CONCH

In front of the mirror in my parents’ bedroom lay a pink conch. I used to approach it on tiptoes, and with a sudden movement put it against my ears. I wanted to surprise it one day when it wasn’t longing with a monotonous hum for the sea. Although I was small I knew that even if we love someone very much, at times it happens that we forget about it.


Zbigniew Herbert
1924-1998


‘Conch’ translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter

 Zbigniew Herbert was a Polish poet, essayist, drama writer, author of plays, and moralist. A member of the Polish resistance movement during World War II, he is one of the best known and the most translated post-war Polish writers.

HAPPINESS

My hair is happy
and my skin is happy.
My skin quivers with happiness.

I breathe happiness instead of air,
slowly and deeply,
as a man who avoided a mortal danger.

Tears roll down my face,
I do not know it.
I forget I still have a face.
My skin is singing,
I shiver.

I feel time's duration
as it felt in the hour of death.
As if my sense of time alone were grasping the world,
as if existence were time only.
Immersed in terrifying
magnificence
I feel every second of happiness, as it arrives,
fills up, bursts into flower
according to its own natural way,
unhurried as a fruit,
astounding as a deity.

Now
I begin to scream.
I am screaming. I leave my body.
I do not now whether I am human anymore,
how could anyone know that, screaming with happiness.
Yet one dies from such screaming,
thus I am dying from happiness.
On my face there are probably no more tears,
my skin probably does not sing by now.
I don't know whether I still have a skin,
from me to my skin
is too far to know.

Soon I will go.
I do not shiver any longer,
I do not breathe any longer.
I don't know whether I still have
something to breathe with.

I feel time's duration,
how perfectly I feel time's duration.

I sink
I sink into time.


Anna Swir (Swirszcynska)
1909-1984

REALITY DEMANDS

La Cambe, Normandy

Reality demands
we also state the following:
life goes on.
It does so near Cannae and Borodino,
at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.

There is a gas station
in a small plaza in Jericho,
and freshly painted
benches near Bila Hora.
Letters travel
between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,
a furniture truck passes
before the eyes of the lion of Cheronea,
and only an atmospheric front advances
towards the blossoming orchards near Verdun.

There is so much of Everything
that Nothing is quite well concealed.
Music flows
from yachts near Actium
and couples on board dance in the sunlight.

So much keeps happening,
that it must be happening everywhere.
Where stone is heaped on stone,
there is an ice cream truck
besieged by children.
Where Hiroshima had been,
Hiroshima is again
manufacturing products
for everyday use.

Not without its charms is this terrible world,
not without its mornings
worth our waking.

In the fields of Maciejowice
the grass is green
and on the grass is -- you know how grass is --
transparent dew.

Maybe there are no fields other than battlefields,
those still remembered,
and those long forgotten,
birch woods and cedar woods,
snows and sands, iridescent swamps,
and ravines of dark defeat
where today, in sudden need,
you squat behind a bush.

What moral flows from this? Maybe none.
But what really flows is quickly-drying blood,
and as always, some rivers and clouds.

On the tragic mountain passes
the wind blows hats off heads
and we cannot help--
but laugh.


Wislawa Szymborska
1923-2012


Nobel Prize Winner 1996




translated by  Joanna Trzeciak

FUNNY

Photo by Navesh Chitrakar (on Pixdaus.com)

Idol Kathmandu - An Offering

What's it like to be human

the bird asked

I myself don't know

it's being held prisoner by your skin

while reaching infinity

being a captive of your scrap of time

while touching eternity

being hopelessly uncertain

and helplessly hopeful

being a needle of frost

and a handful of heat

breathing in the air

and choking wordlessly

it's being on fire

with a nest made of ashes

eating bread

while filling up on hunger

it's dying without love

it's loving through death

That's funny said the bird

and flew effortlessly up into the air.

Anna Kamienska

1920-1986

translated from the Polish by

Stanislav Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

THE JOY OF WRITING

Where is a written deer running through a written forest?

Whether to drink from written water

which will reflect its mouth like a carbon?

Why is it raising its head, does it hear something?

Propped on four legs borrowed from the truth

it pricks up its ears from under my fingers.

Silence  -  that word, too, is rustling on paper

and parts the branches caused by the word 'forest'.

Over a white page letters are ready to jump

and they may take a bad turn.

Sentences capable of bringing to bay,

and against which there is no help.

In a drop of ink there are quite a few

hunters squinting one eye,

ready to rush down a vertical pen,

to encircle the deer, to take aim.

They forget that this is not life here.

Other laws rule here, in black and white.

An instant will last as long as I desire.

It will allow a division into small eternities

each full of buckshot stopped in its flight.

If I command, nothing here will happen ever.

Not even a leaf will fall without my accord,

or a blade of grass bend under a dot of a hoof.

And so there is such a world

on which I impose my autonomous Fate?

A time which I bind with fetters of signs?

A life that at my command is perpetual?

The joy of writing.

A chance to make things stay.

A revenge of a mortal hand.

Wislawa Szymborska

1923

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996

translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz