The line is witty, but it hurts more than it makes me smile. Ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead. The one that still pops into my head from time to time is this one, from a poem called “Museum.” Reading View with a Grain of Sand, I was struck with just how perfect some of Szymborska’s individual lines are. It’s easy for me to think poems are more about the words themselves than their meaning, but somehow, translation can still give us poems with power and resonance. The book had poems from many of her collections from 1957-1993. It is amazing to me how much power poetry can have when translated out of its original language. I recently read a book of Szymborska’s poetry as part of my Nobel literature project. Thus far this figure still remains unchanged. That poem, “A Contribution to Statistics,” hit me hard. I first encountered Wisława Szymborska’s poetry on JoAnne Growney’s mathematical poetry blog.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |