Wisława Szymborska Biography
Polish
poet and translator, who was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1996, at the age of seventy-three. Szymborska is one of the
few woman poets who have received the prize. Her early works were born more or
less within the straitjacket of the Socialist Realism. Later she has expressed
her pessimism about the future of mankind. While skepticism
has marked Szymborska's views of the human condition,
its has not stopped her from believing in the power of
words and the joy arising from imagination. Szymborska often uses ordinary
speech and proverbs but gives them a fresh and arresting meaning.
Is there then a world
where I rule
absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence
become endless at my bidding?
The joy of
writing.
The power of
preserving.
Revenge of a
mortal hand.
(from 'The Joy
of Writing,', 1967)
Wislawa
Szymborska was born in Bnin (now part of Kornick) in western
As
a poet Szymborska made her debut with the poem Szukam
slowa which was published in the newspaper Dziennik Polski in 1945. Three
years later she finished her fist collection of poems, but the book was not
published. The Communist had gained power tightening their cultural policy and Szymborska's work was considered too complex and bourgeois.
She returned to the work, made it more political and her first collection DLAGTEGO
ZYJEMY, appeared in 1952. Szymborska have also published collections of
literary columns, several of which first appeared in Zycie
Literacia.
Like
many Poles, Szymborska became disillusioned with communism. 'I looked back in
terror where to step next...' Her later work have been more personal and
relatively apolitical, although he has noted "Apolitical poems are
political too" in 'Children of This Age'. The 1957 collection of poems,
WOLANIE DO YETI (calling out to Yeti), marks her first break with socialist-realist
literature. In 'Still Life with Toy Balloon' she wrote: "Fly off through
the open window, / fly off into the wide world, / let someone cry out: Oh! / so I can weep."
Ten
years later published STO POCIECH is considered Szymborska's
first work of her mature period. When Communism claimed it was the final answer
to the question about ideal form of society, Szymborska admitted that she has
no knowledge of Utopia, but only an ironic view of it as an "island where
everything comes clear." Her role in the society she saw as vague: "I
am ignorant of the role I perform. / All I know is
it's mine, can't be exchanged."
Szymborska
has been married twice. Since the early 1990s she has been a widow and lived in
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/szymbor.htm