Nothing but pure onionhood fills this devout onionist.

One of the best contemporary poets has just died - Wislawa Szymborska (and I am very glad for the article at the link mentioning, among many other things, how to pronounce her name).

I think this is her most famous poem, or perhaps it's just the one I see most often. Deservedly famous.

In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they're light.

On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.


And this one gives you an idea of how excellently Szymborska played with language:

The Onion

The onion, now that's something else.
Its innards don't exist.
Nothing but pure onionhood
fills this devout onionist.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.

Our skin is just a cover-up
for the land where none dare go,
an internal inferno,
the anathema of anatomy.
In an onion there's only onion
from its top to its toe,
onionymous monomania,
unanimous omninudity.

At peace, of a piece,
internally at rest.
Inside it, there's a smaller one
of undiminished worth.
The second holds a third one,
the third contains a fourth.
A centripetal fugue.
Polyphony compressed.

Nature's rotundest tummy,
its greatest success story,
the onion drapes itself in its
own aureoles of glory.
We hold veins, nerves, and fat,
secretions' secret sections.
Not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections.

There are not too many poets of whom you automatically think whenever you behold a particular object, or hear a particular sound. I would imagine that if I ever heard a nightingale, though, I would always think of Keats. And whenever I cut an onion I think of Szymborska.

Her translators, Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, are amazing. There must be some way of getting a similar sort of wordplay in both languages, but it would require a lot of talent in the translation as well as the original writing.

Finally, isn't it nice to find a Nobel prize winner who is so accessible?