I am not a poet, but I am an impassioned lover of Wislawa Szymborska. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, but I discovered her thanks to a friend, who is a poet, and who had the good sense to give me for a birthday, back when 30 seemed old, a book of Szymborska’s poems. They stunned me.
This was a special time in my life. I’ve learned that now, but then I thought it was how life always is. Curiosity drove me everywhere. I inhaled shelves of books. I lived with Homer one weekend and Dante the next. I invited de Certeau over, but only for an occasional night, and I spent long winter weekends with Jabes. I met assigned texts in the card catalog, swooped them up, and then dated all their neighbors, none ever any the wiser. Literature, which connects so acutely with my mind, is blissfully indifferent to bodies. Books are always their confident, complete selves, giving and giving and giving with not but one thing requested in return. So much better, always, than people.
I was learning to read and to think and to analyze and to critique. This was a time they call “college,” and I miss it. I wrote words everywhere. Other people’s words, copied by hand on butcher paper, hung from my 12 foot ceilings. Copying taught me something different than reading. I copied pieces of Szymborska’s poems, and I slung them between pictures of Poland and other parts of Europe, a terrain whose trauma Szymborska masterful explored.
In those days, I spent a lot of time with the Holocaust. The Holocaust and Poland share a lot, alas, and I shared in the loss in Szymborska’s words. Her work, and to a certain extent her contemporaries, but especially Szymborska — it showed me that there can be imagination and suffering. I was contending with the whole “can there be art after Auschwitz” thing, and with the idea that you could educate for empathy, and that empathy would eliminate difference and suffering and genocide. None of these offerings seemed true to me.
Imagination and empathy do not end suffering. Suffering does not end art, which I think does its best work when it contends well with suffering. Szymborska did that, and more, and led off the dark path that ends, I’ve heard, in despair.
She has her moments. A bit too playful here, or too sentimental, perhaps, there. But I love her, for her work and for its place in my life, and I will defend her fiercely.
My friend Kris Kotarski, blessed with the gift that is native Polish and an ability to understand the simultaneity of whimsy and grieving in her work that I can only intuit from translation, shared the poem “The Turn of the Century” through Twitter. It’s one of my favorites, and I think it’s just the right one to leave off with. Kris found this poem here, though it’s from the collection “Miracle Fair,” which you can buy here:
“The Turn of the Twentieth Century”
It was supposed to be better than the rest, our twentieth century,
But it won’t have time to prove it.
Its years are numbered,
its step unsteady,
its breath short.
Already too much has happened
that was not supposed to happen.
What was to come
has yet to come.
Spring was to be on its way,
and happiness, among other things.
Fear was to leave the mountains and valleys.
The truth was supposed to finish before the lie.
Certain misfortunes
were never to happen again
such as war and hunger and so forth.
The defenselessness of the defenseless,
was going to be respected.
Same for trust and the like.
Whoever wanted to enjoy the world
faces an impossible task.
Stupidity is not funny.
Wisdom is not cheerful.
Hope
is no longer the same young girl
et cetera. Alas.
God was at last to believe in man:
good and strong,
But good and strong
are still two different people.
How to live–someone asked me in a letter,
someone I had wanted
to ask the very same thing.
Again and as always,
and as seen above
there are no questions more urgent
than the naive ones.
