Undrowning One's Self

Poetry by Wisława Szymborska and Benjamin Gucciardi. The Spanish word "desahogar" and other untranslatables. Umberto Eco and the notebook I keep because I don't want to die.

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

From “Nothing Twice” by Wisława Szymborska

I am writing this on the birthday of the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska¹ who was born July 2, 1923. Of her work Czeslaw Milosz wrote, "Hers is a very grim poetry…a comparison with the despairing vision of Samuel Beckett and Philip Larkin suggests itself. Yet, in contrast to them Szymborska offers a world where one can breathe."²

In addition to Szymborska I’ve been reading English translations of St. John of the Cross, Federico García Lorca, Octavio Paz, and Pablo Neruda. Translations have always intrigued me. I know enough about Romance languages to be able to read Spanish out loud and listen for the rhyme and meter, and I appreciate when those musical aspects of poetry are honored by translators. Reading works in different languages has also made me more sensitive to words that have no English translation at all.

Photo by Li Yang on Unsplash

Desahogar is a Spanish word that I have seen from time to time. It is in the poem “The Rungs” by Benjamin Gucciardi, where one boy tells another, “maje, desahógate,”

which translates roughly to un-drown yourself,
though no English phrase so willingly accepts

that everyone has drowned, and that we can reverse that gasping,
expel the fluids from our lungs.

Fidel Martinez wrote about desahogar in the LA Times, saying that it means to vent feelings, like to a therapist, but more than that. He describes his mother when he was growing up,

I saw her drowning and holding her breath. I saw the desperate prayers she would make to whatever god or saint would help her get out of that particular jam. She rarely exhaled, and when she did it would often come with deep sobs.

Reading about Martinez’s mother reminds me of my journal entry from May 28, 2024:

I feel my life is closing in And every door has a door with a door, To pass through one means End/Begin. Behind each wall a voice chants "More…"

Thus how I entered June.

Much of last month had been wonderful, especially my trip to Georgia and North Carolina. However, the stress of coming back was quick to undo me. I flew back to Boston for the end of the school year with my children. Since we had a long teacher strike, our children did not get out of school until the very last week of June. On the second to last day I was a chaperone for a field trip to Plimouth Paxtuxet, an outdoor living museum. It was sunny and very exhausting. My youngest and I had a lot of fun.

Running down to the recreated dwellings of the first settlers in Massachusetts. Look at the water in the distance.

And on the last day, my second youngest exited her elementary school for the last time. My children wanted to go home immediately. No pictures. No goodbyes. I was much sadder than my children were.

June ended.

July begins.

All my plans are in a blue Maker’s Notebook. I’ve been using these for many years.

My notebook with my very small handwriting. My desk with holy people watching over my work. I’ve done this long before bullet journaling was a thing.

On the far left, I draw out my schedule starting at 5am, and every square is a 15 minute block of time onto which I map out my appointments and tasks. To the right of the schedule is a list of things I need to do. The most important items are listed first and then the less important things spill over to the next page. On one of the first pages of each notebook I draw out a color key for understanding the code I use for very complex days (because even I forget).

Umberto Eco was asked in a popular article by DER SPIEGEL:

Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can't be realistically completed?

Eco: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die.

Emphasis mine. Also, that sounds about right.

Timplado is one of those untranslatable words from Tagalog which describes when a person achieves a perfect balance, most often used when ingredients from a dish are in just the right proportions. Sometimes timplado means balance in other areas of life as well. But how do we make a dish that has enough salt, with just the right spice, and not too sweet? We have recipes. Lists of ingredients and sets of directions.

That is all my notebook is: it is a recipe for my life—the life of my family. List after list after list. Instructions for living.

Desahogar and timplado. I need to undrown myself in a blue book in order to achieve balance. My tasks, my schedule. Books to read, essays to write, and poems to revise. I’ve never accomplished everything on my daily list. There is always some thing left undone, but each of the things I did not do is something I’ve thought of doing, and somewhere in the course of the day I made the choice not to do it.

The sun goes down. It comes back up again. I don’t die in my sleep.

A task carries over to the next page.

The choice is made to do it or to not do it.

The sun goes down. It comes back up again. I don’t die in my sleep.

A task carries over to the next page.

The constancy of the everlasting list actually keeps me from experiencing another untranslatable: Torschlusspanik.

Torschlusspanik is a German word that literally means “door closing panic,” the feeling that one’s window of opportunity is closing as life goes on and one gets older.

Don’t panic. Another day. Another opportunity. Something carries over to the next page.

Let’s look at Wisława Szymborska again,

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to stay:
Today is always gone tomorrow.

Szymborska was born a year after Stalin came to power, and she lived in Poland during the Second World War. Many of her poems read like someone who is trying to undrown herself. Although she studied literature and sociology at Kraków’s Jagiellonian University, she never graduated with a degree. Despite all of this, she received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.

I think that should give us all hope.

It is easy to feel drowned in obligations or submerged in grief. If everything seems underwater and you can’t get up for air, remember: “maje, desahógate…”

1. The quoted section of “Nothing Twice” was translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak.

2. https://poets.org/poet/wislawa-szymborska