CZESLAW MILOSZ ~

Notebook: Bons By Lake Leman

Red beeches, shining poplars

And steep spruce behind October fog.

In the valley the lake steams. There is snow

Already on the hillsides of the other shore.

Of life, what remains? Only this light

So that the eyes blink in the sunny noon

Of such a season. People say: this is,

And no capacity, no artfulness

Can reach beyond what is.

And memory, useless, loses its power.

Kegs smell of cider. The vicar mixes lime

With a spade in front of the school.

My son runs there on the path. Boys carry

Sacks of chestnuts gathered on the slope.

If I forget thee, Jerusalem,

Says the prophet, let my right hand wither.

Underground tremors shake what is.

Mountains crack and forests break.

Touched by what was and what will be,

All that is crumbles into dust.

Violent, clean, the world is again in ferment

And neither ambition nor memory ceases.

Autumnal skies, the same in childhood,

In adulthood and old age. I won't

Stare at you. And you, landscapes,

Nourishing our hearts with mild warmth,

What poison dwells in you that you seal our lips,

Makes us sit with folded arms and the look

Of sleepy animals? Whoever finds order,

Peace, and an eternal moment in what is

Will vanish without a trace. Do you agree then

To abolish what is, and pluck from movement

The eternal moment as a gleam

On the current of the black river? I do.

— Bons, 1953

____________________________

Czeslaw Milosz

Poet in the New World

Poems, 1946-1953

TRANSLATED BY ROBERT HASS AND DAVID FRICK

Ecco, 2025

ZBIGNIEW HERBERT (2) ~

 

Winter (from three erotic poems)

I now think

disgracefully rarely

of my First Great Abandoned One

I carefully avoid

anything that might cause

a consternation of memories

—places we used to meet

—street corners

—landscapes

—benches

—benches

—trees

—the window where

our light burned

slowly but pitilessly

I forget

the color of her eyes

what

remains

now rests

in a cardboard box

photographic negatives

our faceless pictures

if someone ran a pointer finger

down the sharp edge of the frame

the heart's blood

would flow

            a friend told me

            that My First Great Love

            now lives alone

            not counting the sea's company

            she is blind

            and compares herself with weaving

            what does she weave

            on the dark loom

            for me it's like

            an empty platform

            like absolute

            irrevocability

            like a pensive drowned man

            with a hat firmly jammed

            over his ears

            who floats

            with his head turned away

            from the world

            like night

            in a mirror

____________________

Zbigniew Herbert

Reconstruction of the Poet

uncollected works

Ecco, 2024

RECONSTRUCTION OF ZBIGNIEW HERBERT ~

 

So Much

How hard

to save a person

who loves

I always feel

your slender arm

heavy as a body

It runs through my fingers

like water

Your breath

my pallor

and care

How hard

to save a person

who trusts

I bend over your sorrow

I lift the weight of love

I lift you from earth in my arms

carry you on my lips

give you up to prayer

On the Repatriation of

Bruno Jasienski's Remains

When the thaw reached

the Far North

the poet's body emerged

from under the ice cap

his grave so shallow

body only half buried

a daisy in one ear

a little grass in the other

but taken all in all

he was in very good shape

so they freshened him up

wiped the mold from his lips

blew on him and slapped him

doused him with jasmine

farewell dear poet

off to your fatherland

his fatherland is happy

the academy overjoyed

no one says they killed him

they all say: he came back

they scream and shout

the crowd lifts him up

so you see my old pal

no need for living legs

at the author's evening

obedient comrades

whip him into shape

make blustery threats

and attached to his strings

the poet steps up to the mic

a little stiff but confident

he wants to read his poems

His hand in his wig

his voice makes the megaphone squeal

he grunts and gestures

and they all say: he's so alive

the poem ends with a shriek

he raises a hand and screams

the string snaps and the arm

drops woodenly on the table

so as to erase the image

the cry goes up: long life

and presidium and poet

go off to have a drink

his wife is at the reception

but she behaves differently

when looking at her husband

she sobs into a handkerchief

champagne caviar oysters

pineapples and wine

poor man no more will you

drink water or feed on clay

but the poet eats nothing

doesn't even clink glasses

pale he goes off to one side

begins to wind his shroud

but no one notices this

alcohol flows like a stream

and it's only near dawn

they yell: he's gone and died again

________________________

Zbigniew Herbert

Reconstruction of the poet

Ecco, 2024

Translated by Alissa Valles

TADEUSZ ROZEWICZ~

A Normal Poet

sometimes I get anxious over the fact

that I am so ordinary

sometime somewhere I've written about it

I'm not worried but I am starting

to think that perhaps it is not

normal when a "poet" is not

a "phenomenon"

it's high time I craft my image as

someone wild, poetic, colorful

part schizophrenic part lover

but the pronlem is I love missionary style

I like taking walks

I am the husband of one wife

in accord with the dictates of the Apostle Paul

I get up at six in the morning

go to the bathroom

and so forth

I don't have a beard

or even a goatee

or curls

falling to my shoulders

for a moment I think about death

revise a poem

then dive into

life

in the evening I tear off

another page from the calendar

September 24, 2007

267th day of the year

sunrise 6:24 a.m.

sunset 6:31 p.m.

on the back of the page

is a recipe for cutlets

fry cutlets in

hot skillet (. . .)

brown on both sides

breading it first (. . .)

before falling asleep I read

a variety of art culture literary

monthlies bimonthlies

and quarterlies

and see (to my surprise)

that the poems of my fellow

poets male and female

slowly come to resemble

my poems

and my old poems

resemble

their new poems

_______________________________

TADEUSZ ROZEWICZ

Sobbing Superpower

translated by Joanna Trzeciak

Norton, 2011

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI ~

 

Figs

Figs are sweet, but don't last long.

They spoil fast in transit,

says the shopkeeper.

Like kisses, adds his wife,

a hunched old woman with bright eyes.

______________________

Adam Zagajewski

True Life

Translated by Clare Cavanagh

Farrar Straus Giroux, 2023

GRZEGORZ WROBLEWSKI ~

 

Isn't  It Strange

Acid rain . . . On the wall

a picture of your long-deceased

cat.

Isn't it strange that every day

I pray to her

to return you to me.

Twin

He resembled me.

I held him up to my lips,

then threw him into the salty

water. He sank to the bottom.

I heard a giggle.

An invitation to play

together.

You and Me

It couldn't have worked out better.

I am with you without you.

I draw figures on the sand.

I breathe.

I wait.

I decay.

Boeing 737

We watched as it disappeared inside a gray cloud.

(We all would like to do something similar.)

Osaka

an eye.

Keep it,

just in

case.

______________________

Grzegorz Wroblewski

Zero Visibility

Phoneme Media, 2017

translated from the Polish by Piotr Gwiazda

JERZY FICOWSKI ~

Village Landscape

There is silence in the meadows

of former battlefields

the bank of the bug river arranges

shells and bones

at times a wasp's ricochet

shoots from the burdocks

someone was buried here

or somewhere else

and there is no hole in heaven

as there is on earth

.     .     .

I was unable to save

a single life

I couldn't sleep

a single bullet

so I circle cemeteries

that aren't there

I search for words

that aren't there

I run

to the aid uncalled for

to the rescue delayed

I want to get there on time

even if it's already over

Kazakhstan, USSR

they let us out of the wagons

right here

And nothing anywhere

not a river

to drown in

or a tree

to hang oneself

____________________________

Jerzy Ficowski

Everything I Don't Know

Selected Poems

translated from the Polish by

Jennifer Grotz & Piotr Sommer

World Poetry Books, 2021

RE-READING MIRON BIALOSZEWSKI ~

     

A Ballad of Going Down To The Store



First I went down to the street

by means of the stairs,

just imagine it,

by means of the stairs.



Then people known to people unknown

passed me by and I passed them by.

Regret

that you did not see

how people walk,

regret!



I entered a complete store:

lamps of glass were glowing.

I saw somebody — he sat down —

and what did I hear? what did I hear?

rustling of bags and human talk.



And indeed,

indeed,

I returned.





____________________
translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI ~

Mandelstam in Theodosia

Let me go; I wasn't made for jail.

       —OSIP MANDELSTAM

     (arrested in Theodosia in 1920

Mandelstam was not mistaken, he wasn't made

for jail, but jails were made

for him, countless camps and prisons

waited for him patiently, freight trains

and filthy barracks, railroad switches and

gloomy waiting rooms kept waiting

till he came, secret police in leather

jackets waited for him and party

hacks with ruddy faces.

"I will not see the famous Phaedra,"

he wrote. The Black Sea didn't shed 

black tears, pebbles on the shore

tumbled submissively, as the wave desired,

clouds sailed swiftly across the inattentive earth.

July

July, the blackbirds have stopped singing.

I sit on a bench by the bank of a slow river,

I hear the hate-filled quarreling of lovers,

whom I don't know and never will.

Sweaty athletes run along the avenue.

The morning sun shines indifferently

on the calm dark water

that is apathy personified.

A little boy carries a plastic bag

bearing the garish logo Men's Health,

souls almost never meet,

bodies do battle cloaked in darkness.

A rain frail as haiku arrives in the night.

Light bells mumble at dawn.

While we're alive.

Sandals

The sandals I bought many years ago

for twenty eros

in the Greek village of Theologos

on the island of Thassos

haven't work out at all,

they're just like new.

I must have gotten,

quite accidentally,

a hermit's, a saint's sandals.

How they must suffer

carrying an ordinary sinner.

__________________________

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

Asymmetry

translated from the Polish

by Clare Cavanagh

Farrar, Straus and Giroux2018

PIOTR SOMMER ~

Other Half

Thank you, I managed to get a seat

on the right side, on the side of the river

which attracts the overflowing shoreline.

With the sign Riverside and overgrown

rocks, the red-brick building.

With the sign Yonkers which turns

gently to the left, then disappears.

Thank you, I can watch. With the bridge

which we have laid from here

to the other shore, in the vicinity of Tarrytown,

with its almost imperceptible embankment.

And yet, the river sometimes appears

at the tracks, as a reminder,

and the steep hills on the other side,

unmoving, nod, the light alone

moved by their fate. And by

the river's? — take your eye off it

for a second — it gets away

at Croton-Harmon, under track three

at platform two.

                           If on the other side

I'd watch the houses, roads, the trees

stripped of their leaves, but shining

with this delayed December light, because

it's January now — here and there shadows

adhere on the trunks. On the rocks at Poughkeepsie

I could study the icicles because the sun

hadn't broken all the ice yet

and January is snowless. And the light,

bouncing off the water's surface, even

through the tinted windows, draws

my inattention. Because the river has

widened again and the power lines help it

not to lose the way. Thank you. I managed

once again to get a seat on the right side,

even though the far shore turns away and

floats out of sight somewhere to the left then

returns, straightforward, and the hills

stand just over the water soft strong,

not hills, cliffs.

                         But then on the river bottom, too,

things shift, the terrain changes,

the water's temper wavers. At Rhinecliff

the water's cooling down, as in that other Rhine, so

all the sun's for nothing. The water or the river? Am I

my body, am I my eye that's also

cooling but sees further off:

mountains and, right here, the ice flow?

And there's another bridge, frail, bright-dark

above the ice, with cars easing

into the air so clear and uncountable

that you don't know how to return

to a place full of individual days

and dreams that don't have time to take

like buds in April after a late freeze.

Thank you, today I sat on the right side,

on the side of the birds who don't feel the chill

and sit, feathered, on the water, paddle, flap,

look for food.

(1994, 2002)

—————————————————

Piotr Sommer

Continued

Wesleyan 2005

RYSZARD KRYNICKI ~

. . . May Slaves


. . .

. . .

. . .

may slaves not strive for power at any cost,

may power govern nothing but itself,

may judges be fallible rather than venal,

may prosecutors not stop at nothing,

may the police work to reveal their own crimes,

may burglars break into their own apartments,

may censors redact themselves out of existence,

may informers deliver reports on themselves,

may customs officers look up their own asses,

may guards build the prison of their dreams

and locking themselves up to a man, from inside

throw the key into the ocean


                                                           73/74




———————————————

Ryszard Krynicki
OUR LIFE GROWS
New York Review of Books 2018
translated by Alissa Valles
afterword Adam Michnik

RYSZARD KRYNICKI ~

My Wife Fights To Protect Man's 
Natural Environment


My delicate wife fights to protect
man's natural environment.
Mornings her slim body vanishes in clouds
of soot and sulphur, on streets giving birth
to cars and hunger, to nooks in skyscrapers
ceaselessly breeding large families,
among mines and mills, in the spastic depths
of a city built from rust and concrete, crawling,
motionless, like a gray glacier. I look for her in vain
— then suddenly I find her, lost, in a train
(am I lost? fleeing myself?)
and through the thick raster I scarcely recognize
her uncertain smile in the group photograph
illustrating a labored feature on new methods
of protecting the environment in the local paper,
which once more promises iron and coal,
a car, a new steel mill, and a Poland of sorts


for every family. Ours too, alas.






Who Isn't


Fear the God

who isn't


in your heart.







Not Much


Our poor dead

gaze at us with their

empty eyes

and see everything to come —

but even they can't help



or warn us,



since neither war nor peace



has taught us much.






Silence


His terrifying fits of rage

*

He worked hard in the forest, he knew how to do everything. He
wanted to teach me everything too, since he believed that only phys-
ical labor would save me when the next war came. Remember, they'll
know you by your hands, he used to say. If your hands are rough, you
go right, if they're delicate, educated, you go left, to the camps or up
against a wall.

  He taught me to plow, to use a scythe, to reap. To tell edible from
inedible plants. Most are edible, you won't starve to death — he said.
He tried teaching me to fish, but quickly gave up; I proved to be a
remarkably stubborn pupil. He showed me how to build a hut, to
dig a shelter. Even how to make a fire, though he'd never managed
it himself.

  He taught me to use an ax. I was a little boy, but I could chop wood
as well as my virtual comrade in misery from The Seven Samurai. And
also from The Magnificent Seven? I don't remember.

  More than anything, though, for reasons I still don't understand
he wanted me to learn to swim and o stay under water as long as I
could. It may save your life when you have to escape — he'd repeat.

  During my next-to-last summer vacation, we worked together in
the woods. He gave me the easiest job, wood barking. We'd leave in
the morning, get back at night. On the way home he liked to take dips
in a woodland lake. One evening he dived in as usual and didn't come
back up. I thought he'd swum across and was waiting for me on the
other side. I circled the lake, not a trace. His stuff had vanished too.
I went around a second time, a third, no luck. I didn't know what to
do. Scared, I couldn't find the road in the dark. I wandered a long
time before I got home.

  He was there, as if nothing had happened. Alone. Mother had
gone out looking for me in the night. He was silent. So was I. I was
afraid to say anything.

  And that's how it stayed.

  I didn't learn much. I would have died in the wilderness. I would
have died trying to escape.

*

When the telegram came, I went straight to the hospital from the
station. He lay in an oxygen tank. He wasn't expecting me, he gazed
at me absently. At last he recognized me. He cried. His right lung,
removed a few days earlier, already journeyed through its uncertain,
crippled afterlife.



————————————

Ryszard Krynicki
MAGNETIC POINT
seleceted poems
translated by Clare Cavanagh
New Directions 2017