Szymborska, Wislawa. Miracle Fair : Selected Poems. Trans. Joanna Trzeciak. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2001.
Joanna Trzekiak is the translator and editor of this volume; she has arranged the poems in this book into six "thematic clusters," and ordered the poems chronologically within each cluster.
Szymborska's poetry is a delight to read; although her diction is mostly chosen from the simple, vernacular, even colloquial, what she does with those words is create a playful, complex landscape full of unexpected twists and turns. She is never boring. Her experiences living in Poland for most of the twentieth century inform her writing profoundly; she is unwilling to shy away from the horrors and evils that are part of our human inheritance, but she is equally compelled by the joys. "Not without draws is this terrible world," she tells us, "not without its dawns / worth our waking" (54). Szymborska maintains this fine balance with the athletic grace of a tightrope walker: where most of us edge ourselves over the abyss inch by inch, she is dancing.
She achieves this balance in part through prolonged, intense observation, which lets no one and nothing off the hook. "Reality Demands" (the poem quoted in the preceding paragraph) turns this fierce gaze to sites of historical human destruction: "Reality demands / we also state the following: / life goes on. / At Cannae and Borodino, / at Kosovo Polje and in Guernica." (53). She continues with a litany of places, once destroyed, now again having an everyday existence, then muses on the possible meaning of this:
Maybe there are no fields but battlefields,
those still remembered,
and those long forgotten,
birch groves and cedar groves,
snows and sands, iridescent swamps,
and ravines of dark defeat
where today, in sudden need,
you squat behind a bush.
What moral flows from this? Probably none.
But what really flows is quickly drying blood,
and as always, some rivers and clouds.
On the tragic mountain passes
the wind blows hats off heads
and we cannot help—
but laugh. (54)
She doesn't observe this return simply to make us all feel better about those tragedies, or only to call us to remembrance (I'm thinking here of the song, "Where have all the flowers gone" and Matsuo Basho's haiku, translated by Kenneth Rexroth as "Summer grass / where warriors dream"). Although this poem and her work in general shares some flavor of those sentiments, it works in both directions-both the dread and the laughter.
She also shows a deep affection throughout the book for humans in their everyday lives, as in "A Man's Household," in which she explains, "You need to love him along with drawers, cabinets, and shelves, / with what's on top of cupboards, or inside or sticking out" (23). Her playfulness emerges in this and other poems, like "Stage Fright," in which she compares the ethereal romantic notion of Poet with the reality of herself: "I should have descended, not walked in — / And wouldn't it be better barefoot, / than in these cheap shoes / clomping, squeaking, / an awkward substitute for an angel" (133). She describes the single candle lit on the table, "Which means / I will have to read by candlelight / what I've written by common bulb / tap tap tap on the typewriter" (134).
Though she deflates the stereotype of poet for comedic effect, she nevertheless sees writing as something astounding, comparing it in "Thomas Mann" to such "excessive scenes" in nature as a flying fish or "a duckbilled platypus nursing her chicks" (132), comparing them to the act of writing as "the moment a mammal emerged, / his hand miraculously feathered by a fountain pen" (132).
Ultimately, though, the poems that haunt me are "Torture," and "On Death, Without Exaggeration." (I've included links to both below.) Both taken together give a flavor for one other characteristic of Szymborska's that bears mentioning, which in fact Czeslaw Milosz mentions in the foreword to the book; he calls it Szymborska's "ascetic 'I,' cleansed not only of the desire to confess, but of any individuating features, and yet it is linked to the 'I' of all others who share in the human condition and thus deserve pity and compassion" (1). In these two poems, it isn't so much a literal "I" (neither is in the first person) as it is a stripping-away of those individuating features, leaving something that approaches a universal experience.
Poetry by Wislawa Szymborksa posted elsewhere on the web:
On Death, without Exaggeration
For more information: