The poet Wisława Szymborska was a 16-year-old in Krakow, Poland, when Germany invaded her country in 1939. Everything changed after that: The Nazis banned secondary schools and universities, so she had to finish high school illegally in secret classes. Eventually, after the war, she went to university—and ultimately won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. She kept writing about the long trail of violence through the centuries, and the stories we tell about that violence in hindsight. “History counts its skeletons in round numbers,” she wrote in the poem “Hunger Camp at Jaslo.” “A thousand and one remains a thousand, / as though the one had never existed: an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle.”
In “A Greek Statue,” Szymborska considers a marble figure with only its torso remaining. “People and other disasters” have chipped away at it, but perhaps the most destructive and sinister force in the poem is time itself; little by little, it has broken into dust something that was once imposing. Time’s erasure seems more sly than merciful; her note that “it stopped midway / and left something for later” only underscores that it will never fully stop, and the statue doesn’t stand a chance against it. Nothing does.
And yet, Szymborska couldn’t be completely fatalistic. To some degree, by writing about history, she undercut her own point about the ways people forget and turn away from it. Throughout her life, she found the human detail—the “thousand and one”—in the biggest, most incomprehensible subjects. And she kept wrestling with how to resist letting the events and people of the past disappear entirely. In one poem, she evokes the Biblical story of Lot’s wife, who is commanded by angels to flee the city of Sodom without looking back. But she disobeys, glancing behind her—and is turned into a pillar of salt. Why, Szymborska wonders, didn’t she simply keep moving forward? “I looked back in desolation,” she imagines Lot’s wife saying, “ashamed of running away in stealth.” Or maybe she was “struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.”
You can zoom in on the page here.
https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiXmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnRoZWF0bGFudGljLmNvbS9ib29rcy9hcmNoaXZlLzIwMjMvMTAvcG9lbS13aXNsYXdhLXN6eW1ib3Jza2EtZ3JlZWstc3RhdHVlLzY3NTgzMS_SAQA?oc=5
2023-10-29 12:00:00Z
CBMiXmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnRoZWF0bGFudGljLmNvbS9ib29rcy9hcmNoaXZlLzIwMjMvMTAvcG9lbS13aXNsYXdhLXN6eW1ib3Jza2EtZ3JlZWstc3RhdHVlLzY3NTgzMS_SAQA
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "A Poem by Wisława Szymborska: 'A Greek Statue' - The Atlantic"
Post a Comment