April 10, 2005: Tortures, Wislawa Szymborska
Tortures
Wislawa Szymborska
Nothing has changed.
The body is susceptible to pain,
it must eat and breathe air and sleep,
it has thin skin and blood right underneath,
an adequate stock of teeth and nails,
its bones are breakable, its joints are stretchable.
In tortures all this is taken into account.
Nothing has changed.
The body shudders as it shuddered
before the founding of Rome and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are as they were, it’s just the earth that’s grown smaller,
and whatever happens seems right on the other side of the wall.
Nothing has changed. It’s just that there are more people,
besides the old offenses new ones have appeared,
real, imaginary, temporary, and none,
but the howl with which the body responds to them,
was, is and ever will be a howl of innocence
according to the time-honored scale and tonality.
Nothing has changed. Maybe just the manners, ceremonies, dances.
Yet the movement of the hands in protecting the head is the same.
The body writhes, jerks and tries to pull away,
its legs give out, it falls, the knees fly up,
it turns blue, swells, salivates and bleeds.
Nothing has changed. Except for the course of boundaries,
the line of forests, coasts, deserts and glaciers.
Amid these landscapes traipses the soul,
disappears, comes back, draws nearer, moves away,
alien to itself, elusive, at times certain, at others uncertain of its
own existence,
while the body is and is and is
and has no place of its own.
trans. Stanislaw Baranczak & Clare Cavanagh
[Wislawa Szymborska is Polish and won the 1996 Nobel Prize in
Literature. Encapsulating the entirety of human history is an
ambitious goal for a poem, but I think this one manages, and that’s
not even its focus. I adore body poems and this is one of my
favorites, and it’s horrifying in the most calmly direct way, which is
Szymborska’s specialty.]
MORE LIKE THIS:
— A Contribution to Statistics, by Wislawa Szymborska
— Lot’s Wife, by Wislawa Szymborska
— Naming the Stars, by Joyce Sutphen
