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PARTISAN REVIEW
"You can't have everything. Where would you put it?" the comedian
Steven Wright asks. Certainly not in a single poem, or even in a single
human life. This is the dilemma shared by poets like Czeslaw Milosz,
Adam Zagajewski, or Wislawa Szymborska, whose lyrics are linked by
their endlessly resourceful, invariably thwarted efforts to achieve at last
what Milosz calls the "unattainable" or, in Polish, "unembraced" or
"unembraceable earth"
(nieobjeta ziemia).
"There was too much / of Lvov, it brimmed the container / it burst
glasses, overflowed / each pond, lake, smoked through every / chimney,"
Zagajewski writes in "To Go to Lvov"
("Jechac do Lwowa"),
a poem
that is at once both a stirring elegy to a vanished world and a paean to
its inextinguishable presence: "[Lvov] is everywhere," the poem ends.
No merely human vessel can hope to contain once and for all a world
that precedes us, exceeds us, and will finally outlast us: Lvov "burst
glasses ... smoked through every chimney," Zagajewski warns. (I'm
quoting here, I should add, from Renata Gorczynska's splendid English
version of the poem.) The lyric form, with its built-in limitations, can't
pretend to comprehensiveness in a way a novel or an epic poem might.
It
can serve, though, as a perfect embodiment or enactment of the indi–
vidual's ceaselessly renewed, joyous struggle to come to terms with a
world that always lies slightly beyond his or her reach. And here I want
to turn to two poems, or rather two translations, in which I attempted
to keep up with two poets working to keep up with the world itself. The
first is Szymborska's "Birthday"
("Urodziny"):
So much world all at once-how it rustles and bustles!
Moraines and morays and morasses and mussels,
the flame, the flamingo, the flounder, the feather–
how to line them all up, how to put them together?
All the thickets and crickets and creepers and creeks!
The beeches and leeches alone could take weeks.
Chinchillas, gorillas, and sarsaparillas-
thanks so much, but this excess of kindness could kill us.
Where's the jar for this burgeoning burdock, brooks' babble,
rooks' squabble, snakes' squiggle, abundance, and trouble?
How to plug up the gold mines and pin down the fox,
how
to
cope with the lynx, bobolinks, streptococs!
Take dioxide: a lightweight, but mighty in deeds;
what about octopodes, what about centipedes?
I could look into prices, but don't have the nerve:
these are products I just can't afford, don't deserve.
Isn't sunset a little too much for two eyes
