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04/01/10(Thu)16:48 No.503578Whenever
I see a post about how much a country's literature sucks, I think about
this poem by Wisława Szymborska:
PSALM
Oh, the leaky
boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with
impunity;
how much desert sand shifts from one land to another;
how
many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil
in provocative hops!
Need
I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
or
alights on the roadblock at the border?
A humble robin - still, its
tail resides abroad
while its beak stays home. If that weren't
enough, it won't stop
bobbing!
Among innumerable insects, I'll
single out only the ant
between the border guard's left and right
boots
blithely ignoring the questions "Where from?" and "Where to?"
Oh,
to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos
prevailing on every
continent!
Isn't that a privet on the far bank
smuggling its
hundred-thousandth leaf across the river?
And who but the octopus,
with impudent long arms,
would disrupt the sacred bounds of
territorial waters?
And how can we talk of order overall
when
the very placement of the stars
leaves us doubting just what shines
for whom?
Not to speak of the fog's reprehensible drifting!
And
dust bowling all over the steppes
as if they hadn't been
partitioned!
And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves,
that
conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!
Only what
is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation,
subversive moles, and wind.
(Translated by Stanislaw Barańczak
and Clare Cavanagh) |
