Wisława Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist, critic and translator of French poetry. She spent most of her life in Kraków, where she studied Polish literature and sociology at Jagellonian University and for nearly thirty years worked as an editor and book review columnist at the literary review Życie Literackie (Literary Life). She died this year at the age of 88. She is the author of around 20 volumes of poetry and prose. Her last poetry collection will be published in 2012. Her works have been translated into many languages, and several books are available in English. She received many prizes and honors, including the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Poland's highest civilian distinction, the Order of the White Eagle. When asked why she had published relatively few poems (most probably around 400), she famously said, “There is a trash bin in my room. A poem written in the evening is read again in the morning. It does not always survive.”
Stanisław Barańczak is a poet, literary critic, scholar, editor, lecturer, and prominent translator of English poetry into Polish (e.g. Shakespeare) and of Polish poetry into English and German. He is the author of some 30 books written in Polish, including poetry, light verse, and literary criticism. His poetry collection Chirurgiczna Precyzja (Surgical Precision), won the 1999 Nike Award. He has lectured at Harvard University since 1981 as Alfred Jurzykowski Professor of Polish Language and Literature. He was editor of The Polish Review from 1986 to 1990, and a co-founder of the Paris-based Zeszyty Literackie in 1983. He has translated, among others, Jan Kochanowski's Laments (with Seamus Heaney). Together with Clare Cavanagh he has translated several books by Wisława Szymborska, including the latest collection, Here (2010), which won the Found in Translation Award.
Clare Cavanagh, scholar and translator, teaches Slavic and comparative literatures at Northwestern University. She is the author of Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (2010), winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award in Criticism. Other works of scholarship include Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (1995), which received the AATSEEL Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Book in Slavic Literature. She is currently working on the authorized biography of Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. Her interests in contemporary Slavic languages and poetics led her, as a graduate student at Harvard, to Polish literature. She is now one of the preeminent translators of contemporary Polish poetry. Together with Stanisław Barańczak, she has translated several books by Wisława Szymborska, including the latest volume, Here (2010), which won the Found in Translation Award.
Regina Grol has taught Polish Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (2007-2010) and is currently a Fellow at the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies at the same university. Previously, she was a Professor of Comparative Literature at Empire State College, State University of New York and a visiting professor at Rutgers University as well as Hunter College. A literary critic and translator of Polish literature, she spent the 2001-2002 academic year in Poland as a Fulbright research scholar. She is the author of introductions to several poetry collections, including Lidia Kosk's niedosyt/reshapings (2003) and her translations of Urszula Kozioł's Selected Poetry (1989) and Anna Frajlich's Between Dawn and the Wind (1991;2006). She has also translated the prose of Joanna Wiszniewicz And yet I Still Have Dreams (2004). Ambers Aglow: An Anthology of Contemporary Polish Women's Poetry (1981-1995), was translated, compiled, and edited by her.
Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka is a bilingual poet, translator, and photographer. She is the translator for the two bilingual books of poems by Lidia Kosk, niedosyt/reshapings (2003) and Słodka woda, słona woda/Sweet Water, Salt Water (2009), the latter of which she has also edited. It has been nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize and Found in Translation Award for book translations. Her translations of poems by Lucille Clifton, Josephine Jacobsen, and Linda Pastan have been published in Poland; her translations of Lidia Kosk's and Ernest Bryll’s poems have appeared in over 50 publications in the USA. She is the co-founder of OneTree Poetry Events at the Carroll Arts Center in Westminster, MD.
Joanna Trzeciak is associate professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State. She works on the phenomenon of self-translation in authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, and Czesław Miłosz. Her translations of Polish and Russian literature have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, Harpers, The Atlantic, Paris Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wisława Szymborska (W.W. Norton), with a foreword by Czesław Miłosz, was awarded the Heldt Translation Prize. Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Różewicz, with a foreword by Edward Hirsch, was published by W. W. Norton in 2011.
Spring 2012
Table of Contents - Vol. VIII, No. 1
Poetry Fiction Translations Essays Reviews
Wisława Szymborska (1923 - 2012)
Wisława Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist, translator, and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. In this issue, we commemorate and celebrate Szymborska with four of her poems and their English renditions by five different translators. Here are bilingual versions of some of our favorite poems by Szymborska. They come from four of her Polish collections spanning three decades. They speak of universal philosophical problems of our existence, in amazement about life in a time and place, where "nothing is usual or normal." In her 1996 Nobel lecture she challenged thus the dictum of Ecclesiastes 1:9 that "there is nothing new under the sun." Her language is sometimes deceptively simple and casual, sometimes from unusual points of view, such as that of a cat after the death of its owner. Her poems also have a special meaning on a personal level for each of us. For example, the first poem, "In Broad Daylight," plays out in a writers' lodge that I know intimately, in Zakopane, a resort town in the Polish Tatra Mountains. In addition to imagining a future to counter the facts, in a "what if" mode, Szymborska introduces here a concrete historical figure, the extremely gifted poet Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, an underground Home Army soldier who participated in the fight against the German occupants of Poland in World War II. He was only 23 years old when killed in action during the first days of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. The same writers' lodge, identified in the poem as a mountain boardinghouse, is also where Szymborska received news of having been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka
He would
vacation in a mountain boardinghouse, he would
come down for lunch, from his
table by the window he would
scan the four spruces, branch to branch,
without shaking off the freshly fallen snow.
Goateed, balding,
gray-haired, in glasses,
with coarsened, weary features,
with a wart on his cheek and a furrowed forehead,
as if clay had covered up the angelic marble—he wouldn't
know himself when it all happened.
The price, after all, for not having died already
goes up not in leaps but step by step, and he would
pay that price, too.
About his ear, just grazed by the bullet
when he ducked at the last minute, he would
say: "I was damned lucky."
While waiting to be served his noodle soup, he would
read a paper with the current date,
giant headlines, the tiny print of ads,
or drum his fingers on the white tablecloth, and his hands would
have been used a long time now,
with their chapped skin and swollen veins.
Sometimes someone would
yell from the doorway: "Mr. Baczyński, phone call for you" —
and there 'd be nothing strange about that
being him, about him standing up, straightening his sweater,
and slowly moving toward the door.
At this sight no one would
stop talking, no one would
freeze in mid-gesture, mid-breath
because this commonplace event would
be treated—such a pity—
as a commonplace event.
~ Translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh
"In Broad Daylight" from POEMS NEW AND COLLECTED by Wisława Szymborska.
English translation copyright © 1998 by Harcourt, Inc. Used by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
W biały dzień
Do pensjonatu w górach jeździłby,
na obiad do jadalni schodziłby,
na cztery świerki z gałęzi na gałąź,
nie otrząsając z nich świeżego śniegu,
zza stolika pod oknem patrzyłby.
Z bródką przyciętą w szpic,
łysawy, siwiejący, w okularach,
o pogrubiałych i znużonych rysach twarzy,
z brodawką na policzku i fałdzistym czołem,
jakby anielski marmur oblepiła glina —
a kiedy to się stało, sam nie wiedziałby,
bo przecież nie gwałtownie, ale pomalutku
zwyżkuje cena za to, że się nie umarło wcześniej,
i również on tę cenę płaciłby.
O chrząstce ucha, ledwie draśniętej pociskiem
— gdy głowa uchyliła się w ostatniej chwili —
"cholerne miałem szczęscie" mawiałby.
Czekając, aż podadzą rosół z makaronem,
dziennik z bieżącą datą czytałby,
wielkie tytuły, ogłoszenia drobne,
albo bębnił palcami po białym obrusie,
a miałby już od dawna używane dłonie
o spierzchłej skórze i wypukłych żyłach.
Czasami ktoś od progu wołałby:
"panie Baczyński, telefon do pana"—
i nic dziwnego w tym nie byłoby,
że to on i że wstaje obciągając sweter
i bez pośpiechu rusza w stronę drzwi.
Rozmów na widok ten nie przerywano by,
w pół gestu i w pół tchu nie zastygano by,
bo zwykłe to zdarzenie — a szkoda, a szkoda —
jako zwykłe zdarzenie traktowano by.
From the collection Ludzie na moście (People on the Bridge) Czytelnik, Warszawa 1986
To die — you don't do that to a cat.
How is a cat to cope
in an empty apartment?
To climb the walls?
To rub against furniture?
Nothing seems to be changed here,
and yet it is changed.
As if nothing's been moved,
and yet things've been moved around.
And in the evenings the lamp is no longer on.
Steps can be heard on the stairs,
but they aren't the ones.
The hand which puts the fish on the plate
also isn't the one that used to do it.
Something doesn't begin here
at its usual time.
Something isn't happening
as it should.
Someone was and was here
and then suddenly disappeared
and is stubbornly gone.
All the closets have been peeked in.
All the shelves dashed on.
The underside of the carpet has been checked out.
Even a rule has been broken
and papers have been scattered about.
What else is there to do?
To sleep and wait.
Let him just come back,
let him just show up.
He'll find out
that you don't do that to a cat.
He will be approached reluctantly,
slowly,
on deeply offended paws.
And no jumping or squealing to begin with.
~ Translated from the Polish by Regina Grol
"A Cat in an Empty Apartment" from the bilingual AMBERS AGLOW: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY POLISH WOMEN'S
POETRY (1981-1995), compiled and edited by Regina Grol. Copyright © 1996 Host Publications, Inc.
Used by permission of Host Publications. All rights reserved.
Umrzeć — tego się nie robi kotu.
Bo co ma począć kot
w pustym mieszkaniu.
Wdrapywać się na ściany.
Ocierać między meblami.
Nic niby tu nie zmienione,
a jednak pozamieniane.
Niby nie przesunięte,
a jednak porozsuwane.
I wieczorami lampa już nie świeci.
Słychać kroki na schodach,
ale to nie te.
Ręka, co kładzie rybę na talerzyk,
także nie ta, co kładła.
Coś się tu nie zaczyna
w swojej zwykłej porze.
Coś się tu nie odbywa
jak powinno.
Ktoś tutaj był i był,
a potem nagle zniknął
i uporczywie go nie ma.
Do wszystkich szaf sie zajrzało.
Przez półki przebiegło.
Wcisnęło się pod dywan i sprawdziło.
Nawet złamało zakaz
i rozrzuciło papiery.
Co więcej jest do zrobienia.
Spać i czekać.
Niech no on tylko wróci,
niech no się pokaże.
Już on się dowie,
że tak z kotem nie można.
Będzie się szło w jego stronę
jakby się wcale nie chciało,
pomalutku,
na bardzo obrażonych łapach.
I żadnych skoków pisków na początek.
From the bilingual AMBERS AGLOW: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY POLISH WOMEN'S
POETRY (1981-1995), compiled and edited by Regina Grol. Copyright © 1996 Host Publications, Inc.
Used by permission of Host Publications.
Originally published in the collection Koniec i początek (The End and the Beginning), 1993.
Life — the only way
to grow leaves,
catch a breath on the sand,
rise on wings;
to be a dog,
or to stroke a dog’s warm fur;
to tell pain
from everything that is not pain;
to inhabit events,
get lost in the sights,
look for the smallest among mistakes.
An exceptional chance
to remember for a while,
what was discussed
when the lights were out;
and to trip over a stone
at least once,
get drenched in some rain,
lose keys in the grass;
and let the eyes follow a spark in the wind;
and perpetually not to know
something important.
~ Translated from the Polish by Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka
Copyright © 2005 Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka
Życie – jedyny sposób,
żeby obrastać liśćmi,
łapać oddech na piasku,
wzlatywać na skrzydłach;
być psem,
albo głaskać go po ciepłej sierści;
odróżniać ból
od wszystkiego, co nim nie jest;
mieścić się w wydarzeniach,
podziewać w widokach,
poszukiwać najmniejszej między omyłkami.
Wyjątkowa okazja,
żeby przez chwilę pamiętać,
o czym się rozmawiało
przy zgaszonej lampie;
i żeby raz przynajmniej
potknąć się o kamień,
zmoknąć na którymś deszczu,
zgubić klucze w trawie;
i wodzić wzrokiem za iskrą na wietrze;
i bez ustanku czegoś ważnego
nie wiedzieć.
From the collection Chwila (Moment) Wydawnictwo Znak, Kraków 2002.
With the help of people and other disasters,
time has worked pretty hard on it.
First it took away the nose, later the genitals,
one by one fingers and toes,
with the passing of years arms, one after the other,
right thigh and left thigh,
back and hips, head and buttocks,
and what fell off, time broke into pieces,
into chunks, into gravel, into sand.
When someone living dies this way,
much blood flows with each blow.
Yet marble statues perish pale
and not always all the way.
Of the one we are speaking of, only a torso remains,
like breath held under exertion
as it now must
draw unto
itself
all the grace and weight
of what has been lost.
And it pulls this off,
pulls this off even now,
pulls us in and dazzles,
dazzles and endures.
Time deserves an honorable mention here,
as it stopped midway
and left something for later.
~ Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak
First published in The Atlantic, March 2007.
Copyright © 2007 Joanna Trzeciak
Z pomocą ludzi i innych żywiołów
nieźle się przy nim napracował czas.
Najpierw pozbawił nosa, później genitaliów,
kolejno palców u rąk i u stóp,
z biegiem lat ramion, jednego po drugim,
uda prawego i uda lewego,
pleców i bioder, głowy i pośladków;
a to, co już odpadło, rozbijał na części,
na gruz, na żwir, na piasek.
Kiedy w ten sposób umiera ktoś żywy,
wypływa dużo krwi za każdym ciosem.
Posągi marmurowe giną jednak biało
i nie zawsze do końca.
Z tego, o którym mowa, zachował się tors
i jest jak wstrzymywany przy wysiłku oddech,
ponieważ musi teraz przyciągać
do siebie
cały wdzięk i powagę
utraconej reszty.
I to mu się udaje,
to mu się jeszcze udaje,
udaje i olśniewa,
olśniewa i trwa –
Czas także tu zasłużył na pochwalną wzmiankę,
bo ustał w pracy
i coś odłożył na potem.
From the collection Dwukropek (Colon) Wydawnictwo a5, Kraków 2005.
