Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska (born July 2, 1923, Bnin (now a district of Kornik), Poland) is a Polish poet, essayist and translator. She is the 1996 laureate of the Noble Literature Prize and several other notable awards. In Poland, her books reach sales rivaling prominent prose authors — although she once remarked in a poem entitled "Some like poetry" [Niektorzy lubia poezje] that no more than two out of a thousand people care for the art.

Szymborska frequently employs literary devices such as irony, paradox, contradiction, and understatement, to illuminate philosophical themes and obsessions. Szymborska's compact poems often conjure large existential puzzles, touching on issues of ethical import, and reflecting on the condition of people both as individuals and as members of human society. Szymborska's style is succint and marked by introspection and wit.

Szymborska's reputation rests on a relatively small body of work: she has not published more than 250 poems. As a person, she is often described as modest to the point of shyness. Long cherished by her Polish literary contemporaries (including Czeslaw Milosz), Szymborska became better known internationally after her 1996 Nobel Prize. Szymborska's work has been translated into many European languages, as well as into Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese.

Wislawa Szymborska - Life

In 1931, Szymborska's family moved to Krakow. She has been linked with this city, where she studied, worked, and still resides, ever since.

When World War II broke out in 1939, she continued her education in underground lessons. From 1943, she worked as a railroad employee and managed to avoid being deported to Germany as a forced labourer. It was during this time that her career as an artist began with illustrations for an English-language textbook. She also began writing stories and occasionally poems.

From 1945 Szymborska studied first Polish language and literature, before switching to sociology, at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, where she soon became involved in the local writing scene, and met and was influenced by Czeslaw Milosz. In March 1945, she published her first poem Szukam slowa ("I seek the word") in the daily paper Dziennik Polski; her poems continued to be published in various newspapers and periodicals for a number of years. In 1948 she quit her studies without a degree, due to her poor financial circumstances; the same year, she married the poet Adam Wlodek, whom she divorced in 1954. At that time, she was working as a secretary for an educational biweekly magazine as well as illustrating books.

Her first book was to be published in 1949, but did not pass censorship as it "did not meet socialist requirements." However, like many other intellectuals in post-war Poland, Szymborska remained loyal to the PRL official ideology early in her career, signing political petitions and praising Stalin, Lenin and the realities of socialism; such as in her debut collection Dlatego ¿yjemy ("That is what we are living for"), containing poems entitled Lenin or Mlodzie¿y budujacej Nowa Hutê ("For the Youth that builds Nowa Huta"), about the construction of a Stalinist industrial town near Krakow. She also became a member of the ruling Polish United Workers' Party.

However, like most Polish intellectuals initially close to the official party line, she grew gradually estranged from the ideology and renounced her earlier political work. Although she did not leave the party until 1966, she began to establish contacts with dissidents. As early as 1957, she befriended Jerzy Giedroyc, the editor of the influential Paris-based emigré journal Kultura, to which she also contributed.

In 1953, she joined the staff of the literary review magazine ¯ycie Literackie ("Literary Life"), where she continued to work until 1981 and from 1968 ran her own book review column entitled Lektury Nadobowiazkowe ("Non-compulsory Reading"); many of these essays were later published in book form. From 1981 to 1983, she was an editor of the Krakow-based monthly Pismo. During the 1980s, she intensified her oppositional activities, contributing to the samizdat periodical Arka under the pseudonym "Stanczykowna", as well as to Kultura in Paris.

Szymborska translated French literature into Polish, in particular Baroque poetry and Agrippa d'Aubigné.

In Germany, Szymborska is often associated with her translator Karl Dedecius, who did much to popularize her works there.

Wislawa Szymborska - Prizes and awards

The City of Cracow Prize for Literature, 1954
The Polish Ministry of Culture Prize, 1963
The Goethe Prize, 1991
The Herder Prize, 1995
Honorary Doctor of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, 1995
The Polish PEN Club prize, 1996
Nobel Prize for Literature, 1996

Wislawa Szymborska - Major works

Dlatego ¿yjemy (That's Why We Are Alive) (1952)
Pytania zadawane sobie (Questioning Yourself) (1954)
Wolanie do Yeti (Calling Out to Yeti) (1957)
Sol (Salt) (1962)
101 wierszy (101 Poems) (1966)
Sto pociech (No End of Fun) (1967)
Poezje wybrane (Selected Poetry) (1967)
Wszelki wypadek (Could Have) (1972)
Wielka liczba (A Large Number) (1976)
Ludzie na mo¶cie (People on the Bridge) (1986)
Poezje: Poems (bilingual Polish-English edition) (1989)
Lektury nadobowiazkowe (Non-required Reading) (1992)
Koniec i poczatek (The End and the Beginning) (1993)
Widok z ziarnkiem piasku (View with a Grain of Sand) (1996)
Sto wierszy - sto pociech (100 Poems - 100 Happinesses) (1997)
Chwila (Moment) (2002)
Rymowanki dla du¿ych dzieci (Rhymes for Big Kids) (2003)
Dwukropek (Colon) (2005)