Periphery.
Vol. 1, No. 1, April 1995
The Longevity of Butchers
Stanislaw Baranczak,
a prominent Polish poet, literary critic and scholar, as well as one of
the most respected translators of English and Russian literatures into
Polish, is the Jurzykowski Professor of Polish Literature at Harvard
University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Among his recent English-
language publications are The Weight of the Body (1989), and Breathing
under Water and Other East European Essays (1990). The following poem
was originally published in Polish under the title "Dlugowiecznosc
oprawcow," in his collection of poetry Widokowka z tego swiata
(1988).
Not just your ordinary everyday butchers
But those on a monumental scale
Not those with the dirty hands
But those with the antiseptic statistics
Not those with the hardknuckled fists
But those with the nicely rounded figures
Reaching six zeroes or so -
In short: mass butchers
The minute they emerge unscathed
From their very own purges
And pass into history,
They continue to amaze
Each one lives on
Into ripe old age
All the incorrect Jehovah's witnesses,
Masons, artists, peasants, priests,
Landowners, ethnic minorities, joke tellers,
Accidental victims someone squealed on to spite
And those whose names others spat out
Along with their teeth
Would surely repeat
(If we could resurrect them)
In unison with us
(But probably louder)
Their disbelieving incredulous "why?"
Upon seeing how those stout old pensioners
Warm their bones on a bench in the garden
Fiddle with their great grandchildren's kites
Slurp borscht without pretensions
Benefit from the miracles of modern medicine
And, excluding the prostate problems of the old,
Otherwise suffer no infernal torments
I guess You're giving us a riddle here
Concealing, as always, Your real design
Dispensed in proportions known only to You
But what is the point
When all is said and done
In keeping them here among us
To give us the chance to - what?
To have a trial a few epochs,
A few million liquidated lives too late?
To force out their confessions and memoirs?
To understand
From this obscenely vivid example
Human nature?
Are we to stand with them before a mirror,
To pose for photos demonstrating
That butchers are not all that different
From those who become their victims?
Or perhaps You want to show
That if You were to vanish altogether
Your existence would be proven nonetheless
By our vain efforts to understand
What is punishment and what reward?
Artwork: Ewa C. Pawlak
Last update: April 28, 1995
Page layout: Zbigniew J. Pasek
URL: http://www.engin.umich.edu:80/~zbigniew/Periphery/butchers.html