Review: New Poems by Wislawa Szymborska of Poland

Why roads are getting more congested even when all drivers install navigators in their cars? The ultimate satellite driving aid is supposed to help to find the least congested route, but the apparently fastest way has become the opposite since everyone has such devices in their cars. Navigating machines cannot explain why life is getting hard when one worked so hard.

What about this question: “Here`s a fan - where is the maiden`s blush? Here are swords. Where is the ire?” (Excerpted from “Museum”) Inside a family photo album, pictures are still showing brothers smiling together, but where has their laughter gone?”

Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska’s new poems book titled “The end and the beginning” provides us with insight into the question why we can only laugh here, not in the past, future, or somewhere else. The poet realized this when she visited a museum and saw it as a theater displaying traces of human beings, who will invariably leave the earth in less than one hundred years.

A museum is a stage of irony. What a displayed fan actually shows you is the blush on the cheeks of the holder. A keen-edged sword shows a knight rushing towards his enemy holding it in his hand. I once visited the National Museum of Korea where I saw the Bangasayusang, one of the finest Buddhist sculptures ever produced. The Buddhist statue under the illumination in the dark seemed to say, “The human beings who lived while I was being created have returned to dust now.” In that sense, we have to understand the laughter and tears of humanity in the contemporary sense when we face the masterpiece.

What we are supposed to do if we cannot afford to laugh as a child or as the dead? We are all made to stay in the moment. We cannot get away from our present lives. Thus, we have to laugh now if we want to at all. All the navigators, all the teachers telling us to go to prestigious universities, all the advice books advising us not to be idle are wrong. There is no shortcut for happiness. As a human, we can only make a choice between being happy or not being happy right now right at this place.

“My apologies to everything that I can`t be everywhere at once. My apologies to everyone that I can`t be every man and woman.” (Excerpted from “Under a Little Star”)

Although comprehending the above poem may seem like taking a roundabout way, that is indeed the shortest way.

The paradox of the navigator and museum proves this irony. When I was young, I used to think 10,000 dollars in per capita income would make all of us affluent. But, now people say that we can only be prosperous if we reach 40,000 dollars in per capita income. That day will never come true. Szymborska says, “Nothing can ever happen twice. It has been that way, and will be in the future. This is why we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice.” There can be no repeats.