On the dust jacket of Map: Collected and Last Poems, Wislawa Szymborska appears to be watching someone, perhaps studying a person from above, from the perch of the concrete porch of her apartment complex. It is quite a telling, quite a revealing portrait, because her literary reputation rests upon observing history and how we have behaved throughout it, as she does in one of her last poems, “Someone I’ve Been Watching for a While.” The poem is from the collection she was working on when she passed from this life, entitled Enough, which was her final compilation of scrupulously crafted poems, bursting with ironies and insight.
Only this posthumous collection was even shorter than the others, since it was left unfinished, containing just thirteen poems. However, each of these poems is a precious and qualitatively substantial addition to this eminent Polish poet’s oeuvre.
The focus of her observation in this poem is someone “Unremarked./ Unspectacular./ He’s employed by City Sanitation.” So, the reader thinks, that this is who she has been watching from above on her poetic aerie, “At first light/ from the site of the event/ he sweeps up, carries off, tosses in the truck,/ what’s been hammered onto half-dead trees,/ trampled into the exhausted grass.” Of the detritus are: “Tattered banners,/ broken bottles,/ burned effigies,/ gnawed bones,/ rosaries, whistles, and condoms.”
All of this tragicomic litany(not unlike the imagery of Gabriel Garcia Marquez), which has pirated the reader’s attention, is driven home by the inimitable poetic alchemy of Szymborska, who could be also referred to as sister to the Brothers Grimm in her portrayal of what Jean-Paul Sartre dubbed as the paralyzing psycho-social ailment humankind suffered from in his mid-century philosophical classic, Nausea.
Szymborska’s vision and imagery offers her own particular gold stamp: an inscrutable resonance which haunts the reader forever with her offering of the transmutable and what is perennially transfixed, as in the conclusion of this poem: “Once he found a dove cage in the bushes./ He took it home/ so he could/ keep it empty.” So be it: we are charmed and we have also been augmented. We understand intuitively but are unsure why. Szymborska leaves us with what Rilke intimated were the questions, which he suggested we come to know before ascertaining the answers themselves. If literature such as this changes, or alters us, as Szymborska does in her poems, with such consistency and high art, then we are affected by one of its true masters.
Map collects some three hundred fifty poems of Szymborska. When asked why she published so few poems, she answered, typifying her impishness, “I have a trash bin at home.” Many poets write many poems; however, Szymborska’s poems are not necessarily just poems at all, they are poetical events. Szymborska’s poems are high-wire acts, the coloratura of a lyrical aria sung by a gifted soprano, children’s games (she did write comic works, such as rymowanki, or limericks and nursery rhymes; and polsuchance, or what she referred to as eavesdroppings, that are uncollected here, since she did not want them included). Szymborska’s poems are themselves cultural events, and they inspired other artists to incorporate them in their own work. And her poems informed that work, such as the concluding film in the trilogy, directed by Krzystof Kieslowski, Three Colors: Red, which was inspired by Szymborska’s poem, “Love At First Sight.” The poem’s portrayal of romantic relationship, or marriage, is intra-generational. It is profound, balancing humor and tragedy as does a circus bear who steadies himself in the air, as he rolls a large medicine ball beneath his feet. It is Pasternak’s Zhivago and Lara, post-romance, who in Szymborska’s poem “don’t remember—a moment face to face/ in some revolving door,” and who find at the poem’s end, “Every beginning/ is only a sequel, after all,/ and the book of events/ is always open halfway through.”
Born in 1923, Szymborska, who died in her sleep in 2012, was initiated into her adulthood, as were so many other Poles, by the invasion by Nazi Germany in September 1939. She was one of the more fortunate of her countrymen, since she was given a job working as a railroad employee, whereas many others were enlisted into forced labor. However, she began studying in underground classes, and eventually, in 1943 enrolled at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, where she switched from her studies of Polish literature to sociology. Although she did not finish a degree, she did become involved in writing groups, and, most felicitously met Czeslaw Milosz, and came under his influence, at least initially—two future Nobel Prize recipients briefly passing each other in the shadow of WWII.
As with Miloz’s work, whose memoir Native Realm can be read as a layperson’s history of eastern Europe or the biography of a member of the resistance written in lyrical prose, Szymborska’s life and literary legacy was incontrovertibly shaped by surviving these bleak war years. In her survival, whether innate characteristics or not, her heightened senses of piquant irony and keen observation became fashioned into sophisticated poetic tools. She developed an elfin and puckish characteristic in her poetry the way Edmond Rostand may have introduced the word panache into the English language, since his character Cyrano de Bergerac is known for his display of it.
Szymborska also needed to weather the apprenticeship and journeyman stages of most writer’s literary careers in that her first book, that was to be published in 1949, “did not meet socialist requirement,” whose parameters were established by the new Soviet state. So, her obstacles were not only of a similar norm as for other writers of her generation, they were made more extraordinary, since she was groomed to support socialist themes. Although her debut poetry collection, Why We Live, included a poem entitled “Lenin” (not included in Map), published in 1952, she diverted herself from such staunch authoritarianism and established her own world view, whose vision remains penetrating. Eventually, in 1966, she officially left the party and actively began to affiliate herself with dissidents, such as Jerzy Giedroyc, Editor of the Paris-based émigré journal, Kultura, as early as 1957. Szymborska’s struggles were imposing ones and she rose above them. It is no wonder she possessed such a knowing and disarming smile, worthy as much of candor as it was of sly mischief.
However, beginning in the late 1950s, Szymborska’s voice took shape with the iconoclastic collection Calling Out to Yeti; and as she writes in the poem “Rehabilitation,” regarding the power of words, in her atypical and uncommon assessment, “I can’t even restore them to half-breath,/ a Sisyphus assigned to the hell of poetry.// They come to us. Sharp as diamonds,/ they pass along shop windows lit in front,/ along the windowpanes of cozy houses,/ along rose-colored glasses, along the glass/ of hearts and brains, quietly cutting.”
The poem is as much criticism as affirmation: Szymborska’s own “quietly cutting” vision, so balanced with the way of the world that she can’t “even restore them to half-breath.” That “half-breath” is so full of itself: a modifier of the living of life itself under one government of oppression or another.
In another poem, appearing in the 1967 collection, No End of Fun, entitled “Railroad Station,” we don’t need to wonder too much if her experience in working for the railroad during the war for the Nazis left any affect on her. The action in the poem nearly takes place vicariously, as if the narrator is estranged from herself: “My absence joined the throng/ as it made its way toward the exit.” The poem concludes in a similar existentialist fashion. However, Szymborska transcends what may be mere absurdist de rigueur by actually becoming more real than real: “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.”
Szymborska’s talent for crystallization is as abundant as her narrative poems are layered with crystallized images. In the 1986 collection, The People on the Bridge, the poem “View with a Grain of Sand” is emblematic of her prowess for discovering what is a spiritual maxim of what is small in what is large and what is large in what is small. The poem also served as a title poem for an earlier Selected Poems that were translated into English by the provident and accomplished team of Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, of whom only Cavanagh is responsible for creating the present volume, since Baranczak has been ill, and whose translations into English apparently are the ones that Szymborska favored. In the poem, not unlike Whitman and his Leaves of Grass, Szymborska views grains of sand, “The lake’s floor exists floorlessly,/ and its shore exists shorelessly,” in her amplitude of incisive playfulness. She goes on to propose that all this goes on going on “beneath a sky by nature skyless/ in which the sun sets without setting at all,” which precipitates the thought that Szymborska and her countryman Nikolaus Copernicus would have been quite delighted with each other. The poem concludes with its imprimatur of aplomb, lightly but raising some cosmological dust just the same: “Time has passed like a courier with urgent news./ But that’s just our simile./ The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,/ his news inhuman.”
Szymborska’s perception regarding “that’s just our simile” is her broad vision of historical perspective. The Mise-en-scene here could be a tableau for a denouement in an Agatha Christie mystery in which Hercule Poirot is treading the boards of the stage itself as he explicates each character’s role in the crime. However, if it were possible, Szymborska’s craft and her poetic gifts only increased with age. In the poem, “Sky,” from the 1993 collection, The End and the Beginning, we easily see how her magician’s tricks acquire such literary technique that they are clearly deserving of her lengthy list of literary awards. “Sky” is similar in its ontological inspection as “View with a Grain of Sand;” however, this poem is even more refined, more distilled, more of a metaphor of itself. She writes an ode to the sky without ostensibly giving it even faint praise: “I don’t have to wait for a starry night,/ I don’t have to crane my neck/ to get a look of it.”
Although the realist in her portrays the ever present dome about our heads as “Grainy, gritty, liquid,/ inflamed, or volatile,” it is also “everywhere,/ even in the dark beneath your skin.” If any reader, by now, can’t see that reading a poem by Szymborska is like a roller coaster ride, then just wait until the car plunges down the track at such an unexpected angle and rate of speed, as in her conclusion of “Sky:” “Division into sky and earth—/ it’s not the proper way/ to contemplate this wholeness./ It simply lets me go on living/ at a more exact address/ where I can be reached promptly/ if I’m sought./ My identifying features/ are rapture and despair.” Here we have arrived again at the beginning of the ride itself, exhausted by both our humanity and the human condition.
Although Szymborska’s vision only continues to deepen with age, and she also further develops her predilection for metaphor as space, as in the 2002 collection, Moment, and in the poem “Clouds.” Her playfulness alerts us only to her underlying seriousness, as she opens the poem, “I’d have to be really quick/ to describe clouds—/ a split second’s enough/ for them to start being something else.” She continues, tongue-in-cheek, one hand tugging at our shirt sleeve: “Their trademark:/ they don’t repeat a single/ shape, shade, pose, arrangement.”
With her hold on us now, she can extrapolate almost extemporaneously, and we believe her: “Next to clouds,/ even a stone seems like a brother.” She insists, “Let people exist if they want,/ and then die, one after another:/ clouds simply don’t care.” Upon which we are nearly ready, but not quite, for the lighthearted lamentation at the poem’s conclusion, regarding “Clouds,” “They aren’t obliged to vanish when we’re gone./ They don’t have to be seen while sailing on.”
Perhaps the poem “Monologue of a Dog Ensnared in History” from the 2005 collection, Colon, may be offered as a lasting, and final, example, here, of the breadth of the work of this European master. We can only truly marvel at both the simplicity and depth of the poem’s initial line: “There are dogs and dogs. I was among the chosen.” We also are aware that “there are dog poems and poems that are dogs,” which is my own inventiveness and a gloss on Szymborska’s, which she just might have smiled at. It is interesting, in light of that comment, that she writes in this poem that we should “Take care, though—beware comparisons.” Although I suspect Szymborska was an atheist, or an agnostic, her sense of spirituality was as imminent as those who might make ostentation of their own religious views, and most spiritual teachers will relay that comparisons are not part of the path. However, the dog in Szymborska’s poem is at first well-groomed by its master, then eschewed by the invading army. In this first person portrayal, the dog in the poem betrays its own sense of lost equilibrium, in barking out that “Someone tore my silver-trimmed collar off,/ someone kicked my bowl, empty for days.” Then another “someone” leans out of the car window, one who “shot me twice.” The poem concludes, “He couldn’t even shoot straight,/ since I died for a long time, in pain,/ to the buzz of impertinent flies./ I, the dog of my master.” Szymborska is not beyond having mastered a Brechtian instinct for the poem as cabaret.
Translator Clare Cavanaugh mentions in her afterword that Marina Tsvetaeva spoke of “poets with a history and poets without a history,” and that Szymborska, she writes, was “a poet with a history”—how true. However, Szymborska’s sense of history, not unlike that of Milosz, possessed a sense of humility; and, perhaps, quite unlike Milosz, she also specialized in a rigorously disciplined sense of humor, as well.
Returning to the trope of the author’s photograph, which began this review, if we look at
the photograph of Szymborska’s that is on the inside of the book’s back flap, we can see a woman who is possibly self-absorbed, however quite fully aware—someone who may be representative of sheer ebullience; and certainly that smile is that of an alchemist, someone who has discovered how to turn the lead of history and the dross of personal experience, thereof, into the gold of a poetic literature—that, if it is anything, will remain as significant to us as it is, in turns, that are both impish and irrevocably brilliant.
Reviewed by Wally Swist, Amherst, Massachusetts
Wislawa Szymborska. Map: Collected and Last Poems. Translated by Clare Cavanaugh and Stanislaw Baranczak. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. ISBN 9780544126022.