Map: Collected and Last Poems

by Wislawa Szymborska, Stanislaw Baranczak, Clare Cavanagh

“Nobel Laureate Szymborska’s gorgeous posthumous collection . . . includes more than 250 poems . . . This is a brilliant and important collection.”??—??Booklist, starred review

  • Format: eBook
  • ISBN-13/ EAN: 9780544127777
  • ISBN-10: 0544127773
  • Pages: 208
  • Publication Date: 04/07/2015
  • Carton Quantity: 1
About the Book
About the Authors
Excerpts
Reviews
  • About the Book
    “NobelLaureate Szymborska’s gorgeous posthumous collection . . . includes more than 250 poems . . . This is a brilliant and important collection.”??—??Booklist, starred review

    One of Europe’s greatest recent poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize–winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. Her elegant, precise poems pose questions we never thought to ask.

    “If you want the world in a nutshell,” a Polish critic remarks, “try Szymborska.” But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew.

    Carefully edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, the poems in Map trace Szymborska’s work until her death in 2012. Of the approximately 250 poems included here, nearly forty are newly translated; thirteen represent the entirety of the poet’s last Polish collection, Enough, never before published in English.

    Map is the first English publication of Szymborska’s work since the acclaimed Here, and it offers her devoted readers a welcome return to her “ironic elegance” (The New Yorker).

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  • About the Author
  • Excerpts
    The Questions You Ask Yourself 

      

    What do a smile and 

    handshake hold? 

    Do your greetings never 

    keep you as far 

    apart as other people 

    sometimes are 

    when passing judgment 

    at first glance? 

    Do you open each human 

    fate like a book, 

    seeking feelings 

    not in fonts 

    or formats? 

    Are you sure you 

    decipher people completely? 

    You gave an evasive 

    word in answering, 

    a bright joke in place of openness  

    how do you tally your losses? 

    Stunted friendships, 

    frozen worlds. 

    Do you know that friendship, 

    like love, requires teamwork? 

    Someone missed a step 

    in this demanding effort. 

    In your friends’ errors 

    do you bear no blame? 

    Someone complained, advised. 

    How many tears ran dry 

    before you lent a hand? 

    Jointly responsible 

    for the happiness of millennia, 

    don’t you slight 

    the single minute 

    of a tear, a wince? 

    Do you never overlook 

    another’s effort? 

    A glass stood on the table, 

    no one noticed 

    until it fell, 

    toppled by a thoughtless gesture. 

      

    Are people really so simple 

    as far as people go? 

     

     

     

    Hania 

      

    Now see, here’s Hania, the good servant. 

    And those aren’t frying pans, you know, they’re halos. 

    And that’s a holy image, knight and serpent. 

    The serpent means vanity in this vale of woes. 

      

    And that’s no necklace, that’s her rosary. 

    Her shoes have toes turned up from daily kneeling. 

    Scarf dark as all the nights she sits up, weary, 

    and waits to hear the morning church bells pealing. 

      

    Scrubbing the mirror once, she saw a devil: 

    Bless me, Father, he shot a nasty look. 

    Blue with yellow stripes, eyes black as kettles —  

    you don’t think he’ll write me in his book? 

      

    And so she gives at Mass, she prays the mysteries, 

    and buys a small heart with a silver flame. 

    Since work began on the new rectory, 

    the devils have all run away in shame. 

      

    The cost is high, preserving souls from sin, 

    but only old folks come here, scraping by. 

    With so much of nothing, razor-thin, 

    Hania would vanish in the Needle’s Eye. 

      

    May, renounce your hues for wintery gray. 

    Leafy bough, throw off your greenery. 

    Clouds, repent; sun, cast your beams away. 

    Spring, save your blooms for heaven’s scenery. 

      

    I never heard her laughter or her tears. 

    Raised humble, she owns nothing but her skin. 

    A shadow walks beside her — her mortal fears, 

    her tattered kerchief yammers in the wind. 

     

     

     

    Still Life with a Balloon 

      

    Returning memories? 

    No, at the time of death 

    I’d like to see lost objects 

    return instead. 

      

    Avalanches of gloves, 

    coats, suitcases, umbrellas —  

    come, and I’ll say at last: 

    What good’s all this? 

      

    Safety pins, two odd combs, 

    a paper rose, a knife, 

    some string — come, and I’ll say 

    at last: I haven’t missed you. 

      

    Please turn up, key, come out, 

    wherever you’ve been hiding, 

    in time for me to say: 

    You’ve gotten rusty, friend! 

      

    Downpours of affidavits, 

    permits and questionnaires, 

    rain down and I will say: 

    I see the sun behind you. 

      

    My watch, dropped in a river, 

    bob up and let me seize you —  

    then, face to face, I’ll say: 

    Your so-called time is up. 

      

    And lastly, toy balloon 

    once kidnapped by the wind —  

    come home, and I will say: 

    There are no children here. 

      

    Fly out the open window 

    and into the wide world; 

    let someone else shout “Look!” 

    and I will cry.

  • Reviews
    New York Times Editor's Choice 

    New York Times Paperback Row 

     

    "Both plain-spoken and luminous…Szymborska’s skepticism, her merry, mischievous irreverence and her thirst for the surprise of fresh perception make her the enemy of all tyrannical certainties. Hers is the best of the Western mind—free, restless, questioning.”--New York Times Book Review 

     

    "Vast, intimate, and charged with the warmth of a life fully imagined to the end, there’s no better place for those unfamiliar with her work to begin."--Megan O'Grady, Vogue 

     

    "An extraordinary and vital summation of Szymborska’s decidedly modest output...Not only is Szymborska a major poet of the last half century but Map, as a reading experience, is wonderful, illuminating and enriching, a reminder that poetry can be direct, unadorned and still deeply moving...Weigh the mastery of Wislawa Szymborska, read Map, read any of her poems this year, the 20th anniversary of her Nobel Prize, if only for a short while."—Literary Hub 

     

    “Listening to Clare Cavanagh speak of translation as an art is a reminder that translators must be as adept as poets at working with words...Map is not only impressive because of Szymborska’s precise, intimate, and observationally funny poems...but because of Cavanagh and Baranczak’s tireless dedication in bringing them to English without sacrificing their forms."--Jacob Victorine, Publishers Weekly Profile 

     

    "Nobel laureate Szymborska’s gorgeous posthumous collection, translated and edited by her confidant, Cavanagh, with Baranczak, includes more than 250 poems, selected from 13 books, dating back to 1952, as well as previously unreleased poems from as far back as 1944. This revered Polish poet, who came to fame well after the poet Charles Simic first handed her work to an editor, interweaves insights into the suffering experienced during WWII and the Cold War brutalities of Stalin with catchy, realistic, colloquial musings on obvious and overlooked aspects of survival. Her poems are revelatory yet rooted in the everyday. She writes about living with horrors, and about ordinary lives: people in love, at work, enjoying a meal. Throughout, Szymborska considers loss and fragility, as when former lovers walk past each other and an aging professor is no longer allowed his vodka and cigarettes. She writes, too, of the imprecision of memory, and in the title poem, the discovery that maps “give no access to the vicious truth.” This is a brilliant and important collection."— Mark Eleveld, Booklist, starred review 

     

    "Szymborska (1923–2012), winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, has her vast and impressive poetic repertoire on full display in this posthumously published volume. Ordered chronologically, the book reveals her development over seven decades, including a gradual departure from end rhyme and the sharpening of her wit. As multitudinous as Whitman, she conveyed deep feeling through vivid, surreal imagery and could revive clichéd language by reconnecting it to the body in startling ways: “Listen,/ how your heart pounds inside me.” To say that Szymborska wore many hats as a poet is an understatement: odes, critiques, and persona poems are just a few of the forms her writing took. Yet, despite their diversity, the constants of her poems were nuance and observational humor: 'Four billion people on this earth,/ but my imagination is still the same.' Also apparent is Szymborska’s rare ability to present an epiphany in a single line, and her bravery in writing toward death: 'But time is short. I write.' Ever the student, she obsessively explored the histories and processes of writing, never far from penning another Ars Poetica. 'Everything here is small, near, accessible,' Szymborska writes in the title poem—a maxim about the way the reader feels within her lines."--Publishers Weekly, starred and boxed review

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