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Wisława Szymborska, Kraków, 2009. Wikimedia Commons · see source for licensing.
Poet · Pairing VIII
Wisława Szymborska
1923–2012 · Polish poet · Nobel Prize in Literature, 1996
A poet who, in the words of the Nobel committee, wrote “with ironic precision.”
Wisława Szymborska was one of the most beloved poets of the twentieth century — a Polish writer whose deceptively plain, witty, and humane poems earned her the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee praised her “poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.”
She lived nearly her whole life in Kraków and wrote through the upheavals of twentieth-century Poland — the Second World War, Nazi occupation, and the long decades of communist rule. Yet her poems rarely announce big themes directly. Instead they begin from something small and ordinary — a museum case, an onion, a grain of sand, a cat in an empty apartment — and turn it, with quiet irony, into a meditation on time, chance, and mortality. “Museum” is a perfect example of this method.
Famously private and self-deprecating, Szymborska published a relatively small body of work but revised it to a fine polish. English readers most often encounter her in the celebrated translations by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh.
In this curriculum
Read her in Pairing VIII — Ruins, Time & Legacy →