De JAROSLAW ANDERS,
en Los Angeles Times, en mayo de 1998:
Hunger of Memory
JAROSLAW ANDERS IS A
WRITER AND TRANSLATOR BORN IN POLAND. HE LIVES AND WORKS IN
WASHINGTON, D.C
Wislawa Szymborska, who
received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1996, must be one of the
most reticent or most self-discerning poets of today. Of the literary
career spanning more than half a century, she is willing to
acknowledge only some 200 of her poems collected in eight slender
volumes. This sparse body of work, however, displays unusual
diversity and polychromy. Szymborska can be simultaneously
highly sophisticated, pursuing involved philosophical questions in
what she herself calls “essay poems,” yet also be
accessible to the extent that some of her poems have been used as
lyrics of popular songs. She struggles for the utmost precision of
expression, yet engages in complicated linguistic games employing
rich polyphonies of her native tongue, unexpected rhymes, puns,
mixtures of “high” and “low” poetic styles. Most important,
she is a poet of modern experience, who often hides behind a mask of
an “innocent” still capable of asking “naive” questions about
the origins and nature of evil. One should be grateful to
Szymborska’s long-standing translators, Stanislaw Baranczak and
Clare Cavanagh, for giving us most of her compact, intriguing verse
in a superb English translation.
Born in 1923, Szymborska
belongs to the generation of Polish writers who, in young adulthood,
witnessed some of the worst atrocities of the century, which left a
lasting impression on their terse, restrained language and their
dark, disenchanted world view. It is not surprising, therefore, that
a subtle, intelligent, often ironic meditation on mortality seems to
be the main unifying theme of her poetry. Her most recent poems
include a number of moving valedictions addressed to deceased
friends. Yet the theme of perpetual, universal fading and
departing--not only of people, nations, living organisms but also
memories, images, shadows and reflections--was present in her poetry
from the very beginning. The very first poem in this volume, “I’m
Working on the World,” written when the poet was in her 30s,
contains a moving invocation to an ideal death:
When it comes you’ll be
dreaming
that you don’t need to
breathe;
that breathless silence
is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the
rhythm
to vanish like a spark.
One of the recurrent
motifs in Szymborska’s poetry is a kind of existential contest
between living, that is mortal, beings and inanimate matter, which
often serves as a reminder of life’s impermanence and
imperfection. In “Museum,” life is presented as a race--decided,
as we are made to believe, long before it had started--between the
human body and objects, in which “The crown has outlasted the
head. / The hand has lost out to the glove. / The right shoe has
defeated the foot.” Free of the inner division into mind and
matter, almost impervious to time and unable to experience pain,
objects evoke the admiration and envy of perplexed human beings. In
“Conversation With a Stone,” the poet knocks “at the stone’s
front door” demanding to be allowed to partake, at least for
a moment, in its tranquil, if inhuman, reality. “You shall not
enter. . . . You lack the sense of taking part,” answers the stone
contemptuously. “I don’t have a door.”
If inanimate objects
represent the ultimate economy of existence, living organisms
epitomize its magnificent but also extravagant and wasteful
generosity. In “Returning Birds,” birds have returned
too early from their winter migration (“Rejoice, O reason: instinct
can err, too”) and now are dying of cold:
. . . a death
that doesn’t suit their
well-wrought throats and splendid claws,
their honest cartilage
and conscientious webbing,
the heart’s sensible
sluice, the entrails’ maze,
the nave of ribs, the
vertebrae in stunning enfilades,
feathers deserving their
own wing in any crafts museum,
the Benedictine patience
of the beak.
The last word in the poem
belongs, again, to a stone that comments “in its own archaic,
simpleminded way” on life as “a chain of failed attempts.”
It is possible to read
such a passage as a general meditation on life’s frailty that seems
to mock and contradict its amazing complexity and beauty. Those
familiar with the poet’s native realm, however, will guess that it
is the memory of war and the Holocaust that engenders her imagery and
gives it an unmistakably moral resonance. There are moments when,
despite the author’s taciturn style, the experience of her wartime
generation speaks through her poems directly and with shattering
force. “Write it down. Write it. With ordinary ink / on ordinary
paper: they weren’t given food, / they all died of hunger.” Thus
begins a poem, “Starvation Camp Near Jaslo.” The Nazi
death camp in Jaslo, in southern Poland, was one of those places
where inmates were crowded in an empty, fenced space and left to die
a slow death without food and water. This is not an easy subject for
a poem, but Szymborska handles it masterfully by reversing the
pastoral image of nurturing nature:
Sunny. Green. A forest
close at hand,
with wood to chew on,
drops beneath the bark to drink--
a view served round the
clock,
until you go blind.
Above, a bird
whose shadow flicked its
nourishing wings
across their lips. Jaws
dropped,
teeth clattered.
This is less a “moral
indictment” than an expression of existential horror that an event
like this could somehow become a part of the human universe. The
horror is deepened by the anonymity of death--the erasure of memory
that inevitably follows an act of genocide. In the same poem,
Szymborska writes:
History rounds off
skeletons to zero.
A thousand and one is
still only a thousand.
That one seems never to
have existed:
a fictitious fetus, an
empty cradle,
a primer opened for no
one,
air that laughs, cries,
and grows,
stairs for a void
bounding out to the garden,
no one’s spot in the
ranks.
One of Szymborska’s
poems, as well as a book published in 1976, is entitled “A
Large Number,” and the notion of statistical
abstraction often figures in her poems as a kind of death’s double,
a shadow that enters the stage after the massacre to wipe out the
stains and to prepare the ground for new atrocities. It is,
therefore, a moral duty to remember everything that is singular--to
save and preserve the concrete, particular facts, moments,
sensations. And yet, this labor of memory is also increasingly
difficult and frustrating. The past and the present have become too
crowded and chaotic. When, in the poem “Census,” no less than
seven cities are uncovered at the site of mythical Troy, “Hexameters
burst” while multitudes unrecorded in verse clamor in vain for our
attention:
We three billion judges
have problems of our own,
our own inarticulate
rabble,
railroad stations,
bleachers, protests and processions,
vast numbers of remote
streets, floors, and walls.
We pass each other once
for all time in department stores
shopping for a new
pitcher.
Homer is working in the
census bureau.
No one knows what he does
in his spare time.
Cities without their own
epic, the author suggests, can easily share the fate of Atlantis:
“Hypothetical. Dubious. / Uncommemorated. / Never extracted from
air, / fire, water, or earth.” (“Atlantis”), or even that of
Hiroshima from the poem “Written in a Hotel,” which, unlike the
celebrated Kyoto, was considered undistinguished, one of countless
“inferior cities” of the world.
Many of Szymborska’s
poems are laments on the insufficiency of human perception that
leaves so much of the world unnoticed, undescribed, “beyond the
reach / of our presence.” In “A Large Number,” she speaks of
this anguish directly:
My choices are
rejections, since there is no other way,
but what I reject is more
numerous,
denser, more demanding
than before.
A little poem, a sigh, at
the cost of indescribable losses.
The thought that the
human mind may be the only mirror in which the universe can see its
own reflection, perhaps its only recourse to nonbeing, is in
Szymborska’s poetry a source of constant guilt, which sometimes
reaches semi-religious intensity:
My apologies to
everything that I can’t be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone
that I can’t be each woman and each man.
I know I won’t be
justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in
my own way.
-- “UNDER ONE SMALL
STAR”
The darkness of
Szymborska’s vision is undeniable. In her universe, man is alone,
unaided by any transcendental guidance, his perceptive faculties and
moral instincts evidently not up to the task with which they have
been burdened. Unable to hold in his mind the plurality and diversity
of things, he seems doomed to reduce them first to abstractions and
then to ashes. Still, it would be hard to classify this vision as
entirely pessimistic. The poet’s reluctance to become yet another
prophet of doom is dramatized in “Soliloquy for Cassandra,” in
which the eponymous doomsayer ponders the futility of her prophetic
powers. She loved the people of Troy, but loved them “From heights
beyond life. / From the future. Where it’s always empty / and
nothing is easier than seeing death.” Those who did not want to
hear the prophecy are dead,
But in them they bore a
moist hope,
a flame fuelled by its
own flickering.
They really knew what a
moment means,
oh any moment, any one at
all
before--
It turns out I was right.
Though some critics see
it as her weakness, Szymborska seems to be determined not to discount
the “moist hope” completely. In “Reality Demands,” she takes
us on a tour of the famous slaughter grounds of history--from Actium
and Chaeronea, through Kosovo Polje and Borodino, to Verdun and
Hiroshima--to show that they in fact became places like any
other--with gas stations, ice cream parlors, holiday resorts and
useful factories. “So much is always going on, / that it must be
going on all over,” she says. “Perhaps all fields are
battlefields, / those we remember / and those that are forgotten.”
Should we be horrified or relieved by that realization? “What moral
flows from this?” asks the poet. “Probably none. / Only the blood
flows, drying quickly, / and, as always, a few rivers, a few clouds.”
Thus life remains a contradiction and a puzzle. The universe does not
want to yield a direct answer about its “moral,” or purpose, but
it does not preclude a search for one, either:
I prefer keeping in mind
even the possibility
that existence has its
own reason for being.
-- “POSSIBILITIES”
This may not be much of a
consolation--says the Polish poet’s quiet, intelligent voice--but
it is the only one we can expect and perhaps the only one we need.
