SOURCE: "Competing Versions of Poem by Nobelist," in The New York Times, October 21, 1996, pp. C13-14.

[In the following essay, Smith focuses on the difference between two translated versions of a poem by Szymborska that appeared in both The New Yorker and The New Republic.]

There was a wee contretemps in the literary world last week when The New Yorker and The New Republic inadvertently published the same poem by Wislawa Szymborska of Poland, winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature. Not only that but the two translations had subtly different tones, and the endings, depending on how seriously one takes these things, had slightly different meanings in the end, though, the whole matter proved to be something of a post-structuralist's dream.

The poem, called "Some People Like Poetry" in The New Republic and "Some Like Poetry" in The New Yorker, is a gentle riff on the...