Wisława Szymborska

Poet and essayist. Laureate of the Literature Noble Price in 1996, She was born on 2 July 1923 in Bnin near Poznań, all her life she was connected with Kraków where she studied, lived and worked. Wisława Szymborska passed away on 1 February 2012.

A worldwide known poet thanks to translations to various languages i.a. English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Czech, Slovakian, Swedish, Bulgarian, Albanian and Chinese.

Szymborska makes a phenomena and a secret: modest, self-contained, discreet and calm, she thrills the readers. Simplicity of her poems effectively resists scholarly explanations and correctly panders a taste of the modern public. The poet communicates with the audience above the heads of critics and without any help of mass media, and her poems sell well in the amounts equal to popular novels. What determines Szymborska’s popularity and success? A peculiarity of her style, identity, exclusivity perceived as a condition for creative and existential independence. Szymborska never identified with any poetic stream, she created her own school of writing, her own language – full of distance from the great historical events, biological conditions of human existence, social role of a poet, philosophical systems, ideologies, truths perceived as faith, habits, stereotypes, inhibitions. It was also a language of compassion towards the aggrieved ones, a language of delight with the beauty of life, illogic, tragedy. A language of balanced judgments and toned down feelings; a language of lyric controlled by a cool and fresh mind, a language subjected to an intellectual discipline that did not rule out sensitivity to ordinary attractions of the existence. A language in general loyal to a colloquial language, slightly expanding its lexical sources. A language of paradox, seemingly simple, but in fact sophisticated and perverse.

Szymborska wrote a little; it was estimated that she published only two hundred and fifty poems. Perhaps thanks to this limitation they all are, nearly with no exception, masterpieces. In any case since mid-50’s she belongs to the top Polish and European poets.

Source and copyrights: Instytut Książki