Pieter Brueghel the Elder - Two chained Monkeys (1562)
Pieter Bruegel der Ältere -
Zwei angekettete Affen [1562] -
Berlin, Gemälde-Galerie - wm
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Wislawa Szymborska
Two Monkeys by Brueghel
(trans. from the Polish by Magnus Kryski)
I keep dreaming of my graduation exam:
in a window sit two chained monkeys,
beyond the window floats the sky,
and the sea splashes.
I am taking an exam on the history of mankind:
I stammer and flounder.
One monkey, eyes fixed upon me, listens ironically,
the other seems to be dozing--
and when silence follows a question,
he prompts me
with a soft jingling of the chain.
english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/szymborska....
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By Marleen Stoessel - Updated 30.06.2023-17:30
From Breughel to Kafka: an early poem by the Polish Nobel laureate who was born a hundred years ago.
The painting to which this poem refers hangs in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie. Two monkeys crouched chained in a kind of embrasure, with a view of the water and sailing ships deep below them; birds crossing the vast sky bounded only by the round arch of the window, the suggestion of a city far off in the right-hand background of the picture. But none of the monkeys is looking out. The one in front crouches with its back to the lookout, staring impassively in the direction of the viewer. The second one crouches to the side, as if dozing. A picture from 1562 that has been interpreted in numerous ways and, almost 400 years later, becomes the dream image of a young Polish poetess who, at that time, in the thaw period a few years after Stalin's death, frees herself from the ideological clutches, i.e. chains, of socialist realism. An image that, like any true work of art, music or literature, reveals new layers, aspects and perspectives in every era, recreating itself with every viewer, listener or reader, with everyone who responds to it in their own time, in their own individual reading.
1957, when this poem was written, was the year in which the poetry of Wisława Szymborska, who was thirty-four years old at the time, underwent a decisive turn and transformation, a turn towards the simplicity, light-footedness and laconicism that are her trademarks - an attitude gained from paradoxical experience of the world, with which she observes the objects of the small everyday world and the big world and seasons them with subtle, often cheerful irony. Small things become big, but the big ones shrink as if casually to their proper size - all of them overshadowed by an indulgently humorous smile with which the poet seems to wink at herself again and again.
The quiet clanking of chains
It is impossible to exhaust the manifold connotations, associations and references that open up in this poem: the paradoxical reversal of the situation that the dream image, overwriting its model as it were, undertakes, in which man is tested by the ape for his "maturity", in human history of all things. Is evolution testing itself backwards here, so to speak? Is man maturing into an ape as his more human counterpart? And yet fails at the same time "stuttering" and "faltering", deeply ashamed?
"Ich schäme mich sehr, ich - Menschenaffe" ("I am very ashamed, I - ape") is the title of another poem from that time, expressing the shame of the spectator in the face of the bullied and whipped circus animals (the title of the 1952 poem). The shame here appears more planar, in simple reflection, while the later dream image shows the chains in multiple reflections, onsets and offsets. They are the examination material before which the examinee fails. And all the required correct answer is contained in the "quiet clanking of the chains", in an answer that also has to be recited. It doesn't get more mocking than this, and more devastating for the dreaming human ego can't be the ape-like contempt. "Failed" would be the verdict of this maturity test, to which a notation from Walter Benjamin's passages seems to correspond: "In every century, humanity must be detained", according to the sober insight of the historical-philosophical thinker, equally illusionless, ironic and bitter.
All the art of paradox, which Szymborska, who died in 2012, developed in her later work with inimitable fine irony, as generously indulgent as she was laconically sober and always with a light hand, is contained in this early poem. Indulgent, however, towards herself, insofar as one wants to relate the aforementioned shame to her earlier ideological aberrations. It is expressed only indirectly, in stuttering and faltering, and its tragedy is reminiscent of and touches on the shame that the ape in Kafka's "Report for an Academy" inflicts on us when, with the awakening consciousness of himself to which, of all things, imprisonment has freed him, he becomes aware of the ape-like nature of his "half-dressed" companion: "she has," we are told towards the end of the text, "the madness of the confused trained animal in her gaze; only I recognise this, and I cannot bear it. "
It is the abyss of shame that opens up in all these paradoxical references - and becoming aware of it is at the same time the only chance of our being human and being human.All of this, shame and opportunity, resonates in the "quiet clanking of the chains" from which the poetic I also frees itself.For as if the poet, who received the Nobel Prize in 1996, had made a virtue out of the faltering need for examination, she will elevate the sober statement "I don't know" to her poetological motto and source of inspiration in her Stockholm speech.Three words, "small, but with strong wings", she says. Chains to wings, then, as only art or a poem can do. Tomorrow, Sunday, (2nd of July 2023) Wisława Szymborska will be one hundred years old.
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Source:
ww.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/frankfurter-anthologie/frankfurter-anthologie-wis-awa-szymborska-die-zwei-affen-von-breughel-19002140.html
Pieter Brueghel the Elder - Two chained Monkeys (1562)
Pieter Bruegel der Ältere -
Zwei angekettete Affen [1562] -
Berlin, Gemälde-Galerie - wm
**********************************************************************************
Wislawa Szymborska
Two Monkeys by Brueghel
(trans. from the Polish by Magnus Kryski)
I keep dreaming of my graduation exam:
in a window sit two chained monkeys,
beyond the window floats the sky,
and the sea splashes.
I am taking an exam on the history of mankind:
I stammer and flounder.
One monkey, eyes fixed upon me, listens ironically,
the other seems to be dozing--
and when silence follows a question,
he prompts me
with a soft jingling of the chain.
english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/szymborska....
**********************************************************************************
By Marleen Stoessel - Updated 30.06.2023-17:30
From Breughel to Kafka: an early poem by the Polish Nobel laureate who was born a hundred years ago.
The painting to which this poem refers hangs in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie. Two monkeys crouched chained in a kind of embrasure, with a view of the water and sailing ships deep below them; birds crossing the vast sky bounded only by the round arch of the window, the suggestion of a city far off in the right-hand background of the picture. But none of the monkeys is looking out. The one in front crouches with its back to the lookout, staring impassively in the direction of the viewer. The second one crouches to the side, as if dozing. A picture from 1562 that has been interpreted in numerous ways and, almost 400 years later, becomes the dream image of a young Polish poetess who, at that time, in the thaw period a few years after Stalin's death, frees herself from the ideological clutches, i.e. chains, of socialist realism. An image that, like any true work of art, music or literature, reveals new layers, aspects and perspectives in every era, recreating itself with every viewer, listener or reader, with everyone who responds to it in their own time, in their own individual reading.
1957, when this poem was written, was the year in which the poetry of Wisława Szymborska, who was thirty-four years old at the time, underwent a decisive turn and transformation, a turn towards the simplicity, light-footedness and laconicism that are her trademarks - an attitude gained from paradoxical experience of the world, with which she observes the objects of the small everyday world and the big world and seasons them with subtle, often cheerful irony. Small things become big, but the big ones shrink as if casually to their proper size - all of them overshadowed by an indulgently humorous smile with which the poet seems to wink at herself again and again.
The quiet clanking of chains
It is impossible to exhaust the manifold connotations, associations and references that open up in this poem: the paradoxical reversal of the situation that the dream image, overwriting its model as it were, undertakes, in which man is tested by the ape for his "maturity", in human history of all things. Is evolution testing itself backwards here, so to speak? Is man maturing into an ape as his more human counterpart? And yet fails at the same time "stuttering" and "faltering", deeply ashamed?
"Ich schäme mich sehr, ich - Menschenaffe" ("I am very ashamed, I - ape") is the title of another poem from that time, expressing the shame of the spectator in the face of the bullied and whipped circus animals (the title of the 1952 poem). The shame here appears more planar, in simple reflection, while the later dream image shows the chains in multiple reflections, onsets and offsets. They are the examination material before which the examinee fails. And all the required correct answer is contained in the "quiet clanking of the chains", in an answer that also has to be recited. It doesn't get more mocking than this, and more devastating for the dreaming human ego can't be the ape-like contempt. "Failed" would be the verdict of this maturity test, to which a notation from Walter Benjamin's passages seems to correspond: "In every century, humanity must be detained", according to the sober insight of the historical-philosophical thinker, equally illusionless, ironic and bitter.
All the art of paradox, which Szymborska, who died in 2012, developed in her later work with inimitable fine irony, as generously indulgent as she was laconically sober and always with a light hand, is contained in this early poem. Indulgent, however, towards herself, insofar as one wants to relate the aforementioned shame to her earlier ideological aberrations. It is expressed only indirectly, in stuttering and faltering, and its tragedy is reminiscent of and touches on the shame that the ape in Kafka's "Report for an Academy" inflicts on us when, with the awakening consciousness of himself to which, of all things, imprisonment has freed him, he becomes aware of the ape-like nature of his "half-dressed" companion: "she has," we are told towards the end of the text, "the madness of the confused trained animal in her gaze; only I recognise this, and I cannot bear it. "
It is the abyss of shame that opens up in all these paradoxical references - and becoming aware of it is at the same time the only chance of our being human and being human.All of this, shame and opportunity, resonates in the "quiet clanking of the chains" from which the poetic I also frees itself.For as if the poet, who received the Nobel Prize in 1996, had made a virtue out of the faltering need for examination, she will elevate the sober statement "I don't know" to her poetological motto and source of inspiration in her Stockholm speech.Three words, "small, but with strong wings", she says. Chains to wings, then, as only art or a poem can do. Tomorrow, Sunday, (2nd of July 2023) Wisława Szymborska will be one hundred years old.
**********************************************************************************
Source:
ww.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/frankfurter-anthologie/frankfurter-anthologie-wis-awa-szymborska-die-zwei-affen-von-breughel-19002140.html