Personal anthology: Wislawa Szymborska

By on May 8th, 2005

Because it’s been ages since I posted anything from the commonplace-book…

Four A.M.

The hour between night and day.
The hour between toss and turn.
The hour of thirty-year-olds.

The hour swept clean for rooster’s crowing.
The hour when the earth takes back its warm embrace.
The hour of cool drafts from extinguished stars.
The hour of do-we-vanish-too-without-a-trace.

Empty hour.
Hollow. Vain.
Rock bottom of all the other hours.

No one feels fine at four a.m.
If ants feel fine at four a.m.,
we’re happy for the ants.  And let five a.m. come
if we’ve got to go on living.

— Wislawa Szymborska (trans. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

I first encountered this poem in a free paraphrase by Edward Hirsch in the New Yorker, which began like this:

The hollow, unearthly hour of night.
Swaying vessel of emptiness.

Patron saint of dead planets
and vast, unearthly spaces receding in mist.

Necklace of shattered constellations:
soon the stars will be extinguished. . . .

and ended thusly:

the scorned hour, the very pit

of all the other hours,
the very dirge.

Let five o’clock come
with its bandages of light.

A life buoy in bruised waters.
The first broken plank of morning.

I can’t decide which version I prefer.

Categorized under: Commonplaces.
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2 Responses to “Personal anthology: Wislawa Szymborska”

  1. Emily Lloyd says:
    May 16, 2005 at 12:54 pm

    Thank you for the Szymborska poem. It resonates a lot right now (maybe because I’m 30? [grin]), and I hadn’t seen it before.
    “Undisclosed location”–you silly. Good luck.

  2. Emily Lloyd says:
    May 16, 2005 at 12:55 pm

    Shoot, I forgot–not the Hirsch! the first one! I prefer it like nobody’s business.