Literature &Poetry Entropy | 23 Nov 2008
The Joy of Writing
I’ve once again returned to Szymborska’s Poem. This is one of her signature poems where she playfully investigates the nature of the poetic imagination. It muses about the relationship between words & things, and illuminates the character of poetic making..
As such this my fifth post on her work..
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence – this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word “woods.”
Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they’ll never let her get away.
Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.
They forget that what’s here isn’t life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof’s full stop.
Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?
The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.
From “No End of Fun”, 1967
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
© Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
on 24 Nov 2008 at 1:26 pm 1.michele roohani said …
“The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.”
how powerful…just a few words and a big smile forms on my face like every time that i read something meaningful, i am vitalized by it— even on my quiet days.
“Like a prolonged hesitation between poem and prose, the song of a flute in the evening.”
jean michel maulpoix