Yet her depictions of events such as war and
other atrocities, often include an element of the
absurd and the comic. ‘‘In every tragedy, an
element of comedy is preserved. Comedy is just
tragedy reversed,’’ she explains. In her poetry
and her rare comments on poetry, Szymborska
warns us not to lose sight of the individual. She
has compared ideology to one of Charlie Chap-
lin’s flimsy suitcases—too small to fit what we
try to stuff into it.
Her poems about love are often laced with
irony, whether she is evoking the ways physical
closeness creates emotional distance or the ways
love’s fantasies labor to keep its realities at bay.
The End and the Beginningfinds its footing in yet
another aspect of love: the strength of presence
that absence can have. The volume is in large
part an elegy for Szymborska’s companion of 23
years, Kornel Filipowicz, a gifted poet and prose
writer, who died in 1990. Outside of her poems,
it’s not a topic Szymborska talks much about.
One glance around her living room demon-
strates that Szymborska’s reading habits are
both voracious and democratic. As usual, there
are more books of every ilk than shelves to hold
them. Her collection of whimsical book reviews,
entitled ‘‘Extracurricular Readings,’’ features
selections from her weekly column that ran for
eight years inLiterary Life, a magazine on whose
editorial board she served from 1953 to 1976. At
Literary Life, she reviewed books on topics rang-
ing from Kant to cacti. Asked if any of these
subjects stand out as influences on her poetry,
Szymborska answers obliquely: ‘‘Even the worst
book can give us something to think about.’’
Her eclectic reading helps to set Szymborska
apart from any intellectual or literary movement.
When this interviewer broaches the topic of her
contemporaries who perished in World War II,
the poet Krzysztof Kamil Baczynski, whose name
appears in a poem of hers, comes up. Szymborska
refuses to brook any attempts at comparison:
‘‘When I mention somebody, that doesn’t neces-
sarily mean that I identify with him, personally or
poetically. I’m extremely happy when I encounter
poets who are different than I am. The ones who
have their own distinct poetics provide me with
the greatest experiences.’’
At the mention of American literature,
Szymborska’s eyes light up. ‘‘I’ve had the good
fortune to read a lot of great American writers in
translation, and my absolute beloved, for me one
of the greatest writers ever, is Mark Twain. Yes,
yes, yes. And Whitman, from whom the whole of
20th-century poetry sprung up. Whitman was
the origin of things, someone with a completely
different outlook. But I think that he’s the father
of the new wave in the world’s poetry which to
this very day is hitting the shore.’’
Have these readings nourished her own
work? Szymborska replies with a shrug: ‘‘Well,
one is inspired by the whole of life, one’s own
and somebody else’s. You know how sometimes
you hear great music, and music is completely
untranslatable into words, into any words. A
certain tension that is born when one listens to
music could aid you in expressing something
absolutely different.’’
For a poet who habitually shies away [from]
such topics, it is as direct an answer as we are
likely to hear. ‘‘I cannot speak for more than an
hour exclusively about poetry,’’ she declares with
an impish smile. At that point, life itself takes
over again.
Source:Joanna Trezeciak, ‘‘Wislawa Szymborska: The
Enchantment of Everyday Objects,’’ in Publishers
Weekly, Vol. 244, No. 14, April 7, 1997, pp. 68–69.Ewa Gajer
In the following essay, Gajer presents an overview
of Szymborska’s career and suggests that ‘‘Some
People Like Poetry’’ is emblematic of the poet’s
‘‘ironic attitude.’’
On October 30 1996, 73-year-old Polish poet
Wislawa Szymborska won the Nobel Prize for
Literature ‘for poetry that with ironic precision
allows the historical and biological context to
come to light in fragments of human reality.’
Szymborska is the fifth Pole to win the prize.
In 1905, the novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz won it
for the bookQuo Vadiswhich depicted the per-
secution of Christians in ancient Rome. Wlady-
slaw Stainslaw Reymont (who influenced some
of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s writing) got
the prize in 1924 forThe Peasants, an epic descrip-
tion of Polish country life. Fifty-four years later,
Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Polish-Jewish writer
living in the US, won the prize for his portrayal
of the Jewish community in Poland. The poet
Czeslaw Milosz, also living in the US, became
the laureate in 1980.
Wislawa Szymborska was born on 2 July
1923 in Bnin near Poznan. She studied Polish
literature and sociology at the Jagiellonian Uni-
versity in Cracow where she now lives. She pub-
lished her first poem ‘‘I Seek the Word’’ in 1945Some People Like Poetry