Friday, October 24, 2014
"Starvation Camp at Jaslo"
Wow... I can't say how much I loved having such an inspired discussion about this poem with you all today. Sometimes the art just needs to be art and I'm happy that we were able to see it as such. Please add any comments you weren't able to make during class. Looking forward to another great week with our very first IOPs!!!!!!
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It was said in class that when Szymborska wrote, "Write that down," she was talking about herself and trying to get herself to write down a poem about the horrors of the camp. I agree with this idea except that she was writing from the perspective of a survivor of the camp and that the survivor was trying to write down their horrible experiences of the camp.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read this poem the first sense I got from it was anger. Then in class we discussed what the poem was about and it became clear to me why Symborska was angry. She was angry how history is documented in a generalized sense which makes it seems as if we only look at the tragedy as a complete undifferentiated whole and does not take in consideration the importance of each individual who was murdered as if they were inconsequential. The way Symborska wrote very short sentences helped portray her rage. In the beginning of the poem I thought Symborska was writing about the tragedy as historians wrote about it and then towards the end she wrote about the tragedy the way it should have been written, in a more evocative way.
ReplyDeleteThe title “Starvation Camp near Jaslo” is an allusion to the concentration camps in the Holocaust. I searched “Jaslo” and found that it is a town in Poland where the major death camps were located. Although the poem was written in 1962, long after the Holocaust, Symborska wrote this poem to highlight the timeless horrors of the people that were most affected because the history books give such a broad clinical view that we do not get a sense of the reality unless we focus on the individual lives and learn about their struggles.
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