60 for 60: Informing on a Couple Unknown Guys

By Aziza Kasumov

Upon stumbling across this work by Polish poet Leszek Szaruga, translated by the esteemed W.D. Snodgrass and published in our journal in 1995, I felt compelled to keep my own eyelids wide open to read it over and over again. There’s something in the way Szaruga chronicles the attempts of these two “unknown guys” to come to terms with their existence in the world that struck me down, completely unexpectedly so. His short, precise, colloquial language doesn’t rely on big, fancy words; its honesty alone is overwhelming.

So, how do our “unknown guys” try to grapple with life? One of them dives into the philosophical study of consciousness, and he never fully closes his eyes again. The other reads only the morning papers, and he clenches his inner fists at the dealings of the world. Where, then, can one go to be able to still close one’s eyelids gently at night? I think Szaruga provides us with a hint when he mentions that our second “guy” hates contemporary poetry, which is, of course, neither hard-hitting newspaper headlines nor in-depth study of consciousness. It is, rather, something in between, something of the stuff that will let you unclench your fists and close your eyes.


Informing on a Couple Unknown Guys

Leszek Szaruga

Translated by W.D. Snodgrass

Between God and truth
there lies philosophy—I was told
by somebody who
read Kant and Husserl:
he's come out of that
intact but now his eyelids
don't completely close. The second
who can't tolerate
contemporary poetry and reads
only morning papers, incessantly
washes his hands and
grinds his teeth
in his sleep: he
says nothing anymore, but
you can see clenched fists
underneath his eyelids. Et
cetera.


About the author:

Aziza Kasumov spent the past several years working as a business reporter, before enrolling in Columbia University's creative writing MFA program, focusing on fiction, in the summer of 2021. Her non-fiction work has been published in the Financial Times, Bloomberg News, Vice, The Hollywood Reporter and Politico.