Poetry Friday--Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska is a Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. We have her Poems New and Collected 1957-1997 [891.8 SZY], translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, on our shelves. We've had the book since 2002, and before I came across it this week, the last time it had been out was 2002! It's really too bad because skimming through her work, I find it fairly accessible--its themes universal.

This segment from the PBS NewsHour, can give you a bit of Szymborska's background. I particularly like this quote by the poet: "I borrow words weighed with pathos and then try hard to make them seem light." A Google image search brought up this page, which leads me to believe that with Szymborska, a laugh is never far away:



Here's one her poems that made me stop and think.

May 16, 1973

One of those many dates
that no longer ring a bell.

Where I was going that day,
what I was doing--I don't know.

Whom I met, what we talked about,
I can't recall.

If a crime had been committed nearby,
I wouldn't have had an alibi.

The sun flared and died
beyond my horizons.
The earth rotated
unnoted in my notebooks.

I'd rather think
that I temporarily died
than that I kept on living
and can't remember a thing.

I wasn't a ghost, after all.
I breathed, I ate,
I walked.
My steps were audible,
my fingers surely left
their prints on doorknobs.

Mirrors caught my reflection.
I wore something or other in such-and-such color.
Somebody must have seen me.

Maybe I found something that day
that had been lost.
Maybe I lost something that turned up later.

I was filled with feelings and sensations.
Now all that's like
a line of dots in parentheses.

Where was I hiding out,
where did I bury myself?
Not a bad trick
to vanish before my own eyes.

I shake my memory.
Maybe something in its branches
that has been asleep for years
will start up with a flutter.

No.
Clearly I'm asking too much.
Nothing less than one whole second.

Spend some time today with Tricia at the Miss Rumphius Effect where she is hosting the Poetry Friday Round-Up.