to the more extensiveView with a Grain of Sand
(Harcourt Brace, 1995), translated by Stanislaw
Baranczak and Claire Cavanagh, a collection of
poems published between 1957 and 1993. (Since
the announcement of the prize, Harcourt has
printed more than 70,000 copies in paperback.)
A third translation, by Adam Czerniawski, is
distributed Stateside by Dufour.
The most successful of these translations
convey the wit and clarity of Szymborska’s
turns of phrase. Under her pen, simple language
becomes striking. Ever the gentle subversive, she
stubbornly refuses to see anything in the world
as ordinary. The result is a poetry of elegance
and irony, full of surprising turns. ‘‘You can find
the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable
objects,’’ she is fond of saying. Inspiration, she
explained in her Nobel speech, is the domain not
only of poets, but of anyone who finds fulfill-
ment in their work. For Szymborska, it origi-
nates with an inquisitive spirit that spurs
sophisticated explorations of such everyday
objects as a postcard, a rock or a cloud.
All of which befits a woman who has per-
fected the art of asking questions, but does not
shy away from answering them, in poetry or in
conversation, with an emphatic ‘‘I don’t know.’’
When asked to explain the sources from which
her own writing springs, she replies that her inspi-
ration is often indirect and mysterious. ‘‘It’s just
not easy to explain to someone else what you
don’t understand yourself,’’ she says.
Up from Socialism
Named after Poland’s largest river, the Vistula
[Wisla in Polish], Wislawa Szymborska (pro-
nounced Vees-WAH-vah Shim-BOR-skah) was
born in Ko ́rnik, in central west Poland, famed
for its beautiful manor houses and gardens.
When she was eight, the family moved to Kra-
ko ́w. Szymborska recalls that her father actively
supported her first stabs at writing by giving her
candy money for each poem she wrote. ‘‘I started
earning a living as a poet rather early on,’’ she
says. German Occupation forced her to attend
an underground school, since regular schools
and universities were closed to Poles. After the
war, she studied Polish literature and sociology
at the Jagiellonian University in Krako ́w, but
never graduated, and to this day remains a little
suspicious of academia.
Szymborska’s life and literary activities have
centered around Krako ́w. Her poetry came to
public attention in 1945, with her debut in the
Polish Daily. Over the next three years, she pub-
lished in the press regularly but the political
climate kept a planned first volume from ever
appearing in print. Her subsequent two volumes,
What We Live For(1952) andQuestions Put
to Myself (1954), contain only a few poems
that survive the test of time. The remainder
today read like socialist propaganda set to cham-
ber music. While her youthful experimentation
with socialism left her deeply distrustful of ideol-
ogy, the idealism that motivated it matured
into a deep humanitarianism as seen inCalling
Out to Yeti(1957), her transitional volume. The
collection that marked her arrival as a major
poet wasSalt(1962). Since then, Szymborska’s
popularity and critical acclaim have grown with
every volume.
To escape from the city, she often slips out
of Krako ́w to the nearby mountains. Nature
suffuses her poetry, but her contacts with the
natural environment are grounded in the sim-
plest of observations. She finds in such objects
as a piece of bone, a sprig of mistletoe or the sky
itself ways of meditating upon our own contin-
gent place in the cosmos. On another visit, while
accompanying this writer along a steep path in
Lubomierz, in the foothills of the Tatry Moun-
tains, she quipped, ‘‘I like being near the top of a
mountain. One can’t get lost here.’’ One would
expect a comment about the splendid vistas laid
out before us, but that’s not Szymborska’s style.
To miss her subversion of expectations is to miss
the essence of Szymborska’s poetry. Irony per-
meates her verse, whether she is writing about
nature, history, love or poetic craft, her domi-
nant themes.
In a day and age when many writers have
declared reality a social construct, Szymborska
stands sober. Deeply touched by historical
events that befell Poland—World War II, the
Holocaust and Communism—she and the best
Polish writers of her generation do not and
cannot engage in the excesses of postmodernism,
as she made clear in her 1991 Goethe Award
address in Frankfurt, one of very few public
speeches she’s given: ‘‘All the best have some-
thing in common [... ] a regard for reality,
an agreement to its primacy over the imagina-
tion.... Even the richest, most surprising and
wild imagination is not as rich, wild and surpris-
ing as reality. The task of the poet is to pick
singular threads from this dense, colorful fabric.’’Some People Like Poetry