______________________________________________________

Periodically one has a soul.
Nobody has it all the time and forever.

Day after day, year after year
can pass without it.

Sometimes only in rapture
and in fears of childhood
it dwells within longer.
Sometimes only in the astonishment,
that we have become old.

It rarely assists us
in strenuous pursuits,
such as moving furniture,
carrying suitcases
or tromping through a road in tight shoes.

While filling in forms
and chopping meat
it usually takes the day off.

In a thousand of our conversations
it participates in one,
and not even necessarily in one,
preferring silence.

When our bodies start aching more and more,
it silently leaves the ward.
It’s fussy:
it doesn’t see us immediately in a crowd,
it sickens at our attempts at mere advantage
and the shrill clamor of business.

Joy and sorrow
are not all that different to it.
Only in the combination of them
does it stand up.

We can rely on it,
when we are certain of nothing,
and when everything seizes us.

Among all material objects
it likes best clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which work fervently,
Even when nobody looks.

It doesn’t say where it comes from
and when it will disappear next,
But it clearly awaits such questions.

It looks like,
as much as we need it,
also it
needs us for something too.


Translated from the Polish
by Rick Hilles and Maja Jablonska

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence – this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word “woods.”

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they’ll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what’s here isn’t life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof’s full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

By Wislawa Szymborska
From “No End of Fun”, 1967
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.

By Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

Thank you WS.

Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If anything like that turned up,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.

True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.

Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’d had enough of dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggles to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.

Hence the indispensable
silver lining,
the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,
the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,
fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,
stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,
good names restored, greed daunted,
old maids married off to worthy parsons,
troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,
forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,
seducers scurrying to the altar,
orphans sheltered, widows comforted,
pride humbled, wounds healed over,
prodigal sons summoned home,
cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,
hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,
general merriment and celebration,
and the dog Fido,
gone astray in the first chapter,
turns up barking gladly
in the last.

Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Barańczak

Translator Notes for Consolation:
Prose can hold everything including poetry,
but in poetry there’s only room for poetry.

So runs Wislawa Szymborska’s gently ironic mock-lament from her poem “Stage Fright” (1986). Her own writing proves time and again, though, that poetry cannot simply hold prose: it can hold it up to scrutiny in ways no novelist could manage. Like the hero of “Consolation,” Szymborska is a great reader—but her choice of material is far more catholic (with a small “c”) than that of the famous naturalist. Happy and unhappy endings alike fall within her purview, as “Consolation” demonstrates. And she takes these endings not only from the Victorian fiction she consumes in Polish translation (she doesn’t read English), but from the guide books, textbooks, mysteries, how-to manuals, histories (natural and otherwise), cookbooks, calendars, and so on, that make up the “non-required reading” she chronicles in the column by that name that has appeared intermittently in various newspapers and magazines over the last few decades. (This series itself met with its own ending—unhappily, at least for me—several years back when Szymborska decided to turn her energies entirely to writing poetry—and, of course, reading.) A great deal of her reading—the majority, I’d guess—is in fact prose, including the prose of Darwin himself, which she uses for her own rather more complicated form of consolation. I’ve said she subjects prose to a kind of scrutiny not available to the prose writers themselves. “Consolation” is a prime example. Why do we humans need narratives to structure our lives both in miniature (the stories we construct and revise in the process of living day to day) and on a global, even cosmic scale, whether by way of religion, science, or some dubious mixture of the two (the Marxist philosophy to which she subscribed briefly in the early fifties)? Darwin, she suggests, used Dickens, Trollope, and their lesser-known contemporaries to compensate for the great evolutionary master plot that apparently did away with the notion of a single, all-encompassing story with a preordained happy ending that invariably placed human beings, Man as Such, in the starring role.

Szymborska herself will happily talk about Anna Karenina, Birds of Poland, or Plots of the Hundred Greatest Operas at great length. But she doesn’t want to discuss her own poetry, not even with her translators. I happened to be working on this particular translation while in Poland, though, and I told her that I loved the poem (even the most modest and reticent poets don’t object to that). I also asked how on earth she’d come up with Fido, since Fido, Rex, or maybe Bowser are the only names that this particular pet could possibly have had. She’d done research, she said. She sent her English-speaking assistant off to read up on the subject, consult the Internet, and so on, until he managed to track down a Victorianist at Oxford or Cambridge who told him that Szymborska had to go with Fido. Another happy ending.

—C.C.

http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazi…em_177886.html