POEMS, NEW AND COLLECTED, 1957-1997

Poems by Wisława Szymborska, 1998

The poetry of Wisława Szymborska is remarkably rich in imagery, subject matter, and intellectual scope. She has written on topics ranging from the purely quotidian ("Cat in an Empty Apartment") to the arts, history ("Reality Demands"), love, existential angst ("Four in the Morning"), and much more. Her work is highly complex and constantly reveals new dimensions of meaning and expression. If there is one thing that characterizes her approach, it would be the concretization of our abstract and fragmented perceptions of the physical, psychological, and moral world. It is highly reminiscent of Hegel's prephenomenological position in his famous essay "Who Thinks Abstractly?" in which he describes people watching a hanging and shows each spectator focusing on just one aspect of the man on the gallows. Each of them thinks he or she is seeing the totality of the phenomenon, but in actuality each only sees a single aspect: criminal, son, youth, and so on. Szymborska examines familiar phenomena, and by reminding her reader of their details and multifaceted nature ("eagerness to see things from all six sides"), she brings to consciousness a refocused and renewed sense of what is there.

She has written numerous poems to address social and political themes, including the conflicts and atrocities of the twentieth century. The three poems from her oeuvre that most directly address the Holocaust are "Still" ("Jeszcze"), "Hunger Camp near Jaslo," and "Hitler's First Photograph," and each in its own way demonstrates her poetic method and contributes to an understanding, both of the phenomena they address and of her poetic imagination. The three poems appear in a 1998 collection of Szymborska's poetry, Poems, New and Collected, 1957-1997.

"Still" is an extended metonymic evocation of a sealed boxcar containing Jewish "names" traveling across the Polish countryside to a sinister destination. The focus on the names instead of the people to which they are attached is not an exploration of nominalism but an indictment of the crude objectification of the "other," which lies at the core of anti-Semitism and other forms of racism: "Let your son have a Slavic name,/for here they count hairs on the head,/for here they tell good from evil/by names and by eyelids' shape." It diminishes their value as individual persons, as personalities, and it seemingly legitimizes the artificial alienation it engenders. Interestingly the poet's target here is not Nazism and its adherents but her compatriot inhabitants of the countryside through which the train is traveling. True, the Nazis may have filled and sealed the boxcars, but it is local anti-Semitism she refers to specifically, and in doing so she raises the always disturbing and thorny question of the passive complicity of bystanders. The train is neither invisible nor silent as it moves like a ghost ship through the countryside. Indeed, she contrasts the clickety-clack of the train moving along holding its grotesque cargo with the "crashing silence" of those on the outside who know but refuse to act or even acknowledge what is happening.

In "Hunger Camp near Jaslo" Szymborska also refers to the silence around such events, but like Anna Akhmatova in "Requiem" she enjoins her poetic persona to "write it," to tell the world. She takes the reader away from conceiving the Holocaust as a phenomenon of unimaginable—and therefore abstract—proportions to confronting the individuality of each victim: "History counts its skeletons in round numbers./A thousand and one remains a thousand,/as though the one had never existed."

Similarly, in "Hitler's First Photograph"—a truly remarkable poem—Szymborska with disturbing irony presents a picture of Hitler as a lovable little baby ("Precious little angel, mommy's sunshine, honey bun.") who embodies all the hope and potentiality of any other infant. He represents and embodies his parents' joys and dreams, he might grow up to be just about anything, but there is no mention, no hint, of the diabolical monster he in fact became. He is identical with all of us and all of our children at that age—indistinguishable: "Looks just like his folks, like a kitten in a basket,/like the tots in every other family album." The reader is left with the realization that everyone is obliged to try to understand and to be engaged, unlike the history teacher at the end of the poem who cannot hear what is going on around him and simply "loosens his collar/and yawns over homework."

These poems, while not occupying a large space within Szymborska's work, are closely connected with other works that, in combination, develop an expansive and profound expression of the worth and importance of every human being and every human existence.

—Allan Reid