View with a Grain of Sand

View with a Grain of Sand

by Wislawa Szymborska
trans Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is no different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.
But that's just our simile.
The character is invented, his haste is make-believe,
his news inhuman.

Written by one of my all-time favourite Poets, this poem by Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish Nobel Laureate, makes us think laterally about objects and things we see and name.

 The central idea in the poem – that everything is relative – is something that we as humans often don’t reflect upon, something we forget. The poem presents the thought that, without people to give meaning to inanimate objects, they would not be important. It points out that the objects do not know their names or their purposes. Sand does not know that it is sand! It is sand to us alone – it is relative to our existence, just like all other lifeless objects.

The poem is a landscape word painting with a twist. Instead of presenting readers with a scene featuring a beach or a lake, Szymborska engages in a metaphysical exploration of physical identity and its relationship to language. We are shown (close-up) a grain of sand falling on a windowsill with a view of a lake beyond, but there is more to the poem’s subtext.

The first stanza introduces the abstract concept o naming—by beginning with “We call it a grain of sand / but it calls itself neither grain nor sand”. The speaker says that what we call sand “does just fine” unburdened by linguistic tags whatever their character, “general, particular, / . . . / incorrect or apt.” The second stanza notes, “Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it”; it is the viewer who sees the grain fall “on the windowsill.” Being unsentient matter, the grain of sand neither feels its environment nor knows it in any human sense. As the third stanza puts it, even “a wonderful view of a lake” has no self-consciousness. The view, like the grain of sand, “exists in this world / colorless, shapeless, / soundless, odorless, and painless.” The senses are what endow human views of the universe with phenomenal qualities (relating to seeing, touching, hearing, smelling, and tasting), and all human languages are born of human experience and perspectives.

Matter in itself obviously exists, but not in any indispensable contact with language: The lake’s water “feels itself neither wet nor dry,” and its waves “splash deaf to their own noise.”
The poem ends with two stanzas on the topic of time. Three seconds are said to have passed, but only the poet and her “audience” have measured and counted them. Humans invent similes (the poem’s speaker says) comparing the universe to themselves and wrap their own terms around things, likening, for instance, the passage of time to the actions of certain “characters”: e.g., “Time has passed like a courier with urgent news.” But the identities we confer on inhuman matter, space, and time—like the “courier” the poet has invented to talk about an occasion—are all “make-believe.” 

By sanitizing the relationship of language to things in this way, Szymborska makes the point that all efforts to get at and to pin down identity (essence) or history (existence in time) are projections from particular (and human) points of view: They are just as ridiculous as our efforts to communicate through mere words a true sense of self or of reality. The poem is self-reflexive and ironic in deprecating itself as well as the activity of writers more generally, but, at the same time, it manages to say something important about the ineffability of identity and about the touching human need forcommunication, achieving itself in a detached and dryly humorous sort of way.

Bomb Crater Sky
by Lâm Thị Mỹ Dạ
Translated by Martha Collins and Thuy Dinh

They say that you, a road builder
Had such love for our country
You rushed out and waved your torch
To call the bombs down on yourself
And save the road for the troops

As my unit passed on that worn road
The bomb crater reminded us of your story
Your grave is radiant with bright-colored stones
Piled high with love for you, a young girl

As I looked in the bomb crater where you died
The rain water became a patch of sky
Our country is kind
Water from the sky washes pain away

Now you lie down deep in the earth
As the sky lay down in that earthen crater
At night your soul sheds light
Like the dazzling stars
Did your soft white skin
Become a bank of white clouds?

By day I pass under a sun-flooded sky
And it is your sky
And that anxious, wakeful disc
Is it the sun, or is it your heart
Lighting my way
As I walk down the long road?

The name of the road is your name
Your death is a young girl’s patch of blue sky
My soul is lit by your life

And my friends, who never saw you
Each has a different image of your face.


The Vietnamese poet Lam Thi My Da is the author of five collections of poems in Vietnam, as well as Green Rice (Northwestern University Press, 2005), translated by Martha Collins and Thuy Dinh. Widely recognized as one of Vietnam’s major poets, she is the recipient of two awards from the Vietnamese Writers’ Association and the highest honors from the National United Board of Vietnamese Literature and the Arts. She comes from Quang Binh Province, in the central part of Vietnam, an area that saw a great deal of fighting during the war.

Set in the Vietnam War, this heart wrenchingly beautiful poem reminds us that bomb craters are never empty, but, for the people whose lives they affect, they are filled with everything and everyone they destroy. The poem is an elegy for a fellow female soldier who was blown apart by a bomb.

Maybe…

Maybe…

By Miklos Radnoti

Translated by Steven Polgar, Stephen Berg and S.J. Marks

Maybe if I were a child again…

Or could go crazy.

The world getting bigger and bigger…

Then I would play and float,

then the sun would blaze again,

then the distance would explode with light.

The net of logic opens

And shuts again.

*

I would be a child, but memory hurts.

Nettles sting like splinters in my tiny fingers.

And leaves grow high on the mulberry tree.

Or maybe I could be a nice madman

And live in yellow house high among yellow

flowers, a small bell tied around my neck…

But I just look around. The ditch is here.

I walk and think and stand, then walk again.

And wait for longer and longer winters.

Palinode

But don't leave me, delicate mind!

Don't let me go crazy.

Sweet wounded reason, don't

leave me now.

Don't leave me. Let me die, without fear,

a clean lovely death,

like Empedocles, who smiled as he fell

into the crater.

Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944) was probably the greatest among the world’s Holocaust poets, murdered by the retreating Hungarian Army at the close of the Second World War. His poetry has won a robust international reputation and made him a beloved figure in World Poetry.

Miklos Radnoti's poems have an anguished intimacy and intensity, a supreme humanity. This learned Hungarian poet, killed during World War II at the age of 35, clung to the classical values of the Western tradition at a time when those values were radically imperiled. 

In Radiotin’s late poems, despair and insanity are countered by the aesthetic and moral ideals of antiquity: the clarity of poetic form, the virtues of reason and the philosophical rectitude of Stoicism.

His poems were deeply felt and thoroughly modern -- filled with his sense of anxiety, uncertainty and fate. He was an avant-garde classicist who, in a mad time, was terrified of madness, as in this great poem "Maybe . . . "

(Note Palinode means a poem (here a stanza) in which the poet retracts a view or sentiment expressed in a former poem. Extracted from “Clouded Sky” New and Revised poems of Miklos Radnoti. A detailed review of his poems by yours truly is  there in Goodreads.) 

 

Radoti with his wife before the war

Tomorrow

Tomorrow
By Dennis O'Driscoll
I

Tomorrow I will start to be happy.
The morning will light up like a celebratory cigar.
Sunbeams sprawling on the lawn will set
dew sparkling like a cut-glass tumbler of champagne.
Today will end the worst phase of my life.

I will put my shapeless days behind me,
fencing off the past, as a golden rind
of sand parts slipshod sea from solid land.
It is tomorrow I want to look back on, not today.
Tomorrow I start to be happy; today is almost yesterday.

II

Australia, how wise you are to get the day
over and done with first, out of the way.
You have eaten the fruit of knowledge, while
we are dithering about which main course to choose.
How liberated you must feel, how free from doubt:

the rise and fall of stocks, today’s closing prices
are revealed to you before our bidding has begun.
Australia, you can gather in your accident statistics
like a harvest while our roads still have hours to kill.
When we are in the dark, you have sagely seen the light.

III

Cagily, presumptuously, I dare to write 2018.
A date without character or tone. 2018.
A year without interest rates or mean daily temperature.
Its hit songs have yet to be written, its new-year
babies yet to be induced, its truces to be signed.

Much too far off for prophecy, though one hazards
a tentative guess—a so-so year most likely,
vague in retrospect, fizzling out with the usual
end-of-season sales; everything slashed:
your last chance to salvage something of its style.

from New and Selected Poems. Anvil Press Poetry, Ltd.

Dennis O'Driscoll (1 January 1954 – 24 December 2012) was an Irish poet, essayist, critic and editor. Regarded as one of the best European poets of his time, Eileen Battersby considered him "the lyric equivalent of William Trevor" and a better poet "by far" than Raymond Carver.

The poet starts the poem on an optimistic tone by writing off the present moment, wishing away his past of “shapeless days” (i.e., “the worst phase of my life”), demanding something better — “Tomorrow I start to be happy; today is almost yesterday.” He expects that "the morning will light up like a celebratory cigar."

The second stanza is an enjoyable read. The poet is jealous of the fact that sunrise in Australia (and hence New Year) would be ahead of Ireland (because of the time difference and hence many businesses get finished before it even starts in the western world) and mulls over the advantages of it. He strikes a dark note at the end of the stanza stating that “our roads still have hours to kill”

Gradually the poet comes to somber tone in the third stanza when he realizes that he may not actually put his shapeless days behind him. The poet who wrote this poem around 2002 imagines the year 2018 (a random year he chose at that time as many events to unfold in 2018 were a mere conjecture for the poet ) would be most likely a "so-so year". The same monotony of year-end sales and people’s mad rush to grab what they had wanted would prevail. Thus the initial expectancy of the speaker that he would be able to change for the better fades towards the end. 

Sadly, the poet passed away in 2012, long before the year 2018 he had dreamed about.

Notwithstanding the skewed optimism of the poet, May I wish all my readers a fabulous New Year filled with fun to all of you

After Someone's Death

After Someone's Death
By Tomas Transtromer
Translated by Robin Fulton

Once there was a shock
that left behind a long pale glimmering comet’s tail.
It contains us. It blurs TV images.
It deposits itself as cold drops on the aerials.

You can still shuffle along on skis in the winter sun
among groves where last year’s leaves still hang.
They are like pages torn from old telephone directories—
the names are eaten up by the cold.

It is still beautiful to feel your heart throbbing.
But often the shadow feels more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.

Tomas Transtromer (2031-2015), the Swedish poet, is acclaimed as one of the most important Scandinavian poets since the Second World War. He won the  2011 Nobel Prize for Literature.

 How beautifully the poet in this poem has captured the death of someone dear to him with unusually striking imagery. The transient nature of life is vivid in comet's tail and the short line‘It contains us’.

Only a great universal poet can transmute a transition into an everlasting memory. An apt eulogy poem for a funeral toast.

Midday 88

Midday 88

by Cees Nooteboom 
Translated by Herlinde Spahr and Leonard Nathan

It takes so little:
An afternoon of burnished hours
that will not fit together
and himself broken up by himself
sitting in various chairs
with almost everywhere a soul or a body.
In one part of the room is night.
In another, time past, vacation and war.
On the ceiling the sea touches the shining beach,
and no hand that controls all this,
no equerry, no computer,
only forever the same self, selfsame he,
someone, somebody scattered,
the uncollected man in converse with himself,
dreaming and thinking
present, invisible.
Someone who was going to eat and sleep later.
Someone with a watch and shoes.
Someone who left.
Someone who was going to leave.
Someone who stayed on for a while.

This poem is a meditation on our fragmented experiences leading to one's uncollected identity. Many of us can reconstruct fragments of lives lived intensely, and now lost, crystallized in memory or in the detail of many landscapes or encounters in life. Perhaps we leave a part of our soul in the animate and inanimate things we are intimately connected.

Cees Nooteboom (1931-) is the best known Dutch author, known mostly for his novels (the only novel I have with me is 'The following Story') and travel writing. He has been on the list of potential Nobel Prize winners for a long time.

Magnolia Basin

Magnolia Basin
By Wang Wei
Translated by Tony Barnstone; Willis Barnstone and Xu Haixin


On branch tips the hibuscus bloom
The mountains show off red calices.
Nobody. A silent cottage in the valley.
One by one flowers open, then fall.
(Calices-Plural of Calyx , outermost part of a flower)

Wang Wei (701-761 C.E.) is often spoken of, with his contemporaries Li Po and Tu Fu, as one of the three greatest poets in China's 3,000-year poetic tradition. Of the three, Wang was the consummate master of the short imagistic landscape poem that came to typify classical Chinese poetry. He developed a nature poetry of resounding tranquility wherein deep understanding goes far beyond the words on the page―a poetics that can be traced to his assiduous practice of Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism.

This is a poem of exceptional quietism. Here is an unmentioned viewer who records the scene is swallowed up in the quiet emptiness of a pure text of nature. Hibiscus blossoming on the branches turn the mountains red. There is nobody about; a cottage in the valley is silent and abandoned. “One by one flowers open, then fall”: this is the only motion in all the mountains. Yet if this is so, then who is there to see it?

Perhaps death’s hold over us limits our perspective, rendering us unable to experience even a decent trace of wonder all around us. I loved the economy of this poem where the movements of the words and the brush synchronize. Life blooms whether anyone notices, then is gone, without fanfare or anguish. His poem affirms the natural course of life. Yet Wei’s hibiscus plant will have flowers next year.

This is remindful of Wallace Stevens’s first way of looking at a blackbird (Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird)

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.