Thì thầm muộn trong đêm từ Ba Lan

Note: Charles Simic điểm mấy cuốn mới ra lò của ba nhà thơ Ba Lan, trên NYRB, Dec 22,  2011.

Đọc câu sau đây, mà chẳng sướng & tủi sao?

It is truly remarkable how many fine poets Poland has given to the world in the last century. This is an extraordinary accomplishment for a country used as a short cut in two world wars by both German and Russian invading and retreating armies, who, in addition to redrawing its borders repeatedly and occupying it for years, slaughtered millions of its citizens and deported others. Perhaps, as Czeslaw Milosz speculated back in 1965, in the preface to his much-admired anthology Post-war Polish Poetry, a poet crawling out from under the historical steamroller is better prepared to assume the tasks assigned to him than his colleagues in happier countries. For us, he said, "history is extremely real. It may not be to American poets, but for us it is very, very much a part of reality."

This sounds plausible, although as Milosz himself noted elsewhere, only a small percentage of human suffering ever gets into literature, while most of it disappears without a trace. Many nations that had undergone similar horrors have remained comparably mute afterward, so the vitality of Polish poetry must be due to many other factors besides its history. Nevertheless, even a cursory look at the lives of the three poets under review here leads one to the inescapable conclusion that the despair and moral outrage provoked by what happened to their nation were decisive for each of them.

Thực sự đáng kể, là con số khá nhiều nhà thơ tuyệt vời Ba Lan đã đến với thế giới trong thế kỷ vừa qua. Quả là 1 thành tựu lạ kỳ của một xứ sở được coi như là một “short cut” [đường cắt ngắn, lối đi tắt…] giữa hai cuộc thế chiến, bởi cả hai quân đội Đức và Nga, xâm lăng, rồi rút lui, và, không chỉ vẽ lại bản đồ biên giới, và chiếm giữ đất nước trong nhiều năm, mà còn làm thịt hàng triệu người Ba Lan, tống xuất, lưu đầy hàng triệu người Ba Lan khác. Có lẽ, như Czeslaw Milosz phán, vào năm 1965, trong lời tựa cho 1 tuyển tập thơ của ông, rất được ái mộ, Thơ Ca Hậu Chiến Ba Lan, một nhà thơ bò lồm ngồm ra khỏi đáy của con tầu lịch sử, thì đúng là đã được sửa soạn đầy đủ, thông tri đầy đủ… để đóng cái vai nhà thơ, và thi hành OK những trách nhiệm được trao cho anh ta, hơn là ba thứ cà chớn khác, tức những đồng nghiệp văn hữu, thi hữu của anh ta, ở trong những xứ sở hạnh phúc hơn. Đối với chúng ta, ông [Milosz] nói, “lịch sử thì thực cực kỳ thực. Điều này chưa chắc đã đúng, đối với những nhà thơ Mẽo, thí dụ, nhưng đối với chúng ta [những nhà thơ Ba Lan], nó quá đúng, quá đúng, là 1 phần của thực tại”.
Nghe thì có vẻ thật là bùi tai, nhưng cũng lại chính Milosz, ở 1 chỗ khác, phán, chỉ một phần trăm rất nhỏ của nhân loại đau khổ cực kỳ may mắn được bò vô văn chương, thơ ca, trong khi đa số, hoặc hầu hết nhân loại, biến mất, chẳng để lại 1 tí dấu vết. Rất nhiều quốc gia trải qua rất nhiều đau thương tang tóc, kinh hoàng, man rợ… tương tự như Ba Lan, nhưng mà sau đó trở thành câm, hoặc cả nước bị Sáu Dân, Tấn Dũng…  bịt miệng, thành thử cái chuyện thơ ca bảnh tỏng như Ba Lan hậu chiến có thể còn phụ thuộc nhiều yếu tố khác, ngoài yếu tố lịch sử của nó.
Mặc dù vậy, chỉ một cái nhìn thoáng qua cuộc đời ba nhà thơ Ba Lan được đề cập tới ở đây, là ngộ ra liền tù tì, là có ngay 1 kết luận không thể chệch đi đâu được: Sự chán chường, và sự vi phạm đạo đức, về những gì xẩy ra cho đất nước của họ, là yếu tố quyết định đối với mỗi một người trong cả ba.

Late-Night Whispers from Poland

It is truly remarkable how many fine poets Poland has given to the world in the last century. This is an extraordinary accomplishment for a country used as a short cut in two world wars by both German and Russian invading and retreating armies, who, in addition to redrawing its borders repeatedly and occupying it for years, slaughtered millions of its citizens and deported others. Perhaps, as Czeslaw Milosz speculated back in 1965, in the preface to his much-admired anthology Postwar Polish Poetry, a poet crawling out from under the historical steamroller is better prepared to assume the tasks assigned to him than his colleagues in happier countries. For us, he said, "history is extremely real. It may not be to American poets, but for us it is very, very much a part of reality."
This sounds plausible, although as Milosz himself noted elsewhere, only a small percentage of human suffering ever gets into literature, while most of it disappears without a trace. Many nations that had undergone similar horrors have remained comparably mute afterward, so the vitality of Polish poetry must be due to many other factors besides its history. Nevertheless, even a cursory look at the lives of the three poets under review here leads one to the inescapable conclusion that the despair and moral outrage provoked by what happened to their nation were decisive for each of them.
In 1944, when Tadeusz Różewicz was twenty-three years old, already a member of the anti-Communist Home Army that had been fighting the Germans since 1941, his older brother was murdered by the Gestapo and his body, with those of many other resistance fighters, was carted through the streets while Różewicz stood watching. In an early poem, "Lament," he describes his own state of mind and that of many other Poles:

I am twenty
I am a murderer
I am a tool
as blind as a sword
in the hands of an executioner
I've murdered a man
Maimed I saw neither sky nor rose
nor bird nor nest nor tree
nor Saint Francis
nor Achilles nor Hector For six years
fumes of blood gushed from my nose
I don't believe in water turned to wine
I don't believe in the forgiveness of sins
I don't believe in the resurrection of the dead

Wislawa Szymborska, who was born in 1923, lived near the railroad station in Krakow during World War II. From 1943, she worked as a railroad employee in a country crisscrossed by trains carrying troops to the front, the wounded back from wherever they saw action, and civilians seeking refuge from the war or being transported under guard to one of its notorious concentration camps. She saw and heard plenty:

Write it down. Write it. With ordinary ink
on ordinary paper: they weren't given food,
they all died of hunger. All. How many?
It's a large meadow. How much grass
per head? Write down: I don't know.
History rounds off skeletons to
zero.
A thousand and one is still only a thousand.
That one seems never to have
existed:
a fictitious fetus, an empty cradle, a primer opened for no one,
air that laughs, cries, and grows, stairs for a void bounding out to
the garden,
no one's spot in the ranks.
It became flesh right here, on this meadow.
But the meadow's silent, like a witness who's been bought *

*"Starvation Camp Near laslo," in Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh (Harcourt Brace, 1998), p. 42.

Adam Zagajewski's family roots are in Lvov, where many generations of his family lived and from where, shortly after he was born in 1945, they were repatriated to Gliwice, a small town in Poland, after Lvov became part of Soviet Ukraine. Growing up among homeless and bereaved people, as so many in those years were, who most probably talked of nothing but the war and its horrors, Zagajewski must have been left with a huge and lasting impression of their stories:

I dreamed of my distant city-
it spoke the language of children and the injured,
it spoke of many voices, rushing to shout each other down,
like simple people suddenly admitted
to the presence of a great official:
"There is no justice," it cried; "All has been taken from us," it wailed
loudly;
No one remembers us, not a soul" ...
("I Dreamed of My City," from Unseen Hand) 

The selection of Różewicz poems is the largest ever to be published in English. The earliest poem in the book dates from 1945 and the last one was written in 2008. Between these two, there are 124 other poems, a number of them several pages long. Różewicz began writing poetry when he was a schoolboy and his first poems were published right after the war. A collection of them, entitled Anxiety, appeared in 1947 and was an immediate success. Their author was understand ably much admired for giving a voice to a country that had lived through six years of tragedy and had lost almost six million of its citizens. The poem were short, stripped of the usual poetic embellishments, consisting almost entirely of short statements in a language kept so plain that even someone barely able to read would understand everything instantly. It's a poetry devoid of mystery, Różewicz explained in one of his poems. It justifies nothing, explains nothing, fulfills no hope, doesn't strive for originality, but only fulfills its own imperative and says what its author feels needs saying.
"I have no time for aesthetic values," he claimed, even though later on in life he became a successful avant-garde playwright and scriptwriter. Naked truth is what he was after in his poetry, the firm conviction that for those who saw truckloads of dismembered people, even art is suspect. Led to slaughter, as he said of himself afterward, he survived, losing forever something that our civilization failed to protect. Religion, philosophy, culture, and the entire moral and ethical heritage of the Western world struck Różewicz as fraudulent. He writes of being amazed that he could still see and hear, that he could wipe the sweat off his forehead, drink raspberry soda, buy pretzels and fuzzy peaches, and go out dancing with a redhead. "That old woman/pulling a goat on a rope," he says to himself in a poem, "is more needed/is worth more, than the seven wonders of the world, anyone who thinks or feels/she isn'1 needed," he concludes, "is guilty of genocide."
Różewicz’s nihilism is tempered with such outbursts. His poems overflow with compassion for suffering humanity. There are many elegies in his selected poems, many poignant poems about his mother, tributes to dead and living friends, and love poems to various women. He speaks to his readers without putting on airs, disclaiming any special power or insight as a poet, which makes his poems, even at their most banal, charming.
As he grows older, he writes more and more about the way the world he has known is changing. The longer, prosy sounding later poems ponder such subjects as mad cow disease, the paintings of Francis Bacon, Ezra Pound's sanity hearing, Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, Samuel Beckett, a visit to the zoo, and the inauguration of George W. Bush as president of what Różewicz calls the "sobbing superpower." These poems are as easy to read and as entertaining as an article in a Sunday newspaper or a weekly magazine. They also demonstrate the limitations of his poetry. Depending solely on their content, as they usually do, his poems once read give the reader little reason to return to them, either in thought or on the page, since what one encounters at first reading is pretty much all there is.

In this country, Wislawa Szymborska is the best-known and most-read Polish poet; one of her volumes can sell over 80,000 copies here. It is not just that she won the Nobel Prize; her compatriot Milosz did too. It's the kind of poetry she writes: it is as open to the reader as Różewicz 's, and yet much more satisfying and original. In addition, she translates well. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that her two translators, Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh (who is also Zagajewski's translator) give that impression in the five books of her poetry they have collaborated on so far. Extremely smart, witty, and levelheaded, she seduces us by her wide range of interests, her atypical lack of narcissism for a poet, and her cheerful pessimism.
This is how she begins a poem called "View with a Grain of Sand" from an older book of hers:

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor
sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean
nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and
touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from
falling on anything else with no assurance that it has
finished falling
or that it is falling still.

Szymborska often writes as if on an assigned subject-a grain of sand or Hitler's first photograph, or something more speculative like the existence of our souls, or the silence of plants around us. She then precedes to examine the subject more closely. First she describes what she sees, then she recalls what she and other people know about it, making sure the reader is following every turn of her mind as she untangles the thread of her thoughts on the way to some surprising conclusion to the poem, either witty or grim. If this sounds like poetry's equivalent of expository writing, it is. More than any poet I can think of, Szymborska not only wants to create a poetic state in her readers, but also to tell them things they didn't know before or never got around to thinking about.
"They call it: space," she writes in a poem from the new book, thinking as she lies in bed about the next day's journey: "What the devil does it border on?," this space that awaits her, "empty and full of everything at once?" Go to sleep, she tells herself, "tomorrow you've got more pressing matters": "touching objects placed close at hand,/casting glances, ... listening to voices"-in other words, real, concrete things. In a world in which no two days, two clouds in the sky, or two blades of grass under our feet are alike, nuance is everything. She has high regard for both reality and imagination; nevertheless, she insists on making sure the two are not confused. Comparing the singing of Ella Fitzgerald to Billie Holliday's in a short review of Fitzgerald's biography, Szymborska also says things that are true of her own poetry:

Yet at some point in the sixties some listeners' taste began to change. People started noticing certain limitations in Ella's singing. Not in her voice, which surmounted all obstacles with ease, but in her manner. Take, for instance, Billy Holiday, who poured her heart, soul, and various other organs into her songs. But Ella wasn't histrionic. She always kept a little distance from the text; she never worked the song into a lather. And thank heavens. I see this as yet another leaf for her laurel. Expressive singing is a slippery slope; once you're on it it's hard to get off.

Her new book, Here, is not as strong a collection as Monologue of a Dog, which came out in 2006. This is not a problem, since Szymborska is always worth reading. One funny little poem tells us that, considering how bleak things are elsewhere in the universe, in some ways life on our little planet is quite a bargain, even when one takes wars and other evils into consideration. Another poem imagines what it would be like if the teenager she once was suddenly stood before her. Would she treat her as near and dear or as a stranger? A poem called "Identification" is a poignant story of a woman who won't accept her husband's death in a plane crash. In "In a Mail Coach" she imagines being a passenger in a crowded coach with Juliusz Slowacki, Poland's greatest Romantic poet. (Once I substituted Edgar Allan Poe for Slowacki and an American stage coach, Szymborska's poem became even more marvelous to me.) Squeezed between I and their bundles, Slowacki pulls from a crumpled envelope a letter, read times before its pages frayed along edges, from which a dried violet suddenly drops. Luckily both he and visitor from the future seize it in flight:

... Alas my imagination lacks the power
to make him hear or at least see me.
He doesn't even feel me tug his sleeve.
He calmly slips the violet between the sheets,
and then into a trunk,
glances through the rain-streaked
window,
rises, pins his cloak, squeezes to
the door,
and what else? Gets off at the next station.

I keep him in my sight a few more minutes.
He walks off, so slight with that
trunk of his,
plows on, head down,
like one who knows
no one is waiting.

Now only the extras remain.
An extended clan beneath
umbrellas,
a corporal with a whistle, breathless
recruits in tow,
a wagon full of piglets,
and two fresh horses waiting to be
hitched.

Unseen Hand is Adam Zagajewski's sixth book of poetry translated into English. It will not disappoint those who already know and admire what is by now a considerable and impressive body of work. If Szymborska is a poet of imaginary journeys, Zagajewski is a real traveler with a ticket and a suitcase. He even has a poem called "Self-Portrait in an Airplane." Many of his poems are about towns and cities in Europe and the United States that he had either lived in or visited. Poetry and travel are allied, Czeslaw Mitosz once claimed, since poetry is an expression of wondering at things, landscapes, people, their habits and mores.

“Tay không nhìn thấy”, Unseen Hand là tập thơ thứ sáu được dịch qua tiếng Anh của Adam Zagajewski.
Nó sẽ chẳng làm thất vọng những người đã từng biết và mê cõi thơ đáng nể, ấn tượng của ông. Nếu Szymborska là nhà thơ của những chuyến đi tưởng tượng, thì Zagajewski đúng là 1 tay du khách thứ thiệt túi luôn có 1 cái vé và tay thì lắc lư 1 cái va li nho nhỏ. Ông còn có ngay 1 bài thơ làm rồi [không phải bài thơ đang làm dở ở trong túi], “Chân dung Tự họa trên Máy bay”, "Self-Portrait in an Airplane." Rất nhiều những bài thơ của ông là về những thành phố Âu Châu, hay Mẽo, mà ông ta từng sống, hay ghé thăm. Thơ và viễn du là đồng minh. Czeslaw Mitosz có lần phán, thơ là biểu hiện của sự ngạc nhiên về sự vật, phong cảnh, con người, những thói quen của họ, và nhiều nhiều nữ

I was struck by the many street poems in Zagajewski's book, often with their actual names, both in Gliwice where he grew up and in Krakow where he attended the university and now lives. These streets (one of them in the old Jewish Quarter) are for him both real places and places outside time, where he returns, either alone or in the company of his old father, who has lost his memory, as if to understand something that has eluded him about them and himself all these years. The mood throughout is elegiac. The light ash of his own melancholy covers even the beautiful Italian towns he visits and the river Garonne in southwest France, to which he dedicates two lovely poems.
Walking in the evening around a town square, he looks greedily at people’s faces. Each is different; one says something, another is persuaded, still another laughs:

I thought that the city is built not
of houses,
squares, boulevards, parks, wide
streets,
but of faces gleaming like lamps,
like the torches of welders, who mend
steel in clouds of sparks at night.

It's that last image of welders working at night with their torches that makes this poem, called "Faces," hard to forget. This is true of many of his other poems. Startling images lie in wait. He compares the impassive river Garonne, flowing in silence, to an Indian brave in plumes of sun; a plane taking off from an airport to a zealous pupil who believes what the old masters told him; the light bulbs hissing in gray hallways at night to the signals  of sinking ships. Describing attending a reading of young poets, he speaks of that moment when the inarguable charm of one good line, an unexpected metaphor or image, meant that all is temporarily forgiven.
In an essay entitled "The Shabby and the Sublime" in his book A Defense of Ardor, he quotes Maupassant:

From time to time I experience strange, intense, short-lived visions of beauty, an unfamiliar, elusive, barely perceptible beauty that surfaces in certain words or landscapes, certain colorations of the world, certain moments ...

This is a familiar experience, Zagajewski says of the passage, one that is also very difficult to convey. "In such moments," he continues, "one experiences something incomprehensible and piercing, both extravagant and absolutely fundamental." This struck me, as I read it, of being true of his poems too. The simultaneous vision of impermanence and permanence, the blending of what vanishes and what remains, are what his poems seek to communicate again and again. I kept thinking of Leopardi's great Romantic poem "I 'Infinito" as I read Zagajewski. He, too, is a poet of ecstatic moments. Watching swifts storming St. Catherine’s Church in Krakow in a beautiful poem by that name and reminding us that they're unable to navigate on land and know only flight, only the endless soaring overhead that demands, he says, a spectator both slightly sober and a little stirred. They also need someone’s eye and heart, the eye to trace the trajectories of dark missiles and the heart to sustain them in their enthusiasm, and thus fortified:

the swifts and the observer's heart
join for a brief moment
in an unlikely contract, in
admiration
for a world that has decided on a
late June evening,
so it seems, to reveal before us,
nonchalantly,
one of its zealously kept secrets
before night returns, mosquitoes
and ignorance,
and my life, unfinished,
uncertain,
made of joy and fear, of ceaseless
unsated curiosity, what's coming, next ...

"Poets, invisible like miners, den in the shafts,/build a home for us,” Zagajewski writes. Some do, indeed. The ones like him, or Emily Dickinson, give us a home, the one we receive a key to by reading their poems. They are poets of intense soul-searching torn between faith and doubt in for them is an ambiguous universe which an occasional moment of ecstasy and extraordinary clarity only deepens the mystery further. They speak of its torments and splendors in a late-night whisper.

The New York Review of Books Dec 22, 2011

 

 Szymborska thường viết, như thể, về 1 đề tài được chỉ định - một hạt cát, hay là bức hình đầu tiên của Hitler, hay một điều gì có tính suy đoán hơn, thí dụ, sự hiện hữu của linh hồn của chúng ta, hay là sự im lặng của cây cối quanh chúng ta. Rồi, tiếp đó, bà nghiên cứu, xem xét đề tài một cách gần gụi hơn. Trước tiên, bà miêu tả cái bà nhìn thấy, rồi bà nhớ lại những gì bà và những người khác biết về nó, và, yên chí lớn, độc giả theo kịp bà, cùng với bà đi tới mọi khúc rẽ, mọi bước ngoặt của cái đầu của bà, khi bà lần theo tư tưởng của mình, trên đường đi tới một kết luận ngỡ ngàng cho bài thơ, hoặc dí dỏm, hoặc tàn nhẫn, dã man, ác liệt.
Thơ như thế, có vẻ như là 1 cuộc triển khai, viết. Thì nó thế, thực.
Hơn hết thẩy những nhà thơ mà tôi biết, hay nghĩ tới, Szymborska không chỉ sáng tạo ra 1 tình trạng, một trạng thái [a state] thơ, ở nơi những độc giả của bà, nhưng còn nói cho họ biết, những điều họ chưa biết trước đó, và chẳng bao giờ nghĩ về nhưng điều đó.