They Carry a Promise: Selected Poems by Janusz Szuber, Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough
2009; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 83; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wlt.2009.0153
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)Polish Historical and Cultural Studies
Resumo> < Q o Schwarcz's imagination and sensibility are best exemplified in the poems inspired by theChinese classics and language. "Confucius Feasting" juxtaposes two separate episodes fromTheAnalects, towhich is added an imagined thirdepisode. Shao gg, thename ofmusic allegedly composed by Emperor Shun is rendered here as "an ancient ode," thus joining the second stanza, in which the master enumerates the reasons why one should cherish the Book ofOdes. For threemonths the master did not taste meat, not because he was entranced by the music, according to theoriginal text, but because hewas "mourning / the death of songs." The poem creates a nostalgic Confucius who holds dear things that are gone, forgot ten, or silenced. Schwarcz's inno vative reading of the two Chinese characters?one traditional and the other simplified?of Hfl and ffl(xian, idle) in "Listening to theUniverse" reminds one of Ezra Pound. For Schwarcz, the past is not buried permanently in the tomb of history; instead, it inevitably interacts with the present. Remem brances are a frame for these poems, which are her "tools / forpictur ing eternity" ("Hands"). Schwarcz seeks inherwork to find "the voice within the silence" ("A Pilfered Life among the Grasses"), while her own voice is "a small still voice, / as one woman polishes the sapphire / of her thoughts" ("Gems"). The opposite of grandiloquent, her voice is able to pierce the reader's heart deeper and linger there longer. For this reader, theweightiest thoughts Schwarcz gives voice to in thisvol ume occur in "What Is theGood of Studying History?": "What is the good / of studying history? /Noth ing, but to be less tongue-tied / when disaster strikes, / to look into darkness /with open eyes." Zhao Yuan Chinese AcademyofSocialSciences, Beijing Janusz Szuber. They Carry a Prom ise: Selected Poems. Ewa Hryniewicz Yarbrough, tr. New York. Knopf. 2009. 112 pages. $26. isbn978-0-307-26753-5 While translations of poetry hardly register on the radar screen of Amer ican readers, the recentlypublished collections by Polish poets, includ ing two issued by amajor New York publisher, attest to the continuing popularity ofPolish poetry inAmer ica. Doubtless most readers associate Polish poetrywith Czesiaw Mifosz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Wislawa Szymborska, so in thecase of Janusz Szuber, who is in his early sixties, theyare in fora treat,forhis poetry is a delightfulmixture of the three masters and much more. Based in the city of Sanok in southeastern Poland, a region that's as rich inhistory and natural beauty as it is impoverished, Szuber is a poet of reflectionand the search for transcendence. Szuber's world may be physically diminutive, but his spiritual and intellectual pursuits are farfrom it.In theopening poem, "About a Boy Stirring Jam," the speaker expresses man's desire to grasp the whole essence ofhis being, before ultimately realizing that more important than the sum are the indi vidual atoms: "For someone who can't grasp thewhole / There's sal vation in the remembered detail." The poem ends with the speaker reminding himself of the role he plays in themaking and unmaking of his surroundings: "Now I know inattention is an unforgivable sin / And each particle of time has an ultimate dimension." Like a great chronicler, Szuber has spent a considerable amount of ink on summoning his ancestors, and has done so, remarkably, with out crossing into the realms of shal low mythologizing. Writing about his great-great-grandmother in "Klara," the poet rescues from obliv ion not only her but himself, a feat achieved not by a simple appeal to familyties,but rather to theunyield ing power of language: "Helpless, I Like you, Klara, more and more naked, /Dissolved in theuniversal, almost transparent, / I summon the possessive pronoun forhelp, / From the rules of grammar deriving / The necessary argument." Of course, some may argue that there is some thing baroque about these lines? and Szuber in general?but what's praiseworthy is how he eschews linguistic and stylistic fireworks in favor of returning to the same uni versal truths thatpropel us to keep searching and exploring who we are. Indeed, bound to a wheelchair since his college days, Szuber's per sonal story could provide him with endless reasons forwriting about himself, and yet even when he does, he always connects his own experi ence to a largerwhole theway only the finest of poets can. "A Small IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIM 74 i World Literature Today , Treatise on Analogy" describes the 1 speaker findinghimself ina carwith i a trapped bee trying to get out: T 1 picked up the notebook inwhich i Fm /Now recording this incident, ' and with its help / I directed the i insect toward the slightlyopen door, , / Halfway believing that one day i / Someone will treatme the same , way." Full of wisdom, intelligence, 1 beauty, and grace, Janusz Szuber's i poems deepen and strengthen our 1 ties to ourselves and theworld at i large. ' PiotrFlorczyk i Wilmington,Delaware 1 Charles Wright. Sestets. New York. ! Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2009. ix+ 75 1 pages. $23. isbn978-0-374-26115-3 ' A collection of six-line poems, Ses i tetsis something new fromCharles , Wright. Readers will hear the same 1 meditative voice, the same mix of , secular and religious reference, the 1 same rich metaphoricity and imag i ery. Humor, nostalgia, remorse, Lit 1 tieRichard, God, Dante, Italy, Mon i tana, the Blue Ridge, the I Ching, and much more?it's all here, in a i wide range of an expansive spirit i and protean imagination. What's 1 different about trying to fitall this i into a sestet is that it's like a size-ten 1 foot fittinginto a size-six shoe. The i incredible thing is that Wright pulls ' itoff,at leastmost of the time,partly i because his lines are often banners , of print that stretch from the leftto 1 right margins, containing as many i as nine to ten stresses and afford 1 ing more opportunity than more i common line lengths. But, even so, 1 why would thepoet ofZone Journals i choose todo this? , Perhaps theopening lines from i "ThisWorld IsNot My Home, I'm , Only Passing Through" offer a 1 clue: "The more you say, the more mistakes youTl make, / so keep it simple." Well, maybe, but my sense is thatWright speaks from the evening land of a spirit on the edge ofnight and feels thepressure to say less or say itmore succinctly than ever: time is growing short. In the poem "Stiletto," we read: "Why does each evening up here / always, in summer, seem to be / The way?as itdoes, with the light knifing low from right to left? / It will be on the next-to-last one?" Here, the speaker isperched on the edge ofchange, in the evening zone of transition. Ah, maybe that's it: the ses tet, the last six lines of the Italian sonnet form (lines 9-14) after the octave, which begin with a "turn," a change, in their first line. These, then, are poems of "the turn." Con sider, for example, these first few richly allusive lines of "Twilight of theDogs": "Death is themother of nothing. / This is a fact of life, / And exponentially sad. /All these years?a lifetime, really?thinking itmight be otherwise. /What are thecolors ofdespair?" Here, Wright has a little fun alluding to theG?t terd?mmerung, the Twilight of the Gods, spelling "God" backward, and directly challenging Wallace Stevens's famous passage from his poem "Sunday Morning": "Death is the mother of beauty." The speaker seems to have turned from hope (though paradoxically in good humor); however, by the last poem in the sequence, "Little Ending," when he is "at thegreat forkon the untouchable road," he says, "Some one will take our hand, / someone will give us refuge, / Circling left or circling right."Here, in the last line of the last sestet, thefull turnis achieved, the eternal turn, the circle. FredDings University ofSouthCarolina MISCELLANEOUS Zs?fia Ban. Esti iskola: Olvas?k?nyv feln?tteknek. Pozsony/Bratislava. Kal ligram. 2007. 232 pages. 2700 Ft. isbn 978-80-7149-921-3 -. Pr?bacsomagol?s. Pozsony/ Bratislava. Kalligram. 2008. 213 pages. 2300 Ft. isbn978-80-8101-056-9 In an intenselypersonal essay about Susan Sontag, included in the volu me Pr?bacsomagol?s (Test packing), Zs?fia Ban comments that real essayists basically write about them selves. By that definition, Ban is an honest-to-goodness essayist. But the personal element is also present in her debut work of fiction,Esti iskola (Evening school), a very loosely con nected stringof stories that run the gamut from somber recitation to zany pastiche. In this book, which carries the subtitle Olvas?k?nyv feln?tteknek(A reader foradults), she does resort to pedagogical devices such as chapter headings that classi fyeach storyaccording to scholastic subjects. She also appends questions for "students" at the end of each piece. These hilariously inane assign ments, which mimic and parody standard end-of-chapter questions, become a devastating comment on an education system and a culture that remain smugly, imperturbably clueless, their "reading comprehen sion" nil. This is not to say that reading Zs?fia Ban is a breeze. The narratives in Esti iskola are oftenwaylaid by philosophical digressions, puzzles, and inserts, which are as allusive and intertextualas only thewriting of a sophisticated literary insider can be (Ban is an associate professor in theAmerican Studies Department ofBudapest University). But embed ded in these trickyand devious post H^^| September-October 2009 i75 ...
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