View With A Grain Of Sand

Selected Poems

Wislawa Szymborska

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780156002165
• eBook ISBN: 9780547546292
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

A remarkable, graceful collection from one of Europe’s most prominent and celebrated poets.

In these 100 poems, Wislawa Szymborska portrays a world of astonishing diversity and richness, in which nature is wise and prodigal and fate unpredictable, if not mischievous. With acute irony tempered by a generous curiosity, she documents life's improbability as well as its transient beauty.

"Wislawa Szymborska is not only one of the finest poets living today, but also one of the most readable. In these dazzling new translations Baranczak and Cavanaugh convey the full range of her wit and humor in poems that read as if they were written in English.” -Charles Simic

One Version of Events

If we’d been allowed to choose,

we’d probably have gone on forever.

The bodies that were offered didn’t fit,

and wore out horribly.

The ways of sating hunger

made us sick.

We were repelled

by blind heredity

and the tyranny of glands.

The world that was meant to embrace us

decayed without end

and the effects of causes raged over it.

Individual fates

were presented for our inspection:

appalled and grieved,

we rejected most of them.

Questions naturally arose, e.g.,

who needs the painful birth

of a dead child

and what’s in it for a sailor

who will never reach the shore.

We agreed to death,

but not to every kind.

Love attracted us,

of course, but only love

that keeps its word.

Both fickle standards

and the impermanence of artworks

kept us wary of the Muses’ service.

Each of us wished to have a homeland

free of neighbors

and to live his entire life

in the intervals between wars.

No one wished to seize power

or to be subject to it.

No one wanted to fall victim

to his own or others’ delusions.

No one volunteered

for crowd scenes and processions,

to say nothing of dying tribes—

although without all these

history couldn’t run its charted course

through centuries to come.

Meanwhile, a fair number

of stars lit earlier

had died out and grown cold.

It was high time for a decision.

Voicing numerous reservations,

candidates finally emerged

for a number of roles as healers and explorers,

a few obscure philosophers,

one or two nameless gardeners,

artistes and virtuosos—

though even these livings

couldn’t all be filled

for lack of other kinds of applications.

It was time to think

the whole thing over.

We’d been offered a trip

from which we’d surely be returning soon,

wouldn’t we.

A trip outside eternity—

monotonous, no matter what they say,

and foreign to time’s flow.

The chance may never come our way again.

We were besieged by doubts—

does knowing everything beforehand

really mean knowing everything.

Is a decision made in advance

re...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• CALLING OUT TO YETI
• Brueghel’s Two Monkeys
• Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition
• Nothing Twice
• SALT
• Museum
• A Moment in Troy
• Clochard
• Vocabulary
• Travel Elegy
• An Unexpected Meeting
• Rubens’ Women
• Coloratura
• Bodybuilders’ Contest
• Poetry Reading
• The Tower of Babel
• Water
• Conversation with a Stone
• NO END OF FUN
• The Joy of Writing
• Landscape
• Family Album
• The Railroad Station
• Born
• Soliloquy for Cassandra
• A Byzantine Mosaic
• Beheading
• Pietà
• Returning Birds
• Thomas Mann
• Tarsier
• The Acrobat
• A Palaeolithic Fertility Fetish
• No End Of Fun
• COULD HAVE
• Could Have
• Theatre Impressions
• Voices
• The Letters of the Dead
• Advertisement
• Going Home
• Discovery
• Dinosaur Skeleton
• Birthday
• Allegro ma non troppo
• Autotomy
• Frozen Motion
• The Classic
• In Praise of Dreams
• True Love
• Under One Small Star
• A LARGE NUMBER
• A Large Number
• Thank-You Note
• Psalm
• Lot’s Wife
• Seen from Above
• Experiment
• Smiles
• The Terrorist, He’s Watching
• A Medieval Miniature
• In Praise of My Sister
• Hermitage
• Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem
• Warning
• The Onion
• The Suicide’s Room
• In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself
• On the Banks of the Styx
• Utopia
• Pi
• THE PEOPLE ON THE BRIDGE
• Archeology
• View with a Grain of Sand
• Clothes
• On Death, without Exaggeration
• In Broad Daylight
• Our Ancestors’ Short Lives
• Hitler’s First Photograph
• The Century’s Decline
• Children of Our Age
• Tortures
• Plotting with the Dead
• Writing a Résumé
• Funeral
• An Opinion on the Question of Pornography
• A Tale Begun
• Into the Ark
• Miracle Fair
• The People on the Bridge
• THE END AND THE BEGINNING
• Sky
• No Title Required
• The End and the Beginning
• Hatred
• Reality Demands
• Elegiac Calculation
• Cat in an Empty Apartment
• Parting with a View
• Séance
• Love at First Sight
• May 16, 1973
• Maybe All This
• Slapstick
• Nothing’s a Gift
• One Version of Events
• We’re Extremely Fortunate
• About the Author
• Footnotes