Wislawa Szymborska won the Noble Prize for literature in 1996 “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.”
The irony of such an academic description of Szmborska’s poetry, that is anything but academic and imprecise is, I am guessing, completely lost on the committee who wrote the Nobel tribute. But that is no surprise. Academic language, after all, always fails to understand or describe the poetic.
The challenge with reading poetry in translation is that you do not know what you do not know. What many headed meanings are missing? What tongue-beautiful lines are lost? How good are the translators? Are the translators poets or merely academics? (Szymborska worked as a translator of others work herself.)
Consolation
by Wislawa Szmborska
Darwin.They say he read novels to relax,But only certain kinds:nothing that ended unhappily.If anything like that turned up,enraged, he flung the book into the fire.True or not,I’m ready to believe it.Scanning in his mind so many times and places,he’d had enough of dying species,the triumphs of the strong over the weak,the endless struggles to survive,all doomed sooner or later.He’d earned the right to happy endings,at least in fictionwith its diminutions.Hence the indispensablesilver lining,the lovers reunited, the families reconciled,the doubts dispelled, fidelity rewarded,fortunes regained, treasures uncovered,stiff-necked neighbors mending their ways,good names restored, greed daunted,old maids married off to worthy parsons,troublemakers banished to other hemispheres,forgers of documents tossed down the stairs,seducers scurrying to the altar,orphans sheltered, widows comforted,pride humbled, wounds healed over,prodigal sons summoned home,cups of sorrow thrown into the ocean,hankies drenched with tears of reconciliation,general merriment and celebration,and the dog Fido,gone astray in the first chapter,turns up barking gladlyin the last.
Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:
He’d earned the right to happy endings,at least in fictionwith its diminutions.
As someone who quickly abandons any book or movie where hope and joy will not win the day, the premise of this poem immediately caught my attention.
At the heart of the poem is this question, what is the purpose of art? Is it to lead us into or out of the “real world”? Is it to give a description of our fallen world or the hope and vision we need to overcome and transcend it?
In the end, how we answer these questions will determine how we read this poem.
ClimbingSky 
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