Icy Cold Warm Ups POETIC VARIETY
Earl.demott@vbschools.com | English 9/GSWLA 9 | February 1, 2017
Wislawa Szymborska Born: 2 July 1923, Bnin (now Kórnik), Poland Died: 1 February 2012, Kraków, Poland Residence at the time of the award: Poland Prize motivation: "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality" Life Wisława Szymborska was born in Bnin (now part of Kórnik), close to the city of Poznań, Poland. She was the youngest in a family of two daughters. Szymborska began writing short stories and songs as a child, and made her poetic debut in 1945. She married Adam Wlodek and the pair lived in a writers' collective in Krakow. The couple divorced in 1954, but remained friends. Alongside her writing career Wisława Szymborska has also held various positions working for literary journals, such as Zycie Literackie and Pismo, and as a translator of older French poetry. Work Wisława Szymborska's poetry addressed existential questions. It is unique among its kind and does not easily lend itself to categorization. Wisława Szymborska strives to illuminate the deepest problems of human existence, surrounded by the transitoriness of the now and everyday life. She weaves in the machinery of eternity in a momentary experience of the here and now. Her poetry is characterized by a simplified, "personal" language that is unlike contemporary language, often with a little twist at the end, with a striking combination of spirituality, ingenuity, and empathy. To cite this page MLA style: "Wislawa Szymborska - Facts". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 5 Sep 2017. <http://www.nobelpri ze.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1996/szymborska-facts.html>
PAGE 1
Possibilities I prefer movies. I prefer cats. I prefer the oaks along the Warta. I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky. I prefer myself liking people to myself loving mankind. I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case. I prefer the color green. I prefer not to maintain that reason is to blame for everything. I prefer exceptions. I prefer to leave early. I prefer talking to doctors about something else. I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations. I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries that can be celebrated every day. I prefer moralists who promise me nothing. I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind. I prefer the earth in civvies. I prefer conquered to conquering countries. I prefer having some reservations. I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order. I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages. I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves. I prefer dogs with uncropped tails. I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark. I prefer desk drawers. I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here to many things I've also left unsaid. I prefer zeroes on the loose to those lined up behind a cipher. I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars. I prefer to knock on wood. I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
PAGE 2
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being.
By Wislawa Szymborska From "Nothing Twice", 1997 Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh Copyright Š Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
PAGE 3
The Three Oddest Words When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. When I pronounce the word Nothing, I make something no non-being can hold.
By Wislawa Szymborska Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh Copyright Š Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
PAGE 4
The Joy of Writing Why does this written doe bound through these written woods? For a drink of written water from a spring whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle? Why does she lift her head; does she hear something? Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth, she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips. Silence - this word also rustles across the page and parts the boughs that have sprouted from the word "woods." Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page, are letters up to no good, clutches of clauses so subordinate they'll never let her get away. Each drop of ink contains a fair supply of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights, prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment, surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns. They forget that what's here isn't life. Other laws, black on white, obtain. The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say, and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities, full of bullets stopped in mid-flight. Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so. Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall, not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop. Is there then a world where I rule absolutely on fate? A time I bind with chains of signs? An existence become endless at my bidding? The joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
PAGE 5
By Wislawa Szymborska From "No End of Fun", 1967 Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh Copyright © Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
PAGE 6
On Death, without Exaggeration It can't take a joke, find a star, make a bridge. It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming, building ships, or baking cakes. In our planning for tomorrow, it has the final word, which is always beside the point. It can't even get the things done that are part of its trade: dig a grave, make a coffin, clean up after itself. Preoccupied with killing, it does the job awkwardly, without system or skill. As though each of us were its first kill. Oh, it has its triumphs, but look at its countless defeats, missed blows, and repeat attempts! Sometimes it isn't strong enough to swat a fly from the air. Many are the caterpillars that have outcrawled it. All those bulbs, pods, tentacles, fins, tracheae, nuptial plumage, and winter fur show that it has fallen behind with its halfhearted work. Ill will won't help
PAGE 7
and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d'etat is so far not enough. Hearts beat inside eggs. Babies' skeletons grow. Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves and sometimes even tall trees fall away. Whoever claims that it's omnipotent is himself living proof that it's not. There's no life that couldn't be immortal if only for a moment. Death always arrives by that very moment too late. In vain it tugs at the knob of the invisible door. As far as you've come can't be undone.
By Wislawa Szymborska From "The People on the Bridge", 1986 Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh Copyright Š Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
PAGE 8
Utopia Island where all becomes clear. Solid ground beneath your feet. The only roads are those that offer access. Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs. The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here with branches disentangled since time immemorial. The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple, sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It. The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista: the Valley of Obviously. If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly. Echoes stir unsummoned and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds. On the right a cave where Meaning lies. On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction. Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface. Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley. Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things. For all its charms, the island is uninhabited, and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches turn without exception to the sea. As if all you can do here is leave and plunge, never to return, into the depths.
PAGE 9
Into unfathomable life.
By Wislawa Szymborska From "A large number", 1976 Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh Copyright Š Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
PAGE 10
Golden Anniversary They must have been different once, fire and water, miles apart, robbing and giving in desire, that assault on one another’s otherness. Embracing, they appropriated and expropriated each other for so long that only air was left within their arms, transparent as if after lightning. One day the answer came before the question. Another night they guessed their eyes’ expression by the type of silence in the dark. Gender fades, mysteries molder, distinctions meet in all-resemblance just as all colors coincide in white. Which of them is doubled and which missing? Which one is smiling with two smiles? Whose voice forms a two-part canon? When both heads nod, which one agrees? Whose gesture lifts the teaspoon to their lips? Who’s flayed the other one alive? Which one lives and which has died entangled in the lines of whose palm? They gazed into each other’s eyes and slowly twins emerged. Familiarity breeds the most perfect of mothers— it favors neither of the little darlings, it scarcely can recall which one is which. On this festive day, their golden anniversary, a dove, seen identically, perched on the windowsill.
PAGE 11
Hitler's First Photograph And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe? That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers little boy! Will he grow up to be an LL.D.? Or a tenor in Vienna's Opera House? Whose teensy hand is this, whose little ear and eye and nose? Whose tummy full of milk, we just don't know: printer's, doctor's, merchant's, priest's? Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander? To garden, to school, to an office, to a bride, maybe to the Burgermeister's daughter? Precious little angel, mommy's sunshine, honeybun, while he was being born a year ago, there was no dearth of signs on the earth and in the sky: spring sun, geraniums in windows, the organ-grinder's music in the yard, a lucky fortune wrapped in rosy paper, then just before the labor his mother's fateful dream: a dove seen in dream means joyful news, if it is caught, a long-awaited guest will come. Knock knock, who's there, it's Adolf's heartchen knocking. A little pacifier, diaper, rattle, bib, our bouncing boy, thank God and knock on wood, is well, looks just like his folks, like a kitten in a basket, like the tots in every other family album. Shush, let's not start crying, sugar, the camera will click from under that black hood. The Klinger Atelier, Grabenstrasse, Braunau, and Braunau is small but worthy town, honest businesses, obliging neighbors, smell of yeast dough, of gray soap. No one hears howling dogs, or fate's footsteps. A history teacher loosens his collar and yawns over homework.
PAGE 12
--- Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavenagh, translators from The People on the Bridge
PAGE 13
Nothing Twice Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.
Even if there is no one dumber, if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce, you can’t repeat the class in summer: this course is only offered once.
No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses.
One day, perhaps some idle tongue mentions your name by accident: I feel as if a rose were flung
PAGE 14
into the room, all hue and scent.
The next day, though you’re here with me, I can’t help looking at the clock: A rose? A rose? What could that be? Is it a flower or a rock?
Why do we treat the fleeting day with so much needless fear and sorrow? It’s in its nature not to stay: Today is always gone tomorrow.
With smiles and kisses, we prefer to seek accord beneath our star, although we’re different (we concur) just as two drops of water are.
PAGE 15
Love at First Sight They’re both convinced that a sudden passion joined them. Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still. Since they’d never met before, they’re sure that there’d been nothing between them. But what’s the word from the streets, staircases, hallways— perhaps they’ve passed by each other a million times? I want to ask them if they don’t remember— a moment face to face in some revolving door? perhaps a “sorry” muttered in a crowd? a curt “wrong number” caught in the receiver?— but I know the answer. No, they don’t remember. They’d be amazed to hear that Chance has been toying with them now for years. Not quite ready yet to become their Destiny, it pushed them close, drove them apart, it barred their path, stifling a laugh, and then leaped aside. There were signs and signals, even if they couldn’t read them yet. Perhaps three years ago or just last Tuesday
PAGE 16
a certain leaf fluttered from one shoulder to another? Something was dropped and then picked up. Who knows, maybe the ball that vanished into childhoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thicket? There were doorknobs and doorbells where one touch had covered another beforehand. Suitcases checked and standing side by side. One night, perhaps, the same dream, grown hazy by morning. Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
PAGE 17
HATRED See how efficient it still is, how it keeps itself in shape— our century’s hatred. How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles. How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.
It is not like other feelings. At once both older and younger. It gives birth itself to the reasons that give it life. When it sleeps, it’s never eternal rest. And sleeplessness won’t sap its strength; it feeds it. One religion or another— whatever gets it ready, in position. One fatherland or another— whatever helps it get a running start. Just also works well at the outset until hate gets its own momentum going. Hatred. Hatred. Its face twisted in a grimace of erotic ecstasy.
PAGE 18
Oh these other feelings, listless weaklings. Since when does brotherhood draw crowds? Has compassion ever finished first? Does doubt ever really rouse the rabble? Only hatred has just what it takes.
Gifted, diligent, hard-working. Need we mention all the songs it has composed? All the pages it has added to our history books? All the human carpets it has spread over countless city squares and football fields?
Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face it: it knows how to make beauty. The splendid fire-glow in midnight skies. Magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns. You canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t deny the inspiring pathos of ruins and a certain bawdy humor to be found in the sturdy column jutting from their midst.
PAGE 19
Hatred is a master of contrast—between explosions and dead quiet, red blood and white snow. Above all, it never tires of its leitmotif—the impeccable executioner towering over its soiled victim.
It’s always ready for new challenges. If it has to wait awhile, it will. They say it’s blind. Blind? It has a sniper’s keen sight and gazes unflinchingly at the future as only it can.
PAGE 20
Audio Version A reading of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska's poem “Hatred”. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. See More Information Connection Questions 1. What words does Wislawa Szymborska use to describe hatred? What factors does she consider most important in keeping hate alive? How are her views similar to those expressed in Readings 7 and 8? How do you account for differences? 2. People often speak of hatred as “blind”? Why does Szymborska describe it as having “a sniper’s keen sight”? Do you agree? 3. If you were to write a poem about hatred, what words would you use to describe it? How is it like other emotions? How is it different? Why does Szymborska see it as more powerful than other emotions? How does hatred get its power? 4. In the introduction to the guide that Facing History and Ourselves created for his film Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg wrote of the Holocaust, “Even today the world has not yet learned the lesson of those terrible years. There are far too many places where hate, intolerance, and genocide still exist. Thus Schindler’s List is no less a “Jewish story” or a “German story” than it is a human story. And its subject matter applies to every generation.” To what extent do his comments apply to the hatred that inspired the Kishinev Massacre? To what extent is he describing “our century’s hatred”?
PAGE 21
Analysis Common Heritage: The Poetry of Wislawa Szymborska Written by Czeslaw Milosz
Posted February 21, 2014
Type Essays
One Poetry that speaks to the enduring and irreversible coordinates of human fate—love, striving, fear of pain, hope, the fleeting nature of things, and death-leads us to believe that the poet is one of us, and shares in that fate. “We," the subject of such poetry, is determined neither by nation nor by class. But it would not be quite right to claim that its theme is therefore an eternal human nature, for as our consciousness changes, we humans try to confront ultimate things in new and different ways. In Wislawa Szymborska‘s poetry the “we” denotes all of us living on this planet now, joined by a common consciousness, a “post-consciousness," post-Copernican, post-Newtonian, post-Darwinian, post-twoWorld-Wars, post-crimes-and-inventions-of-the-twentiethcentury. It is a serious and bold enterprise to venture a diagnosis, that is, to try to say who we are, what we believe in, and what we think. Two Szymborska’s “I” is an ascetic “I," cleansed not only of the desire to confess, but of any individuating features, and yet it is linked to the “I” of all others who share in the human condition and thus deserve pity and compassion. Although one of her poems bears the title “In Praise of My Sister," the sister appears only as someone who “doesn’t write poetry.” The poem “Laughter” tells of a conversation with a girl, the poet herself from many years ago, but there is nothing PAGE 22
singular in this: it could be a meeting between any two people. Moreover the “he” in “Laughter” goes unnamed; we know nothing about him. Another poem “Clothing," which describes a visit to the doctor’s office, begins: “You undress, we undress, you undress”—the use of these three forms of the verb “undress” embodies the essence of Szymborska’s poetry: “the singular you," “the plural you," and “the collective we” merge into one. And to cite yet another example, doesn’t the poem “A Report from the Hospital” bring us news of what happens to each of “you," to all of “us”? Three The consciousness that Szymborska probes is “ours” because we hold it in common, the result of our schooling, the glossy magazines we’ve read, television, and visits to museums. Now, there may be a villager somewhere in southern India who would not recognize himself in these poems because the frequent references to our past—Homer, Troy, Rome, Lot’s wife, the Flood, Mary Stuart, and so forth—would be foreign to him. But in general, on a planet growing ever smaller, increasingly we dine on the same cultural dishes. Four Our cultural consciousness is shaped early on in life: We learn from grownups that the Sun does not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, that the Earth is but a speck within an unfathomable whirl of galaxies, that scientists seek to discover the origin of life on earth, that Homo sapiens resulted from a long evolutionary process, and that our closest relative is the monkey. The foundation of Szyrnborska’s worldview seems to be biology lessons learned at school—many of her poems find their origins in evolutionary theory itself. Yet she never makes the
PAGE 23
reductionist turn. On the contrary, to her, man is astonishing, precisely because even though his genealogy is so modest and he is bound up in a fragile body, he nonetheless stands up to nature and creates his own world of art, values, discoveries, and adventures. Man is astonishing because he has “a hand miraculously feathered by a fountain pen” (in “Thomas Mann”), because he summons up the courage to write—the “Revenge of a mortal hand” (in “The Joy of Writing”). The cult of the giant achievements of the human spirit, of the masterpieces of the past preserved in museums or passed on in writing, is counted among the basic ingredients of twentieth-century consciousness. Szymborska cultivates this, mindful that whatever remains is all the more precious for having been torn away from an ever watchful death. Particular to our century is a coming to grips with the fragility of our bodily existence, as treated in one of Szymborska’s most moving poems, “Torture”: Nothing has changed. The body is painful, because the soul is: a stranger to itself, evasive, at one moment sure, the next unsure of its existence, while the body is and is and is and has no place to go. Five Thus Polish poetry finally has worked its way to existential meditation, leaving behind pure lyric and embarking on discourse, which had always been thought prosaic. At the end of the nineteenth century Adam Asnyk (1838-1897) philosophized in verse in a way that today seems rather unconvincing. During the Polish Modernist era, Kazimierz
PAGE 24
Tetmajer (1865-1940) wrote a meditative poem, titled “End of the Century.” The poetry of the “Skamander” movement, which flourished in the interwar years, was not distinguished by its intellectual content. A great deal had to happen before the necessary tools could be forged to allow a poet like Szymborska to respond to the clearly perceived need for intelligent discourse on life’s cheerless dance. Varied shades of irony and humor became the modern and indispensable seasoning. Szymborska brings joy because she is so sharp, because she derives pleasure out of juggling the props of our common heritage (when she writes about Rubens’ women and the Baroque, for example), and because she has such a good sense of the comic. And she takes a conscious risk, performing her magic tricks along the fine line between poem and essay. She would not have been faithful to the true colors of her times had she preserved their brighter shades. To be frank, hers is a very grim poetry. Because her work is part of world literature, we can hold this diagnosis up to that of others in different languages. A comparison with the despairing vision of Samuel Beckett and Philip Larkin suggests itself. Yet, in contrast to them Szymborska offers a world where one can breathe. Thanks to a thorough relinquishing of subjectivity, “I” and its particular form of personal depression fall by the wayside. They are replaced by a playfulness that gives us, in spite of everything else, a feeling for the enormous diversity and splendor of human existence.
From the Foreward to Miracle Fair by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak. Copyright © 2001 by Czeslaw Milosz. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency.
PAGE 25
NOTES Find some of Szymborska’s poems in the original Polish, as well as in Swedish (the language of the Nobel Prize) on the following website: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1996/szy mborska-poetry.html For more detailed look at all sorts of literature that battles hated and divisive speech, see Facing History’s website. The poem (and follow up questions are from: https://www.facinghistory.org/resourcelibrary/hatred-poem ) Celebrating poetry through exposing readers to the masterful works, Flowers for Socrates offers a great cannon of literature to read. Find the poem featured in this ISSUU right here: https://flowersforsocrates.com/2014/04/19/a-poem-for-nationalpoetry-month-hatred-by-wislawa-szymborska/ Good reads offers a lot of good reads. Find our featured poem here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/25479-apr-19---hitler-s-firstphotograph---wislawa-szymborska For a multi-genre approach to finding out about an author, try this website: https://www.poets.org/search/node/szymborska For the award winning Nobel Prize recipients, the best place to go is to the Swedish website. Here’s the search results for Szymborska: https://www.nobelprize.org/search/?query=szymborska
PAGE 26
PAGE 27