Anna Swir / Woman Unborn

Woman Unborn

BY ANNA SWIR

Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan

I am not born as yet,

five minutes before my birth.

I can still go back

into my unbirth.

Now it’s ten minutes before,

now, it’s one hour before birth.

I go back,

I run

into my minus life.

I walk through my unbirth as in a tunnel

with bizarre perspectives.

Ten years before,

a hundred and fifty years before,

I walk, my steps thump,

a fantastic journey through epochs

in which there was no me.

How long is my minus life,

nonexistence so much resembles immortality.

Here is Romanticism, where I could have been a spinster,

Here is the Renaissance, where I would have been

an ugly and unloved wife of an evil husband,

The Middle Ages, where I would have carried water in a tavern.

I walk still further,

what an echo,

my steps thump

through my minus life,

through the reverse of life.

I reach Adam and Eve,

nothing is seen anymore, it’s dark.

Now my nonexistence dies already

with the trite death of mathematical fiction.

As trite as the death of my existence would have been

had I been really born.

Talking to My Body (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1996)