Monologue Of A Dog

By Wislawa Szymborska

From a writer whom Charles Simic calls "one of the finest poets living" comes a collection of witty, compassionate, contemplative, and always surprising poems. Szymborska writes with verve about everything from love unremembered to keys mislaid in the grass. The poems will appear, for the first time, side by side with the Polish originals, in a book to delight new and old readers alike.

EVERYTHING
Everything-
a bumptious, stuck-up word.
It should be written in quotes.
It pretends to miss nothing,
to gather, hold, contain, and have.
While all the while it's just
a shred of a gale.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Feb 24, 2015
• ISBN: 9780547542249

Wislawa Szymborska

WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA (1923–2012) was born in Poland and worked as a poetry editor, translator, and columnist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. Her books include Monologue of a Dog, Map: Collected and Last Poems, and Poems New and Collected: 1957–1997.

Book preview

Copyright © by Wisława Szymborska, 2002

Translation, copyright © 2006 by Harcourt, Inc.

Foreword © 2006 by Billy Collins

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Szymborska, Wisława.

[Poems. English & Polish. Selections]

Monologue of a dog: new poems/Wisława Szymborska; translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak,

p. cm.

Polish original with English translation.

1. Szymborska, Wisława—Translations into English. I. Cavanagh, Clare. II. Barańczak, Stanisław, 1946– III. Title.

PG7178.Z9A222 2005

895.8 '5173—dc22 2005016084

ISBN-13: 978-0-15-101220-6 ISBN-10: 0-15-101220-2

eISBN 978-0-547-54224-9

v1.0215

Foreword

Just about any commentary on Wisława Szymborska must include, and might as well begin with, the fact that in 1996 she unexpectedly won the Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of seventy-three. For almost five decades—her first book appeared in 1952—she had been regarded in her native Poland as a prominent and popular poet; yet on the day of the announcement her books were difficult to find even at that bibliophile extravaganza known as the Frankfurt Book Fair. The sheer power of the Nobel would elevate Szymborska, much to her apparent embarrassment and surprise, from a respected place on the literary scene of her own country to center stage in the theater of world poetry, where she would follow in the footsteps of such Nobel-winning compatriots as Isaac Bashevis Singer and Czeslaw Milosz.

The Nobel launched Szymborska to the heights of literary celebrity, and, strange as it is to say, the dreadful events of 9/11 had the unforeseeable effect of bringing her work to the attention of a wide audience of stunned Americans, now hungry for poems that were responsive to the horror story of history. American poetry had generally taken Time as its predominant theme, rather than History, which someone once characterized as the violent misuse of Time. Poetry’s most ancient theme, carpe diem, arises from the fact that our earthly time is limited; the cyclical brutality of man arises from specific historical events. That Americans turned to foreign poetry for solace in those nervous days of psychic recuperation was a sign that America—its virginity suddenly lost—lacked a tradition of poetry that adequately addressed such realities as the horrors of war, the shock of military attack, and the atrocities of dictatorial regimes. It should have come as no surprise, then, that the poems most