POETRY FRIDAY: Hunger at Camp Jaslo

Here is Hunger at Camp Jaslo, one translated version of a poem written by Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska. It doesn’t read exactly the same as Starvation Camp at Jaslo, which was translated by Joanna Treciak and is included in the book Miracle Fair: Selected Poems by Wislawa Szymborska. I do believe both versions get the poet’s point across.

Hunger at Camp Jaslo
By Wislawa Szymborska
Translated by Grazyna Drabik and Austin Flint

Write it. Write. In ordinary ink
on ordinary paper: they were given no food,
they all died of hunger. "All. How many?
It's a big meadow. How much grass
for each one?" Write: I don't know.
History counts its skeletons in round numbers.
A thousand and one remains a thousand,
as though the one had never existed:
an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle,
an ABC never read,
air that laughs, cries, grows,
emptiness running down steps toward the garden,
nobody's place in the line.


You can read the rest of the poem here.

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At Wild Rose Reader, I have an original poem about chocolate pudding and a link to a Szymborska poem I posted yesterday in remembrance of September 11, 2001.

Jennie has the Poetry Friday Roundup at Biblio File.