US IB English-Wislawa Szmborska's Poetry: Reviews

Poems: New and Collected, 1957-1997

Wisława Szymborska
Translated by Stanislaw Baránczak and Clare Cavanagh

For good or bad--as is always the case with translation-- the work of the Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska has undergone sea changes as it has been conveyed to English. Removed from its original culture where attenuating circumstances would be tacitly understood and separated from the variegated nuance of the Polish voice, the poetry causes the reader to become a collaborator in a process of being re-imagined. Though some of our pleasure with Szymborska arises from speculation about the poems in their original form, the unsettling but rich complication of her lines is evident in the English versions: "Memories come to mind like excavated statues / that have misplaced their heads." ("Travel Elegy")

The American reading public has been unusually appreciative of the poet's tart wit; her 1995 collection sold 80,000 copies in this country. The dust jacket and publicity for Poems: New and Collected are explicit in reassurance that the work is "accessible" and "readable," a distinction among books of poetry. Often engaged with disentangling perplexities from the commonplace, Szymborska is permeated with irony, brittle humor, more than a bit of pessimism. In a characteristic poem from the sixties, she remarks that a lover can be brought down to size after the introduction of his mother. Observing the "Genetrix of the man / with whom I leap through fire," the speaker reasons: If the "gray-eyed procreator" is mortal, the son must be mortal as well and so she looks fixedly upon "The boat in which, years ago, / he sailed to shore." Many of the poems begin with the recognition of simple but disorienting truths: "We call it a grain of sand, / but it calls itself neither grain nor sand" or the Audenesque "The world is never ready / for the birth of a child." 

To read the full review by Frances Padorr Brent click HERE.

 For almost two centuries, since Poland was first erased from the map in 1795, its land divided between Russia, Austria, and Prussia, until the fall of communism in 1989, poets kept Polish identity alive. The Romantic poets first took up the country's cause with their patri otic poems and plays and active participation in underground activi ties; they were followed by writers who became members of the Home Army, many of whom were killed during the disastrous 1944 Warsaw Uprising. While these writers were fighting and tending the wounded, others turned to communism in hope of transforming their war-torn country. Poets Anna Swir and Zbigniew Herbert belonged to the first group; Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska belonged to the sec ond. When Szymborska realized she had been practicing what she elsewhere called "magical thinking" and was implicated in the deaths of her fellow Poles, she abandoned communism to question the ways stories are made. Szymborska's latest book in English, Here, which combines her Polish book Here (2009) with other poems, contains many revisions of earlier works. The volume can be read as a deepen ing investigation into the ways in which narrative shapes experience.

Born in 1923, Szymborska and her family moved to Krakow when she was eight years old. After the invasion and subsequent Nazi shut down of schools, Szymborska attended a secret study group to obtain her high school diploma and took underground university classes. She became a member of a communist youth group and published her first poem in the communist newspaper, Polish Daily. 

To read the full article, click HERE.

Biele, Joelle. “Here and There: Wislawa Szymborska and the Grand Narrative.” The Kenyon Review, vol. 35, no. 1, 2013, pp. 168–184. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24241940. Accessed 3 June 2020.

https://patrickmurfin.blogspot.com/2017/04/polish-nobelist-wislawa-szymborska.html

By Edyta M. Bojanowska
​Harvard University

Wislawa Szymborska (b. 1923), the author of nine slim volumes of poetry that span nearly half a century, is a foremost figure in contemporary Polish poetry. Her recognition was slow in the coming. Unlike such established gi- ants of post-war Polish poetry as Czeslaw Milosz or Zbigniew Herbert, until 1996 Szymborska had not earned a single book-length scholarly study either in Poland or abroad. Only recent years have brought a surge of interest.1 While Polish articles represent an important step toward a scholarly analysis of Szymborska's poetry-and I will acknowledge their insights-they too often aim at holistic views of the poet's Weltanschauung in which the diver- sity of the poet's voices becomes lost at the expense of textual analysis (the most notable exceptions being the works by Baranczak, Balcerzan, and Ligeza). In an attempt to limit my scope, I will use the theme of nature as a point of entry into Szymborska's poetic world and through close readings of particular poems within this thematic group I hope to identify crucial as- pects of Szymborska's poetics.

Szymborska's scant poetic output, her few translations of French poetry2, and her numerous essayistic book review-feuilletons (Szymborska's idiosyn- cratic genre; most of them do not concern belles-lettres), is complemented by very few non-literary utterances on literature. The two significant instances include a preface to her selected poems (the only one she wrote) and a 1966 interview.3 This paucity of Szymborska's self-commentary increases its weight. It makes the concerns she chose to address and the attitudes she displayed particularly worthy of attention. For the purpose of this article, the metaphoric framework of the following passage from the poet's preface is especially revealing:

I would prefer not to grant myself the right of writing about my own poems. The longer I engage in composing them, the lesser is my willingness and need to formulate a poetic credo- the more embarrassing and premature it seems. I would feel like an insect that for unknown reasons chases itself into a glass box and pins itself down. Biology describes man as a creature that lacks specialization, seeing in that the guarantee of his further development. Allow me, dear Reader, to cherish the hope that I myself am an unspecialized poet, who does not want to link herself to any one theme and any one way of expressing things that are of importance to her. (emphasis mine)

To read the full review, click HERE:

Bojanowska, Edyta M. “Wisława Szymborska: Naturalist and Humanist.” The Slavic and East European Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, 1997, pp. 199–223. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/309733. Accessed 3 June 2020.