Life &Poetry Entropy | 12 Sep 2008
Nothing Twice
Delightful Inventiveness, Prodigious Imagination..is the appropriate description of Wislawa Szymborska’s work. Her poems are probing and complete messages. In attenuated, sometimes even colloquial language, Szymborska raises original and unsettling questions about human nature, the precariousness and sense of human existence, about mankind’s place in the universe. Her poetry is never confessional or personal. She transforms her observations, issuing from personal experiences, into poems of a general nature, touching upon the universal or even the cosmic.
As such this is my fourth post on her work
Nothing Twice
Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.
Even if there is no one dumber,
if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,
you can’t repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.
No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.
One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.
The next day, though you’re here with me,
I can’t help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is it a flower or a rock?
Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It’s in its nature not to say
Today is always gone tomorrow
With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we’re different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.
By Wislawa Szymborska.
Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak