]
“O Theotropia, my empress consort.”, [>]
Our Ancestors’ Short Lives, [>]
Our one-sided acquaintance, [>]
Our twentieth century was going to improve on the others, [>]
Out of a hundred people, [>]
Over Wine, [>]
Parable, [>]
Parting with a View, [>]
Perspective, [>]
Photograph from September [>], [>]
Pi, [>]
Pietà, [>]
Plato, or Why, [>]
Plotting with the Dead, [>]
Poem in Honor, [>]
Poetry Reading, [>]
Poets and writers, [>]
Poised beneath a twig-wigged tree, [>]
Portrait from Memory, [>]
Portrait of a Woman, [>]
Possibilities, [>]
Prologue to a Comedy, [>]
Psalm, [>]
Puddle, [>]
Pursuit, [>]
Questions You Ask Yourself, [>]
Reality Demands, [>]
Receiver, [>]
Reciprocity, [>]
Rehabilitation, [>]
Report from the Hospital, [>]
Return Baggage, [>]
Returning Birds, [>]
Returning memories?, [>]
Rubens’ Women, [>]
Séance, [>]
See how efficient it still is, [>]
Seen from Above, [>]
Shadow, [>]
She must be a variety, [>]
She prayed to God, [>]
She’s been in this world for over a year, [>]
Sky, [>]
Sky, earth, morning, [>]
Slapstick, [>]
Smiles, [>]
Snapshot of a Crowd, [>]
So he once was. He invented zero, [>]
So here we are, the naked lovers, [>]
So he’s got to have happiness, [>]
Soliloquy for Cassandra, [>]
So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum, [>]
Some fishermen pulled a bottle from the deep. It held a piece of, [>]
Someone I’ve Been Watching for a While, [>]
Some people—, [>]
Some People, [>]
Some People Like Poetry, [>]
So much world all at once—how it rustles and bustles!, [>]
“so suddenly, who could have seen it coming,” [>]
So these are the Himalayas, [>]
So this is his mother, [>]
So what did Isaac do?, [>]
Stage Fright, [>]
Starvation Camp Near Jaslo, [>]
Still, [>]
Still Life with a Balloon, [>]
Subject King Alexander predicate cuts direct, [>]
Surplus, [>]
Synopsis, [>]
Tarsier, [>]
Teenager, [>]
Thank you, my heart:, [>]
Thank-You Note, [>]
The Acrobat, [>]
The admirable number pi:, [>]
Theater Impressions, [>]
The Ball, [>]
The bomb in the bar will explode at thirteen twenty, [>]
The buzzard never says it is to blame, [>]
The cemetery plot for tiny graves, [>]
The Century’s Decline, [>]
The Classic, [>]
The commonplace miracle:, [>]
The Courtesy of the Blind, [>]
The Day After—Without Us, [>]
The End and the Beginning, [>]
The first display case, [>]
The forest in the Vosges Mountains shines, [>]
The Great Man’s House, [>]
The Great Mother has no face, [>]
The hour between night and day, [>]
The Joy of Writing, [>]
The key was here and now it’s gone, [>]
The Letters of the Dead, [>]
The little girl I was—, [>]
The long-drawn saxophonist, the saxophonist joker, [>]
The marble tells us in golden syllables:, [>]
The marching bears hit all their notes, [>]
The Master hasn’t been among us long, [>]
The Monkey, [>]
The morning is expected to be cool and foggy, [>]
The Old Professor, [>]
The old turtle dreams about a lettuce leaf, [>]
The Old Turtle’s Dream, [>]
The Onion, [>]
The onion, now that’s something else, [>]
The People on the Bridge, [>]
The poet reads his lines to the blind, [>]
The Poet’s Nightmare, [>]
The professor has died three times now, [>]
The Railroad Station, [>]
The Real World, [>]
The real world doesn’t take flight, [>]
There are catalogs of catalogs, [>]
There are dogs and dogs, I was among the chosen, [>]
There Are Those Who, [>]
There are those who conduct life more precisely, [>]
There’s nothing more debauched than thinking, [>]
There’s nothing on the walls, [>]
The Rest, [>]
These days we just hold him, [>]
The Silence of Plants, [>]
The Suicide’s Room, [>]
The Terrorist, He’s Watching, [>]
The Three Oddest Words, [>]
The Tower of Babel, [>]
The two of them were left so long alone, [>]
The world is never ready, [>]
The world would rather see hope than just hear, [>]
They call it: space, [>]
They jumped from the burning floors—, [>]
They made love in a hazel grove, [>]
They must have been different once, [>]
They passed like strangers, [>]
They’re both convinced, [>]
They run to each other with open arms, [>]
They say, [>]
They say I looked back out of curiosity, [>]
They still don’t know, [>]
They think for days on end, [>]
They were or they weren’t, [>]
This adult male. This person on earth, [>]
This isn’t Miss Duncan, the noted danseuse?, [>]
This is what I see in my dreams about final exams:, [>]
This spring the birds came back again too early, [>]
Thomas Mann, [>]
“Thou art certain then, our ship hath touch’d upon, [>]
Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets, [>]
Titanettes, female fauna, [>]
To be a boxer, or not to be there, [>]
“Today he sings this way: tralala tra la, [>]
To My Friends, [>]
To My Heart, on Sunday, [>]
To My Own Poem, [>]
Tortures, [>]
Travel Elegy, [>]
True Love, [>]
True love. Is it normal, [>]
Twenty-seven bones, [>]
Under One Small Star, [>]
Under what conditions do you dream of the dead?, [>]
Up the verdantest of hills, [>]
Utopia, [>]
Vermeer, [>]
Vietnam, [>]
View with a Grain of Sand, [>]
Vocabulary, [>]
Voices, [>]
Warning, [>]
Water, [>]
We are children of our age, [>]
We call it a grain of sand, [>]
We eat another life so as to live, [>]
We have a soul at times, [>]
Well, my poor man, [>]
Well versed in the expanses, [>]
We read the letters of the dead like helpless gods, [>]
We’re Extremely Fortunate, [>]
We treat each other with exceeding courtesy;, [>]
We used matches to draw lots: who would visit him., [>]
We were chatting, [>]
What do a smile and, [>]
What needs to be done?, [>]
“What time is it?” “Oh yes, I’m so happy;, [>]
When I pronounce the word Future, [>]
When they first started looking through microscopes, [>]
While Sleeping, [>]
WHOEVER’S found out what location, [>]
Why, after all, this one and not the rest?, [>]
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?, [>]
Why not, let’s take the Foraminifera, [>]
Without a Title, [>]
With the help of people and the other elements, [>]
“Woman, what’s your name?” “I don’t know.”, [>]
Write it down. Write it. With ordinary ink, [>]
Writing a Résumé, [>]
Written in a Hotel, [>]
Wrong Number, [>]
Yes, I remember that wall, [>]
You can’t move an inch, my dear Marcus Emilius, [>]
You expected a hermit to live in the wilderness, [>]
You’re crying here, but there they’re dancing, [>]
You take off, we take off, they take off, [>]
Visit www.hmhco.com or your favorite retailer to order Here, by Wisława Szymborska.
About the Author
WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA (1923–2012) was born in Poland and worked as a poetry editor, translator and columnist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996.
CLARE CAVANAGH has received an NBCC award for criticism and a PEN Translation Prize for her work, with STANISŁAW BARAŃSCZAK, on Szymborska’s poetry.
Footnotes
* Changed from Shakespeare’s “perfect.” (Translators’ note)
[back]
***
* Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, an enormously gifted poet of the “war generation,” was killed as a Home Army fighter in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 at the age of twenty-three. (Translators’ note)
[back]
***
* The reference is to the Polish novelist Bolesław Prus (1847–1912), whose most famous work, The Doll (1890), later became a popular TV miniseries. (Translators’ note)
[back]
***
* One of Poland’s greatest Romantic poets, Słowacki lived from 1809 to 1849. (Translators’ note)
[back]