Wisława Szymborska was a Polish poet, essayist, and translator, born in 1923 and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996 for poetry marked by a sharp, ironic awareness of human life and history.
Map: Collected and Last Poems is an English-language volume of Szymborska’s work, translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak and edited by Cavanagh. It gathers poems from across her career, including her final Polish collection, Enough, and includes many newly translated poems. “Map”, the title poem of the book, is one of Szymborska’s late poems and the final piece in the collection. In its English translation, the poem is noted for how translation handles a Polish idiom for “quiet,” a detail that became a focal point for translator Clare Cavanagh. But that’s not the poem I’d like to start with.
“The End and the Beginning” is one of her best-known reflections on war and aftermath. It describes the work of clearing rubble, burying the dead, and rebuilding after conflict, stressing that the real labour of history often starts when the fighting ends. It’s also a poem about the lack of attention to reconstruction.
“Photogenic it’s not, and takes years.
All the cameras have left for another war.”
This belongs in the same week as Herbert’s besieged city, but Herbert insisted that losing the ruins meant losing everything, that the broken stone was the last proof a city had ever existed. Szymborska isn’t interested in the stone as proof of anything: she’s interested in the person holding the broom, and what actually happens to that person’s knowledge over time.
“Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.”
No ceremony marks this handover: it simply happens and needs to happen, outside romanticism, generation by generation, because people need to live somewhere, and that’s life.
Aafter everything has been catalogued, cleared, rebuilt, and half-forgotten, someone lies in the grass that has grown back over “causes and effects,” a blade of grass in his mouth, looking at the clouds, with no idea what happened on that ground. Read against Herbert or Michaels, this should feel like a failure of memory, the exact outcome both of them were warning against. Szymborska doesn’t let it feel that way. There’s no irony poisoning the image, no implied rebuke aimed at the person in the grass: he’s just there, unbothered, doing what grass and people both eventually do on ground that’s been repaired well enough to be ordinary again. Arguably, erasure is needed for a certain degree of healing that’s necessary.
So, where’s the balance? And who’s authorised to do the erasing so that the healing can happen? That is the real question, I think.
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