Wislawa Szymborska
Saturday, June 23rd, 2007I have spent the day with Wislawa Szymborska’s Poems New and Collected, and I am enraptured by her, spellbound and deeply pleasured by her, grateful to her and to Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, who put her words into English. I will spend many more days with her, Inshallah. Her book will have to be squeezed into the small bookcase I have set aside to take to Seth’s house, books I can’t bear to part with. There is a wonderfully engaging photograph of Szymborska on the inside back cover of the paperback edition of the book. She was born a year before my mother, and she looks like a woman full of stories. The first of her poems that shredded my consciousness was “Tortures.” There is another translation and another interesting portrait photograph on a blog here (scroll down a bit, to the third picture and just below it). This version, which I think is a much more powerful translation, first appeared in The People on the Bridge (1986) but is included in the collected works: [read on]
Kendall