A Note

A Note

By Wislawa Szymborska
(Translated, from Polish, by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)
From The New Yorker Newyorker.com

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur,

to tell pain
from everything it’s not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble on a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;

and to keep on not knowing
something important.

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Bio from http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1996/szymborska-bibl.html

Wislawa Szymborska was born 2 July 1923 in the small western Polish town of Bnin (now a part of Kórnik), near Poznan. Since 1931 she has been living in Cracow, where she studied Polish literature and sociology at the Jagellonian University between 1945 and 1948. In March 1945 she made her début with the poem "Szukam slowa" ("I seek the word") in a weekly supplement of the daily paper Dziennik Polski, and during the period immediately after the war she continued to publish poems in various newspapers and periodicals. From 1953 to 1981 she was on the editorial staff of the weekly magazine Zycie Literackie (Literary Life), where in a column entitled "Non-compulsory reading" she reviewed books on a wide variety of subjects: from tourism, cooking, gardening and witchcraft to the history of art, T.S. Eliot's cat poetry and Edward Lear's nonsense verse. Szymborska has also translated a fair amount of lyric poetry, especially French Baroque poetry and Agrippa d'Aubigné. During the 1980s she collaborated under the pseudonym Stanczykówna in the Polish "samizdat" publication Arka and in the exile magazine Kultura, which was published in Paris. Her poetry can be found in a large number of European languages, and also in Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese.