`Time Deserves an Honorable Mention Here'

Thanks to Dave Lull for alerting me to a characteristically colloquial, slight-feeling new poem by Wislawa Szymborska, “A Greek Statue,” published in the March issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The translation from the Polish is by Joanna Trzeciak:

“With the help of people and other disasters,
time has worked pretty hard on it.
First it took away the nose, later the genitals,
one by one fingers and toes,
with the passing of years arms, one after the other,
right thigh and left thigh,
back and hips, head and buttocks,
and what fell off, time broke into pieces,
into chunks, into gravel, into sand.

“When someone living dies this way,
much blood flows with each blow.

“Yet marble statues perish pale
and not always all the way.

“Of the one we are speaking of, only a torso remains,
like breath held under exertion
as it now must
draw unto
itself
all the grace and weight
of what has been lost.

“And it pulls this off,
pulls this off still,
pulls us in and dazzles,
dazzles and endures –

Time deserves an honorable mention here,
as it stopped midway
and left something for later.”

I say “slight-feeling” because Szymborska’s manner is casual and slangy despite the philosophical heft of her poems. Like Jane Austen, she wears the mask of a clever but conventional woman, a strategy that permits her to take on weighty matters while clandestinely puncturing over-inflated inflated ideas and reputations. “A Greek Statue” reads like a cheeky repudiation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” with its presumptuous final sentence: “Du mußt dein Leben ändern.” (“You must change your life.”) When I read that, I want to tell Rilke to mind his own damn business and change his own damn life.

Szymborska likes endings. Her poems often are organized around a single idea, with endings like ambiguous punch lines. When they succeed, her poems often conclude with a distilled nugget of insight or a koan-like aphorism. When they fail, they often trail off into whimsy. In “A Greek Statue,” the notion of time stopping “midway” is a grim, humbling metaphysical joke – especially the conceit of leaving “something for later.” Here are some other memorable Szymborska finales:

“The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.”
(from “The Joy of Writing”)

“I might have been myself minus amazement,
That is,
Someone completely different.”
(from “Among the Multitudes“)

“The abyss doesn’t divide us.
The abyss surrounds us.”
(from “Autonomy”)

“Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.”
(from “Psalm”)

“An extra miracle, extra and ordinary:
the unthinkable
can be thought.”
(from “Miracle Fair”)