Anna J., and Michael, as well as Mike and Marty.
S. B. & C. C.
from
CALLING OUT TO YETI
1957
I’m Working on the World
I’m working on the world,
revised, improved edition,
featuring fun for fools,
blues for brooders,
combs for bald pates,
tricks for old dogs.
Here’s one chapter: The Speech
of Animals and Plants.
Each species comes, of course,
with its own dictionary.
Even a simple “Hi there,”
when traded with a fish,
makes both the fish and you
feel quite extraordinary.
The long-suspected meanings
of rustlings, chirps, and growls!
Soliloquies of forests!
The epic hoots of owls!
Those crafty hedgehogs drafting
aphorisms after dark,
while we blindly believe
they’re sleeping in the park!
Time (Chapter Two) retains
its sacred right to meddle
in each earthly affair.
Still, time’s unbounded power
that makes a mountain crumble,
moves seas, rotates a star,
won’t be enough to tear
lovers apart: they are
too naked, too embraced,
too much like timid sparrows.
Old age is, in my book,
the price that felons pay,
so don’t whine that it’s steep:
you’ll stay young if you’re good.
Suffering (Chapter Three)
doesn’t insult the body.
Death? It comes in your sleep,
exactly as it should.
When it comes, you’ll be dreaming
that you don’t need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.
Only a death like that. A rose
could prick you harder, I suppose;
you’d feel more terror at the sound
of petals falling to the ground.
Only a world like that. To die
just that much. And to live just so.
And all the rest is Bach’s fugue, played
for the time being
on a saw.
Classifieds
WHOEVER’S found out what location
compassion (heart’s imagination)
can be contacted at these days,
is herewith urged to name the place;
and sing about it in full voice,
and dance like crazy and rejoice
beneath the frail birch that appears
to be upon the verge of tears.
I TEACH silence
through intensive examination of:
the starry sky,
the Sinanthropus’ jaws,
a grasshopper’s hop,
an infant’s fingernails,
plankton,
a snowflake.
I RESTORE lost love.
Act now! Special offer!
You lie on last year’s grass
bathed in sunlight to the chin
while winds of summers past
caress your hair and seem
to lead you in a dance.
For further details, write: “Dream.”
WANTED: someone to mourn
the elderly who die
alone in old folks’ homes.
Applicants, don’t send forms
or birth certificates.
All papers will be torn,
no receipts will be issued
at this or later dates.
FOR PROMISES made by my spouse,
who’s tricked so many with his sweet
colors and fragrances and sounds—
dogs barking, guitars in the street—
into believing that they still
might conquer loneliness and fright,
I cannot be responsible.
Mr. Day’s widow, Mrs. Night.
Greeting the Supersonics
Faster than sound today,
faster than light tomorrow,
we’ll turn sound into the Tortoise
and light into the Hare.
Two venerable creatures
from the ancient parable,
a noble team, since ages past
competing fair and square.
You ran so many times
across this lowly earth;
now try another course,
across the lofty blue.
The track’s all yours. We won’t
get in your way: by then
we will have set off chasing
ourselves rather than you.
An Effort
Alack and woe, oh song: you’re mocking me;
try as I may, I’ll never be your red, red rose.
A rose is a rose is a rose. And you know it.
I worked to sprout leaves. I tried to take root.
I held my breath to speed things up, and waited
for the petals to enclose me.
Merciless song, you leave me with my lone,
nonconvertible, unmetamorphic body:
I’m one-time-only to the marrow of my bones.
Four A.M.
The hour between night and day.
The hour between toss and turn.
The hour of thirty-year-olds.
The hour swept clean for roosters’ crowing.
The hour when the earth takes back its warm embrace.
The hour of cool drafts from extinguished stars.
The hour of do-we-vanish-too-without-a-trace.
Empty hour.
Hollow. Vain.
Rock bottom of all the other hours.
No one feels fine at four a.m.
If ants feel fine at four a.m.,
we’re happy for the ants. And let five a.m. come
if we’ve got to go on living.
Still Life with a Balloon
No, at the time of death
I’d like to see lost objects
return instead.
Avalanches of gloves,
coats, suitcases, umbrellas—
come, and I’ll say at last:
What good’s all this?
Safety pins, two odd combs,
a paper rose, a knife,
some string—come, and I’ll say
at last: I haven’t missed you.
Please turn up, key, come out,
wherever you’ve been hiding,
in time for me to say:
You’ve gotten rusty, f
riend!
Downpours of affidavits,
permits and questionnaires,
rain down and I will say:
I see the sun behind you.
My watch, dropped in a river,
bob up and let me seize you—
then, face to face, I’ll say:
Your so-called time is up.
And lastly, toy balloon
once kidnapped by the wind—
come home, and I will say:
There are no children here.
Fly out the open window
and into the wide world;
let someone else shout “Look!”
and I will cry.
To My Friends
Well-versed in the expanses
that stretch from earth to stars,
we get lost in the space
from earth up to our skull.
Intergalactic reaches
divide sorrow from tears.
En route from false to true
you wither and grow dull.
We are amused by jets,
those crevices of silence
wedged between flight and sound:
“World record!” the world cheers.
But we’ve seen faster takeoffs:
their long-belated echo
still wrenches us from sleep
after so many years.
Outside, a storm of voices:
“We’re innocent,” they cry.
We rush to open windows,
lean out to catch their call.
But then the voices break off.
We watch the falling stars
just as after a salvo
plaster drops from the wall.
Funeral (I)
His skull, dug up from clay,
rests in a marble tomb;
sleep tight, medals, on pillows:
now it’s got lots of room,
that skull dug up from clay.
They read off index cards:
a) he has been/will be missed,
b) go on, band, play the march,
c) too bad he can’t see this.
They read off index cards.
Nation, be thankful now
for blessings you possess:
a being born just once
has two graves nonetheless.
Nation, be thankful now.
Parades were plentiful:
a thousand slide trombones,
police for crowd control,
bell-ringing for the bones.
Parades were plentiful.
Their eyes flicked heavenward
for omens from above:
a ray of light perhaps
or a bomb-carrying dove.
Their eyes flicked heavenward.
Between them and the people,
according to the plan,
the trees alone would sing
their silence on command.
Between them and the people.
Instead, bridges are drawn
above a gorge of stone,
its bed’s been smoothed for tanks,
echoes await a moan.
Instead, bridges are drawn.
Still full of blood and hopes
the people turn away,
not knowing that bell ropes,
like human hair, turn gray.
Still full of blood and hopes.
Brueghel’s Two Monkeys
This is what I see in my dreams about final exams:
two monkeys, chained to the floor, sit on the windowsill,
the sky behind them flutters,
the sea is taking its bath.
The exam is History of Mankind.
I stammer and hedge.
One monkey stares and listens with mocking disdain,
the other seems to be dreaming away—
but when it’s clear I don’t know what to say
he prompts me with a gentle
clinking of his chain.
Still
Across the country’s plains
sealed boxcars are carrying names:
how long will they travel, how far,
will they ever leave the boxcar—
don’t ask, I can’t say, I don’t know.
The name Nathan beats the wall with his fist,
the name Isaac sings a mad hymn,
the name Aaron is dying of thirst,
the name Sarah begs water for him.
Don’t jump from the boxcar, name David.
In these lands you’re a name to avoid,
you’re bound for defeat, you’re a sign
pointing out those who must be destroyed.
At least give your son a Slavic name:
he’ll need it. Here people count hairs
and examine the shape of your eyelids
to tell right from wrong, “ours” from “theirs.”
Don’t jump yet. Your son’s name will be Lech.
Don’t jump yet. The time’s still not right.
Don’t jump yet. The clattering wheels
are mocked by the echoes of night.
Clouds of people passed over this plain.
Vast clouds, but they held little rain—
just one tear, that’s a fact, just one tear.
A dark forest. The tracks disappear.
That’s-a-fact. The rail and the wheels.
That’s-a-fact. A forest, no fields.
That’s-a-fact. And their silence once more,
that’s-a-fact, drums on my silent door.
Atlantis
They were or they weren’t.
On an island or not.
An ocean or not an ocean
swallowed them up or it didn’t.
Was there anyone to love anyone?
Did anybody have someone to fight?
Everything happened or it didn’t