Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"Tortures" by Wis?awa Szymborska, translated by Stanis?aw Bara?czak and Clare Cavanagh, delves into the unsettling constancy of human suffering across time and space. With a haunting refrain of "Nothing has changed," the poem serves as a powerful indictment of the human capability for cruelty, remarking on how, despite the passage of centuries, the human body remains as vulnerable as ever to pain and suffering.

The poem opens with a clinical view of the body's vulnerabilities: "The body is a reservoir of pain; / it has to eat and breathe the air, and sleep; / it has thin skin and the blood is just beneath it; / it has a good supply of teeth and fingernails; / its bones can be broken; its joints can be stretched." This litany forms a grim inventory, a reminder of how fragile human beings are. It serves as a preamble to the chilling follow-up: "In tortures, all of this is considered." The tone is matter-of-fact, as if cataloging a mundane observation, which makes it even more jarring. This duality between the clinical and the horrific pervades the poem, making the reader uncomfortably aware of the objectification involved in the act of torture.

As the poem progresses, it makes historical sweeps from "before Rome was founded and after, / in the twentieth century before and after Christ," remarking on the unchanging nature of human cruelty. While the world might have become more interconnected-"the earth has shrunk / and whatever goes on sounds as if it's just a room away"-the nature of suffering remains the same. There is a terrible intimacy suggested here; torture is never far away, never removed from human experience, no matter how much we may advance or how much our world may shrink.

Szymborska notes that while "new offenses have sprung up beside the old ones," the fundamental nature of human pain remains unaltered. The "cry with which the body answers for them / was, is, and will be a cry of innocence." Here, Szymborska extends the innocence to the body itself, tortured for "real, make-believe, short-lived, and nonexistent" offenses, again emphasizing the ubiquity and constancy of such suffering.

The poem acknowledges that external circumstances have evolved-"Except perhaps the manners, ceremonies, dances. / Except the run of rivers, / the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers." The natural world, civilizations, and cultures may change, but the human body is always the same, always as susceptible to pain as it has ever been. Even the soul, the essence of individual identity, is portrayed as elusive and unsure of its "own existence," in contrast to the persistent, inescapable physicality of the body.

The poem closes with a statement that is both simple and harrowing: "whereas the body is and is and is / and has nowhere to go." In the face of all the cruelties that have been and will be perpetrated upon it, the body remains a constant, agonizingly present through all suffering, an ever-vulnerable entity in an ever-dangerous world.

Szymborska's "Tortures" is an eloquent yet devastating commentary on humanity's persistent inhumanity, one that echoes through the corridors of history and casts a shadow far into the future. It suggests that while the particulars may change, the capacity for cruelty is a constant, etched into the very fabric of human existence.

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