I might have been myself minus amazement,
that is,
someone completely different.
I wrote recently, in three posts last autumn, about the life and work of the poet Wislawa Szymborska. (See Wislawa Szymborska, poet, 1923-2012; Stockholm: Wislawa Szymborska and the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize; and The Soul, by Wislawa Szymborska.) If you are unfamiliar with her poems, I hope you will begin to explore them there.
Now I've been reading Szymborska again, and some fine critical writing shedding valuable light on her work, in the New York Review of Books as that journal celebrates its 50th anniversary of publication. This new reading offers further appreciation and understanding of her extraordinary poetic imagination. Szymborska is rightly identified as "a poet of consciousness," what Edward Hirsch called "the radical contingency of experience itself."
The translations of Szymborska's poetry by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak are regarded as masterful; they won a 1996 PEN Translation Prize.
The volume of Szymborska's poems most often recommended is Poems New and Collected, which also includes her Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
From the NYRB, here is a fine photograph and a very brief biographical sketch:
"Szymborska was born in 1923 in Bnin, a small town in western Poland, and from early childhood lived in Kraków. She worked on the editorial staff of the cultural weekly Życie Literackie (Literary Life) from 1952 to 1981. Szymborska wrote some twenty books of poetry, was a distinguished translator of French poetry into Polish, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996, “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” She died in February 2012."
And here is another poem, revealing her imaginative, playful and deeply gifted spirit :
Among the Multitudes I am who I am. A coincidence no less unthinkable than any other. I could have different ancestors, after all. I could have fluttered from another nest or crawled bescaled from under another tree. Nature’s wardrobe holds a fair supply of costumes: spider, seagull, field mouse. Each fits perfectly right off and is dutifully worn into shreds. I didn’t get a choice either, but I can’t complain. I could have been someone much less separate. Someone from an anthill, shoal, or buzzing swarm, an inch of landscape tousled by the wind. Someone much less fortunate, bred for my fur or Christmas dinner, something swimming under a square of glass. A tree rooted to the ground as the fire draws near. A grass blade trampled by a stampede of incomprehensible events. A shady type whose darkness dazzled some. What if I’d prompted only fear, loathing, or pity? If I’d been born in the wrong tribe, with all roads closed before me? Fate has been kind to me thus far. I might never have been given the memory of happy moments. My yen for comparison might have been taken away. I might have been myself minus amazement, that is, someone completely different.