Finished the utterly wonderful Poems New and Collected by Wislawa Szymborska, wonderfully translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, the other day. Of course, I'm assuming the translation is top notch simply because the poems in English are just so darned good. It would be easy to list at least fifteen that strike me as right up there with the best stuff I can think of since the middle of the twentieth century.
Let me try and get beyond fanboy enthusiasm - though I've got plenty of that - and say something a bit more concrete about why she's so good. One aspect of this is the accessibility of her work. No matter how surreal it gets - and it's pretty out there on occasion - no matter what philosophical depths are being trawled - and it's frequently more than just pretty deep - you know, or think you know, what's going on at the centre of any given poem. For example, at random, the last piece in the collection: The Silence of Plants; it's about us and plants and the relationship between. Simple, but not so, because there isn't any real relationship, though, We cast shadows based on the same laws. And suddenly the strangeness of casting any shadow is manifest, and the strangeness of the laws which enable us, and the plants, to do so, strangely unifying us.
And that's the other aspect (just to stop at two) of our laureate's work I find beguiling: her ability to make concrete thoughts that normally lie too deep for words; particularly the way she deals with ontological concerns, the oddness of being, the mystery of things. Words just don't fail her, never, as they've failed me here.
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