Poet's Choice

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, July 29, 2007

In the news, reports have appeared of a perhaps mythical, possibly one-eyed, furry creature: the Mapinguary. Whether the man-eating creature, said to resemble a giant sloth, exists or not, it reveals something about the human need to imagine a being profoundly other than ourselves that yet somehow reflects (or consumes) US. Here is a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh:

NOTES FROM A NONEXISTENT HIMALAYAN EXPEDITION

So these are the Himalayas.

Mountains racing to the moon.

The moment of their start recorded

on the startling, ripped canvas of the sky.

Holes punched in a desert of clouds.

Thrust into nothing.

Echo--a white mute.

Quiet.

Yeti, down there we've got Wednesday,

bread and alphabets.

Two times two is four.

Roses are red there,

and violets are blue.

Yeti, crime is not all

we're up to down there.

Yeti, not every sentence there

means death.

We've inherited hope --

the gift of forgetting.

You'll see how we give

birth among the ruins.

Yeti, we've got Shakespeare there.

Yeti, we play solitaire

and violin. At nightfall,

we turn lights on, Yeti.

Up here it's neither moon nor earth.

Tears freeze.

Oh Yeti, semi-moonman,

turn back, think again!

I called this to the Yeti

inside four walls of avalanche,

stomping my feet for warmth

on the everlasting

snow.

The Yeti, like the Mapinguary, is, among other things, a form of human autobiography, wistful and lonesome, as well as scary.

(Wislawa Szymborska's poem can be found in "View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems," translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. Harcourt Brace. Copyright 1962, 1967, by Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warszawa. Copyright 1975, 1976, by Czytelnik, Warszawa. Copyright 1985 by Wislawa Szymborska, Warszawa. Copyright 1993 by Wislawa Szymborska. Copyright 1995 by Harcourt Brace.)

Robert Pinsky was poet laureate of the United States

from 1997 through 2000.