Woodstock

October 29, 2008, 1:43 pm

A Poem for the Pentagon

By Barry Gewen

Wislawa Szymborska (Eric Roxfelt/Associated Press)

Last week, when I was writing about the Caucasus and all those peoples no one outside the region had ever heard of, I couldn’t get a poem out of my mind. It was “Voices” by the Nobel-prize-winner Wislawa Szymborska.
I’m not much for modern poetry, but I like Szymborska because of her compassion, her humility and her warm good humor. What’s more, you don’t need a Ph.D. in literature to understand her. Once I was comparing notes with a friend much more literary than I about modern poets we enjoyed reading: Philip Larkin, of course, and then we both said, simultaneously, “Szymborska.”
“Four in the Morning” is a poem with a Larkinesque theme but spun with Szymborska-esque whimsy: “No one feels good at four in the morning./If ants feel good at four in the morning/— three cheers for the ants.” Addressing the women in Rubens’s paintings, she writes, “O meloned, O excessive ones … you lavish dishes of love.” Then she adds that the 17th century “had nothing for the flat of chest.”
Szymborska’s subjects are the subjects of poets everywhere — love, death, art, the infinite coupled to the quotidian, the world in a grain of sand. But she is also attentive to current events. One of her poems is entitled “Vietnam,” another “The Terrorist, He’s Watching.”
And there is “Voices.” Inspired by Livy, it isn’t as overtly political as some of her other poems. Still, I’d like to see it tacked up on bulletin boards in the Pentagon and at Foggy Bottom.
Here are the first few lines*:

You can’t move an inch, my dear Marcus Emilius,
without Aborigines sprouting up as if from the earth itself.
Your heel sticks fast amidst Rutulians.
You founder knee-deep in Sabines and Latins.
You’re up to your waist, your neck, your nostrils
in Aequians and Volscians, dear Lucius Fabius.
These irksome little nations, thick as flies.

Click to read the whole poem at Google Books.
* “Voices” is in the translation by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. The other quotations are from the translations by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire.