ABSTRACT
Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012), one of the major postwar voices of Polish poetry, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, lived most of her life in Kraków. Known as the Greta Garbo of Polish literature for ‘wanting to be left alone’, Szymborska felt uncomfortable in crowds and specialized mostly in small contemplative poetic forms. Her reputation rested on several hundred poems, written at the rate of only a few dozen per year. They are often whimsical and adopt unusual points of view. Because of their concreteness her poems lend themselves to translation, and she became greatly admired around the world following her 2006 Nobel win. Szymborska was called an ‘anti-Platonist’ for trying to build up her own world around her from scratch, using as building blocks the material of everyday reality. In this world concrete objects count as much as the people that rub against them. Depending on perspective, two drops of water can be as similar as two peas in a pod or as different as night and day. A person can get to know another person as much as they can a stone. She often contemplates herself and her own mortality from an ironic distance. At times a poetic jokester, Szymborska’s literary ouevre includes limericks and a series of two-line so-called ‘betterments’ (lepieje) criticizing restaurant food, as in ‘Lepiej w głowę dostać drągiem, Niż się tutaj raczyć pstrągiem’ (It’s better to be beaten on the head with a knout, than in this establishment to sample the trout). The poem ‘Nic dwa razy się nie zdarza’ (Nothing ever happens twice), included below, was turned into a popular rock song. https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315883724/f1ec34ee-0050-45f0-bb21-227ec0c07bdd/content/ufig17_1_B.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
