| ashu |
Posted
on 17-Mar-02 08:34 PM
Hi all,
Happy to be plugging my favorite poet: Poland's Wislawa Szymborska
(vee-SWAHV-ahh shimm-BOR-skah), a Nobel Prize winner 1996.
Her poetry is stunningly simple, beautiful and profound -- great works
of art.
Enjoy,
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
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Falls of Towers and the Rise of Polish Poetry
March 16, 2002
By SARAH BOXER
Who could have foreseen the poetic ripples of Sept. 11? A
week after the attack, Adam Zagajewski's poem "Try to
Praise the Mutilated World," written long before that day,
ran on The New Yorker's back page.
Czeslaw Milosz's poem
"The Multi-Storied Man" seemed uncomfortably relevant. And
Wislawa Szymborska's poem "The Terrorist, He's Watching,"
composed a quarter of a century ago, came to look like a
premonition. Innocent America became a land of experience.
Postwar Polish poetry became eerily pertinent.
It is not as if the poets Czeslaw Milosz (pronounced
CHESS-wass ME-wash), a Nobel laureate; Wislawa Szymborska
(vee-SWAHV-ahh shimm-BOR-skah), also a Nobel laureate;
Zbigniew Herbert and Mr. Zagajewski (zagg-ahh- YEV-ski)
were unknowns before last year. But suddenly their poems
hit a new American nerve.
On Wednesday "Try to Praise the Mutilated World: An Evening
in Celebration of Contemporary Polish Poetry" filled the
Great Hall of Cooper Union. The event, composed of readings
in honor of Mr. Herbert, Mr. Milosz, Ms. Szymborska and Mr.
Zagajewski, was organized by Alice Quinn, executive
director of the Poetry Society of America, in cooperation
with the New York Institute of the Humanities and the
Polish Cultural Institute.
The old masters could not make the event. Ms. Szymborska is
nearing 80. Mr. Milosz is in his 90's. (Mr. Herbert died in
1998.)
But Mr. Zagajewski, who is in his late 50's, was
there, and he was joined as a reader by the poets'
students, friends, translators and admirers, who went up
onstage in alphabetical order: Clare Cavanagh, Elzbieta
Czyzewska, Renata Gorczynski, Edward Hirsch, Mary Karr,
Wendy Lesser, W. S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, Omar Sangare,
Susan Sontag, Rosanna Warren, Lawrence Weschler, and C. K.
Williams. Four poster-size portraits of the poets looked
out from the stage. The audience sat rapt for two hours.
The night began with a shock: Ms. Cavanagh read her
translation of "September 11," Ms. Szymborska's poem about
a photograph of the people who "jumped from the burning
floors" of the World Trade Center hand in hand.
The photograph halted them in life,
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.
In that photograph, the poem continues:
There's enough
time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.
The room was stunned for a moment.
The silence was broken by the lustily sarcastic voice of
Ms. Czyzewska, an actress. She read Ms. Szymbor ska's "An
Opinion on the Question of Pornography," about the
smuttiness of all thinking, and "In Praise of My Sister,"
an ode to everyone who doesn't write poetry.
The thrill of
the night was Ms. Szymborska's poem "Birthday," which Ms.
Czyzewska recited in Polish with great trilling rrr's. It's
safe to say that more than half the room had no idea what
she was saying, but they were won over by the sloshing,
comical meter, which sounded something like a loud washing
machine speaking in Dr. Seuss's relentless rhythms.
|
| ashu |
Posted
on 17-Mar-02 08:40 PM
In translation, "Birthday" turned out to be a poem about
the bewilderments of the world:
So much world all at once - how it rustles and bustles!
Moraines and morays and morasses and mussels,
the flame, the flamingo, the flounder, the feather -
how
to line them all up, how to put them together?
Polish poets, if they have their druthers, like to think
about truth and philosophy, Mr. Hirsch declared, but they
have been pulled time and again into being witnesses to
history. He spoke of the "survivor's guilt and survivor's
amazement," evident in Mr. Milosz's "Caffé Greco." Ms.
Karr, the novelist and poet from Texas, put it more
bluntly: Poland, she said, has taken in its history a
tremendous whipping.
What does that do to a nation's poems? Does it make them
tender and tough, attentive to the little things in life
and rambunctious with words? Ms. Karr read Mr. Herbert's
"Mr. Cogito Looks at a Deceased Friend," in which survivor
guilt is made palpable:
Mr. Cogito walked into the corridor
to smoke a cigarette.
But when Mr. Cogito returned:
his friend was no longer there
something else lay
in
his place
with a twisted head and goggled eyes.
How do the Polish poets deal with survivor guilt and
astonishment?
Ms. Lesser, founder of "Threepenny Review," said they "get
to philosophy through tangible objects."
Mr. Pinsky suggested that they deal with guilt through
irony, but not the English kind. While English irony is
savage, the irony of Jonathan Swift, he noted, Polish irony
is a "melancholy, brooding sweetness" with a bite. And then
he read Mr. Herbert's "Seventh Angel," about a "black and
nervous" angel named Shemkel, who gets to stay on "the
squad" only because of the angels' consideration for the
number 7.
Then he recited Ms. Szymborska's "Joy of Writing," in which
the poet chastises letters "up to no good" and "clauses so
subordinate they'll never let her get away." Her mortal
revenge on those immortal letters is that they are under
her complete control: "Not a thing will ever happen unless
I say so."
Maybe that is what motivates Polish poetry, the idea that
words are the only good refuge from a world spun out of
control. You can push words around. You can play with them.
Mr. Sangare, a Polish actor, took his revenge on Ms.
Szymbor ska's poem "Nothing Twice" by reading it
dramatically, twice. Ms. Sontag read "Franz Schubert: A
Press Conference," by Mr. Zagajewski in which the composer
in death answers questions about his life: "Yes, my life
was short. . . . Yes, I had little time. . . . No, I am not
familiar with Wagner's music."
Polish poetry, said Rosanna Warren, a poet, is "a great
antidote" to both symbolism and solipsism. But when Mr.
Weschler got up to read the poem "Could Have," it was hard
not to think, solipsistically, that Ms. Szymborska could
have written it for those who did not die on Sept. 11:
You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved
because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining.
Because
of the shade.
Because the day was sunny.
The difference between life and death on any given day is
just a matter of chance. And maybe that is also the
difference in a nation's fate.
The evening ended with Mr. Zagajewski reading "Try to
Praise the Mutilated World." But before that, he recited
"To Go to Lvov," about his hometown, Lvov, once part of
Poland, then part of the Soviet Union, now part of Ukraine.
It concerned the strangeness of being from a place that no
longer is what it was.
there was too much of Lvov, and now
there isn't any, it
grew relentlessly
and the scissors cut it
Those not present were the stars. Mr. Zagajewski praised
his masters, Ms. Szymborska, Mr. Milosz and Mr. Herbert,
who "had the elegance of not being here." But he added,
speaking for the young and the living: "What can I do? Here
I am."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/16/arts/16POET.html?ex=1017332733&ei=1&en=9560cad9e196d95d
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