 |
 February 2, 2012 Wislawa Szymborska: The
Happiness of Wisdom Felt Posted by Adam Gopnik It was only
the other morning that my wife, happening to leaf again through “Here,”
the
most recent gathering of Wislawa Szymborska’s poems, remarked, looking
at the
cover photograph of the eighty-something-year-old Polish poet, the
writer’s
eyes shut in private bliss, cigarette in hand, “You know, I’m worried
about
Szymborska. I wish she would stop smoking.” This remark—made, of
course, by
someone who had never come anywhere near the poet’s fleshly, personal
presence—was a sign of the effect that Szymborska had on her readers.
They
thought of her as a friend and neighbor and counsellor—as someone to
worry
about, and worry with, more than someone to merely pay the blank
tribute of
“admiration.” She had no mere “admirers,” really, though her friends
and fans,
in this American neighborhood alone, ran from Jane Hirshfeld and Billy
Collins
to Woody Allen. Of course,
obituaries are not—or shouldn’t be—a competitive sport, so we shouldn’t
spend
too long complaining that the New York Times, this morning, announcing
her
death—from lung cancer, just as my wife had feared and the photo
presaged—badly
underplayed it, pushing her off to the margins with a much shorter
notice than
they gave the death of the artist Mike Kelley. Bitching about
obituaries (to
invent a rather Szymborksian title for a poem) is a mug’s game, so: not
too
long—but a moment. A poem of hers should have appeared on the front
page, but,
allowing that that’s too much to ask, the notice might have given those
unfamiliar with her work some sense of why she mattered so much.
Nothing in the
Times obit—which oddly made much of her early unimportant political
writing and
was inadvertently chauvinist in its implication that the Nobel Prize
overburdened her in a way that it might not have some other, more
burly,
pundit-minded male writer—would give a non-Szymborska-reader a clear
sense of
why she won it, or why hers was perhaps the one recent “obscure” Nobel
in
Literature to which everyone who knew the author’s work already
assented.
(Everyone who didn’t know her work, and was puzzled, read it, and then
they
assented, too.) She is that kind of good. Though
hardly a happy poet in the usual sense—born in Krakow in 1923, possibly
the
worst moment and place ever to arrive on this planet, with Hitler
waiting to
greet her on her sixteenth birthday and Stalin evilly coming along
behind, how
could she be?—Szymborska’s poetry had the gift of creating both the
happiness
of wisdom felt and the ecstatic happiness of the particulars of life
fully
imagined. From the experience of armies and dogmas and death that
shaped her
early life, she found a new commitment to the belief that the poetic
impulse,
however small its objects, is always saner than the polemical
imperative,
however passionate its certitudes. Szymborska
took as subjects “chairs and sorrows, scissors, tenderness,
transistors, violins,
teacups, dams and quips,” to use a list from the title poem in that
last
collection. Though determinedly microcosmic, she was never minor.
Szymborska
takes on an onion, and that onion is peeled, down to its essence. A
Szymborska
poem is always charming, wonderfully charming, charming as a small
child
singing, charming as a great pop-song lyric. But her poems are also, to
use an
old word, “deep,” mysteriously so, about the very nature of existence.
The sum
effect of a Szymborska poem, at least as rendered in American English,
is often
of an odd but happy collaboration between Ogden Nash and Emily
Dickinson.
(Though she is less easily defeated than Ogden, and more worldly than
Emily.) In her
poetry, a child about to pull a tablecloth from a table becomes every
scientist
beginning an experiment; a visit to the doctor, with its stripping down
and
piling on of clothes, a metaphor for the company and odd mechanisms of
our
naked bodies; she ponders the grammar of divorce (“are they still
linked with
the conjunction ‘and’ or does a period divide them?”) and the inner
life of
Hitler’s dog. In my favorite of all her poems, “A Tale Began” (which I
was
overjoyed to be able to use for the epigraph for my own book “Through
The
Children’s Gate”), she writes about the range of human difficulties
that, over
time, make the decision to have a child impossible. “The world is never
ready
for the birth of a child,” she writes, and goes on: Our ships
are not yet back from Winland But the
child, arrives anyway, and she wishes that: May delivery
be easy, But not so
far In a way,
Szymborska supplied her own best epitaph, and obituary, in the text of
her
Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which she took on the “astonishment”
of
normal life: “Astonishing”
is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all,
by things
that deviate from some well known and universally acknowledged norm,
from an
obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Granted, in daily speech, where
we don’t
stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary
world,”
“ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events.” …But in the language
of poetry,
where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single
stone and
not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night
after it.
And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this
world. Not a single
existence unastonishing. So perhaps a notice merging her existence into
so many
others, not making too much of it, would have been the one she wanted,
and
found truly astonishing. In any case, the poems are there this morning
as much
as they were there last night, with the poet still smoking and smiling
on the
cover of her final book. Though doubtless to those who loved her as
Wislawa the
loss is immense, is it too terrible to admit that I can’t recall a
literary
loss I’ve felt with more emotion but less grief? We can now press
Szymborska on
to the next receptive reader. “You now have a curated body of work that
you can
love and contemplate,” that same wife said this morning. While the poet
lived,
it was cheering to think, as her readers did almost every day, that
another
poem might be coming. Now that’s she gone, we’re happy—truly happy,
astonishingly happy—to know the poems came.
|