Cat in the empty apartment

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Cat in the Empty Apartment ( Polish: Kot w pustym mieszkaniu ) is a poem by the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska . It was written after the death of her partner, the Polish writer Kornel Filipowicz, who died in February 1990 . At the center of the poem is a house cat waiting for its deceased owner in an abandoned apartment. The point of view of a cat unable to grasp death leads to an unusual view of human impermanence.

Szymborska published the poem in Odra magazine in 1991 and included it in her collection of poems Koniec i początek (End and Beginning) in 1993 . The German translation by Karl Dedecius appeared in 1992 in the yearbook of the German Poland Institute under the title The cat in the empty apartment . The book Auf Wiedersehn followed in 1995 . See you tomorrow at Suhrkamp Verlag . In particular after Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, the poem found international circulation in numerous translations. It became one of her best known and most popular poems , especially in Poland .

content

Wisława Szymborska
cat in the empty apartment
Link to the full text of the poem
(please note copyrights )

The poem begins with the line:

"Dying - you don't do that to a cat."

Then a house cat is described waiting for its deceased owner in an empty apartment. Outwardly, the rooms are unchanged, but life has lost its order for the cat. A person continues to take care of them, but they are no longer their trusted caregivers. Despite all the prohibitions, she searches the entire apartment until in the end there is nothing left but to sleep and wait. She imagines how she will meet the disappeared person again. Offended and without a sign of joy, she wants to show him that you don't do such a disappearance to a cat.

  • Sculpture bench in Kórnik with quotations from the poem

  • "Kot w pustym mieszkaniu"
    "Cat in the empty apartment"

  • "Umrzeć - tego się nie robi kotu [...]"
    "Dying - you don't do that to a cat [...]"

  • "Ktoś tutaj był i był [...]"
    "Someone was here and was [...]"

  • "[...] na bardzo obrażonych łapach [...]"
    "[...] on extremely offended paws [...]"

shape

The poem Cat in the Empty Apartment consists of five stanzas made up of a varying number of rhyming , free verses . Gerhard Bauer describes the simple language as " elegy in a child's tone". Often there is an antithesis between the pairs of lines , for example when in stanza two a sensory impression is followed by the negation of the familiar memory ("On the stairs you can hear steps, / but not those."). Three indefinite pronouns in stanza three (twice "Something", once "Somebody") refer to the vagueness of the memories, whereby the pronouns in the Polish original ("Coś" and "Ktoś") in their phonetic similarity a connection between the missing event and the reveal the disappeared person. After the first three stanzas apply to the cat's perception, the final two stanzas show their reactions, which change from activity to resigned retreat (“What remains to be done. / Sleep and wait.”).

In the Polish original, the poem remains indefinitely between a role poem and experienced speech , as the sentences in which the cat acts are written in the infinitive or the impersonal form (third person singular neuter with reflexive pronouns ). Dedecius transferred this form, which lacks a direct equivalent in German, using ellipses without a finite auxiliary verb and personal pronouns , which the reader can complete with either the first or third person, while the verb in the past participle can be interpreted as a passive construction or perfect (“Alle Searched through cabinets / Go through all shelves. "). Only in the future tense of the last stanza is the translation forced to be unambiguous, with Dedecius opting for the third person (“She will strut towards him”).

interpretation

speaker

The impersonal form in which the cat's actions are portrayed in the poem leads the interpreters to very different judgments about the speaker of the poem. For Janusz Orlikowski, for example, simply “the cat” speaks, for Wojciech Kajtoch, on the other hand, “an anthropomorphized cat or someone who thinks in cat style”. Stanisław Żak makes a representative of both “the cat” and “the poet called Wisława Szymborska”. For Tadeusz Nyczek, the cat expresses an “ omniscient narrator ” and an impersonal “himself” (Polish: “się”), which he associates with Heidegger's “ man ”. Katarzyna Kuczyńska, on the other hand, simply recognizes the impersonal form as the grammatical equivalent of a loneliness in which the cat stopped saying “I” after losing the “you”.

For Dörte Lütvogt , the first three lines reveal a person as the speaker of the poem. Even the introductory term “dying”, which is additionally emphasized by the hyphen, lies outside the consciousness of a cat. The accusation “you don't do that to a cat”, which can be directed equally at the deceased as well as death itself, reveals the emotional involvement of the human speaker in the events. He hides his own inappropriate feeling of offense behind the understandable offense of an animal. Although the speaker is almost completely in the background from the fourth line onwards, he remains present behind the imagined inner world of a cat until the end.

Animal and human

Cat sculpture in Kórnik

According to Lütvogt, the attempt to put oneself into the consciousness of an animal is always caught between anthropomorphism and behaviorism or, as Wisława Szymborska put it in a review of a book by Konrad Lorenz , a “humanization or dehumanization of the psyche of animals”. The poet found her middle way in Lorenz's concept of comparative behavioral research , through which both animal and human behaviors are reduced to “something pre-human”. In her work, the relationship between humans and animals is always characterized by a special responsibility that humans have for creatures, but also their inviolable autonomy , which they must respect.

Already the poem I think of the world (Obmyślam świat) in Syzmborska's early volume of poems Rufe an Yeti (Wołanie do Yeti) from 1957 proclaimed a “language of plants and animals”. In his later work, numerous poems about animals followed, for example in the selection volume Tarsjusz i inne wiersze from 1976. Szymborska expressed a similar empathy for the psyche of a waiting animal as in the cat in the empty apartment in a feature section published in 1981 in which she discussed the review of a book about dog diseases took the opportunity to reason about the psychological stress of a domestic dog: “Every time we leave the house, the dog atones for it with desperation, as if we had left forever. Every time we come back, it is a joy for the dog that borders on shock - as if we had been saved by a miracle. ”Humans have no way of putting the waiting animal off with the date of its return. “The dog is condemned to an eternity of hopeless waiting”.

Insult and reproach

The Cat in the empty apartment is the understanding Szymborska according to conscious memory and anticipation capable. Your expectations of the future match your memories of past processes. She reacts to the disappearance of the human reference person with a feeling of hurt and betrayal, the accusation that something like this should not be done to her. Such reproaches are typically human for Wojciech Kajtoch, and the imagined reaction when the absent person returns is for him an expression of a “specifically womanly (but also girlish and childish) coquetry ”. For Dörte Lütvogt, being insulted, despite its transparency and comedy, is a form of exercise of power by the actually powerless and dependent. Although the cat is essentially less fixated on its owner than the waiting dog, for example, the creature of habit, the cat, is dependent on the desire for the order maintained and now disturbed by the disappeared.

Although the situation in the poem gives the cat's perspective an injustice, according to Gerhard Bauer the reader involuntarily tends to take the cat's side and, like the animal, refuse to acknowledge the situation that has arisen through death. The charm and the "childish" behavior of the cat in its run against the irrefutable certainty of death contribute to this. For Marian Stala , the poem denies the naturalness and power of death, with which every living being has to come to terms: “It becomes a metaphysical scandal”, something “that one must not do [for example: do not do to anyone] that must not happen ". Barbara Surowska agrees: “A sensitive, living being is not condemned to a wait that never ends…” Tadeusz Nyczek, on the other hand, emphasizes the irony of the poem, according to which living beings initially reacted to injustice inflicted on them with offense. "Only then do we jump on his shoulder with a squeak".

Hope and knowledge

In the last stanza, the human and animal consciousness overlap and create a culmination point of comedy and tragedy, in which the special effect of the poem lies for Lütvogt, also referred to by Tadeusz Nyczek as its "gash". The impotent and hopeful wait of the animal for a re-encounter comes up against the reality, which only humans can understand, that death is irreversible. It is no coincidence that the poem ends with the words “at the beginning” (“na początek”), because for the animal, which lacks human awareness of time, nothing else is conceivable than a cyclical return of the eternal same, while only humans can grasp that a completely different situation has occurred in which repetition is no longer possible.

In the implicit comparison of a grieving person with a waiting cat, the poem for Lütvogt asks whether the reader wants to exchange the cat's hope for the hopelessness of a person or, on the contrary, the ability of a person to actively come to terms with a situation, to the continually disappointed expectation of the animal is preferable. With this, Szymborska breaks a traditional template according to which ignorance of death is a paradisiacal state. According to Renate Ingbrant, Szymborska often uses an unusual point of view like the one in the poem, through which the reader not only observes the cat, but is drawn into its feline character himself, in order to enable new, unusual insights into apparently familiar processes. For Barbara Surowska, the cat in the empty apartment crowns “a long series of poems in which Szymborska tries to say that we never come across anything for granted”.

Autobiographical reference

Wisława Szymborska at a reading in Prague, 2010

The cat in the empty apartment is one of a series of poems that Szymborska published in the collection of poems Koniec i początek (German: "Ende und Anfang") in 1993 and which can be interpreted as a reaction to the death of her long-term partner Kornel Filipowicz in 1990. In Wakefulness (Jawa) , Szymborska describes the contrast between the dream world and the waking world, between the dreamlike memory of a dead person, which cancels the passage of time, and the irrefutable, real transitoriness. The Elegic Balance (Rachunek elegijny) balances the deceased acquaintances of a lyrical self , whereby the attempt to approach death ends in the term "absence". The farewell to the view (Pożegnanie widoku) contrasts the impermanence of the individual with the life cycle of nature.

According to Lütvogt, all of these poems in Koniec i początek express the author's personal concern with the subject of death in an “incomparable discretion” on which the strong effect of cats in the empty apartment is based. According to the interpretations of Tak, Kajtoch / Orlikowski and Stala, when the author expresses her own grief through another being who is also affected by death, she succeeds in controlling her own emotions, while still maintaining posture and dignity in the face of pain To confront death and to show an alternative world of hope. According to Justyna Sobolewska , the poem makes direct reference to the story The Cat in the Wet Grass by the late prose writer Filipowicz. It remains open to the reader to what extent the poem is actually based on a real event after Filipowicz's death. In any case, György Gömöri remembers an encounter with Szymborska, captured in photographs, when a cat was resting on her lap.

Publications and reception

Karl Dedecius in Frankfurt am Main, 2006

Kot w pustym mieszkaniu first appeared in 1991 in Odra magazine . Two years later, Szymborska added the poem to her Koniec i początek collection . The German translation by Karl Dedecius , Szymborska's long-time translator, first appeared in 1992 in German-Polish Views on Literature and Culture , the yearbook of the German Poland Institute , under the title The Cat in the Empty Apartment . In 1995 the poem appeared in the volume Auf Wiedersehn. See you tomorrow from Suhrkamp Verlag for the first time in book form. In 1997 the publisher published a complete edition of Szymborska's poems, which was re-edited in 2006 as part of an edition of the Brigitte magazine under the leadership of Elke Heidenreich . The English translation Cat in an Empty Apartment by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh published the New York Review of Books in 1993 .

Kot w pustym mieszkaniu is one of Szymborska's best-known and most popular poems, which are often quoted in Poland. According to Barańczak, the poem became a real cult object in Szymborska's homeland . In 2007 it had become compulsory reading in Polish elementary schools. In particular, after Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, it was widely used in translations beyond Poland's borders and was praised by international critics. On the occasion of the announcement of her death on February 1, 2012, numerous media spread the poem again.

Various reviewers highlighted the poem as one of their favorite poems from Szymborska's work, such as György Gömöri and Elke Heidenreich. For Gerhard Bauer, the poem cat in the empty apartment plays “tact and reason in such perfection that we can only admire it.” The Wiener Zeitung praised it as a “masterpiece” with an “unforgettable opening line”. Małgorzata Baranowska called it "one of the most unusual and beautiful love poems ". Even Peter Hamm spoke of "the most beautiful and painful love poems ever". Małgorzata Anna Packalén considered the poem to be one of the most remarkable lamentations since Jan Kochanowski's Treny . In response to Cat in the empty apartment , the Polish poet Marianna Bocian envisioned a dead woman in the furniture and objects of her house in the poem In the House of the Deceased .

expenditure

Original version

  • Wisława Szymborska: Kot w pustym mieszkaniu . In: Odra No. 6 1991, pp. 3-4.
  • Wisława Szymborska: Kot w pustym mieszkaniu . In: Wisława Szymborska: Koniec i początek . Wydawnictwa A5, Poznań 1993, ISBN 83-85568-03-4 , pp. 20-21.

German translation

  • Wisława Szymborska: The cat in the empty apartment . Translated by Karl Dedecius. In: German-Polish views on literature and culture . Yearbook 1991. German Poland Institute , Darmstadt 1992, pp. 145–147.
  • Wisława Szymborska: Cat in the empty apartment . In: Wisława Szymborska: The poems. Edited and transferred by Karl Dedecius . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-518-40881-X , pp. 284-285.
  • Wisława Szymborska: Cat in the empty apartment . In: Wisława Szymborska: The poems. Edited and transferred by Karl Dedecius . Brigitte-Edition 12. Gruner and Jahr, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-570-19520-1 , pp. 280-281.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Wisława Szymborska: Cat in the empty apartment . In: Wisława Szymborska: The poems. Edited and transferred by Karl Dedecius . Brigitte-Edition 12. Gruner and Jahr, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-570-19520-1 , pp. 280-281.
  2. ↑ Gerhard Bauer: The art of negation of the poets and the daylight that cannot be disputed away . In: Maria Gierlak (Ed.): In the interplay of cultures. Festschrift for Professor Karol Sauerland . Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, Toruń 2001, ISBN 83-231-1356-4 , p. 28.
  3. ↑ Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , pp. 270-276.
  4. ^ Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , pp. 268–269.
  5. ↑ Wojciech Kajtoch, Janusz Orlikowski: Dwugłos o wierszu "Kot w pustym mieszkaniu" Wisławy Szymborskiej . In: Koniec wieku No. 14/15 2000, pp. 144-151. After: Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , p. 268.
  6. ↑ Stanisław Żak: … tego nie robi się kotu. W. Szymborska, "Kot w pustym mieszkaniu" . In: Stanisław Żak (ed.): Obmyślam świat czyli O poezji Wisławy Szymborskiej . Wydawnictwo Pedagogiczne ZNP, Kielce 1998, ISBN 83-7173-010-1 , pp. 133-142. After: Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , p. 268.
  7. ↑ Tadeusz Nyczek: x Szymborska 22 . Wydawnictwa A5, Poznań 1997, ISBN 83-85568-77-8 , pp. 150–158. After: Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , pp. 268, 274.
  8. ^ Katarzyna Kuczyńska: Kot i śmierć . In: Polonistyka No. 8 1997, pp. 482-485. After: Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , p. 274.
  9. ^ Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , pp. 269–270.
  10. ^ Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , pp. 266–267.
  11. ^ Wisława Szymborska: I consider the world . In: Wisława Szymborska: The poems. Edited and transferred by Karl Dedecius . Brigitte-Edition 12. Gruner and Jahr, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-570-19520-1 , p. 50.
  12. ^ Gerhard Bauer: Question art. Szymborska's Poems , p. 231.
  13. ^ Wisława Szymborska: Lektury nadobowiązkowe. Część druga . Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1981, p. 101. According to: Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , p. 278.
  14. ^ Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , pp. 295–296.
  15. ↑ Wojciech Kajtoch, Janusz Orlikowski: Dwugłos o wierszu "Kot w pustym mieszkaniu" Wisławy Szymborskiej , pp. 146–147. After: Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , pp. 269–270, 276.
  16. ^ Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , pp. 273, 276–277.
  17. ^ Gerhard Bauer: Question art. Szymborska's poems , pp. 206–207.
  18. ^ Marian Stala : Druga strona. Notatki o poezji współczesnej . Znak, Kraków 1997, ISBN 83-7006-649-6 , pp. 56-59. After: Gerhard Bauer: Question Art. Szymborska's poems , pp. 206–207.
  19. ↑ a b Barbara Surowska: Wisława Szymborska. Nobel Prize Winner 1996 . In: Journal for Literary Studies and Linguistics 108. Metzler, Stuttgart 1997, p. 143.
  20. ↑ Tadeusz Nyczek: x Szymborska 22 . Wydawnictwa A5, Poznań 1997, ISBN 83-85568-77-8 , pp. 150–158. After: Tomasz Żurawlew: On the poetics of irony in selected love poems by Wisława Szymborskas . In: Studia Germanica Gedanensia No. 25. University of Gdansk , Gdańsk 2011, p. 319 ( pdf ).
  21. ^ Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , p. 277.
  22. ^ Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , pp. 264, 278-279.
  23. ↑ Renata Ingbrant: Out of the sitting-room - the Point of View of Wislawa Szymborska . In: Leonard Neuger, Rikard Wennerholm (ed.): Wislawa Szymborska - a Stockholm Conference. May 23-24, 2003 . Almqvist & Wiksel, Stockholm 2006, ISBN 91-7402-356-X , p. 66.
  24. ^ Wisława Szymborska: Awake . In: Wisława Szymborska: The poems. Edited and transferred by Karl Dedecius . Brigitte Edition 12. Gruner and Jahr, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-570-19520-1 , pp. 276-277.
  25. ^ Wisława Szymborska: Elegic balance . In: Wisława Szymborska: The poems. Edited and transferred by Karl Dedecius . Brigitte Edition 12. Gruner und Jahr, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-570-19520-1 , pp. 278-279.
  26. ^ Wisława Szymborska: Farewell to the view . In: Wisława Szymborska: The poems. Edited and transferred by Karl Dedecius . Brigitte Edition 12. Gruner and Jahr, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-570-19520-1 , pp. 282–283.
  27. ^ Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , pp. 209, 251, 258-259.
  28. ^ Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , pp. 264, 278.
  29. ↑ a b Justyna Sobolewska: Zachwyt i rozpacz In: Polityka No. 6 from February 8, 2012. German translation: Enthusiasm and desperation  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.portalpoint.info   on POINT, German-Polish portal (pdf).
  30. ↑ a b Małgorzata Anna Packalén: The Domestication of Death - The Poetic Universe of Wislawa Szymborska . In: Leonard Neuger, Rikard Wennerholm (ed.): Wislawa Szymborska - a Stockholm Conference. May 23-24, 2003 . Almqvist & Wiksel, Stockholm 2006, ISBN 91-7402-356-X , p. 37.
  31. ↑ a b George Gomori: Wislawa Szymborska obituary . In: The Guardian of February 2, 2012.
  32. ↑ a b Gerhard Bauer: Question Art. Szymborska's poems , p. 207.
  33. ^ Wisława Szymborska: Cat in an Empty Apartment . In: The New York Review of Books, October 21, 1993.
  34. ↑ Katha Pollitt: Wislawa Szymborska, 1923–2012 . In: The Nation, February 15, 2012.
  35. ^ Gerhard Bauer: Polish poet from a German point of view . In: Reichwein-Forum No. 7/2005, p. 22 ( pdf ( memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to instructions and then remove this notice. ). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.adolf-reichwein-verein.de
  36. ↑ Alison Flood: Wislawa Szymborska, "Mozart of poetry", this aged 88 . On: guardian.co.uk of February 2, 2012.
  37. ^ Stanisław Barańczak : Afterword . In: Wisława Szymborska: Nothing Twice. Selected Poems . Wydawn. Literackie, Kraków 1997, ISBN 83-08-02678-8 , p. 389.
  38. ^ Dörte Lütvogt: Time and Temporality in the Poetry of Wisława Szymborskas , p. 264.
  39. ^ Charity Scribner: Parting with a View: Wisława Szymborska and the Work of Mourning . In: The Polish Review . Volume 44, Issue 3 1999, p. 313.
  40. ↑ Elke Heidenreich : My Favorite Poem ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Review in Hörzu magazine from 2003.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.quergestrickt.de
  41. ^ Gerhard Bauer: Question art. Szymborska's poems , p. 196.
  42. ↑ Edwin Baumgartner: The Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska is dead . In: Wiener Zeitung of February 2, 2012.
  43. ^ "One of the most unusual and beautiful love poems". In: Małgorzata Baranowska: Wisława Szymborska. Nobel '96 for literature . Polish Information Agency, Warszawa 1996, p. 45.
  44. ↑ Peter Hamm : The world does not deserve the end of the world . In: Die Zeit from May 23, 2013.
  45. ^ Marianna Bocian: Poezje wybrane . Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Polonistyki Wrocławskiej, Wrocław 1998, ISBN 83-7091-058-0 , p. 202.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on December 3, 2012 in this version .