A Funny Take on Wislawa Szymborska's Onion Poem

Leave it to the Italians to make it about sex or desire.

Not my favorite Szymborska poem, but clearly a hard one to translate into any language other than its original.

The poem is a perfect one to illustrate the philosophical concept of quiddity.

Every onion is the perfect embodiment of onionness in a way no human will ever be the perfect embodiment of humanness.

It's as if Francis Ponge tried to write a poem about how the concept of quiddity relates to the concept of the single descriptive word: the original tragedy (or joy?) of The Poet.

It doesn't!

In the vernacular, I believe the concept of quiddity can best be explained by the locution: "Whoop! There it is!"

Here's Sharon Olds' translation of the poem.

Onion - Wislawa Szymborska

Translated from Polish by Sharon Olds

It's really something, the onion
It doesn't have entrails.
It is itself, through and through,
all of it just onion.
Onionlike on the outside,
oniony to the core,
the onion could look into itself
without any fear.

In us lurks the strange and the wild
barely covered by the skin.
In us, an inferno of guts,
violent anatomy.
In the onion, nothing but the onion,
no twisted intestines,
Undressed many times, it repeats itself
to its depths.

A consistent creature, the onion,
a well-made thing.
Inside one, simply another,
in a larger, a smaller,
and in the next, the next.
Centrifugal fugue.
Echo in unison.

The onion, I do appreciate it:
the prettiest belly in the world.
It wears halos
for its own glory.
In us, fat, nerves, veins,
valves, and secrets.
For us it's unattainable,
the idiotism of perfection.

In a sense then, the onion is the vegetal world's version of the hologram, every constituent unit of which also contains a complete image of the whole.

The holon.

Szymborska contrasts this elegant model of being with the human messiness of heterogeneity.

We are a congeries, a mess, of physical and mental contradictions. Composed of utterly discrete and disparate entities. If we can even be said to be composed at all.

But of course the poet sides with us, the way the human protagonists always do against the perfect space aliens in those movies in which earth faces conquest by "higher, better organized" (but creepily inhuman--duh) forms of consciousness.

I suppose in light of that interpretation I can see the sense of the visual reading (including the concept of seduction) the filmmaker went with.



I think the way Italian men (like these anyway) are designed is proof God did indeed "have it in" for homosexuals.