todavía

Por el bosque va un transporte de gritos.

Wislawa Szymborska

Aquí está completo.

la noche de Isaac

Atlántida

Exitieron o no existieron.

En una isla o no en una isla.
Un océano o no un océano
se los tragó o no.

¿Hubo quien amara a quién?
¿Hubo quien con quién luchara?
Sucedió todo o nada
allí o no allí.

Había siete ciudades
¿Seguro?
Querían estar para siempre.
¿Y las pruebas?

No inventaron la pólvora, no.
Inventaron la pólvora, sí.

Hipotéticos. Dudosos.
No conmemorados.
No extraídos del aire,
del fuego, del agua, de la tierra.

No encerrados en la piedra
Ni en la gota de lluvia.
Incapaces de servir
en serio como moraleja.

Cayó un meteoro.
No era un meteoro.
Un volcán hizo erupción.
No era un volcán.
Alguien gritó algo.
Nadie nada.

En esta más/menos Atlántida.

Atlantis

They were or they weren't.
On an island or not.
An ocean or not an ocean
swallowed them up or it didn't.

Was there anyone to love anyone?
Did anybody have someone to fight?
Everything happened or it didn't
there or someplace else.

Seven cities stood there.
So we think.
They were meant to stand forever.
We suppose.

They weren't up to much, no.
They were up to something, yes.

Hypothetical. Dubious. 
Uncommemorated.
Never extracted from air,
fire,water, or earth.

Not contained within a stone
or drop of rain.

Not suitable for straight-faced use
as a story's moral.

A meteor fell. 
Not a meteor.
A volcano exploded.
Not a volcano.
Someone summoned something. 
Nothing was called.

On this more-or-less Atlantis.

trs. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

Noche

“Y dijo Dios: ‘Toma ahora a tu hijo, el único que tienes, al que tanto amas, Isaac, y ve a la región de Moriah, y allí lo ofrecerás en holocausto en un monte que yo te indicaré”

¿Pues qué habrá hecho Isaac?

dígame, padre catequista.
¿Quizá rompió con su pelota el vidrio del vecino?
¿Quizá rasgó sus pantalones nuevos
al cruzar la cerca?
¿Tal vez robaba lápices?
¿Espantaba gallinas?
¿Soplaba en los exámenes?

Que los adultos
duerman su estúpido sueño,
yo esta noche
debo pasarla en vela.
Esta noche calla,
pero calla contra mí
y es negra
como el fervor de Abraham.

¿Dónde me ocultaré
cuando el bíblico ojo divino
se pose sobre mí
como se posó sobre Isaac?
Dios puede revivir, si quiere,
historias antiguas.
Por eso me oculto entre las mantas,
congelada de miedo.

Al poco tiempo, algo
blanquea tras la ventana,
un pájaro o el viento
comienza a susurrar por mi cuarto.
Pero no hay pájaros
con alas tan grandes,
ni viento
con un camisón tan largo.

Dios finge

que entró volando sin querer,
que no, que para nada es aquí,
y luego se lleva a papá hasta la cocina
para ponerse de acuerdo;
desde una gran trompa le sopla en el oído.
Y cuando mañana, apenas amanezca,
papá me lleve consigo,
iré, iré
negra de odio.

En niguna bondad, en nigún amor
voy a creer, más indefensa
que las hoja de noviembre.
Ni a confiar 

en nada vale la pena confiar.
Ni voy a amar,
a llevar el corazón vivo en el pecho.
Cuando suceda lo que ha de suceder,
cuando suceda,
me latirá un hongo seco
en lugar de corazón.

Y Dios espera,
y desde un balcón de nubes mira
si la hoguera prende
bien, parejo
pero va a ver
cómo se muere de despecho,
pues así voy a morir,
¡no dejaré que me salve!

Desde esa nocche

de un insomnio terrible,
desde esa noche,
de espantosa soledad,
comenzó Dios,
poco a poco,
día a día,
la mudanza
de lo literal
a lo figurado.

Night

And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.

 

So what did Isaac do?

I ask the priest at catechism.

Break the neighbor's window with his ball?

Tear his new pants

on the fence post?

Did he steal pencils?

Scare the chickens?

Cheat on tests?

Leave the grownups

to their stupid sleep,

I've got to keep

watch until dawn.

The night is mute

but mute out of malice

and black

as the zeal of Abraham.

Where will I hide,

when God's biblical eye

lands on me

as it landed on Isaac?

Ancient history.

God can resurrect you if he wants.

I pull the blanket over my head

in a chill of fear.

Something white

will flit along the window,

then rustle through the room,

like a bird or the wind.

But no bird has

such enormous wings,

no wind wears

such a long gown.

The Lord God will pretend

he flew in by accident,

there must be some mistake,

then he'll take my father

to the kitchen and hatch plots,

blow a giant trumpet in his ear.

And at the crack of dawn

my father will drag me along,

I'll go, I'll go,

dark with hatred.

More defenseless

than November leaves,

I won't believe in goodness

or love.

No trust,

nothing can be trusted.

No caring,

no more live heart in my chest.

When it happens, as it has to happen,

when it happens,

a dried mushroom will be beating,

not a heart.

The Lord God waits,

from a balcony of clouds he checks,

does the stake light,

is it nice and even,

and he sees

how to die out of spite,

since I'll die,

refusing to be saved!

From that night

much worse than any bad dream,

from that night

much worse than loneliness,

the Lord God began

inch by inch

day by day

to move

from literalness

to metaphor.

Szymborska Wislawa

viajero a omega

Nacido

Así que esta es su madre.
Esta pequeña mujer.
Causante de ojos grises.

Barca en la que años atrás
llegó a la orilla.

De ella se extrajo
al mundo,
a la no-eternidad.

Procreadora del hombre
con el que saltaré sobre el fuego.

Así que es ella la única,
la que no lo cogió
ya listo, completo.

Ella misma lo atrapó
en una piel que conozco,
lo ató a unos huesos
escondidos ante mí.

Ella misma buscó con sus ojos
los ojos grises
con los que él me miró.

Así que es ella, su alfa.
¿Por qué me la mostró?

Nacido.
A pesar de todo, nacido él también.
Nacido como todos.
Como yo, que moriré.

Hijo de una mujer real.
Llegado de las profundidades del cuerpo.
Viajero a omega.

Expuesto
a la inexistencia
por todas partes,
a cada momento.

Y su cabeza
es una cabeza golpeando contra un muro
que cede hasta cierto momento.

Y sus movimientos
son anulaciones
de una condena general.

Entendí
que él ya había recorrido la mitad del camino.

Pero no me lo dijo,
no.

Sólo me dijo
─Es mi madre.

Wislawa Szymborska.

Traducción de: Abel Murcia y Gerardo Beltrán

Born

So this is his mother.

This small woman.

The gray-eyed procreator.

 

The boat in which, years ago,

he sailed to shore.

 

The boat from which he stepped

into the world,

into un-eternity.

 

Genetrix of the man

with whom I leap through fire.

 

So this is she, the only one

who didn’t take him

finished and complete.

 

She herself pulled him

into the skin I know,

bound him to the bones

that are hidden from me.

 

She herself raised

the gray eyes

that he raised to me.

 

So this is she, his Alpha.

Why has he shown her to me.

 

Born.

So he was born, too.

Born like everyone else.

Like me, who will die.

 

The son of an actual woman.

A new arrival from the body’s depths.

A voyager to Omega

 

Subjed to

his own absence,

on every front,

at any moment.

 

He hits his head

against a wall

that won’t give way forever.

 

His movements

dodge and parry

the universal verdict.

 

I realized

that his journey was already halfway over.

 

But he didn’t tell me that,

no.

 

“This is my mother.”

was all he said.

hormigas muriendo de amor bajo la constelación del diente de león

Tomando vino

Me miró, me dio belleza,

y yo la creí mía.

Feliz, me tragué la estrella.

Permití ser pensada

a imagen del reflejo

producido en sus ojos. Bailo, bailo

al compás de repentinas alas.

La mesa es una mesa, el vino, vino

en una copa, que es una copa

y está estando en la mesa.

Y yo soy imaginaria, increíblemente imaginaria,

imaginaria hasta la médula.

Le hablo de lo que quiere, de las hormigas

que mueren de amor

bajo la constelación del diente de león.

Juro que una rosa blanca

salpicada de vino, canta.

Me río, inclino la cabeza

con cuidado, como si comprobara

un invento. Bailo, bailo

en una sorprendida piel, en un abrazo,

que me crea.

La Eva de la costilla, la Venus de la espuma,

la Minerva de la cabeza de Júpiter

eran más reales.

Cuando él no me mira,

busco mi reflejo

en la pared. Y sólo veo

un clavo del que han descolgado un cuadro.

Drinking Wine

He looked, and gave me beauty,
and I took it as if mine.
Happy, I swallowed a star.

I allowed myself to be
invented in the likeness
of the reflection in his eyes.
I am dancing, dancing
in the flutter of sudden wings.

A table is a table.
Wine is wine in a glass
that is just a glass and stands
standing on a table. While
I am imaginary
to the point of no belief,
imaginary
to the point of blood.

I am telling him
what he want to hear: ants
dying of love under
the constellation of the dandelion.
I swear that a white rose,
sprinkled with wine, sings.

I am laughing, tilting
my head carefully
as if checking an invention
I am dancing, dancing
in astonished skin, in
an embrace that creates me.

Eve from a rib, Venus from sea-foam,
Minerva from Jove's head––
all were more real than I.

When he stops looking at me
I search for my reflection
on a wall. I see only
a nail from which a picture
has been removed

Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Graźyna Drabik and Sharon Olds


Over Wine

He glanced, gave me extra charm

and I took it as my own.

Happily I gulped a star.

 

I let myself be invented,

modelled on my own reflection

in his eyes. I dance, dance, dance

in the stir of sudden wings.

 

The chair’s a chair, the wine is wine,

in a wineglass that’s the wineglass

standing there by standing there.

Only I’m imaginary,

make-believe beyond belief,

so fictitious that it hurts.

 

And I tell him tales about

ants that die of love beneath

a dandelion’s constellation.

I swear a white rose will sing

if you sprinkle it with wine.

 

I laugh and I tilt my head

cautiously, as if to check

whether the invention works.

I dance, dance inside my stunned

skin, in his arms that create me.

 

Eve from the rib, Venus from foam,

Minerva from Jupiter’s head –

all three were more real than me.

 

When he isn’t looking at me,

I try to catch my reflection

on the wall. And I see the nail

where a picture used to be.

rust, my dear friend, rust

STILL LIFE WITH A BALLOON

Returning memories?

No, at the time of death

I’d like to see lost objects

return instead

Avalanches of gloves,

coats, suitcases, umbrellas -

come, and I’ll say at last:

What good’s all this?

Safety pins, two odd combs,

a paper rose, a knife,

some string-come, and I’ll say

at last: I haven’t missed you.

Please turn up, key, come out,

wherever you’ve been hiding,

in time for me to say:

You’ve gotten rusty, my friend!

Downpours of affidavits,

permits and questionnaires,

rain down and I will say:

I see the sun behind you.

My watch, dropped in a river,

bob up and let me seize you-

then, face to face, I’ll say:

Your so-called time is up. 

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.

Wistawa Szymborska, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

Still Life with Toy Balloon

Instead of the return of memories
at the hour of death
I order up the return
of lost objects.

Through the windows, the doors - umbrellas,
a suitcase, gloves, a coat,
so I can say:
What use is all that to me?

Safety pins, this comb or that,
a paper rose, a string, a knife,
so I can say:
I have no regrets about anything.

Wherever you may be, key,
try to arrive on time,
so I can say:
It’s all rust, my dear friend, rust.

A cloud of certificates will descend,
of passes and questionnaires,
so I can say:
The sun is setting.

O watch, swim out of the river,
let me take you in my hand,
so I can say:
Don’t still pretend to indicate the hour.

The toy balloon torn loose by the wind
will also reappear,
so I can say:
There are no children here.

Fly off through the open window,
fly off into the wide world,
let someone cry out: Oh!
so I can weep.

Translated from the Polish by Magnus Y. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire

Naturaleza muerta con globo.

En lugar de que vuelvan los recuerdos
en el instante de la muerte
solicito el regreso
de las cosas perdidas.

Por las puertas y ventanas: los paraguas,
la maleta, los guantes, el abrigo,
para poder decir:
qué me importa todo eso.

Alfileres, este peine, aquél,
la rosa de papel, la cuerda, el cuchillo,
para poder decir:
nada de eso echo de menos.

Dondequiera que estés, llave,
trata de llegar a tiempo,
para poder decir:
la herrumbre, querida, la herrumbre.

Descenderá una nube de constancias,
de pases, de expedientes,
para poder decir:
el sol se pone.

Reloj, fluye desde el río,
deja que te tome en mi mano,
para poder decir:
finges la hora.

Aparecerá también el globo
secuestrado por el viento,
para poder decir:
aquí no hay niños.

Vuela por la ventana abierta,
vuela por el amplio mundo,
que alguien exclame: ¡Ay!
para poder llorar.

Wislawa Szymborska.

La naturaleza muerta que sigue es del francés Simon Renard de Saint Andre del XVII.

las cuatro acaban de dar

Cuando me desvelo suele ser sobre esta hora que plantea la polaca. No por casualidad. La versión en inglés está sacada de esta maravillosa página. La idea es tan sencila como espectacular y funcionan desde 1992...

Las cuatro de la madrugada

Hora entre la noche y el día.
Hora de un costado al otro.
Hora para treintañeros.

Hora preparada para el canto del gallo.
Hora cuando la tierra nos ignora.
Hora cuando sopla el viento de astros apagados.
Hora de y-si-de-nosotros-no-quedara-nada.

Hora hueca.
Sorda, vana.
Fondo de todas las horas.

Nadie está bien a las cuatro de la madrugada.
Si las hormigas están bien a las cuatro de la madrugada
démosles la enhorabuena. Y que lleguen a las cinco,
si hemos de seguir viviendo.

Four in the morning

The hour from night to day.
The hour from side to side.
The hour for those past thirty.

The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.
The hour when earth betrays us.
The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.
The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.

The hollow hour.
Blank, empty.
The very pit of all other hours.

No one feels good at four in the morning.
If ants feel good at four in the morning
—three cheers for the ants. And let five o'clock come
if we're to go on living.

Wislawa Szymborska,
Translated by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire

if the same thing ever happened

Llave

Había una llave y de pronto no hay llave.
¿Cómo entraremos en casa?
Quizá alguien la encuentre tirada,
la vea ¿y luego qué?
Camine, juguetee, la eche al aire
como si fuera chatarra.

Si al amor que yo te tengo
le sucediera lo mismo,
no sólo a nosotros, sino a todo el mundo
se le perdería ese amor.
En unas manos extrañas
no abrirá ninguna casa
y sólo será una forma,
¡y que la corroa la herrumbre!

Este horóscopo no surge
de las cartas, de los astros, ni del grito de la lumbre.

Wislawa Szymborska

Aquí está la versión inglesa que me gusta bastante más que la española.

mi no llegada

La estación de ferrocarril

Mi no llegada a la ciudad de N.

tuvo lugar puntualmente.

Fuiste avisado

con una carta no enviada.

Lograste no llegar

a la hora prevista.

El tren llegó al andén número tres.

Bajó mucha gente.

Entre la multitud se dirigió a la salida

la ausencia de mi persona.

Varias mujeres me sustituyeron

rápidamente

en aquella prisa.

A una de ellas se le acercó corriendo

alguien desconocido para mí,

pero ella lo reconoció

al instante.

Ambos intercambiaron

un beso no nuestro,

durante el cual se perdió

no mi maleta.

La estación de la ciudad de N.

pasó bien el examen

de la existencia objetiva.

La totalidad permanecía en su lugar.

Los detalles se movían

por trayectorias calculadas.

Tuvo lugar incluso

una cita acordada.

Fuera del alcance

de nuestra presencia.

En el paraíso perdido

de la probabilidad.

En otra parte.

En otra parte.

Como suenan estas palabras.

Wislawa Szymborska  

Aquí hay otra versión en castellano.

The Railroad Station

My nonarrival in the city of N.

took place on the dot.

You'd been alerted

in my unmailed letter.

You were able not to be there

at the agreed-upon time.

The train pulled up at platform 3.

A lot of people got out.

My absence joined the throng

as it made its way toward the exit.

Several women rushed

to take my place

in all that rush.

Somebody ran up to one of them.

I didn't know him,

but she recognized him

immediately.

While they kissed

with not our lips,

a suitcase disappeared,

not mine.

The railroad station in the city of N.

passed its exam

in objective existence

with flying colors.

The whole remained in place.

Particulars scurried

along the designated tracks.

Even a rendezvous

took place as planned.

Beyond the reach

of our presence.

In the paradise lost

of probability.

Somewhere else.

Somewhere else.

How these little words ring.

Translated from the Polish the by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

no nos saludaba con fanfarrias victoriosas

ANTES NOS SABÍAMOS EL MUNDO AL AZAR:

era tan pequeño que cabía en un apretón de manos,
tan fácil que se podía describir con una sonrisa,
tan común como en una plegaria el eco de las viejas verdades.

La historia nos saludaba con fanfarrias victoriosas:
en nuestros ojos entraba arena sucia.
Teníamos por delante caminos lejanos y ciegos,
pozos contaminados, pan amargo.

Nuestro botín de guerra es el conocimiento del mundo:
es tan grande que cabe en un apretón de manos,
tan difícil que se puede describir con una sonrisa.
tan extraño como en una plegaria el eco de las viejas verdades.

We knew the world backwards and forwards
So small it fit in a handshake
So easy it could be described in a smile
As plain as the echoes of old truths and a prayer

History did not greet us with triumphant fanfare
It flung dirty sand in our eyes
Ahead of us were distant roads leading nowhere
Poisoned wells, bitter bread

The spoils of war is our knowledge of the world
So large it fits in a handshake
So hard it could be described in a smile
As strange as the echoes of old truths and a prayer.

Wislawa Szymborska.

En esta ocasión la diferencia en la versión inglesa y la española es notoria: did not. Y yo me inclino a pensar que efectivamente, no nos saludaba con fanfarrias victoriosas...

Desconozco la autoría de las versiones.

los entresijos de la poética de la polaca

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.