I first encountered Wisława Szymborska’s poetry on JoAnne Growney’s mathematical poetry blog. That poem, “A Contribution to Statistics,” hit me hard.
Out of every hundred people
those who always know better:
— fifty-two,doubting every step
— nearly all the rest,glad to lend a hand
if it doesn’t take too long:
— as high as forty-nine,always good,
because they can’t be otherwise:
— four, well maybe five,able to admire without envy
— eighteen,living in constant fear
of someone or something
— seventy-seven.capable of happiness:
— twenty-something tops,harmless singly,
savage in crowds
— half at least,cruel
when forced by circumstances:
— better not to know,
even b allpark figures,wise after the fact
— just a couple more
than wise before it,taking only things from life
— forty
(I wish I were wrong),hunched in pain,
no flashlight in the dark
— eighty-three
sooner or later,worthy of compassion
— ninety-nine.mortal
— a hundred out of one hundred.
Thus far this figure still remains unchanged.
I recently read a book of Szymborska’s poetry as part of my Nobel literature project. The book had poems from many of her collections from 1957-1993. It is amazing to me how much power poetry can have when translated out of its original language. Poetry isn’t straightforward. It’s easy for me to think poems are more about the words themselves than their meaning, but somehow, translation can still give us poems with power and resonance.
Reading View with a Grain of Sand, I was struck with just how perfect some of Szymborska’s individual lines are. The one that still pops into my head from time to time is this one, from a poem called “Museum.”
Since eternity was out of stock,
ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead.
The line is witty, but it hurts more than it makes me smile. Like “A Contribution to Statistics” and many more of her poems, it seems to turn over the idea of our lives being insignificant and hopeless without descending all the way into nihilism. The language in her poems is fairly straightforward, but it’s perfectly spare and often devastating.
Another line that got me, from “In Praise of my Sister:”
When my sister asks me over for lunch,
I know she doesn’t want me to read her poems.
Her soups are delicious without ulterior motives.
I will definitely be reading more of Szymborska’s poetry.
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