New Poems from Wisława Szymborska

Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska's presence continues to be felt. Several collections of her poems have been published posthumously and more of her life has come to light through three biographies—two new ones— Nic zwyczajnego: o Wisławie Szymborskiej by Michał Rusinek (Znak, Kraków: 2016) and Szymborska. Znaki Szczególne: biografia wewnętrzna by Joanna Gromek-Illg (Znak, Kraków: 2020) and an earlier one now revised and expanded—Anna Bikont and Joanna Szczęsna's Pamiątkowe rupiecie. Biografia Wisławy Szymborskiej (Agora, Warszawa: 2023). There has been a steady stream of her collected correspondence, including exchanges with fellow poets Ryszard Krynicki and Zbigniew Herbert, with poet and translator Stanislaw Barańczak, and the love of her life, writer Kornel Filipowicz.1 Her poems in English translation have been set to music on Kasia Klich's album, Stubbornly Absent. Already in her lifetime, interest in her as an essayist and reviewer of books, aficionado of kitsch, author of limericks and light verse, and collage artist—pursuits long treated as somewhat ancillary—had grown to the point where the capacious persona friends and intimates had long known became her public persona. Her centennial year, 2023, brought with it a steady stream of conferences, readings, exhibits, and even a park named for her in the heart of Kraków.The publication of her complete poetic works, Wiersze wszystkie (Znak, 2023) seals her status as a classic. Weighing in at 792 pages, it is an imposing but inviting book. “Complete” here encompasses even her manuscripts. The very idea these were recovered is nothing short of miraculous given a poet whose favorite piece of furniture was the trash can. Szymborska was stingy in what she chose to share. But in fact, Wiersze wszystkie [literally, “all poems,”] goes beyond the complete and the incomplete and, in a master stroke of cosmic coincidence, contains “Przerwana opowieść” [Interrupted tale], a pastiche by Witold Turdza, attributed to Szymborska whose “Rozpoczęta opowieść” [A tale begun] was published in her 1986 collection Ludzie na moście [People on the bridge]. So here we have a collection that transcends the poet's own poetic universe, with a new planet sent into orbit.Presented here is a selection of three poems that dot her poetic path, each written roughly three decades apart. “Children of War” is a plea to both recognize the destructive power of war and the need to bear its burdens collectively. “Utopia” is a playful rejection of embodied ideology, and finally the untitled poem “. . . . ” is an incomplete address to the universe itself.“Children of War” [Dzieci wojny] comes from what would have been Szymborska's first collection, Czarna piosenka [Black song]. The collection was prepared for publication in 1948, but political tides turned—it was taken to be too morbid—and it went unpublished in her lifetime. Containing poems written roughly between 1945 and 1948, in the wake of World War II, the collection is indeed stark. Many poems in Black Song confront the reality of war, a theme Szymborska returned to throughout her oeuvre (witness, among others, “Starvation Camp at Jasło,” “Dream,” “Still,” “Vietnam,” “The End and the Beginning,” “Reality Demands” and “Some People”). Black Song makes it arrestingly clear that Szymborska was a child of war, something that fundamentally shaped her sensibility. Rendering “Children of War” into English nearly 80 years after it was written brings home that it will take more work than we have so far done for “never again” to truly become never again. The effects of war on children on several continents from Syria to Yemen, from Afghanistan to Tigray, from Ukraine to Israel and Gaza are there for the world to see. The poem performs the need for collective response. In the beginning, the dialectic of the swayer and the swayed is like a force of nature, the crowd being rallied to the cause of war by a charismatic leader. The apprehension of the effects of war on children (the silver hair) has a somatic, humbling effect on the leader. He starts to bleed. He can no longer speak. By the end of this poem the metaphysical horror of war has been corporealized. It must be borne collectively.In poetry, and even more so in the translation of a poem, every word matters. To single out one, Polish has an onomatopoetic noun, szum [pronounced “shoom”], and its counterparts in other parts of speech [such as the verb szumieć], which have a broad semantic (and sonic) range: wind through a forest, waves against the beach, and a conch shell held to the ear, to mention a few. In English, we use different words for these various sounds. Hence, in the lines “A tłum szumiał w przypływie, / grzbiet jego pęczniał i pękał,” I render “szumiał” as “roared” to capture the sound of breaking waves, the basis for an extended metaphor: “And the crowd roared in on the tide, / its crest swelled and broke.” Choosing “roar” for “szum” helps to safeguard the semantic potential of the metaphor of the wave, allowing the speaker and the crowd to be seen as participants in a (seemingly) natural process, one that is arrested and exposed by the sight of the silver-haired children of war. For me, the process of translation consists of revisions and revisitations of the dialectic between the text that one reads and tries to understand and a new text that comes into being. Though not always successful, I try to be on the lookout for the trap of aestheticization, for sometimes the pursuit of the pretty tramples the logic of the poem. In my case it was the rendering of “tragarz ciosu” (sing.) as “bearer of blows” (pl.) in an early draft. Transposing this phrase into the plural and giving it a certain lilt obscured the fact that the sight of the silver-haired children was “a blow” to the speaker. This and the next alliteration in the last couplet, “bear / that which bows,” were an attempt to compensate for the loss of the alliterative “Głos gestem” in the second line of the final quatrain, but it nearly undermined the defining moment of the poem.The second poem, “Utopia,” first appearing in the literary journal, Literatura, in 1973, and later published as the penultimate poem in the collection Wielka Liczba [A large number, 1976], brings us Szymborska the ironist, a subversive. Alluding to the fictitious island first imagined by Thomas More (1478–1535) in his Utopia (published in Latin in 1516), Szymborska relies on playful satire to challenge the socialist utopia in a time and a country where this was already possible if done in the right way. Here the challenge was to maintain a running conceit of the poem, the dubbing of geographical features with names bearing both literal and figurative meaning. For maximum effect, Szymborska here tended to give end weight to the names themselves, reserving them for the ends of lines. Whereas the syntactical burden of English is largely borne by word order, Polish has the luxury of the flexibility of inflection—word endings—to allow words to be placed in whatever sequence will achieve the desired poetic effect. “Here grows the tree of Righteous Conjecture” follows the Polish word order whereas English would typically place the subject before the verb. The saving grace is the adverb of place: “here.” If “grows” had had a direct object, there would be more signs of obvious strain and contortion in the line. The poem is aphoristic and in aphorism end weight matters. The last word of a poem can be just as important as its title. The source text ends on “nie do pojęcia” [unfathomable], but in translation I felt the demands of aphorism pulling “life” to the end of the final line, thus framing the poem as a contrast between the reality of utopia and the ideal of (unfathomable) life.The welcomed bonus of the publication of Wiersze wzystkie [Complete poems] was the inclusion of Szymborska's late poems, including manuscripts published posthumously, among them the untitled poem translated here. Some of Szymborska's most distinctive poems have harbored her metaphysical—often astrophysical—musings, coupled with an abiding virtue of humility. With this poem we also see, as in such earlier poems as “The Silence of Plants” and “Conversation with a Rock,” Szymborska's attempts at a dialogue with nature. It is easy to conclude that the conversation is one-sided, but in this fragmentary and unfinished message to the universe, we see the possibility that the universe does speak to us—it shines—and the poet speaks to it (even writing to it), but the languages and modes of being are so incommensurable that, ironically enough, the real dialogue is with the reader. This poem was relatively simple to translate, and I felt Szymborska and the editor, the ever-judicious and spare poet Ryszard Krynicki, coming to my aid with bracketed question marks, almost a fig leaf over expletives Szymborska would never have set down in ink.For us to have so many more of her poems in this, Szymborska's 100th year, is what she might have called, “an ordinary miracule.”2

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