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We all
have glaring gaps in our reading, right? Several years ago, I set myself the
task of completing all of Dickens novels, for that very reason. But Ive
never read any Trollope. Nor Austen. Poetry? Ive read all of Ashbery and
OHara, but very little of that other celebrated New York poet, Kenneth Koch.
Why? There seems to be no rhyme or reason to these omissions. I mention this
only by way of introducing the fact... Wislawa Szymborska is the best poet Ive
never read.
Ive been fully immersed in this Collected and Last Poems for a month
or so, and havent really wanted to climb out of the water. I just didnt want
to put the book
down. Its a big, weighty American hardback, with a lovely dust jacket, fine
paper and beautiful, clear typesetting. An object I shall return to again,
with pleasure. It gathers together all of Szymborskas serious poems from
1944 to her last poems of 2011 before her death in 2012 (apparently she wrote
quite a few rhymes and comic works, 'eavesdroppings', that were kept separate
from the poetry proper). And the translations are limpid and exquisite. No
wonder she was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1996. Shame on me, neglectful reader!
Anyway, that has been righted now and, if you havent read Szymborskas work
before, Id urge you to do so at some point, say with this authoritative and
august book.
Born in Poland in 1923, Szymborska belongs to that Eastern European tradition
which celebrates the idea that poets and novelists might also be philosophers
too, even if their work takes the form of rhyme and fable. Her oeuvre
clarifies (to me at least) a little more about what it means to be alive,
about interconnectedness across time and place, and that poetry has its own
special ways of engaging with the world. As she wrote in in 1944, Im coming
back to you, the real world, / crowded, dark, and full of fate. Her poems
have that uncanny knack of being able to fit all of the world in and then
revealing to us that it is somehow more expansive than the sum of those
parts, as in: So much world all at once - how it rustles and bustles! with
its echoes of Louis MacNeices Snow (World is crazier and more of it than we think,/Incorrigibly
plural); or
Everythings mine, but
just on loan,
nothing for the memory to
hold,
though mine as long as I
look.
(Travel Elegy)
There are recurring obsessions with time, place, identity and the accidents
of birth:
Nothing can ever happen
twice.
In consequence, the sorry
fact is
that we arrive here
improvised
and leave without the
chance to practice
(Nothing Twice)
as well as a constant questioning of self-hood: So how do you / suddenly
lose the habit / of yourself? [...] // We know ourselves only / as far as weve
been tested. (Moment of Silence). If this human questioning recurs in a
quotidian setting in many of the poems, it is also frequently set against
vast universals:
Well versed in the
expanses
that stretch from earth
to stars,
we get lost in eth space
from earth up to our
skull.
(To My Friends)
Szymborska is also a fan of the metaphysical conceit; her poems often set up
a central device or motif that she then explores in multiple ways to arrive
at some existential conclusion. In the magnificent poem Water, for example,
the poet takes the simple symbolic element and explores its multiple
emanations in culture, history and science. Science recurs in other poems
too, such as The Railroad Station, which is almost a quantum poem, while in
Still Life With Balloon the poet sets out the existential conceit in the
first stanza:
Returning memories?
No, at the time of death
Id like to see lost
objects
return instead
going on to explore her metaphysics through a thoroughly grounded list of
objects - gloves, suitcases, umbrellas - before alighting on the balloon of
the title:
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.
Here the symbolic metaphor is carried with such easeful gravitas - the
language of the translation pitch-perfect in its simplicity, as it deals with
questions of dying. Theres a great ease and variety to Szymborskas forms
too: simple rhymes, quatrains, free verse poems, prose poems, parables, and a
wonderful wry humour:
So hes got to have
happiness,
hes got to have truth,
too,
hes got to have eternity -
did you ever!
(No End of Fun')
There is also, throughout, a controlled use of rhetorical shapes, repetitions
and other framing devices. Unsurprisingly, this leads to a recurring
fascination with writing itself, and numerous poems about the writing of
poetry and the function of poetry in an individuals life. In The joy of
Writing, meaning is figured as a doe, a female deer: Perched on four slim
legs borrowed from the truth, / she pricks up her ears beneath my
fingertips.
History, medicine, nature, science, evolution, art, literature, philosophy -
throughout her oeuvre, Szymborska turned her attention to major topics and
delivered philosophic insight on them in simply beguiling language. Her
insights on our existential absurdities and conundrums are fascinating and,
sometimes, devastating, as in her poem about middle-aged depression Going
Home. Repeatedly she asks, why am I this person, and not that one? Or not
that animal? What does this one time appearance on Earth afford us and
mean? Is this the definitive, actual world? These questions come through
time and time again in poems about people and higher animals, but also
through investigations of creatures living in the microscopic world, microbes
and foraminifera; or the lowlier animals such as insects and holothurians
(sea cucumbers) which, when threatened cut themselves in two. Characteristically,
Szymborska finds a human writing metaphor in this:
We, too, can divide
ourselves, its true.
But only into flesh and a
broken whisper.
Into flesh and poetry.
There are simply too many outstanding poems in this Collected works to cover in a review -
I have starred some 40plus poems for revisiting - and my partner must have
tired of hearing me say 'Wow!' every five pages or so, then putting the book
down to stare into space, pondering. Szymborskas is a serious poetry of our
human condition - but a poetry that is rendered here in delightfully light
touch language, pared back from pretension and obscurantism. Like her toy
balloon, the ideas are allowed to float gracefully and simply across our
experience. And for that, we also have to praise the translators.
©
Andy Brown 2015
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