Anna Świrszczyńska 

 

Quatrain

George is the name. I know what I was born for, 

I idle away my life, let it go hang.
When they hang me, the outcome will be gain. 

Losing my life, I'll win it back again. 

György Petri 

Like a virgin forest

Like a virgin forest
We too have become coal.

You, who goes into yourself,
Remember the echoes.

Whoever digs into time
Injures eternity.

Aleš Šteger, transl. by Brian Henry

 

Elegy and Dissertation

I'd like to shrink nowadays
It's better if one is proactive with
event that happen to him.
The desire for death is a synonym for a willing compromise.
Reducing size is not that bad at all;
one can fit in a baby kangaroo pouch, in a sportbag,
in an urn.
shrinking creates less difficulties for a person.
Though he must gravitate. But chalk that up to
Mr. Newton's account.

Above all and after all
I would rather shrink into myself.
(I throng inside me. I contract.)
No community, no party, no corporation, no caste.
Jst to present myself: what I am, that.
Morevoer: becoming. Be
any side of the dice.
Not a turn, but a twirl.
Be it! Whatever will ber, will be. Prevailing

Gerade-so-Seinemet

I comprehend it as my own subevent.

I'd like to walk
on the "all bodies street" (Gyorgy Petri Boulevard),
beforehand I'd make
a good juicy beefstew,
just to eat a few more gristles and cartilages,
but first buy the ingredients for it
(calf, and maybe heartroot, oxtail)
and then take a walk in this
(perhaps the last)
spring with you, with you, with you
(Da capo el fine).

Gyorgy Petri 

Transl. by Michael Castro and Gabor G. Gyukics

 

Objects

Inanimate objects are always correct and cannot, unfortunately, be reproached with anything. I have never observed a chair shift from one foot to another, or a bed rear on its hind legs. And tables, even when they are tired, will not dare to bend their knees. I suspect that objects do this from pedagogical considerations, to reprove us constantly for our instability. 

Zbigniew Herbert 

A wooden die

A wooden die can be described only from without. We are therefore condemned to eternal ignorance of its essence. Even if it is cut in two, immediately its inside becomes a wall and there occurs the lightning-swift transformation of a mystery into a skin.

For this reason it is impossible to lay foundations for the psychology of a stone ball, of an iron bar, of a wooden cube.

Zbigniew Herbert, 1968

Careful with the table

At the table you should sit calmly and not daydream. Let us recall what an effort it took for the stormy ocean tides to arrange themselves in quiet rings. A moment of inattention and everything might wash away. It is also forbidden to rub the table legs, as they are very sensitive. Everything at the table must be done coolly and matter-of-factly. You can't sit down here with things not completely thought through. For daydreaming we have been given other objects made of wood: the forest, the bed.

Zbigniew Herbert, 1961

Thank you note to those I don't love

I owe so much

to those I don't love.

The relief as I agree

that someone else needs them more.

The happiness that I'm not

the wolf to their sheep.

The peace I feel with them,

the freedom –

love can neither give

nor take that.

I don't wait for them,

as in window-to-door-and-back.

Almost as patient

as a sundial,

I understand

what love can't,

and forgive

as love never would.

From a rendezvous to a letter

is just a few days or weeks,

not an eternity.

Trips with them always go smoothly,

concerts are heard,

cathedrals visited,

scenery is seen.

And when seven hills and rivers

come between us,

the hills and rivers

can be found on any map.

They deserve the credit

if I live in three dimensions,

in nonlyrical and nonrhetorical space

with a genuine, shifting horizon.

They themselves don't realize

how much they hold in their empty hands.

"I don't owe them a thing,"

would be love's answer

to this open question.

Wisława Szymborska

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

The Undarkened Window

In the daytime, I see him in the street

in a dark suit,

shaved,

combed,

wearing a tie -

at night the light shines in his window

across from my window.

A survivor

of Hitler's gas chambers,

he sails at night around

his undarkened window -

a wandering ship

on oceans of darkness,

and no port

allows it to enter,

so it may anchor

and darken.

Only in the mornings

does it go out,

the sickly yellow light

in his window.

Rajzel Zychlinksy

Goodness

A tenderness so great welled up in him that upon seeing

A wounded sparrow, he was ready to burst into tears.

Beneath the flawless manners of a worldly gentleman he hid

His compassion for all that is living.

Some people perhaps could sense it, but it was certainly known,

In ways mysterious to us, to the small birds

That would perch on his head and hands when he stopped

In a park alley. They would eat from his hands

As if the law that demands that the smaller

Take shelter from the larger,

Lest it be devoured, was suspended.

As if time had turned back, and the paths

Of the heavenly garden shone anew.

I had trouble understanding this man

Since what he said betrayed his knowledge of the horror of the world,

A knowledge at some point known and experienced to the very core.

I thus asked myself how he had managed to quell

His rebellion and bring himself to such humble charity.

Probably because this world, evil but existing,

He thought better than one that did not exist.

But he also believed in the immaculate beauty of the earth

from before the fall of Adam.

Whose free decision had brought death upon humans and animals.

But this was already something my mind didn't know how to accept.

Czeslaw Milosz

translated from the Polish by Anthony Milosz

Old Marx

I try to envision his last winter,
London, cold and damp, the snow’s curt kisses
on empty streets, the Thames’ black water.
Chilled prostitutes lit bonfires in the park.
Vast locomotives sobbed somewhere in the night.
The workers spoke so quickly in the pub
that he couldn’t catch a single word.
Perhaps Europe was richer and at peace,
but the Belgians still tormented the Congo.
And Russia? Its tyranny? Siberia?

He spent evenings staring at the shutters.
He couldn’t concentrate, rewrote old work,
reread young Marx for days on end,
and secretly admired that ambitious author.
He still had faith in his fantastic vision,
but in moments of doubt
he worried that he’d given the world only
a new version of despair;
then he’d close his eyes and see nothing
but the scarlet darkness of his lids.


Adam Zagajewski January 21, 2008
Translated, from the Polish, by Clare Cavanagh.

The cats' strike

The cat's cough wakes him at night.
He turns in bed, gets up.
Puts on his dressing-gown because it's cold.
Puts on his slippers because he's barefoot.
Slowly he approaches the window.
Drawing open the curtain, stares:
Below,
In the street,
As far as Republic Square
Thousands of phosphorescent flares
Thousands upon thousands of cats
Thousands upon thousands of raised tails.
Calmly
He closes the curtain.
And returns to his warm bed.
Yawning
He mutters:

Novica Tadic
(translated from the Serbian by Michael March and Dusan Puvacic)

I’ll Open the Window

Our embrace lasted too long.
We loved right down to the bone.
I hear the bones grind, I see
our two skeletons.

Now I am waiting
till you leave, till
the clatter of your shoes
is heard no more. Now, silence.

Tonight I am going to sleep alone
on the bedclothes of purity.
Aloneness
is the first hygienic measure.
Aloneness
will enlarge the walls of the room,
I will open the window
and the large, frosty air will enter,
healthy as tragedy.
Human thoughts will enter
and human concerns,
misfortune of others, saintliness of others.
They will converse softly and sternly.

Do not come anymore.
I am an animal
very rarely.

Anna Swir, “I’ll Open the Window” from Talking to My Body,
translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan.