True, the gentlemen of the Swedish Academy have made more than their share of bloopers. But when they bestowed the Nobel Prize upon Wislawa Szymborska in 1996, they got it right, rescuing a major poet from minor obscurity. Two previous collections of her work had appeared in English, of course. Yet
View with a Grain of Sand is by far the best introduction to the Polish writer, conveying not only the fantastic lightness of her touch but the entire worlds she manages to pack into, as it were, a grain of sand. Miniscule wonders are her specialty, such as the tableau she records in "Miracle Fair": "The usual miracle: / invisible dogs barking / in the dead of night. / One of many miracles: / a small and airy cloud / is able to upstage the massive moon." Yet Szymborska is also a love poet of peculiar tartness:
True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life's highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.
What comes along so rarely, in fact, is a writer of this quality--and a translation that does her justice. Szymborska's brilliance would probably overpower even a second-rate rendering into English. But thanks to the efforts of Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, she is not only brilliant but supremely readable--an intellectual comedian for whom "there's nothing more debauched than thinking."
