The Most Pressing Questions – Revisiting Wisława Szymborska
I took my selected poems of Wisława Szymborska off the shelf recently and I keep returning to it. It’s titled View with a Grain of Sand, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. It’s where I started with her work, later picking up the collected works but this one is hit after hit. Highly recommended. There’s a great article here about where to start with her literature, which begins with the tale of her sneaking out for cigarettes with the King of Sweden during the Nobel award presentation.
The Century’s Decline
By Wisława Szymborska
Our twentieth century was going to improve on the others.
It will never prove it now,
now that its years are numbered,
its gait is shaky,
its breath is short.
Too many things have happened
that weren’t supposed to happen,
and what was supposed to come about
has not.
Happiness and spring, among other things,
were supposed to be getting closer.
Fear was expected to leave the mountains and the valleys.
Truth was supposed to hit home
before a lie.
A couple of problems weren’t going
to come up anymore:
hunger, for example,
and war, and so forth.
There was going to be respect
for helpless people’s helplessness,
trust, that kind of stuff.
Anyone who planned to enjoy the world
is now faced
with a hopeless task.
Stupidity isn’t funny.
Wisdom isn’t gay.
Hope
isn’t that young girl anymore,
et cetera, alas.
God was finally going to believe
in a man both good and strong,
but good and strong
are still two different men.
“How should we live?” someone asked me in a letter.
I had meant to ask him
the same question.
Again, and as ever,
as may be seen above,
the most pressing questions
are naïve ones.
Children of Our Age
by Wisława Szymborska
We are children of our age,
it's a political age.
All day long, all through the night,
all affairs--yours, ours, theirs--
are political affairs.
Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.
Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don't say speaks for itself.
So either way you're talking politics.
Even when you take to the woods,
you're taking political steps
on political grounds.
Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And though it troubles the digestion
it's a question, as always, of politics.
To acquire a political meaning
you don't even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,
or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months;
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?
Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.
The world is a lot these days, shock after shock. There’s another poem in View with a Grain of Sand where she says, “After every war / someone has to tidy up.” I always visualize a house party that’s not quite over yet, and the host of the party is going around cleaning up the glasses and mess ahead of everyone leaving. On angels, “If there are angels, / I doubt they read / our novels / concerning thwarted hopes.”
Her poem “Thank You Note” has always been there: “I owe so much / to those I don’t love. // The relief as I agree / that someone needs them more.” Those who don’t love us now will probably never love us. That’s fine.
The angels are too busy now to read our novels or to put the drinks glasses in the sink. I doubt they’re reading our social media posts. I guess this means we’re going to have to do stuff ourselves. Start cleaning up those things in our vicinity. Our poems won’t change the world, says Patrizia Cavalli, in a poem that changed my world. What will?
