Trzy slowa najdziwniejsze

I. About the poet  

When Wislawa Szymborska was one year old, her father retired from his job as steward of the estates of a nobleman, Count Zamoyski. The family moved to Krakow where they bought a house. Wislawa, called Ichna by her family, enrolled in first grade when she was seven and a Catholic middle school at twelve. Ichna had to finish her high school studies in secret during the German occupation. Wislawa’s first surviving poem dates from 1942. As a young poet, she met and admired her fellow future Nobel laureate, Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004). Her first book of poems, Dlatego Zyjemy (That’s What We Live For) was published in 1952 in an edition of 1,140 copies. By 1979 her book Wybòr Wiersky (A Selection of Poems) was published with more than 50,000 copies. She was awarded Germany’s highest literary honor, the Goethe Prize, in 1991 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. She was a life-long smoker, and died of lung cancer at 89.

Wislawa Szymborska has been called “the Mozart of poetry” for her seemingly effortless lyric style. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, she explained her poetics thus: “Astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events.” …But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

II. History

Wislawa Szymbroska got Hitler for a sixteenth birthday present as the Nazi death machine invaded Poland in September 1939.  Wislawa managed to avoid being sent to Germany as a slave laborer by taking an office job with the railways. After the war, Poland was occupied by the Russian Red Army. Szymborska was at first a loyal supporter of the new regime. She joined the Communist Party, and published a poem mourning the death of Josef Stalin. But her horizons widened after she first travelled to Paris in 1957, and she resigned from the Party in 1966. She became a strong voice of the Polish opposition and a supporter of the Solidarity movement that was eventually successful in bringing down the Communist government.

III. Culture

Polish culture was deeply influenced by the Catholic Church and a widespread system of religious education run by the Jesuits. It took centuries for the Polish vernacular language to be accepted on an equal footing with Latin. Poland was usually a few decades late in absorbing waves of thought from Western Europe. A Baroque phase is identied in the 17th Century, an Enlightenment phase in the 18th, and a period of Romanticism, identified with Poland’s age-old struggle for independence, in the 19th. The poets assumed responsibility for developing a national identity. A brief period of freedom between world wars saw a new model of Polish culture embodying the language of everyday life along with avant-garde styles. Then, just as the young Ichna Szymborska was writing her first poems, everything was thrown into desperate confusion by the Nazi invasion. With Soviet occupation and Stalinist oppression, the poets once again had to lead the way in developing a sense of identity. Czeslaw Milosz, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1980, played this role from exile, living for many years in Berkeley, California. Wislawa Szymborska had to find her own difficult path from within the system.

I. About this poem

“Trzy Slowa” is a poem about the power of words. With just three keywords, Wislawa Szymborska takes on time, information and existence. When Wislawa says the word Future, its first syllables are already in the past. Speaking the word Silence, she destroys it. Pronouncing the word Nothing (or Nothingness or Nada) she makes something that no non-existent thing can understand. Each keyword requires one couplet, in the form “when I say (or synonym) the word ___ , this happens.

Poetry out loud: the consonant-rich Polish language looks intimidating, but its sounds are actually very smooth and expressive. Fortunately for us there is a recording of Szymborska reading this poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRoaKvZ2zbo. The instructor should practice by playing Szymborska’s reading and imitating each line. Then she can model pronouncing Polish while playing Szymborska to the class, working line-by-line, couplet-by-couplet, and call-and-response. Each group should memorize and perform one couplet in Polish.

Difficulties of translation? The syntax of the last line may be confusing: miesci sie is one verb, grasp, hold onto, get hold of, referring to the thing (cos) Wislawa has created by saying Nothing, and the subject of the clause, niebycie, non-being, comes at the very end of the line. Aside from this line the unfamiliar Polish rather smootkly reveals a rich pallete of word choices in the process of translation.

II. Poetic Form

A pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length. A couplet is “closed” when the
lines form a bounded grammatical unit like a sentence. For an example see Dorothy Parker’s
“interview”

The ladies men admire, I’ve heard,
Would shudder at a wicked word.
Their candle gives a single light;
They’d rather stay at home at night.
They do not keep awake till three,
Nor read erotic poetry.
They never sanction the impure,
Nor recognize an overture.
They shrink from powders and from paints…
So far, I’ve had no complaints.

The “heroic couplet” is written in iambic pentameter and features prominently in the work of 17th
and 18th century didactic and satirical poets such as Alexander Pope

III. Suggested Activities

Find three cognate words between the Polish and a language you already know (trzy, three; cos (cosa, Spanish) thing; sie, se, Spanish reflexive pronoun).

Take a page to doodle in any style, using the three keywords of Szymborska’s poem (in Polish or Englsih) as graphic elements in your design.

Draw the niebycie, non-being, in the form of an imaginary animal.

Memorize the whole poem in Polish and your entire translation in English, and perform it.

IV. Original Poetry

Brainstorm a list of possible key words and write them on the board.

When I (say, utter, pronounce, shout, whisper) the word ____ , / what happens. Write your poem as a series of couplets, one for each key word. Make some of your happening lines short as in Szymborska’s second couplet, some long like the first and third.

Now choose the most interesting couplet from your first poem, and write a longer poem, expanding on the events that will happen when you say that word.

Turn your doodle into a free-form poem that still incorporates some artistic elements.