Antologia po angielsku - Wisława Szymborska

Non-reading

Bookstores don’t provide
A remote control for Proust,
You can’t switch
To a soccer match,
or a quiz show, win a Cadillac.

We live longer
But less precisely
and in shorter sentences.

We travel faster, farther, more often,
But bring back slides instead of memories.
Here I am with some guy.
There I guess that’s my ex.
Here everyone’s naked
So this must be a beach.

Seven volumes – mercy.
Couldn’t it be cut or summarized,
Or better yet put into pictures.
There was that series called “The Doll”,
But my sister-in-law says that’s some other P*.

And by the way, who was he anyway.
They say he wrote in bed for years on end.
Page after page
At a snail’s pace.
But we’re still going in fifth gear
And, knock wood, never better.

-Wisława Szymborska---Wisława Szymborska, born in July 1923, was a Polish poet, essayist and translator. She is often described as a "Mozart of Poetry". She frequently used ironic precision, paradox, contradiction and understatement in her poems to underline philosophical themes and obsessions. Many of her poems are about war and terrorism.

This poem talks about how despite the fact that technology is growing more and more, people are becoming more empty as we are always in a hurry and don’t reflect on our surroundings and significant issues. This is explained when the poet says
“We live longer
But less precisely
and in shorter sentences.”

Wislawa explains how dull some lives can get as we go through many experiences but don’t cherish much of them. Our lives become miserable as we do many things but don’t pay too much attention to them, just like when she is looking through the “slides instead of memories”. We take pictures to lock in memories and occurrences, however it’s pretty ironic as she can’t recall any of the moments in the pictures

“We travel faster, farther, more often,
But bring back slides instead of memories.
Here I am with some guy.
There I guess that’s my ex.
Here everyone’s naked
So this must be a beach.”

The main point that the poet is trying to show is that we should take the things around us into consideration. We don’t need to go everywhere and meet a lot of new people to stay happy. Doing too much wont make your experience in life better. It ties into my theme as people will be miserable and dull if you don’t take the best out of life and their experiences.

*The reference is to the Polish novelist Boleslaw Prus (1847-1912), whose most famous work The Doll (1890) later became a popular mini-series.