Oriental Impossibilities

contra Wisława Szymborska's "Possibilities"

I first learned of Szymborska's "Possibilities" right here on Substack, from unusual poetry in this post. I worked from the version there; the translation is unattributed, and the poem is broken down into multiple bite-sized stanzas. However, I subsequently learned — from multiple sources, including arguably the final arbiter of these matters, the Wisława Szymborska Foundation — that the accepted translation, by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, contains a few more lines, a few more line breaks, and no separate stanzas.

In any case, here’s my cheeky (almost) line-by-line retort to Szymborska — refutation, semantic inversion, but above all just a fun little creative exercise. It’s perhaps best read alongside the original, but I’m too lazy to figure out some clever side-by-side formatting or anything of the sort, so I’ll just naively assume that you’ll be considerate enough to do it yourself for me. And while I hate tedious disclaimers and feel that a circumspect unveiling of the artist — as a hedge against being misconstrued — is antithetical to preserving what magic lies within a work, I’ll note that this is as far as possible from any “oppression Olympics”-ing of a POC woman’s experiences against those of a white woman. Szymborska was a Nobel laureate, and to write a piece of such deceptive ease after all she and her native Poland had been through by the 90’s…yeah, I’ll hazard that she was every bit as badass as my grandmothers in the East, and much more of a “strong woman” (lol) than I’ll ever be.

I prefer books.
I prefer cats that prefer other cats to me.
I prefer the honeysuckle of the homeland.
I prefer Dostoyevsky to fable-inclined Victorians.
I prefer people liking me
to myself loving mankind, or any man.

I prefer being free of spare needle and thread because
my mother would insist on mending things beyond repair.
I prefer to maintain that others’ lapses of reason
are to blame for everything.
I prefer broken rules iff I was the one to break them.
I prefer arriving late.
I prefer talking to doctors about exactly what I showed up for.

I prefer the catharsis of untamed rage
to the absurdity of domesticating it into verse.
I prefer, where love’s concerned, misplaced anniversaries
that cause conniptions whose resolution
reminds us why we chose this infernal tie.

I prefer immoral hucksters who promise me everything
so that I can laugh at how dumb they were
to think me so dumb.
I prefer hard-earned kindness to gormless admiration.
I prefer conquering countries, if my people are among them.

I prefer flowers denuded of leaves
to the blossom-less leaves of impotent specimens.
I prefer dark eyes, since mine are darker.
I prefer vast expanses of desk across which I can scatter
the concretized detritus of my mind.
I prefer many things and people that I haven’t mentioned here
to most you’re convinced that I love.

I prefer zeroes strung tight
behind the mantissa.
I prefer infinities that remind me
of my insect-like mortality.
I prefer the resonance of a piano soundboard
after I knock compactly on an ivory C.
I prefer to know when we’ll be fucking done.
I prefer forgetting it’s possible
that existence is as senseless as it seems.

…We are not the same 😉