Contemporary International Writers

In “The End and the Beginning”, Wislawa Szymborska writes about the war, and more precisely, the after war. What is interesting is her way to write a poem about this subject. We could expect something tragic, or with a lot of pathos. But her choice is to tell the story through a poem of what is going on after a war. We understand that she is not going to talk about an everyday event from the title because of the capital at “End” and “Beginning”. Also, the choice to put the end before the beginning is interesting because she is not going through a chronology of the events but she does the contrary and starts from the end when there is nothing left. Almost nothing left, the ninth stanza is evocating the fact that at the end, we think there is nothing left, and she corrects line after line to end by saying that there is always something that reborns from that.  Then, the fact that she doesn’t focus on a particular war, even if we can assume that she is writing about the Second World War because she was born in 1923 in Poland and was twenty years old when it was annexed by the Nazis. She is using general terms and it creates sort of a statement about the war itself as a repetitive thing and removes the particularity of choosing one war and mentioning special events or places. She stays in a general and kind of vague statement and yet with a really precise word choice. The fact that she is not even using a pronoun but “Someone” in different sentences when she writes about the person who is gonna clean the place and in a way be alive in a place where there was only death is significant. It is not a he or she but someone, it can show that we will not remember or care about this person, but this is gonna be the one that is gonna bring back life after the disaster. We can always question the words and the style when it’s a translation but in this case, we can assume that the translation is good and that even in Polish, the general tone and the choice of words is, at least, giving the same feeling to the reader.