Wisława Szymborska was born on 2 July 1923 in Prowent, Poland (now part of Kórnik, Poland), the second daughter[8] of Wincenty Szymborski and Anna (née Rottermund) Szymborska. Her father was at that time the steward of Count Władysław Zamoyski, a Polish patriot and charitable patron. After the death of Count Zamoyski in 1924, her family moved to Toruń, and in 1931 to Kraków, where she lived and worked until her death in early 2012.
When World War II broke out in 1939, she continued her education in underground classes. 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 occasional poems. Beginning in 1945, she began studying Polish literature before switching to sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. There she soon became involved in the local writing scene, and met and was influenced by Czesław Miłosz. In March 1945, she published her first poem "Szukam słowa" ("Looking for words") in the daily newspaper, 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 poet Adam Włodek, whom she divorced in 1954 (they remained close until Włodek's death in 1986).Their union was childless. Around the time of her marriage she was working as a secretary for an educational biweekly magazine as well as an illustrator. Her first book was to be published in 1949, but did not pass censorship as it "did not meet socialist requirements".
However, Szymborska adhered to the People's Republic of Poland's (PRL) official ideology early in her career, signing an infamous political petition from 8 February 1953, condemning Polish priests accused of treason in a show trial. Her early work supported socialist themes, as seen in her debut collection Dlatego żyjemy (That is what we are living for), containing the poems "Lenin" and "Młodzieży budującej Nową Hutę" ("For the Youth who are building Nowa Huta"), about the construction of a Stalinist industrial town near Kraków. She became a member of the ruling Polish United Workers' Party.
Although initially close to the official party line, as the Polish Communist Party shifted from the Stalinist communists to "national" communists, Szymborska grew estranged from socialist ideology and renounced her earlier political work. Although she did not officially leave the Communist 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 émigré journal Kultura, to which she also contributed. In 1964, she opposed a Communist-backed protest to The Times against independent intellectuals, demanding freedom of speech instead.
In 1953, Szymborska joined the staff of the literary review magazine Życie Literackie (Literary Life), where she continued to work until 1981 and from 1968 ran her own book review column, called Lektury Nadobowiązkowe. Many of her essays from this period were later published in book form. From 1981–83, she was an editor of the Kraków-based monthly periodical, NaGlos (OutLoud). In the 1980s, she intensified her oppositional activities, contributing to the samizdat periodical Arka under the pseudonym "Stańczykówna", as well as to the Paris-based Kultura. In the early 1990s, with her poem published in Gazeta Wyborcza, she supported the vote of no-confidence in the first non-Communist government; thereby bringing former Communists back to power. The final collection published while Szymborska was still alive, Dwukropek, was chosen as the best book of 2006 by readers of Poland's Gazeta Wyborcza. She also translated French literature into Polish, in particular Baroque poetry and the works of Agrippa d'Aubigné. In Germany, Szymborska was associated with her translator Karl Dedecius, who did much to popularize her works there.
Here and There: Wislawa Szymborska and the Grand Narrative
One rainy fall evening in Krakow my neighbor Justyna, an elementary school teacher, came by our apartment. We walked into the kitchen where I made a pot of tea, and she told me about an upcoming trip. We were chatting about buses, the quickest way to the mountains, and Poland's "golden autumn," when she paused to say her grandfather will not sleep outside his home. When I asked why, she said that he is afraid of returning to strangers, that several months after the end of World War Two, a Soviet soldier stood in his doorway, informing him that he and his family were to be moved. Riding on a train east, Justyna's mother remembers peering through the car's wooden slats and watching trees rush by. Sometimes she saw trains running on the opposite track.
Sixty years after the end of the war, the past is present, not just in Krakow's miraculously undamaged Renaissance buildings, but also in coal-stained tenements like mine. Situated in a neighborhood that was once home to many secular Jews, the building had many of its original art nouveau fixtures: hanging lights, old doorbells, and dulled brass mail slots mounted in the heavy doors. Ours read "BRIEFE," or "letters," in German instead of "POCZTA" in Polish, startling me the first time I realized what it was I saw. I couldn't help feeling strange when I walked into the administration building at Jagiellonian University where I worked. In 1939,183 faculty members entered its great hall for what they thought was a meeting. After they arrived, the Nazis locked the doors and condemned the professors to imprisonment at Sachsenhausen and Dachau. In Warsaw's meticulously rebuilt old town, decorative details that survived the German bombardment have been worked into buildings like pieces of a scattered puzzle. The Polish army's bomb squad arrives on construction sites a few times a year to remove Russian ordinance. The next spring they worked outside Justyna's school.
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Wiglawa Szymborska
Selected and introduced by Edward Hirsch
Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in literature, is a canny ironist and rapturous skeptic. She writes a poetry of sardonic individualism, and comes at common experiences from her own angle, with her own perspective. "Four billion people on this earth,/but my imagination is still the same," she confesses in her poem "A Large Number"; "It's bad with large numbers./It's still taken by particularity." Szymborska is all too aware of how the world keeps escap- ing our various formulations about it: "But even a Dante couldn't get it right," she admits, "Let alone someone who is not./Even with all the muses behind me."
Despite her modesty, Szymborska has mounted in her work a witty and tireless defense of individual subjectivity against collectivist thinking, and her poems are slyly subversive in a way that compels us to reconsider received opinion. No sooner does a familiar idea come her way than she starts turning it around to see what it will look like from different direc- tions. She manages to question herself even as she exposes general assump- tions and undermines political cant. Indeed, the rejection of dogma becomes the premise of a thoughtful personal ethics. Szymborska was born in 1923 in the small town of Bnin in the Pozman area of western Poland....
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