Wondering what book to read next? Looking for a book to motivate you? Keen to try a new author in English? We’d like to
celebrate World Book Day by creating a new section in this blog that will help
you discover your next read: Students recommend books to students.
Yolanda Ferro is a C2 student
in Sar and also a member of our book club. In order to inspire you, Yolanda has
chosen the work of a wonderful writer, Polish poetess Wislawa Szymborska:
I happened to learn about
the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska back in 2002, when I was living in Krakow,
Poland, the very same town she inhabited at that time and where she died in
2012, aged 88. Some years earlier, in 1996, she had been awarded the Nobel Prize
in Literature "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical
and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality."
Surfing the net I came
through this excerpt that I reckon perfectly expresses her uniqueness:
“Szymborska frequently
employed literary devices such as ironic precision, paradox, contradiction and
understatement, to illuminate philosophical themes and obsessions. (…). It is,
however, important to note the ambiguity of her poetry. Although her poetry was
influenced by her experiences, it is relevant across time and culture. She
wrote from unusual points of view, such as a cat in the newly empty apartment
of its dead owner. Her reputation rests on a relatively small body of work,
fewer than 350 poems. When asked why she had published so few poems, she said:
I have a trash can in my home.”
Source
The two poems below will
allow you to have a taste of what I find to be her profound and serene vision
of existence, her joyful wisdom concerning life. When living in Poland, I spent
many consecutive hours in her poems´ company. So, it is from my own experience
that I can tell that her words have a very powerful "healing" effect:
"The Three Oddest
Words"
When I pronounce the word
Future,
the first syllable already
belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word
Silence,
I destroy it.
When I pronounce the word
Nothing,
I make something no
non-being can hold.
"Possibilities"
I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along
the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to
Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking
people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle
and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame
for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to
doctors about something else.
I prefer the old
fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of
writing poems
to the absurdity of not
writing poems.
I prefer, where love’s
concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated
every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness
to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in
civvies.
I prefer conquered to
conquering countries.
I prefer having some
reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos
to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms’ fairy
tales to the newspapers’ front pages.
I prefer leaves without
flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with
uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since
mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that
I haven’t mentioned here
to many things I’ve also
left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the
loose
to those lined up behind a
cipher.
I prefer the time of
insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how
much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind
even the possibility
that existence has its own
reason for being.
Thanks, Yolanda, for sharing the exquisite work of such an exceptional poetress. We're really moved by how wonderfully both poems capture the greatness of ordinary life.
