or pity?
If I’d been born
in the wrong tribe,
with all roads closed before me?
Fate has been kind
to me thus far.
I might never have been given
the memory of happy moments.
My yen for comparison
might have been taken away.
I might have been myself minus amazement,
that is,
someone completely different.
The Silence of Plants
Our one-sided acquaintance
grows quite nicely.
I know what a leaf, petal, ear, cone, stalk is,
what April and December do to you.
Although my curiosity is not reciprocal,
I specially stoop over some of you,
and crane my neck at others.
I’ve got a list of names for you:
maple, burdock, hepatica,
mistletoe, heath, juniper, forget-me-not,
but you have none for me.
We’re traveling together.
But fellow passengers usually chat,
exchange remarks at least about the weather,
or about the stations rushing past.
We wouldn’t lack for topics: we’ve got a lot in common.
The same star keeps us in its reach.
We cast shadows based on the same laws.
We try to understand things, each in our own way,
and what we don’t know brings us closer too.
I’ll explain as best I can, just ask me:
what seeing with two eyes is like,
what my heart beats for,
and why my body isn’t rooted down.
But how to answer unasked questions,
while being furthermore a being so totally
a nobody to you.
Undergrowth, coppices, meadows, rushes—
everything I tell you is a monologue,
and it’s not you who listens.
Talking with you is essential and impossible.
Urgent in this hurried life
and postponed to never.
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
A dead beetle lies on the path through the field, [>]
A drop of water fell on my hand, [>]
A few clods of dirt, and his life will be forgotten, [>]
A new star has been discovered, [>]
Across the country’s plains, [>]
After every war, [>]
Against a grayish sky, [>]
Alack and woe, o song: you’re mocking me, [>]
An endless rain is just beginning, [>]
An odd planet, and those on it are odd, too, [>]
And who’s this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?, [>]
As a short subject before the main feature—, [>]
At midnight, in an empty, hushed art gallery, [>]
Beloved Brethren, [>]
Conceived on a mattress made of human hair, [>]
Dear individual soul, this is the Styx, [>]
Dear mermaids, it was bound to happen, [>]
Décolletage comes from decollo, [>]
Die—you can’t do that to a cat, [>]
Don’t take jesters into outer space, [>]
Everything’s mine but just on loan, [>]
Evicted from the Garden long before, [>]
Faster than sound today, [>]
Few of them made it to thirty, [>]
First, our love will die, alas, [>]
For me, the tragedy’s most important act is the sixth, [>]
Four billion people on this earth, [>]
From scalp to sole, all muscles in slow motion, [>]
From trapeze to, [>]
Happenstance reveals its tricks, [>]
He came home. Said nothing, [>]
He glanced, gave me extra charm, [>]
He made himself a glass violin, so he could see what music looks . . . , [>]
Hear the ballad “Murdered Woman, [>]
Her mad songs over, Ophelia darts out, [>]
Here are plates, but no appetite, [>]
Here comes Her Highness—well you know who I mean, [>]
Here I am, Cassandra, [>]
Here lies, old-fashioned as parentheses, [>]
His skull, dug up from clay, [>]
How many of those I knew, [>]
I am a tarsier and a tarsier’s son, [>]
I am too close for him to dream of me, [>]
I am who I am, [>]
I believe in the great discovery, [>]
I don’t reproach the spring, [>]
I knock at the stone’s front door, [>]
I lost a few goddesses while moving south to north, [>]
I owe so much, [>]
I prefer movies, [>]
I should have begun with this: the sky, [>]
I’d have to be really quick, [>]
I’ll bet you think the room was empty, [>]
If the gods’ favorites die young—, [>]
If we’d been allowed to choose, [>]
I’m a tranquilizer, [>]
I’m working on the world, [>]
In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two, [>]
In Heraclitus’s river, [>]
In my dreams, [>]
In Paris, on a day that stayed morning until dusk, [>]
In the old master’s landscape, [>]
In the poem’s opening words, [>]
In the snapshot of a crowd, [>]
In the town where the hero was born you may, [>]
Island where all becomes clear, [>]
It can’t take a joke, [>]
It could have happened, [>]
It has come to this: I’m sitting under a tree, [>]
Job, sorely tried in both flesh and possessions, curses man’s fate, [>]
Kyoto is fortunate, [>]
“La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn’t it terribly cold there?” she asked, [>]
Life While-You-Wait, [>]
Life, you’re beautiful (I say), [>]
Little girls—, [>]
Magic is dying out, although the heights, [>]
Maybe all this, [>]
Memory’s finally found what it was after, [>]
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity, [>]
My nonarrival in the city of N., [>]
My shadow is a fool whose feelings, [>]
My sister doesn’t write poems, [>]
No one in this family has ever died of love, [>]
Nothing can ever happen twice, [>]
Nothing has changed, [>]
Nothing’s a gift, it’s all on loan, [>]
“O Theotropia, my empress consort, [>]
Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!, [>]
On the hill where Troy once stood, [>]
One of those many dates, [>]
Our one-sided acquaintance, [>]
Our twentieth century was going to improve on the others, [>]
Out of a hundred people, [>]
Poets and writers, [>]
Poised beneath a twig-wigged tree, [>]
Reality demands, [>]
Returning memories?, [>]
See how efficient it still is, [>]
She must be a variety, [>]
So he’s got to have happiness, [>]
So much world all at once—how it rustles and bustles!, [>]
“so suddenly, who could have seen it coming,” [>]
So these are the Himalayas, [>]
So this is his mother, [>]
Some fishermen pulled a bottle from the deep. . . . [>]
Some people, [>]
Some people flee some other people, [>]
Subject King Alexander predicate cuts direct, [>]
Thank you, my heart, [>]
The admirable number pi, [>]
The bomb in the bar will explode at thirteen twenty, [>]
The buzzard never says it
is to blame, [>]
The commonplace miracle, [>]
The Great Mother has no face, [>]
The hour between night and day, [>]
The little girl I was—, [>]
The marble tells us in golden syllables, [>]
The Master hasn’t been among us long, [>]
The onion, now that’s something else, [>]
The professor has died three times now, [>]
The real world doesn’t take flight, [>]
The two of them were left so long alone, [>]
The world is never ready, [>]
The world would rather see hope than just hear, [>]
There’s nothing more debauched than thinking, [>]
There’s nothing on the walls, [>]
These days we just hold him, [>]
They made love in a hazel grove, [>]
They must have been different once, [>]
They say I looked back out of curiosity, [>]
They were or they weren’t, [>]
They’re both convinced, [>]
This adult male. This person on earth, [>]
This is what I see in my dreams about final exams, [>]
This isn’t Miss Duncan, the noted danseuse?, [>]
This spring the birds came back again too early, [>]
“Thou art certain, then, our ship hath touch’d upon, [>]
Titanettes, female fauna, [>]
To be a boxer, or not to be there, [>]
“Today he sings this way: tralala tra la, [>]
True love. Is it normal, [>]
Under what conditions do you dream of the dead?, [>]
Up the verdantest of hills, [>]
We are children of our age, [>]
We call it a grain of sand, [>]
We read the letters of the dead like helpless gods, [>]
We treat each other with exceeding courtesy, [>]
We used matches to draw lots: who would visit him, [>]
Well, my poor man, [>]
Well-versed in the expanses, [>]
Were extremely fortunate, [>]
What needs to be done?, [>]
“What time is it?” “Oh yes, I’m so happy, [>]
When I pronounce the word Future, [>]
WHOEVER’S found out what location, [>]
Why after all this one and not the rest?, [>]
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?, [>]
“Woman, what’s your name?” “I don’t know, [>]
Write it down. Write it. With ordinary ink, [>]
You can’t move an inch, my dear Marcus Emilius, [>]
You expected a hermit to live in the wilderness, [>]
You take off, we take off, they take off. [>]
You’re crying here, but there they’re dancing, [>]
About the Author
WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA (1923–2012) was born in Poland and worked as a poetry editor, translator and columnist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996.
Footnotes
* Changed from Shakespeare’s “perfect.” [Translators’ note]
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***
* Krzystof of Kamil Baczyński, an enormously gifted poet of the “war generation,” was killed as a Home Army fighter in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 at the age of twenty-three [Translators’ note]
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
The Poet and the World
Translators’ Note
CALLING OUT TO YETI
I’m Working on the World
Classifieds
Greeting the Supersonics
An Effort
Four A.M.
Still Life with a Balloon
To My Friends
Funeral (I)
Brueghel’s Two Monkeys
Still
Atlantis
Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition
Nothing Twice
Buffo
Commemoration
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
Water
Synopsis
In Heraclitus’s River
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 Palaeolithic Fertility Fetish
Cave
Motion
No End of Fun
COULD HAVE
Could Have
Falling from the Sky
Wrong Number
Theatre 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
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
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
NEW POEMS
The Three Oddest Words
Some People
A Contribution to Statistics
Negative
Clouds
Among the Multitudes
The Silence of Plants
Index of First Lines
About the Author
Footnotes