POETRY BY WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA SELECTIONS TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH WITH CONNECTIONS SPEECH: Nobel Prize Winning Speech POETRY: In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself ---Hitler’s First Photograph --On Death, Without Exaggeration---The Three Oddest Words---Possibilities---The End and The Beginning--QUOTES ARTICLES:
Why You should be reading Wislawa Szymborska
Italian Graphic Novel The Nine Secret Sides of Wislawa Szymborska Wislawa Szymborska, Poet of Gentle Irony, Dies at 88
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Nobel Lecture Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1996
The Poet and the World
They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway. But I have a feeling that the sentences to come - the third, the sixth, the tenth, and so on, up to the final line - will be just as hard, since I'm supposed to talk about poetry. I've said very little on the subject, next to nothing, in fact. And whenever I have said anything, I've always had the sneaking suspicion that I'm not very good at it. This is why my lecture will be rather short. All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses. Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself ... When filling in questionnaires or chatting with strangers, that is, when they can't avoid revealing their profession, poets prefer to use the general term "writer" or replace "poet" with the name of whatever job they do in addition to writing. Bureaucrats and bus passengers respond with a touch of incredulity and alarm when they find out that they're dealing with a poet. I suppose philosophers may meet with a similar reaction. Still, they're in a better position, since as often as not they can embellish their calling with some kind of scholarly title. Professor of philosophy - now that sounds much more respectable. But there are no professors of poetry. This would mean, after all, that poetry is an occupation requiring specialized study, regular examinations, theoretical articles with bibliographies and footnotes attached, and finally, ceremoniously conferred diplomas. And this would mean, in turn, that it's not enough to cover pages with even the most exquisite poems in order to become a poet. The crucial element is some slip of paper bearing an official stamp. Let us recall that the pride of Russian poetry, the future Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky was once sentenced to internal exile precisely on such grounds. They called him "a parasite," because he lacked official certification granting him the right to be a poet ... Several years ago, I had the honor and pleasure of meeting Brodsky in person. And I noticed that, of all the poets I've known, he was the only one who enjoyed calling himself a poet. He pronounced the word without inhibitions.
Just the opposite - he spoke it with defiant freedom. It seems to me that this must have been because he recalled the brutal humiliations he had experienced in his youth. In more fortunate countries, where human dignity isn't assaulted so readily, poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind. And yet it wasn't so long ago, in this century's first decades, that poets strove to shock us with their extravagant dress and eccentric behavior. But all this was merely for the sake of public display. The moment always came when poets had to close the doors behind them, strip off their mantles, fripperies, and other poetic paraphernalia, and confront - silently, patiently awaiting their own selves - the still white sheet of paper. For this is finally what really counts. It's not accidental that film biographies of great scientists and artists are produced in droves. The more ambitious directors seek to reproduce convincingly the creative process that led to important scientific discoveries or the emergence of a masterpiece. And one can depict certain kinds of scientific labor with some success. Laboratories, sundry instruments, elaborate machinery brought to life: such scenes may hold the audience's interest for a while. And those moments of uncertainty - will the experiment, conducted for the thousandth time with some tiny modification, finally yield the desired result? - can be quite dramatic. Films about painters can be spectacular, as they go about recreating every stage of a famous painting's evolution, from the first penciled line to the final brush-stroke. Music swells in films about composers: the first bars of the melody that rings in the musician's ears finally emerge as a mature work in symphonic form. Of course this is all quite naive and doesn't explain the strange mental state popularly known as inspiration, but at least there's something to look at and listen to. But poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens ... Who could stand to watch this kind of thing? I've mentioned inspiration. Contemporary poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually exists. It's not that they've never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It's just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don't understand yourself. When I'm asked about this on occasion, I hedge the question too. But my answer is this: inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their
calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know." There aren't many such people. Most of the earth's inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn't pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there's no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes. And so, though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings. At this point, though, certain doubts may arise in my audience. All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they "know." They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don't want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments' force. And any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society. This is why I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself "I don't know," the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself "I don't know", she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying "I don't know," and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.
Poets, if they're genuine, must also keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their "oeuvre" ... I sometimes dream of situations that can't possibly come true. I audaciously imagine, for example, that I get a chance to chat with the Ecclesiastes, the author of that moving lament on the vanity of all human endeavors. I would bow very deeply before him, because he is, after all, one of the greatest poets, for me at least. That done, I would grab his hand. "'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun. And the poem you created is also new under the sun, since no one wrote it down before you. And all your readers are also new under the sun, since those who lived before you couldn't read your poem. And that cypress that you're sitting under hasn't been growing since the dawn of time. It came into being by way of another cypress similar to yours, but not exactly the same. And Ecclesiastes, I'd also like to ask you what new thing under the sun you're planning to work on now? A further supplement to the thoughts you've already expressed? Or maybe you're tempted to contradict some of them now? In your earlier work you mentioned joy - so what if it's fleeting? So maybe your new-under-the-sun poem will be about joy? Have you taken notes yet, do you have drafts? I doubt you'll say, 'I've written everything down, I've got nothing left to add.' There's no poet in the world who can say this, least of all a great poet like yourself." The world - whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we've just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don't know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we've got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world - it is astonishing. But "astonishing" is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We're astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we've grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn't based on comparison with something else.
Granted, in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like "the ordinary world," "ordinary life," "the ordinary course of events" ... But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world. It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.
Translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
Copyright Š The Nobel Foundation 1996
The buzzard never says it is to blame. The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean. When the piranha strikes it feels no shame. If snakes had hands, they's claim their hands were clean. A jackal doesn't understand remorse. Lions and lice don't waver in their course. Why should they, when they know they're right? Though hearts of killer whales weigh a ton, In every other way they're light. On this third planet of the sun, among the signs of bestiality A clear conscience is Number One.
In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself
And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe? That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers' little boy! Will he grow up to be an LL.D.? Or a tenor in Vienna's Opera House? Whose teensy hand is this, whose little ear and eye and nose? Whose tummy full of milk, we just don't know: printer's, doctor's, merchant's, priest's? Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander? To garden, to school, to an office, to a bride, maybe to the Burgermeister's daughter? Precious little angel, mommy's sunshine, honeybun, while he was being born a year ago, there was no dearth of signs on the earth and in the sky: spring sun, geraniums in windows, the organ-grinder's music in the yard, a lucky fortune wrapped in rosy paper, then just before the labor his mother's fateful dream: a dove seen in dream means joyful news, if it is caught, a long-awaited guest will come. Knock knock, who's there, it's Adolf's heartchen knocking. A little pacifier, diaper, rattle, bib, our bouncing boy, thank God and knock on wood, is well, looks just like his folks, like a kitten in a basket, like the tots in every other family album. Shush, let's not start crying, sugar, the camera will click from under that black hood. The Klinger Atelier, Grabenstrasse, Braunau, and Braunau is small but worthy town, honest businesses, obliging neighbors, smell of yeast dough, of gray soap.
Hitler’s First Photograph
No one hears howling dogs, or fate's footsteps. A history teacher loosens his collar and yawns over homework.
It can't take a joke, find a star, make a bridge. It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming, building ships, or baking cakes. In our planning for tomorrow, it has the final word, which is always beside the point. It can't even get the things done that are part of its trade: dig a grave, make a coffin, clean up after itself. Preoccupied with killing, it does the job awkwardly, without system or skill. As though each of us were its first kill. Oh, it has its triumphs, but look at its countless defeats, missed blows, and repeat attempts! Sometimes it isn't strong enough to swat a fly from the air. Many are the caterpillars that have outcrawled it. All those bulbs, pods, tentacles, fins, tracheae, nuptial plumage, and winter fur show that it has fallen behind with its halfhearted work.
On Death, Without Exaggeration
Ill will won't help and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d'etat is so far not enough. Hearts beat inside eggs. Babies' skeletons grow. Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves and sometimes even tall trees fall away. Whoever claims that it's omnipotent is himself living proof that it's not. There's no life that couldn't be immortal if only for a moment. Death always arrives by that very moment too late. In vain it tugs at the knob of the invisible door. As far as you've come can't be undone. By Wislawa Szymborska From "The People on the Bridge", 1986 Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh Copyright Š Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it. When I pronounce the word Nothing, I make something no non-being can hold. By Wislawa Szymborska Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh Copyright Š Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
The Three Oddest Words
I prefer movies. I prefer cats. I prefer the oaks along the Warta. I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky. I prefer myself liking people to myself loving mankind. I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case. I prefer the color green. I prefer not to maintain that reason is to blame for everything. I prefer exceptions. I prefer to leave early. I prefer talking to doctors about something else. I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations. I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. I prefer, where love's concerned, nonspecific anniversaries that can be celebrated every day. I prefer moralists who promise me nothing. I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind. I prefer the earth in civvies. I prefer conquered to conquering countries. I prefer having some reservations. I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order. I prefer Grimms' fairy tales to the newspapers' front pages. I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves. I prefer dogs with uncropped tails. I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark. I prefer desk drawers. I prefer many things that I haven't mentioned here to many things I've also left unsaid. I prefer zeroes on the loose to those lined up behind a cipher. I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars. I prefer to knock on wood.
Possibilities
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when. I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being. By Wislawa Szymborska From "Nothing Twice", 1997 Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh Copyright Š Wislawa Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
After every war someone has to clean up. Things won't straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble to the side of the road, so the corpse-filled wagons can pass.
Someone has to get mired in scum and ashes, sofa springs, splintered glass, and bloody rags.
Someone has to drag in a girder to prop up a wall, Someone has to glaze a window,
The End and the Beginning
rehang a door.
Photogenic it's not, and takes years. All the cameras have left for another war.
We'll need the bridges back, and new railway stations. Sleeves will go ragged from rolling them up.
Someone, broom in hand, still recalls the way it was. Someone else listens and nods with unsevered head. But already there are those nearby starting to mill about who will find it dull.
From out of the bushes sometimes someone still unearths rusted-out arguments and carries them to the garbage pile.
Those who knew what was going on here must make way for those who know little. And less than little. And finally as little as nothing. In the grass that has overgrown causes and effects, someone must be stretched out blade of grass in his mouth gazing at the clouds.
—Wisława Szymborska
Quotes “Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.” ― Wisława Szymborska, View With a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems “Such certainty is beautiful, but uncertainty is more beautiful still” ― Wisława Szymborska “We live longer but less precisely and in shorter sentences.” ― Wisława Szymborska, Here
“I am my own obstacle.” ― Wisława Szymborska “We know ourselves only as far as we’ve been tested.” ― Wisława Szymborska, Map: Collected and Last Poems “History rounds off skeletons to zero. A thousand and one is still only a thousand.” ― Wisława Szymborska “... in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like "the ordinary world," "ordinary life," "the ordinary course of events" ... But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.” ― Wisława Szymborska
Why You Should Be Reading Wislawa Szymborska A P R I L 6 , 2 0 1 5 1 : 1 2 P M by M E G A N O ' G R A D Y We don’t always know what life consists of until poetry tells us. Shortly afterWislawa Szymborska won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996, I graduated from college and moved to Poland to teach English. It would be overstating it, but not by much, to say that I decided to go because of her. Szymborska had an un-pin-downable knowledge that I wanted to possess, an understanding of the magic and metaphysics of daily life, with its clutter of “chairs and sorrows, scissors, tenderness, transistors, violins, teacups, dams and quips,” as she wrote in the title poem of one of her last collections. Her poems contained everything I seemed to be missing: A sense of past and future. A belief that stuff meant something. Life as I knew it up to that point had felt pretty unmagical. My suburban Midwestern childhood had emphasized athletics and success in the corporate world. The academic life I’d pursued in college was mired in the fashionably reductive theories of the time. I did not love my boyfriend. What did I have to lose?
A few emails and a flight later, I found myself suspended in a post-Communist context I had no connection to. I didn’t speak the language (eventually, I would learn); I knew no one. Yet there was something soothing about this state of anonymous detachment. Listening to a mixtape a friend back home had made for me, my surroundings took on a music video–like quality as I walked daily from my apartment down the main street— depressingly called Victory Street—the crumbling building facades along the main street un-renovated since before the Second World War. But life in Poland, as I soon discovered, demanded things. In those days before supermarkets, grocery shopping required a mortifying transaction: I had to request, in Polish, each item I wanted from a surly woman with dyed-red hair who stood behind a shop counter. Neighbors knocked on my door (this rarely happened in the U.S.) or threw beer bottles against it (“Pani Amerykanka!” one would scream, “Miss America!”). Most alarming of all were my students, adapting to an entirely new reality, who desperately needed me to teach them things. With no textbooks and no clue how to plan a lesson, I walked into the classroom on the first day with an English-Polish dictionary and set it on the table, which promptly collapsed.
There’s no pedagogy for life, one realizes in such moments. “The sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised, and leave without chance to practice,” as Szymborska wrote in one of her most famous poems, Nothing Twice. Everyone I met there knew her—the slightly kitschy painted covers of her books were as familiar a sight as the coal dust that accumulated in the corners of my apartment—and they seemed to really know her, not as a lofty cultural hero, but something more akin to a wise, slightly mischievous auntie. Born in 1923 in Bnin, a small town in Western Poland, Szymborska and her family moved to Krakow in 1931. Her coming of age was met by Hitler, then Stalin; for her and her readers, the poetic imperative was just that—an imperative, essential reading in a nation still reeling from its own history. In Szymborska’s Nobel speech, she said, “In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.” No existence usual or normal. Everything matters, whether you emerged from the strip shopping malls of the Midwest or the Socialist housing blocks of post-Communist Europe.
Arriving in bookstores this week, Szymborska’s MAP: Collected and Last Poems(HMH), translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, includes thirteen poems written just before her death in 2012, available for the first time in English (one appears below). Vast, intimate, and charged with the warmth of a life fully imagined to the end, there’s no better place for those unfamiliar with her work to begin. While Sleeping I dreamed I was looking for something, maybe hidden somewhere or lost under the bed, under the stairs, under an old address.
I dug through wardrobes, boxes and drawers pointlessly packed with stuff and nonsense.
I pulled from my suitcases the years and journeys I’d picked up.
I shook from my pockets withered letters, litter, leaves not addressed to me.
I ran panting through comforting, discomfiting displaces, places.
I floundered through tunnels of snow and unremembrance.
I got stuck in thorny thickets and conjectures.
I swam through air and the grass of childhood.
I hustled to finish up before the outdated dusk fell, the curtain, silence.
In the end I stopped knowing what I’d been looking for so long.
I woke up. Looked at my watch. The dream took not quite two and a half minutes.
Such are the tricks to which time resorts ever since it started stumbling on sleeping heads.
While Sleeping from MAP: Collected and Last Poems by Wislawa Szymborska, translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak. Copyright © 2015 by The Wislawa Szymborska Foundation. English translation copyright © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Italian Graphic Novel about Nobel Laureate Szymborska 2015/12/03 Cover of the Wislawa Szymborska,
graphic novel
AgraphicnovelaboutWisławaSzymborska,thewinnerofthe1996NobelPrizeforLiterature,hasarousedgreatinterestamongstpoetryenthusiastsandthemedia.Theauthorof theillustratedbookisItaliangraphicartistAliceMilani. Szymborska, whose poetry books were published in enormous numbers, is considered one of the most important voices of the 20th and 21st century literature, and is a figure much appreciated and valued in Italy. The subheading of the graphic novel about Szymborska uses a quote from one of her poems: It just so happened that I am. The full Italian title is Wislawa Szymborska, Si dà il caso che io sia qui. Over 144 pages, various stages of the poet's life are presented, such as her marriage to Adam Włodek in 1948, and their flat in Writers' House on Krupnicza Steet in Kraków where a lot of great Polish literature was written. The drawings are accompanied with short sentences by the young poet, her thoughts, artistic dilemmas and anecdotes, along with dialogues overheard on the streets of Kraków filled with everyday life – from cleaning dishes to choosing clothing.
Storyboard (press release)
The Italian media has highlighted the very attractive layout of the book and its beautiful ‘very feminine’ drawings and portraits of the poet. Last year, another important Italian graphic novel that appeared was about the courier and Polish Underground emissary Jan Karski, created by Marco Rizzo and Lelio Bonaccorso. Source: Polish Press Agency, edited by PW, translated by ND, 2 Dec 2015
9 Secret Sides of Szymborska
Alena Aniskiewicz 2014/06/16
Wisława Szymborska, 2003, photo. Anna Kaczmarz / Reporter / East News
Wisława Szymborska is widely known as an exceptional poet, yet her personal history yields much more than exquisite poetry. This series of little-known eccentricities reveals a multifaceted mind, a generous heart and a delightful sense of humor. Szymborska as Humorist In 1996, Szymborska reflected on her earliest forays into poetry, telling Życie Warszawy, I was always writing little poems. I even made some money on my first little poems. I wrote them at home and when my father liked one of my poems – and it always had to be witty with none of those lyrical confessions – he would take out his purse and pay me.
Early on, then, Szymborska was attuned to the value of humor in her verse. This appreciation for the light and comic never left her, and Szymborska was an ardent lover of witty jokes and playful poems. She claimed limericks as her favorite poetic genre and loved to compose short comic poems. Katarzyna Kolenda-Zaleska’s 2010’s documentary featureLife is Bearable at Times shows the octogenarian poet wandering the streets of Limerick, Ireland, gleefully improvising (at times rather bawdy) limericks with her companions. The subjects of these short poems vary, but On the Bus offers a glimpse of their playful spirit; My wife died young. Before her death, she promised that she would be waiting for me. Okay, but I’m an old man now, bald and crippled. I will say “Zosia, Zosia” and she will not recognize me. How will it work? I will carry my ID to my coffin?
While perhaps more subtle in her published poetry, admirers of Szymborska no doubt are familiar with her characteristic wit. Her playful style was made evident to the world when in 1996 she began her Nobel lecture, “They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one’s behind me, anyway.” Humble, concise, witty – and so very Szymborska.
Szymborska as Artist Wisława Szymborska, 1980, photo: Wojciech Plewiński / Forum
Szymborska’s distinctive sense of humor is well known to those familiar with her writing, and her forays into visual arts further underscore the poet’s playful spirit. Szymborska’s postcard collages became an annual project starting in the late 1960s after she decided it was impossible to find any nice postcards to send to friends. Unhappy with available
selections, she elected to make her own, turning her Kraków flat into an artist’s studio. Michał Rusinek describes the scene, “Please don’t visit me for a few days because I’m going to be an artist,’ she would tell her friends once a year, in early November. This was not an expression of a sudden withdrawal of hospitality or onset of inspiration which required isolation from the world. The reasons were quite practical: all over her flat the floor was scattered with cut-outs from newspapers and magazines, which she used to make collages she called wyklejanki or “cut-and-paste-cards.” She made such pictorial compositions every year, for over 40 years.
While the subjects of these “cut-and-paste-cards” vary, they are distinguished by a recognizable juxtaposition of images and texts. In one we find a toothy human grin pasted upon a cut-out of a cat. Another features the head of a dog joined with a woman in polka-dot pajamas. A third playfully depicts two love birds perched with a text bubble reading “sex is a private issue” inserted near ones beak. Szymborska used the cards for correspondence with her close friends and also was known to send them to other artists whose work she admired – including Woody Allen, who commented of the gift, “this means more to me than the golden statues they give in Hollywood.” Exhibitions across the globe have been organized to share this side of Szymborska’s creativity with her fans, the most comprehensive of which was organized by MOCAK in early 2014.
Szymborska as Collector
Wisława Szymborska acknowledges the applause from the audience, Stockholm, 1996, photo: REUTERS/FORUM
She considered drawers to be the greatest invention of mankind and loved them. The drawer unit in her apartment consisted of 36 drawers in which she kept, among others, a collection of old postcards.
Commenting here on Szymborska’s habit of collecting trinkets in her small Kraków flat, Szymborska’s long time secretary and the president of the Szymborska Foundation, Michał Rusinek underscores the poet’s appreciation of drawers. Filled with various kitschy objects, Szymborska’s apartment was nicknamed “the drawer” by her friends. Such storage housed her collection of quirky objects, many obtained from friends – a pig with a music box in its tail, a lighter in the shape of a submarine, a miniature chest of drawers from Czesław Miłosz. She also collected cuttings for her collage projects, and drawer upon drawer was filled with stacks of cut-out heads, amusing texts, and decorative embellishments. A delightful scene from Kolenda-Zaleska’s Life is Bearable at Timesshows Szymborska and her friends
rooting through the clutter, searching for the poet’s Nobel medal, which had been lost in the chaos of her “collectables.” A selection from Szymborska’s delightful collection can be seen the Szymborska’s Drawer exhibition in Kraków. While she delighted in collecting these objects, Szymborska’s primary objective was to obtain objects she could then share with her friends. She held regular “lucky dips” in her living room, where objects from her collection were given as “prizes.” Following her death, a final meeting was held, according to her wishes, and friends received mementos chosen at random. Given Szymborska’s ability to find value and depth in the everyday and the overlooked, her passion for such things is perhaps unsurprising. In her poem Kitschy, Szymborska celebrates the value of the type of objects she collected, writing, “trash does not pretend to be anything better than it is.”
Szymborska as Muse Anyone lucky enough to have heard Szymborska read her texts live knows that her words come alive off the page. Referred to by the Nobel Committee as “the Mozart of poetry,” she created verses that were both nimble and innovative, particularly when experienced aurally. Readings are, however, not the only way in which audiences can hear Szymborska’s poetry performed. Her works have long served as inspiration to musicians – both in Poland and abroad. Łucja Prus, a popular Polish singer of the 1960s and 70s, performed a rendition of Szymborska’s Nothing Twice at the Sopot International Song Festival in 1965. Following Prus’s death from breast cancer in 2002, a series of benefit concerts were organized under the title “Nothing Twice: Campaign for Women with Breast Cancer” – again evoking Szymborska, and Prus’s classic version of her verse. Almost thirty years after Prus’s performance in Sopot, another
female icon of Polish music made Nothing Twice her own. Kora Jackowska and Maanam again set Szymborska’s words to music in 1994, delivering them in Kora’s distinctive precise and rapid style over driving electric guitar and drums. Following Prus’s lead, a number of Polish musicians endeavored to set Szymborska’s verses to song. A fellow Krakowian, Grzegorz Turnau, adapted Atlantis to his characteristic smooth jazz on his 1995 ablum To tu, to tam. Other artists’ takes on Szymborska’s oeuvre were released on a compilation disc included in Kolenda-Zaleska’s Life is Bearable at Times. Outside of Poland, Szymborska’s growing appeal is evident in Taiwanese singer Hebe Tien’s 2013 single Insignificance. Inspired by Szymborska’s Under One Small Star, the pop song, sung in Mandarin, features a spoken interlude in which Tien recites the following lines in the original Polish, Prawdo, nie zwracaj na mnie zbyt bacznej uwagi. Powago, okaż mi wspaniałomyślność. Ścierp, tajemnico bytu, że nie mogę być wszędzie. Truth, please don’t pay me much attention. Dignity, please be magnanimous. Bear with me, O mystery of existence, that I cannot be everywhere.
Upon the release of Insignificance, Szymborska’s long time secretary, Michał Rusinek, reflected on charges that using the Nobel Laureate’s verse as pop lyrics diminished them. He asserted, This is a traveler-poem, a poem that doesn’t require footnotes, a universal poem, understandable virtually everywhere. Someone will perhaps think that using such a serious poem, high culture poem in a pop song is
profanation. I believe that it speaks well of Hebe that she chose a Nobelist’s poem. Secondly, I think it may lead to more people wanting to read her poems.
Indeed, such adaptations of Szymborska’s verse bring her words to new audiences and we can only wonder what Szymborska would have thought of her poetry incorporated into a Mandarin pop song. Alongside those who adapt Szymborska’s verses into lyrics, jazz trumpeter Tomasz Stańko’s 2013 album Wisława offers an alternative approach to making music of her poetry. Each track on Wisława alludes to a poem of Szymborska’s and reveals Stańko’s reading of her texts. Of the project he comments, I was most inspired by Szymborska as a person, her greatness, her singularity, her beauty, her goodness, and of course what she created, but that is somewhat obvious.
This project is not Stańko’s first attempt to render Szymborska’s verse through music. In 2009 he performed with her at the Kraków Opera. “My role was to comment on the poetry, to play short interludes,” he recalls.
Szymborska as Eternally Questioning
Wisława Szymborska, photo: Piotr Guzik / Fotorzepa / Forum
Born in 1923, Szymborska witnessed her country fall under the grips of two totalitarian regimes, both of which asserted an absolute claim to knowledge that would guide the world to a better future. She consequently developed a strong skepticism when faced with any position claiming certainty. Both in her verse and her life, Szymborska reveled in complexity and ambiguity. In her Nobel Lecture, she remarked, All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power…they “know.” They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don’t want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments’ force. And any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well know from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society. This is why I value that little phrase, “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.
Szymborska’s commitment to “I don’t know” is evident throughout her work. Of her poetry, Stainsław Baranczak wrote in the New York Times Book Review, The typical lyrical situation on which a Szymborska poem is founded is the confrontation between the directly stated or implied opinion on an issue and the question that raises doubt about its validity. The opinion not only reflects some widely shared belief or is representative of some widespread mind-set, but also, as a rule, has a certain doctrinaire ring to it: the philosophy behind it is usually speculative, anti-empirical, prone to hasty generalizations, collectivist, dogmatic and intolerant.
Her1976 poem Utopia highlights this wariness of “perfect futures� and certain answers, evoking a scene where the only path to life in the utopic world is one of escape. Island where all becomes clear.
Solid ground beneath your feet.
The only roads are those that offer access.
Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.
The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here with branches disentangled since time immemorial.
The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple, sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.
The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista: the Valley of Obviously.
If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.
Echoes stir unsummoned and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.
On the right a cave where Meaning lies.
On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction. Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.
Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley. Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.
For all its charms, the island is uninhabited, and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches turn without exception to the sea.
As if all you can do here is leave and plunge, never to return, into the depths.
Into unfathomable life. (trans. S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh)
Szymborska as a Poet of Deceptive Simplicity
Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska, photo: Andrzej Iwanczuk / Reporter Szymborska’s nimble use of language, paired with her interest in exploring unusual perspectives on the everyday, may lead some initially to dismiss her poetry as overly simple. To read her directness as indicative of a lack of depth, however, undervalues her genius. Her simplicity is intentional and carefully composed. Her focus on minute objects creates a poetry of scale in which readers “zoom in” or “pan out” to reveal unusual perspectives and unexpected relationships. Szymborska perhaps describes her craft best in her poem Under One Small Star, writing, “I borrow weighty words, / then labor heavily so that they may seem light.” In Szymborska’s The Onion, for example, what might initially appear to be a playful description of an onion reveals itself as a thoughtful reflection on the contrast between man and nature, wherein the natural onion’s pure externality exposes man’s ever changing consciousness.
The onion, now that’s something else its innards don’t exist nothing but pure onionhood fills this devout onionist oniony on the inside onionesque it appears it follows its own daimonion without our human tears
Our skin is just a coverup for the land where none dare to go an internal inferno the anathema of anatomy in an onion there’s only onion from its top to its toe onionymous monomania unanimous omninudity….(trans. S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh)
Szymborska as Reluctant Nobel Laureate
Wisława Szymborska, Frankfurt, 1997, photo: Elżbieta Lempp Interview is the least favorite of my literary genres.
Szymborska was notoriously private and rarely gave interviews. It is thus not surprising that she met the sudden global recognition thrust upon her with the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996 with great hesitancy, calling it the “Stockholm Tragedy.” Szymborska was at a writers’ retreat in the Polish mountain town of Zakopane when the prize
was announced and initially refused to take calls with the news, preferring to instead finish her lunch privately. It was only after a number of calls – including one from her friend and colleague Czesław Miłosz – that she agreed to speak to the press. By the end of that day, however, she’d had enough and retreated to place even more remote, where she hoped she would not be found by reporters. Though the majority of media coverage of the prize feature quotations from her colleagues, rather than from Szymborska herself, she was, of course, center stage at the awarding of the prize. She admitted to Miłosz that “the most difficult thing will be to write a speech. I will be writing it for a month. I don’t know what I will be talking about, but I will talk about you.” In the end she delivered one of the shortest Nobel Lectures to date, the beautiful The Poet and the World.
Szymborska as Prose Writer Though known primarily as a poet, Szymborska wrote short prose pieces throughout her career. She worked as the head of the poetry department at Literary Life from 1953 to 1966. In 1967 she began writing a column Non-required Reading that was printed in a number of newspapers and ran until 1981. Pieces from this column have been collected and published in book form under the title Non-required Reading. Of these works, Szymborska commented, “I am and wish to remain a reader, an amateur, and a fan. Anyone insisting on ‘reviews’ will incur my displeasure.” This collection of concise pieces finds Szymborska exploring diverse topics – ranging from absent minded professors, to the demonization of smokers in America, to the reason why some civilizations fail. This volume of prose, much like her poetry, allows Szymborska to explore her eclectic interests and approach both big and small questions with her customary curiosity.
Szymborska as a Lover of the Natural World Wisława Szymborska, photo: Jerzy Dudek/ Fotorzepa/Forum In 2013, Szymborska’s hometown of Kórnik unveiled a statute in her honor. Depicting the poet dressed for a walk in the park, the memorial also features a cat perched upon a neighboring bench. The memorialization of Szymborska alongside a cat highlights the poet’s lifelong love of animals and nature. Animals appear throughout her oeuvre, whether as the subject of poems or positioned as the eyes through which the world is described. Her Cat in an Empty Apartmentpowerfully renders a sense of loss through the naïve malaise of the deceased’s cat, Die – you can’t do that to a cat. Since what can a cat do in an empty apartment? Climb the walls? Rub up against the furniture? Nothing seems different here but nothing is the same. Nothing’s been moved But there’s more space. And at nighttime no lamps are lit…. (trans. S. Barańczak and C. Cavanagh)
Not only interested in the natural world in her verse, Szymborska famously loved to take long walks through Kraków and was an avid angler. She also greatly admired the work of British primatologist Jane Goodall. When Lawrence Weschler of the New Yorker tried to persuade Szymborska, a notoriously wary traveler, to come to the United States, she replied, “I’d come if you arranged meetings with Woody Allen and Jane Goodall.” One need only witness the glee on the poet’s face as she watches footage of Goodall and her primates to understand the depth of her respect and love for the natural world. Such reverence and wonder shaped both her life and her verse. Examining, questioning, and valuing everything, Szymborska brilliantly articulated her perspective on the world in her Nobel Lecture, Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events”…. But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighted, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud about it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.
Wislawa Szymborska, Poet Of Gentle Irony, Dies At 88 David Orr
The path to international fame as a poet generally doesn't involve writing short poems about sea cucumbers. Yet for the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize in 1996 and died Wednesday, the little things — onions, cats, monkeys, and yes, sea cucumbers — turned out to be very big indeed. A popular writer in Poland for many years, Szymborska became a reluctant international literary celebrity after her Nobel win. Szymborska is an ironist. But in her work, irony becomes playful, almost whimsical. She thinks of the poet as an acrobat who moves, as she puts it, with "laborious ease, with patient agility, with calculated inspiration." Szymborska's poems generally focus on everyday subjects or situations, and her tone stays firmly in the middle ground. She doesn't rant; she calmly assesses. She's a poet of dry-eyed, athletic precision: an acrobat, as she says, not a powerlifter. Here is how she begins a poem called "Under One Small Star" (all quotations are from translations by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh): My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all. Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due. May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade. My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second. My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first. Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home. Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. And the poem concludes: Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words then labor heavily so that they may seem light.
Yet if Szymborska's touch is gentle, it can still burn or freeze. Consider her sea cucumber (or "holothurian") poem, which is called "Autotomy." The poem begins: In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two. It abandons one self to a hungry world and with the other self it flees. It violently divides into doom and salvation, retribution and reward, what has been and what will be. An abyss appears in the middle of its body between what instantly becomes two foreign shores. Life on one shore, death on the other. The sea cucumber can become two parts, one living, one dead. Szymborska compares this to the way in which writers have long argued that when they died, their work would live on — granting them a kind of immortality. But Szymborska is skeptical. She doesn't think anyone exists outside of time, or that writing poetry is a matter of falling on the right side of an abyss. As she puts it in the poem's conclusion: Here the heavy heart, there non omnis moriar — Just three little words, like a flight's three feathers. The abyss doesn't divide us. The abyss surrounds us.
The ending of the poem could seem grim. After all, she's suggesting that there is, in the end, no way to cheat time. But if that's the case — if we can't continually evade death — then this is at least something we all share. It's no surprise that her poem is dedicated to the memory of one of her friends. Szymborska has now fallen into the very abyss that she wrote about with such understated passion. And yet it's hard not to think that, with all her delicate power, she somehow still walks on air above us. CorrectionFeb. 3, 2012
The audio of this story, as did a previous Web version, gives the name "Autonomy" to Szymborska's poem about the sea cucumber. The correct name is "Autotomy" — a term for the process whereby creatures sacrifice then regenerate body parts.