Wisława Szymborska and Horst Beckmann’s Hat

—for Friko 

In yet another alarming gap in my cultural education, I’d not heard of Wisława Szymborska until Friko’s Poetry and Pictures introduced a poem of hers to me. The poem was The Joy of Writing, and its first line, as translated from the Polish by Czesław Miłosz, is this:  “Where is a written deer running through a written forest?”