Wisława Szymborska and the
Importance of the Unimportant
‘I am no longer certain
that what is
important
is more
important than the unimportant.’
Szymborska's
ability to speak in simple language has made her poetry accessible and attractive
to an unusually broad spectrum of readers.
Fellow
Polish Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz stated that, “Szymborska
is first of all a poet of consciousness … she speaks … as one of us … referring
to what everybody knows from one's own life.” Szymborska frequently opens poems
with a seemingly innocent question, and through the body of the poem, uncovers
a series of harsh truths. Commentators have consistently lauded Szymborska's wit, wisdom, irony, and adept use of simple
and straightforward language. Acknowledging that Szymborska's
poetry is extremely focused on the everyday and the manifestly realistic,
reviewers have maintained that her works embody a universal appeal that
demonstrates her poetic joy in life's miraculous potential, tempered by her
strong skepticism of easy solutions and her acute
awareness of suffering. This all-encompassing worldview, coupled with her
precise language, has facilitated the conveyance of concepts when Szymborska's works undergo translation.
Paradoxically,
Szymborska's very simplicity and directness present
the greatest challenge to a critic, and probably also accounts for a relative
dearth of studies about her poetry. The analytic language of literary criticism
often seems powerless and inadequate when dealing with these deceptively
transparent poems; it is heavy-handed and clumsy in comparison with the lightness
and agility of the poetic lines. Attempts at description and analysis
frequently end in a frustrating realization of failure and the necessity to go
back to the poems themselves, to let the poet speak with her own voice and
defend herself against the awkward approximations of the critic.
An
important and integral part of her poetics, Szymborska's
apparent ease conceals a conscious and determined effort. Her simplicity is
careful, a result of struggle, and is hard to trace since the poet covers her
tracks: "I borrow weighty words, / then labor
heavily so that they may seem light."
Bogdana Carpenter (extract)