Christ Carrying the Cross by Hieronymus Boschby Wisława Szymborska
Look, how spry she still is,
how well she holds up:
hatred, in our century.
How lithely she takes high hurdles.
How easy for her to pounce, to seize.
She is not like the other feelings.
At once older and younger than they.
She alone gives birth to causes
which rouse her to life.
If she sleeps, it's never for eternity.
Insomnia doesn't take away but gives her strength.
Religion or no religion
-- as long as she's in the running
Motherland or no-man's land
-- as long as she's in the race.
Even justice suffices at first.
After that she speeds off on her own
Hatred. Hatred.
The grimace of love's ecstasy
twists her face.
Oh, those other feelings,
so sickly and sluggish.
Since when could brotherhood
count on milling crowds?
Was compassion ever first across the finish line?
How many followers does doubt command?
Only hatred commands, for hatred knows her stuff.
Smart, able, hard working.
Need we say how many songs she has written.
How many pages of history she has numbered.
How many human carpets she has unrolled,
over how many plazas and stadiums.
Let's be honest:
Hatred can create beauty.
Marvelous are her fire-glows, in deep night.
Clouds of smoke most beautiful, in rosy dawn.
It's hard to deny ruins their pathos
and not to see bawdy humor
in the stout column lording it over them.
She is a master of contrast
between clatter and silence,
red blood and white snow.
Above all the image of a clean-shaven torturer
standing over his defiled victim
never bores her.
She is always ready for new tasks.
If she has to wait, she waits.
They say hatred is blind. Blind?
With eyes sharp as a sniper's,
she looks bravely into the future
-- she alone.
Trans. from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak.
Elizabeth, thank you! This needed to be posted.
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome, Octo!
ReplyDeleteI thought so too. This needs to be permanently etched somewhere, because it (hatred) ain't going away.
Great selection!
ReplyDeleteSzymborska suffered both nazi and communist violence and oppression visited upon her country, so she knows what she is writing about.
These events caused much ideological ferment and the questioning of everything by Poles like her, much like WW I did to Western Europe's lost generation.
We would do well to emulate her deep skepticism of political rhetoric and rejection of blind adherence to ideologies.
The angry faces in the Bosch painting could be teabaggers today. Irate but happy to be in a mob where they can share their angry feelings with perverse joy.
ReplyDeleteThank you, SF. Glad you like it. Szymborska is my compatriot, you know. :)
ReplyDeleteAs to her deep skepticism toward and rejection of ideological rhetoric, it was hard-won and slow-to-come.
My first experience with Szymborska's poetry was through being required, at school, to memorize her peans to communism (yes, she did that -- we all make mistakes, it seems; unfortunately, some of those mistakes of hers are permanently stuck in my head. But she's already more than redeemed herself.)
Yep, HE. This painting reminds me of (among other things) the right-wingers' taunting of the Parkinson's man in Columbus, OH.
ReplyDeleteElizabeth: Mine too! Polish grandpa, Ukranian/Romanian grandma.
ReplyDeleteI really wish we did a better job teaching the humanities. There is so much beauty in the architecture, poetry, art and philosophy of Western Civilization's history (and other peoples' as well. I'm just biased towards Europe and North and South American stuff).
My degree and my job is in the technical arena, but I think everyone should be exposed to the humanities.
Amen and thanks, Elizabeth. May our ballots take precedence over their bullets.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful post.
ReplyDeleteThe snarling, sneering stereotypically grotesque Jewish faces mocking and harassing Jesus have a large role in Christian iconography and I've often compared our political scene to another of the countless depictions of the mocking crowd and the helpless Liberal being marched down the street.
This is one of the better depictions and one of the few Bosches I haven't seen in person. They usually surprise you with how small and jewel like they are.
There are times that I hate the Human race and those times are many. Bosch, I think, may have been as cynical as I am. So many of his paintings are making fun of human foibles.
It's true, the humanities seem to have been tossed out in our "education" system. Language, rhetoric, art and even history are gone or so bowdlerized and politicized they might as well be gone. We train and indoctrinate people to be cogs in a machine, to make money, not to think and not to question.
It was bad enough when I went to school half a century ago, but it's worse now.
I can only say...I learned a lot today, thank you for this post...
ReplyDeleteBolshaya spasiba, Elizavyetta. Ochen' "horrorshow" post, as little Alex from A Clockwork Orange would say.
ReplyDeleteAs for the humanities, si signore SF, sono d'accordo. Just getting kids interested in another language or two works wonders, I think, and of course literature (my field) is something that encourages us to interpret and feel for ourselves. It's a shame how etiolated and "utilitarianized" these fields have become in recent decades. Wilde said, "All art is quite useless," by which he meant to pay art the highest compliment he could think of. And Oscar was no fool.
BloggingDino,
ReplyDeleteOK, I looked up etiolated, and I agree with you.
Of course, my wife and I are raising our kids in our conservative values, but I teach them to never discount anything out of hand.
Nothing is off-limits because of ideology. Wilde, like Rousseau, would be considered "liberal" nowadays, but they have much to teach us about real life and ultimately ourselves.
When I catch one of my kids parroting one of my rightwing diatribes, I challenge them to defend it logically.
We have always raised them to think for themselves and to defend themselves. Now it's like facing down a team of lawyers when they want something. They know how to make their case!
Hemingway is my favorite fiction writer, and Steinbeck a close second. Yes, there is a strain of schizophrenia running through me.
Provide a solid background in the humanities and eliminate, for starters, business schools and degrees such as 'construction management'. We shouldn't be using valuable resources to churn out corporate drones. Let business do it themselves.
ReplyDeleteBardzo dziękuję, Szanowni Panowie.
ReplyDeleteTom, ballots over bullets, yes.
SF 'n all, absolutely agree on the desperate need for teaching humanities (and art and music) in our schools. As it is, these are the first subjects to be eliminated -- if they even were in place at all -- because of perennial and growing budget cuts.
Bosch's art looks so contemporary, doesn't it -- or maybe today's reality, or at least our understanding of it, is so reminiscent of wild and nightmarish dreams. (Some of the people mocking Christ in this painting, especially the guy in the middle, look like today's... bikers, no? ;) But contemporary as his paintings may seem (to me), I'm glad that neurosurgery has progressed a bit since HB's times (yikes!)).
And ochen horrorshow is ironically appropriate, Dino.