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?

My recent bouts with verse have been belabored, not in terms of complexity or allusion but because, so often, the stanzas were heavy. The weight of history and personal affectation gave each phrase a heft. Imagine how disoriented I was when encountering Szymborska. This collection nearly bursts with a wild-eyed wonder. There is a freshness to almost every observation. There is a youthful lightness which appears to almost float from one stanza to the next.

It shouldn't be assumed then that this collection is childish, not without first accepting a subtle weary edge. My favorite line is "My faith is strong, blind and without foundation." That disconnect creates an opening, a fissure of sighs where wonder goes to molt.

One of my favorite poets - she makes me smile.

Szymborska is my all time favorite poet and this is my favorite collection of her poems. Read it. It is amazing.

Much of what we lose in translation is the art of mystification. Some works circumvent with footnotes, end notes, even an odd completely separate 'guide' and more commonly hashed around Wiki pages for purposes of filling in the much voiding blank, but there's still the matter of whether you're a native speaker of the translated from, the translated to, or neither. Reading my one-trick-pony English translated from Polish, I can't latch on to a rhyme, a particular beat of metaphor, a singular refrain of vowelized and consonated communication for purposes of distraction. What I have is the translator's sense of rhyme, the translator's sense of metaphor, the translator's sense of communication, all boiling down to a crucible of meaning. True, this work has two for hopefully more effective tag team, and I would like to think that somewhere along the line Szymborska herself was consulted (this was published the year before she won the Nobel for Lit, but from what I've heard she was big enough in her home country for prestige's sake), but the fact of the matter is that I loved and loved until the moment I didn't. It's instances like those that make me wish I could comprehend the far more contextualized original.

This desire doesn't happen often, mind you. I've read far too many critiques that go along the lines of "Well the bigotry's unfortunate and the forcing the reader to empathize with sadistic pigs is a shame but you gotta admit the prose is a beaut" to hold language supreme over all else. It'd be different if linguists in my particular Anglo side of the world didn't feel the need to shit all over anything that wasn't "proper", inheriting their eugenics sentiment (the role of a biologist is to map out, not to pick and choose) from a long line of misogynistic, classist, and racist enforcement of The English that is The Proper and The Absolute, but there you go. What a relief, then, Szymborska's

I believe in the refusal to take part.
I believe in the ruined career.
I believe in the wasted years of work.
I believe in the secret taken to the grave.

, a parcel taken from her "Discovery" that I will cradle to my tomb. What a shame, then, that this inherent morality is so glazed over later on that it never resurfaces again. Political, perhaps, but the Nobel Prize is a very political thing, which language is used and read and translate is a very political thing, and morality, in these days where it's your money or your life, is you tell me.

The interesting thing about reading an anthology with the decades of successive works clearly labeled is how implicitly it draws temporal psychology and personal development into the mix. It makes the appeal of bibilo-completionism more understandable, for better than an outsider bio or a self-corrected autobio is the development of the creative work in response to the holism of stimuli. This collection of poems may span from 1957 to 1993, but all the poems of my preference are pre '76, the death knell of my uncritical enjoyment sounding somewhere in the decade after. What, I must wonder, gives? Cause the transition from chain-yourself-to-the-gates-of-a-nuclear-test-site mentality to the privileged fairyland of

Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.

is a dramatic one.

It's not only my radical aka "from the root" leanings being miffed, mind you. Poems previous to "Discovery" run along the lines of

[...]

There are not enough mouths to utter
all your fleeting names, O water.

I would have to name you in every tongue,
pronouncing all the vowels at once

while also keeping silent—for the sake of the lake
that still goes unnamed

and doesn't exist on this earth, just as the star
reflected in it is not in the sky.

[...]

and the delightful metafiction of "The Joy of Writing", a delicate and powerful probing that is never matched by the complacency of later works. The titular piece comes close, but there is far more a feeling of satisfied definition than the awe in all of its forms I am ever in search of when it comes to the written word. Disappointing, yes, but just as there is a diving line between what makes a favorite work and what denotes a favorite author, far more rare than the appealing author is the segment that happens to be of a particular work that happens to be of a particular work that happens to circumscribe a portion of my soul. It makes the evaluation of "worth my time" a difficult one, I'll tell you that much.

So. Did I like these? Yes. Indeed, I would recommend that parents read them to their children, as the interest in art, science, and the boundaries of existence and its end is the sort too strong to ever be "grown out of". In light of that, the whole of my less than enamored state may be encompassed by the fact that I am no longer a child. My refusal to take part may be appeased in future times of unknown compensation, but not now.

Amazing poems that illuminate life in the same manner as eastern philosophy. My favorite poet. She paints masterpieces with words.

Toegankelijke, onpretentieuze gedichten die vaak over kleine, simpele zaken lijken te gaan, maar dan toch mooi even de zin van het leven bij de lurven proberen te pakken - een museumbezoek, een datum waar je geen herinneringen meer aan hebt, de gruwelen van een CV maken, enz enz…

Szymborska's poetry is stark, sharp, ironic, and at times wryly humorous. A Polish poet, her work is thoughtful with a dark edge. At the top of my list of favorite poets.