ABSTRACT
Szymborska moved to Cracow from Kornik at the age of eight and has lived there ever since. She studied sociology and Polish literature at the Jagiellonian University and made her debut with the poem "Szukam slowa" (I Seek the Word) in Walka (Struggle), the 1945, no. 3 supplement to the Cracow newspaper Dziennikpolski (Polish Daily). Officially criticized for writing "in a manner unintelligible to the masses" and dwelling morbidly on the experiences of the war . . . at the expense of the new theme of building socialism (Krynski and Maguire), her first volume of poetry, ready in 1948, was not published for four years until, apparently convinced that the times called for art to serve an important immediate goal, she rewrote it. Even though she sincerely tried to raise an authentic poetic voice in tune with the revolutionary era, she was found wanting. Her later publications included fewer and fewer poems on political themes and dealt more and more with lyrical subjects. She has won many literary prizes, written extensively on books by both Polish and foreign writers, and translated French poetry, mostly from the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. She is poetry editor of the weekly Zycie literackie (Literary Life) in Cracow. The beautiful bilingual American publication of her seventy poems contains an extremely interesting and sensitively written introduction to her work and her ideas about poetry.
