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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  From UNPUBLISHED COLLECTION

  Once we had the world backwards and forwards . . .

  Leaving the Movie Theater

  Comic Love Poem

  Black Song

  From WHY WE LIVE

  In Trite Rhymes

  Circus Animals

  From QUESTIONS YOU ASK YOURSELF

  Questions You Ask Yourself

  Lovers

  Key

  CALLING OUT TO YETI

  Night

  Hania

  Nothing Twice

  Flagrance

  Buffo

  Commemoration

  Classifieds

  Moment of Silence

  Rehabilitation

  To My Friends

  Funeral (I)

  I hear trumpets play the tune . . .

  Brueghel’s Two Monkeys

  Still

  Greeting the Supersonics

  Still Life with a Balloon

  Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition

  An Effort

  Four A.M.

  Midsummer Night’s Dream

  Atlantis

  I’m Working on the World

  SALT

  The Monkey

  Lesson

  Museum

  A Moment in Troy

  Shadow

  The Rest

  Clochard

  Vocabulary

  Travel Elegy

  Without a Title

  An Unexpected Meeting

  Golden Anniversary

  Starvation Camp Near Jaslo

  Parable

  Ballad

  Over Wine

  Rubens’ Women

  Coloratura

  Bodybuilders’ Contest

  Poetry Reading

  Epitaph

  Prologue to a Comedy

  Likeness

  I am too close . . .

  The Tower of Babel

  Dream

  Water

  Synopsis

  In Heraclitus’s River

  Poem in Honor

  A Note

  Conversation with a Stone

  NO END OF FUN

  The Joy of Writing

  Memory Finally

  Landscape

  Family Album

  Laughter

  The Railroad Station

  Alive

  Born

  Census

  Soliloquy for Cassandra

  A Byzantine Mosaic

  Beheading

  Pietà

  Innocence

  Vietnam

  Written in a Hotel

  A Film from the Sixties

  Report from the Hospital

  Returning Birds

  Thomas Mann

  Tarsier

  To My Heart, on Sunday

  The Acrobat

  A Paleolithic Fertility Fetish

  Cave

  Motion

  No End of Fun

  COULD HAVE

  Could Have

  Falling from the Sky

  Wrong Number

  Theater Impressions

  Voices

  The Letters of the Dead

  Old Folks’ Home

  Advertisement

  Lazarus Takes a Walk

  Snapshot of a Crowd

  Going Home

  Discovery

  Dinosaur Skeleton

  Pursuit

  A Speech at the Lost-and-Found

  Astonishment

  Birthday

  Interview with a Child

  Allegro ma Non Troppo

  Autotomy

  Frozen Motion

  Certainty

  The Classic

  In Praise of Dreams

  True Love

  Nothingness unseamed itself for me too . . .

  Under One Small Star

  A LARGE NUMBER

  A Large Number

  Thank-You Note

  Psalm

  Lot’s Wife

  Seen from Above

  The Old Turtle’s Dream

  Experiment

  Smiles

  Military Parade

  The Terrorist, He’s Watching

  A Medieval Miniature

  Aging Opera Singer

  In Praise of My Sister

  Hermitage

  Portrait of a Woman

  Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem

  Warning

  The Onion

  The Suicide’s Room

  Apple Tree

  In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself

  Life While-You-Wait

  On the Banks of the Styx

  Utopia

  Pi

  THE PEOPLE ON THE BRIDGE

  Stage Fright

  Surplus

  Archeology

  View with a Grain of Sand

  Clothes

  On Death, Without Exaggeration

  The Great Man’s House

  In Broad Daylight

  Our Ancestors’ Short Lives

  Hitler’s First Photograph

  The Century’s Decline

  Children of Our Age

  Tortures

  Plotting with the Dead

  Writing a Résumé

  Funeral (II)

  An Opinion on the Question of Pornography

  A Tale Begun

  Into the Ark

  Possibilities

  Miracle Fair

  The People on the Bridge

  THE END AND THE BEGINNING

  Sky

  No Title Required

  Some People Like Poetry

  The End and the Beginning

  Hatred

  Reality Demands

  The Real World

  Elegiac Calculation

  Cat in an Empty Apartment

  Parting with a View

  Séance

  Love at First Sight

  May 16, 1973

  Maybe All This

  Slapstick

  Nothing’s a Gift

  One Version of Events

  We’re Extremely Fortunate

  MOMENT

  Moment

  Among the Multitudes

  Clouds

  Negative

  Receiver

  The Three Oddest Words

  The Silence of Plants

  Plato, or Why

  A Little Girl Tugs at the Tablecloth

  A Memory

  Puddle

  First Love

  A Few Words on the Soul

  Early Hour

  In the Park

  A Contribution to Statistics

  Some People

  Photograph from September 11

  Return Baggage

  The Ball

  A Note

  List

  Everything

  COLON

  Absence

  ABC

  Highway Accident

  The Day After—Without Us

  An Occurrence

  Consolation

  The Old Professor

  Perspective

  The Courtesy of the Blind

  Monologue of a Dog Ensnared in History

  An Interview with Atropos

  The Poet’s Nightmare

  Labyrinth

  Distraction

  Greek Statue

  In Fact Every Poem

  HERE

  Here

  Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets

  An Idea

  Teenager

  Hard Life with Memory

  Microcosmos

  Foraminifera

  Before a Journey

  Divorce

  Assassins

  Example

  Identifi
cation

  Nonreading

  Portrait from Memory

  Dreams

  In a Mail Coach

  Ella in Heaven

  Vermeer

  Metaphysics

  ENOUGH

  Someone I’ve Been Watching for a While

  Confessions of a Reading Machine

  There Are Those Who

  Chains

  At the Airport

  Compulsion

  Everyone Sometime

  Hand

  Mirror

  While Sleeping

  Reciprocity

  To My Own Poem

  Map

  Translator’s Afterword

  Translation Credits

  Index of Titles and First Lines

  Read More from Wisława Szymborska

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  All works by Wisława Szymborska

  copyright © The Wisława Szymborska Foundation

  www.szymborska.org.pl

  English translation © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-12602-2

  eISBN 978-0-544-12777-7

  v1.0415

  All translations in this edition were made by Clare Cavanagh or Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak

  FROM

  UNPUBLISHED COLLECTION

  1944–1948

  * * *

  Once we had the world backwards and forwards:

  —it was so small it fit in two clasped hands,

  so simple that a smile did to describe it,

  so common, like old truths echoing in prayers.

  History didn’t greet us with triumphal fanfares:

  —it flung dirty sand into our eyes.

  Ahead of us lay long roads leading nowhere,

  poisoned wells and bitter bread.

  Our wartime loot is knowledge of the world,

  —it is so large it fits in two clasped hands,

  so hard that a smile does to describe it,

  so strange, like old truths echoing in prayers.

  Leaving the Movie Theater

  Dreams flickered on white canvas.

  The moon’s husk glimmered for two hours.

  There was the melancholy song of love,

  a happy journey’s end and flowers.

  After the fairy tale, the world is hazy, blue.

  The roles and faces here are unrehearsed.

  The soldier sings the partisan’s laments.

  The young girl plays her songs of mourning too.

  I’m coming back to you, the real world,

  crowded, dark, and full of fate—

  you, one-armed boy beneath the gate,

  you, empty eyes of a young girl.

  Comic Love Poem

  I wear beads around my neck.

  Every day’s a day of joy

  sustained by the touch

  of unforeseen events.

  I only know the rhythm

  to a melody so soft

  that if you ever heard it,

  you’d have to hum along.

  I exist not in myself,

  I’m an element’s function.

  A symbol in the air.

  Or a circle on the water.

  Each time your eyes open,

  I only take what’s mine.

  I leave faithfully behind

  your earth, your fire.

  Black Song

  The long-drawn saxophonist, the saxophonist joker,

  he’s got his system for the world, he does fine without words.

  The future—who can guess it. The past—who’s got it right.

  Just blink those thoughts away and play a black song.

  They were dancing cheek to cheek. When someone dropped.

  Head struck floor to the beat. They danced by him in time.

  He didn’t see the knees above him. Pale eyelids dawned,

  plucked from the packed crowd, the night’s strange colors.

  Don’t make a scene. He’ll live. He must have drunk too much,

  the blood by his temple must be lipstick. Nothing happened.

  Just some guy on the floor. He fell himself, he’ll get himself up,

  he made it through the war. They danced on in cramped sweetness,

  revolving fans mixed cold and heat,

  the saxophone howled like a dog to a pink lantern.

  FROM

  WHY WE LIVE

  1952

  In Trite Rhymes

  A great joy: flower upon flower,

  the branches stretch in pristine blue,

  but there’s a greater: today’s Tuesday,

  tomorrow will bring mail from you,

  and still greater: the letter trembles,

  strange reading it in spots of sun,

  and still greater: just a week now,

  now just four days, now it’s begun,

  and still greater: I kneel on top

  and make the suitcase lid shut tight,

  and still greater: the train at seven,

  just one ticket, thanks, that’s right,

  and still greater: rushing windows,

  with view on view on view on view,

  and still greater: dark and darker,

  by nighttime I will be with you,

  and still greater: the door opens,

  and still greater: past the door,

  and still greater: flower on flower.

  —Ohhh, who are all these roses for?

  Circus Animals

  The marching bears hit all their notes,

  the lion jumps through flaming hoops,

  chimps ride their bikes in yellow coats,

  the whip cracks and the trumpet toots.

  The whip cracks, animal eyes leap,

  an elephant strides, pitcher on his head,

  dogs minuet with cautious feet.

  We humans should be better bred.

  So this was the great circus trip:

  applause cascaded, just as planned,

  an arm made longer by a whip

  cast its sharp shadow on the sand.

  FROM

  QUESTIONS YOU ASK YOURSELF

  1954

  Questions You Ask Yourself

  What do a smile and

  handshake hold?

  Do your greetings never

  keep you as far

  apart as other people

  sometimes are

  when passing judgment

  at first glance?

  Do you open each human

  fate like a book,

  seeking feelings

  not in fonts

  or formats?

  Are you sure you

  decipher people completely?

  You gave an evasive

  word in answering,

  a bright joke in place of openness—

  how do you tally your losses?

  Stunted friendships,

  frozen worlds.

  Do you know that friendship,

  like love, requires teamwork?

  Someone missed a step

  in this demanding effort.

  In your friends’ errors

  do you bear no blame?

  Someone complained, advised.

  How many tears ran dry

  before you lent a hand?

  Jointly responsible

  for the happiness of millennia,

  don’t you slight

  the single minute

  of a tear, a wince?

  Do you never overlook

  another’s effort?

  A glass stood on the table,

  no one noticed

  until it fell,

/>   toppled by a thoughtless gesture.

  Are people really so simple

  as far as people go?

  Lovers

  In this quiet we can still hear

  what they were singing yesterday

  about the high road and the low road . . .

  We hear—but we don’t believe it.

  Our smile doesn’t mask our sorrow,