My original template for this blog did not include the “Politics/Culture” category you see off to the right of your screen, where the site’s archives stretch back to 2012. At the time, I fancied Traversing as a kind of haven from the hurly burly world of politics, a place where sometimes weighty, sometimes light-hearted issues of how to live in, reflect on and understand the world could be discussed under a multi-hued blanket of the arts, religion, psychology and philosophy.
Another six months on, I was nearing the end of a post on songs by the folkies John Stewart and John Gorka when it occurred to me that, like plentiful music across every genre, their songs were so intertwined with the politics of their day that labeling the category of that post merely as “Music” did not do it justice.
So was born the “Politics/Culture” category that, once Donald Trump barreled onto the American political scene a couple of years later, grew to be a far more regular feature on this site than was my original intent. Truth to tell, I’m rarely comfortable with that fact.
Sometimes, I hear from readers who aren’t either, to whom it is easy to respond, because it is true, “Yeah, me too.”
Very early on, the very young grow ever more aware of the environment they inhabit, the levers to pull, the limits to challenge, the smiles to employ, the sorrows to express, to secure their place as masters, to the greatest extent possible, of their fate.
I often feel as if I am girding my loins when the politics of any given week washes tsunami-like over the national conversation and I whine with a reluctant “Must I?” to the heavens as I debate which option is more ridiculous: plunging into the often gale-force political winds buffeting our world…or ignoring them as if they’re not knocking me and most everyone I know right off our feet.
Et tu?
Into this breach steps the late Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska with “Children of Our Age,” a poem from her 1986 volume, “The People on the Bridge.”
The poem expounds with sure-footed authority on the tension between the political and other facets of life, no doubt born of Szymborska’s 1923 birth between the two world wars, followed after the second of those by nearly another half-century of oppression in her country by the communist Soviet Union.
Szymborska died in 2012, meaning she lived and wrote under some form of occupation by a hostile and controlling foreign power for some 60 of her 88 years on earth.
Over that span, she managed to not attract undue attention from her occupiers and win the Nobel Prize for literature with a body of work that the Nobel committee described as “unique among its kind and does not easily lend itself to categorization. Szymborska strives to illuminate the deepest problems of human existence, surrounded by the transitoriness of the now and everyday life.”
One aspect of that “everyday life” she sees as decidedly not transitory but instead wedded indelibly, serpent-like, through every day: the political.
***
I imagine Ms. Szymborska would reply: “It had better…”
***
“Home politicus” is a term plucked from Plato’s “Republic” in 375 B.C., which holds that human beings are essentially political animals. Nearly a quarter-millennium later, Szymborska boldly poeticized that idea without naming it, the first five lines of “Children of Our Age” reading,
We are children of our age,
it’s a political age.
All day long, all through the night,,
all affairs—yours, ours, theirs—
are political affairs.
Maybe you’re not so sure about that? Maybe you note that you often don’t think or talk about politics at all as you go about your busy days filled with work and family, shopping for groceries and heading out for some exercise?
Nothing wrong with any of that, but here’s Szymborska’s backdrop, the next six lines asserting just how ensnared we are:
Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your eyes, a political slant.
Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don’t say speaks for itself.
So either way you’re talking politics.
Yes, silence may be golden, but what we choose to remain silent about can speak volumes. Damn!
And wait: the machinations of Washington, D.C., Moscow, Berlin, Riyadh, Beijing, Albany, Sacramento and St. Paul are in our genes?
Of course they’re in our genes. How we respond to those genes and their interplay with our environment represents the whole adventure of life.
Very early on, the very young grow ever more aware of the environment they inhabit, the levers to pull, the limits to challenge, the smiles to employ, the sorrows to express, to secure their place as masters, to the greatest extent possible, of their fate.
Yes, it would be highly reductionist to say, “It’s all politics,” but it would be absurd to claim politics isn’t a major player. Power is almost never absent in human affairs (most all species’ affairs, actually), and politics is all about power and how it is used.
“All right, but sometimes I just drop it all and head off to the woods, inhaling and ingesting nature whole, leaving every last care of the world behind.”
Really?
Even when you take to the woods,
you’re taking political steps
on political grounds.
Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And though it troubles the digestion
it’s a question, as always, of politics.
A delicious bit of poetic business there to throw Shakespeare and the woebegon Hamlet into her argument, but all such existential questions hinge mightily on the political context in which they are uttered. Unfortunately, they “trouble the digestion” every bit as much today as they always have.
Part of Szymborska’s genius is the playful, ironic way in which she ponders and proclaims on serious matters. That no doubt helped keep her occupiers at bay over the decades even as she regularly pierced their authoritarian armor.
Through most of history, poets have often doubled as public intellectuals, the conscience of their cultures. (In 21st century America, not so much…)
That role allows Szymborska to sign off with two scathing and longer stanzas in which she invokes first the notion of the raw materials of life—cattle feed, oil—that hinge heavily on politics, before quickly segueing first to the kind of human foolishness that even the shape of a conference table can become a political football.
This alludes to a famous incident known as the “Battle of the Tables” at the Paris peace talks on the Vietnam War in 1968, when preliminary negotiators spent 10 weeks arguing about the shape of the tables at which they would be sitting.
To acquire a political meaning
you don’t even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,
or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months:
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?
Silly, silly humans. But nothing silly about what follows as Szymborska brings us back to the reality of what else is happening through those 10 weeks and beyond:
Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.
Szymborska was once asked why she had published fewer than 400 poems starting with her debut piece at age 21 for a daily Polish newspaper’s literary supplement. “I have a trash can in my home,” she offered in reply. “A poem written in the evening is read again in the morning. It does not always survive.”
That sense of humor undergirded by a serious aversion to the trappings of fame that came with the Nobel Prize served her and her readers well through the poems she did write, complemented by occasional essays and criticism.
Finally, a note on translation, which deserves a whole post of its own in light of the widely varied translations of this and other works in Szymborska’s ouevre.
Two versions of “Children…” make appearances online, both of which differ dramatically from each other but even more so from the version printed a few stanzas at a time above and, for your convenience, en toto if you keep scrolling below. I actually couldn’t find an online translation of the widely hailed “definitive” version that is printed in Szymborska’s “Map: Collected and Last Poems,” from 2015.
Translators Clare Cavanagh and the late Stanislaw Barańcsak do what all great translators do: make a kind of poetry of their own by not enslaving themselves to literal, word-for-word translations that might capture the meaning of a given poem well enough but miss the musical magic of the original.
The result, when I lay all three translations in my possession next to each other, is notable, starting right off with the title, which is “Children of the Epoch,” in one version and the slightly different “Children of an Epoch” in the other. Both of them employ the somewhat obscure “Epoch” instead of the vernacular “Age” that Cavanagh-Barańcsak chose, which is more in keeping with Szymborska’s preference for everyday language, shorn of artifice. From there, almost every subsequent line presents quite a bit differently in all three versions, albeit with the same basic theme of the poem intact.
So my advice if you go looking for more Szymborska to read is to make sure you note it’s Cavanagh-Barańcsak doing the heavy lifting of translation, it always being better to read poetry with the true poetry intact.
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See here for a tender, intimate and humorous interview with Szymborska’s longtime secretary and current head of her foundation, Michal Risinek.
Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewhidas/
Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing.
Elizabeth Haslam, whose photos (except for the books) grace the rotating banner at top of page.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books photo by Larry Rose, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
Teal/blue green by Jason Eppink, New York City https://www.flickr.com/photos/jasoneppink/
Protest march by Heather Mount, Knoxville, Tennessee https://unsplash.com/@heathermount
Szymborska side portrait courtesy of The Thornfield Review
CHILDREN OF OUR AGE
We are children of our age,
it’s a political age.
All day long, all through the night,
all affairs—yours, ours, theirs—
are political affairs.
Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your eyes, a political slant.
Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don’t say speaks for itself.
So either way your’re talking politics.
Even when you take to the woods,
you’re taking political steps
on political grounds.
Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And though it troubles the digestion
it’s a question, as always, of politics.
To acquire a political meaning
you don’t even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,
or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months:
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?
Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.
(Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Barańcsak)
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