A Few Words On The Soul
I return to Wislawa Szymborska once again.. for her simple yet profound words..”My apologies to great questions for small answers.”
This poem like all her poems can be interpreted on several levels but what can be felt especially strongly is the universally human meaning, here having both an existential and a deeply ethical dimension.
A Few Words on the Soul
We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.
Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.
Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.
It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.
It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.
For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.
Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.
It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.
Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.
We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.
Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.
It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.
We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.
- By Wislawa Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
on 18 Feb 2010 at 9:34 am 1.Max Babi said …
Ajay,
Thanks a lot for this lovley sample of Wislawa Szymborska’s brilliance. All her poems have that contemporary Euro-touch, making everyday events and small things that make up a routine day, full of inexpressible mystique and enigmatic revelations.
She is one of the major poets today, no doubt.
Thanks a lot for keeping our souls dusted and oil-slick free….
Cheerz!
Max
on 18 Feb 2010 at 4:27 pm 2.marie-ancolie said …
You can come to Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry/writings as often as you want Ajay.
She says with so simple words what all of us see, think,
and wish. Beautiful choice of yours again, and I propose you this one
too. Her words are so true, they should reach immediately all hearts and souls.
“the kindness of the blind”
A poet is reading to the blind.
He did not suspect it was so hard.
His voice is breaking.
His hands are shaking.
He feels that here each sentence
is put to the test of the dark.
It will have to fend for itself
without the lights or colors.
A perilous adventure
for the stars in his poems,
for the dawn, the rainbow, the clouds, neon lights, the moon,
for the fish until now so silver under water,
and the hawk so silently high in the sky.
He is reading—for it is too late to stop—
of a boy in a jacket yellow in the green meadow,
of red rooftops easy to spot in the valley,
the restless numbers on the players’ shirts,
and a nude stranger in the door cracked open.
He would like to pass over—though it’s not an option—
all those saints on the cathedral’s ceiling,
that farewell wave from the train window,
the microscope lens, ray of light in the gem,
video screens, and mirrors, and the album with faces.
Yet great is the kindness of the blind,
great their compassion and generosity.
They listen, smile, and clap.
One of them even approaches
with a book held topsy-turvy
to ask for an invisible autograph.
on 18 Feb 2010 at 10:04 pm 3.Michele said …
what a beautiful poem Ajay…
The soul is absent superficially but always present profoundly and I disagree with the statement that it disappears when we chop vegetables!
cooking with friends and sharing meals together (notice I said with friends) is one of the most soulful (available to us all) experiences…
yes…clocks and mirrors…the two enemies of the old…how can your soul like those? how can an old soul even care about the arch-superficial mirror?
but never mind me…I am parsing the poem like a cold engineer that I can become when my soul is wandering on the Malibu beach somewhere!