"Cat in an Empty Apartment" (Polish: Kot w pustym mieszkaniu) is a poem by the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska. It was written after the death of her partner, the Polish writer Kornel Filipowicz, who died in February 1990. At the center of the poem is a house cat waiting in an abandoned apartment for its deceased owner. The point of view of a cat that cannot grasp death leads to an unusual view of human mortality.
Szymborska published the poem in the magazine Odra in 1991 and included it in her poetry collection Koniec i początek (The End and the Beginning) in 1993. Especially after Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996, the poem found international distribution in numerous translations. It became one of her best-known and most popular poems, especially in Poland.
Content The poem begins with the line:"Die — you can't do that to a cat..".Wisława Szymborska: "Cat in an Empty Apartment" In: Nothing twice (selected poems). Selected and translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh. Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1997 . pp. 347-349.It then describes a domestic cat waiting for its deceased owner in an empty apartment. Externally, the rooms are unchanged, but for the cat, life has lost its order. Although a human continues to look after it, it is no longer its familiar caregiver. Despite all the prohibitions, the cat searches the entire apartment until, in the end, there is nothing left to do but sleep and wait. The cat imagines how it will meet the missing person again. Offended and without a sign of joy, it wants to show him that one does not disappear like this to a cat.
Form The poem Cat in an Empty Apartment comprises five strophes made up of a varying number of rhymeless, free verses. Gerhard Bauer describes the simple language as an "elegy in a child's tone".Gerhard Bauer: Die Negationskünste der Poeten und das nicht wegzudisputierende Tageslicht. In: Maria Gierlak (ed.): Im Wechselspiel der Kulturen. Festschrift für Professor Karol Sauerland. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, Toruń 2001, , p. 28. There is often an antithesis between the pairs of lines, for example when in strophe two a sensory impression is followed by the negation of the familiar memory ("Footsteps on the staircase, but they're new ones."). Three indefinite pronouns in strophe three (twice "something", once "someone") refer to the indeterminacy of the memories, whereby the pronouns in the Polish original ("Coś" and "Ktoś"), in their phonetic similarity, reveal a connection between the missing event and the missing person. After the first three strophes focus on the cat's perception, the final two strophes show its reactions, which change from activity to a resigned retreat ("What remains to be done. Just sleep and wait.").Dörte Lütvogt: Zeit und Zeitlichkeit in der Dichtung Wisława Szymborskas, pp. 270–276.
In the Polish original, the poem remains indeterminate between a role poem and free indirect speech, in that the sentences in which the cat acts are written in the infinitive or the impersonal form (third person singular neutral with reflexive pronoun).Dörte Lütvogt: Zeit und Zeitlichkeit in der Dichtung Wisława Szymborskas, pp. 268–269.
Interpretation
Speaker The impersonal form in which the cat's actions are described in the poem leads interpreters to make very different judgments about the speaker of the poem. For Janusz Orlikowski, for example, it is simply "the cat" that speaks, whereas for Wojciech Kajtoch it is "an anthropomorphized cat or someone who thinks like a cat."Wojciech Kajtoch, Janusz Orlikowski: Dwugłos o wierszu „Kot w pustym mieszkaniu“ Wisławy Szymborskiej. In: Koniec wieku No. 14/15 2000, pp. 144–151. After: Dörte Lütvogt: Zeit und Zeitlichkeit in der Dichtung Wisława Szymborskas, p. 268. Stanisław Żak identifies a representative of both "the cat" and "the poetess named Wisława Szymborska".Stanisław Żak: ... tego nie robi się kotu. W. Szymborska, „Kot w pustym mieszkaniu“. In: Stanisław Żak (ed.): Obmyślam świat czyli O poezji Wisławy Szymborskiej. Wydawnictwo Pedagogiczne ZNP, Kielce 1998, , pp. 133–142. After: Dörte Lütvogt: Zeit und Zeitlichkeit in der Dichtung Wisława Szymborskas, p. 268. For Tadeusz Nyczek, the cat expresses an "omniscient narrator" and an impersonal " self" (Polish: "się"), which he associates with Heidegger's "man".Tadeusz Nyczek: 22 x Szymborska. Wydawnictwa A5, Poznań 1997, , pp. 150–158. After: Dörte Lütvogt: Zeit und Zeitlichkeit in der Dichtung Wisława Szymborskas, pp. 268, 274. In contrast, Katarzyna Kuczyńska recognizes in the impersonal form simply the grammatical equivalent of isolation, in which the cat has also stopped saying "I" after losing the "you".Katarzyna Kuczyńska: Kot i śmierć. In: Polonistyka Nr. 8 1997, pp. 482–485. After: Dörte Lütvogt: Zeit und Zeitlichkeit in der Dichtung Wisława Szymborskas, p. 274.
For Dörte Lütvogt, the first three lines reveal a human being as the speaker of the poem. Even the introductory term "die", which is additionally emphasized by the hyphen that separates it, lies outside the horizon of a cat's consciousness. The reproach "you can't do that to a cat", which could be directed equally at the deceased and at death itself, reveals an emotional involvement of the human speaker in the event. It hides its own inappropriate feeling of being offended behind the understandable offense of an animal. Although the speaker fades almost completely into the background from the fourth line onwards, it remains present until the end behind the imagined inner world of a cat.Dörte Lütvogt: Zeit und Zeitlichkeit in der Dichtung Wisława Szymborskas, pp. 269–270.
Animal and man
According to Lütvogt, the attempt to put oneself in the mind of an animal is always caught between anthropomorphism and behaviorism or, as Wisława Szymborska put it in her review of a book by Konrad Lorenz, a "humanization or dehumanization of the psyche of animals". The poet found her middle ground in Lorenz's concept of comparative behavioral research, which traced both animal and human behavior back to "something pre-human". In her work, the relationship between humans and animals is always characterized by a special responsibility of humans for the creature, but also its inviolable autonomy, which should be respected by them.Dörte Lütvogt: Zeit und Zeitlichkeit in der Dichtung Wisława Szymborskas, pp. 266–267.
The poem "Thinking up the world" (Obmyślam świat) in Szymborska's early poetry collection Calling out to Yeti (Wołanie do Yeti) from 1957 already proclaimed a "language of plants and animals."Wisława Szymborska: Ich bedenke die Welt. In: Wisława Szymborska: Die Gedichte. Herausgegeben und übertragen von Karl Dedecius. Brigitte-Edition 12. Gruner und Jahr, Hamburg 2006, , p. 50. Numerous poems about animals followed in her later work, for example in the selected volume Tarsjusz i inne wiersze from 1976.Gerhard Bauer: Frage-Kunst. Szymborskas Gedichte, p. 231. Szymborska expressed a similar empathy for the psyche of a waiting animal as in "Cat in an Empty Apartment" in a feuilleton published in 1981, in which she took the review of a book on dog diseases as an opportunity to reflect on the psychological burdens of a pet dog: "Every time we leave the house, the dog atones for it with a despair as if we had gone away forever. Every time we come back, it is a joy for the dog that borders on shock - as if we had been saved by a miracle." Humans have no way of comforting the waiting animal with the date of their return. "The dog is condemned to an eternity of hopeless waiting."Wisława Szymborska: Lektury nadobowiązkowe. Część druga. Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 1981, p. 101. After: Dörte Lütvogt: Zeit und Zeitlichkeit in der Dichtung Wisława Szymborskas, p. 278.
Offense and reproach According to Szymborska's understanding, the cat in the empty apartment is capable of conscious memory and anticipation. Its expectations of the future coincide with the memory of past events.Dörte Lütvogt: Zeit und Zeitlichkeit in der Dichtung Wisława Szymborskas, pp. 295–296. It reacts to the disappearance of its human caregiver with a sense of grievance and betrayal, the accusation that such a thing should not be done to it. For Wojciech Kajtoch, this kind of reproach is typically human, and the imagined reaction when the absent person returns is for him an expression of a "specifically female (but also girlish and childish) coquetry."Wojciech Kajtoch, Janusz Orlikowski: Dwugłos o wierszu „Kot w pustym mieszkaniu“ Wisławy Szymborskiej, pp. 146–147. After: Dörte Lütvogt: Zeit und Zeitlichkeit in der Dichtung Wisława Szymborskas, pp. 269–270, 276. For Dörte Lütvogt, the insult on display, despite its transparency and comedy, is a form of exercise of power by the actually powerless and dependent. Although the nature of the cat is far less fixated on its owner than, for example, the waiting dog, the dependency of the habitual animal cat lies above all in the desire for the order maintained and now disturbed by the missing person.Dörte Lütvogt: Zeit und Zeitlichkeit in der Dichtung Wisława Szymborskas, pp. 273, 276–277.
Although the situation of the poem proves the cat's perspective wrong, according to Gerhard Bauer, the reader tends involuntarily to side with the cat and, like the animal, refuse to acknowledge the situation that has arisen through death. The charm and "childish" behavior of the cat in its struggle against the incontrovertible certainty of death contributes to this.Gerhard Bauer: Frage-Kunst. Szymborskas Gedichte, pp. 206–207. For Marian Stala, the poem denies the self-evidence and power of death, which every living being has to come to terms with: "It becomes a metaphysical scandal", something "that one must not do [for example: do to no one], that must not happen".Marian Stala: Druga strona. Notatki o poezji współczesnej. Znak, Kraków 1997, , pp. 56–59. After: Gerhard Bauer: Frage-Kunst. Szymborskas Gedichte, pp. 206–207. Barbara Surowska agrees: "One does not condemn a sensitive, living being to a wait that never comes to an end..."Barbara Surowska: Wisława Szymborska. Nobelpreisträgerin 1996. In: Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 108. Metzler, Stuttgart 1997, p. 143. Tadeusz Nyczek, on the other hand, emphasizes the irony of the poem, according to which living beings initially react to injustice inflicted on them by being offended. "Only then do we jump on his shoulder with a squeak".Tadeusz Nyczek: 22 x Szymborska. Wydawnictwa A5, Poznań 1997, , pp. 150–158. After: Tomasz Żurawlew: Zur Poetik der Ironie in ausgewählten Liebesgedichten Wisława Szymborskas. In: Studia Germanica Gedanensia No. 25. Universität Danzig, Gdańsk 2011, p. 319.
Hope and realization In the last strophe, human and animal consciousness overlap, creating a culmination of comedy and tragedy, which for Lütvogt is the poem's special effect, also described by Tadeusz Nyczek as its "most gaping wound". The animal's impotent, hopeful waiting for a reunion comes up against the reality, comprehensible only to humans, that death is irreversible. It is no coincidence that the poem ends with the words "to start" ("na początek"), because for the animal, which lacks human awareness of time, nothing else is conceivable than a cyclical return of the eternally same, while only humans can grasp that a completely changed situation has occurred in which repetition is no longer possible.Dörte Lütvogt: Zeit und Zeitlichkeit in der Dichtung Wisława Szymborskas, p. 277.