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nictoe
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Wislawa Szymborska Dead at 88
« Thread Started on Feb 1, 2012, 9:01pm »

Poland's 1996 Nobel Poet Szymborska Dies at 88

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

February 1, 2012

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland's 1996 Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska, whose simple words and playful verse plucked threads of irony and empathy out of life, has died. She was 88.

Szymborska, a heavy smoker, died in her sleep of lung cancer Wednesday evening at her home in the southern city of Krakow, her personal secretary Michal Rusinek said.

She died surrounded by relatives and friends, said Katarzyna Kolenda-Zaleska, a journalist and a friend of the poet.

The Nobel award committee's citation called her the "Mozart of poetry," a woman who mixed the elegance of language with "the fury of Beethoven" and tackled serious subjects with humor. While she was arguably the most popular poet in Poland, most of the world had not heard of the shy, soft-spoken Szymborska before she won the Nobel prize.

She has been called both deeply political and playful, a poet who used humor in unforeseen ways. Her verse, seemingly simple, was subtle, deep and often hauntingly beautiful. She used simple objects and detailed observation to reflect on larger truths, often using everyday images — an onion, a cat wandering in an empty apartment, an old fan in a museum — to reflect on grand topics such as love, death and passing time.

Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said on Twitter that her death was an "irreparable loss to Poland's culture."

Last year, President Bronislaw Komorowski honored Szymborska with Poland's highest distinction, The Order of the White Eagle, in recognition of her contribution to her country's culture.

In reaction to her death, Komorowski wrote that "for decades she infused Poles with optimism and with trust in the power of beauty and the might of the word."

Szymborska was our "guardian spirit," Komorowski wrote. "In her poems we could find brilliant advice which made the world easier to understand."

Rusinek said on TVN24 that as long as her condition allowed, Szymborska was working on new poems, but she had not had time to arrange them in order for a new book, which she had intended. The book will be published this year, he said.

The Nobel Prize brought a "revolution" into the life of the modest poet and she had to struggle to protect her privacy, Rusinek said, but the prize also was a "great joy, a great honor which brought new friendships and changes for the better."

Despite six decades of writing, Szymborska had less than 400 poems published.

Asked why, she once said: "There is a trash bin in my room. A poem written in the evening is read again in the morning. It does not always survive."

Culture Minister Bogdan Zdrojewski said in a statement that Szymborska was candid, authentic and hostile to any form of celebrity.

"She had understanding for others, she understood the weaknesses of others and had huge tolerance for them," the statement said. "On the other hand, she expected to have a modest place for herself."

Szymborska was born in the village of Bnin, now part of Kornik, near Poznan in western Poland on July 2, 1923. Eight years later she moved with her parents to Krakow, and developed deep ties to the medieval city, with its rich artistic and intellectual milieu. She lived there until her death.

After the Nazis invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II, Szymborska found work as a railway clerk to avoid deportation to Germany as a forced laborer. In her free time, she studied at illegal underground universities.

She resumed her formal studies after the war in Polish literature and sociology at Krakow's Jagiellonian University, but never earned a degree.

In 1945, she published her first poem, "I Am Looking for a Word," in a weekly supplement to the local "Dziennik Polski" newspaper.

Not long after, Szymborska married fellow-poet Adam Wlodek. Although the two divorced after a few years, they remained close friends until Wlodek's death in 1986.

The young poet quickly became a fixture of the city's postwar literary circles, which initially accepted Soviet-imposed ideology in art and literature, and she joined the communist party in 1952.

Her first two books, published in 1952 and 1954, were heavily influenced by Socialist Realism, the official doctrine that art must serve revolutionary goals, at a time when the communist censors held sway.

One poem, entitled "Youth Building Nowa Huta," heroically recalled the construction of what the communist regime hailed as a utopian socialist neighborhood on Krakow's outskirts centered around a giant steel mill. Another poem, "Lenin," praised Russia's revolutionary leader.

But like many Polish writers and artists, Szymborska eventually grew disillusioned with communism and later renounced her Stalin-era verse. She officially broke with the party in 1966.

Her later poetry served as a revenge of sorts against her first two books, both of which she later disavowed. She likened Soviet leader Josef Stalin to the abominable snowman in the 1957 poem "Calling Out To Yeti," and frequently mocked communism in her verse.

From 1953 to 1981, she worked as a poetry editor and columnist for the literary weekly Zycie Literackie, or Literary Life, where she wrote a column called Lektury Nadobowiazkowe, or Non-Required Reading.

Szymborska published some 20 volumes of poetry in all — one every four or five years — a handful of which have been translated into over a dozen languages. Works available in English include "View With a Grain of Sand," ''People on a Bridge" and "Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems."

But her poetry was wildly popular with her Polish readers, who snapped up each new volume upon release. Polish rock singer Kora turned her poem "Nothing Twice" into a popular song. The tune was a 1994 hit in Poland, leading Poles to sing: "nothing can ever happen twice/in consequence, the sorry fact is/that we arrive here improvised/and leave without the chance to practice."

Another Szymborska poem, "Love At First Sight," inspired the lauded, enigmatic movie "Red" by the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Despite her advanced age, Szymborska's work continued to speak to a broad public. Her collection, "Dwukropek," was selected by readers of the nationwide Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper as the best book of 2006.

She published her last book, "Here," in 2008.

Yet the shy poet fiercely clung to her privacy, and lived a quiet life in her beloved Krakow despite her popularity. She reluctantly faced the limelight that accompanies the Nobel Prize, and the corresponding lecture in front of 1,800 people was a heavy burden for a woman who had said she's comfortable only in groups of up to a dozen.

After arriving in Stockholm to receive her Nobel, reporters at the airport asked Szymborska about the first poem she ever wrote.

She replied with modesty and humor familiar to her readers.

"It's hard to say what the first one was about because I started very early to write poems. I was about 4 years old," she said. "Of course they were clumsy and ridiculous. But when one poem was right, my father took it and gave me some money to buy chocolates.

"So I can say I started living by my poetry when I was 4."

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Jaga
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Re: Wislawa Szymborska Dead at 88
« Reply #1 on Feb 2, 2012, 1:43am »

Szymborska died after being sick for several months. She had a surgery in Fall. She died in her sleep.

Here is the photo when she learned that she received a Nobel prize:

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Re: Wislawa Szymborska Dead at 88
« Reply #2 on Feb 2, 2012, 1:45am »

more photos from travel to the Nobel award ceremony:

http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/wiadomosci/5....droga.html?i =0

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Re: Wislawa Szymborska Dead at 88
« Reply #3 on Feb 2, 2012, 8:46am »

here is one of the poems of Szymborska:

Dying–you don’t do that to a cat.
For what is a cat to do
in an empty flat?
Climb up the walls?
Brush up against furniture?
Nothing here seems changed,
and yet something has changed.
Nothing has been moved,
and yet there's more room.
And in the evening the light is not lit.

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Re: Wislawa Szymborska Dead at 88
« Reply #4 on Feb 2, 2012, 7:53pm »

Wislawa Szymborska: The Happiness of Wisdom Felt

Posted by Adam Gopnik
February 2, 2012

It was only the other morning that my wife, happening to leaf again through “Here,” the most recent gathering of Wislawa Szymborska’s poems, remarked, looking at the cover photograph of the eighty-something-year-old Polish poet, the writer’s eyes shut in private bliss, cigarette in hand, “You know, I’m worried about Szymborska. I wish she would stop smoking.” This remark—made, of course, by someone who had never come anywhere near the poet’s fleshly, personal presence—was a sign of the effect that Szymborska had on her readers. They thought of her as a friend and neighbor and counsellor—as someone to worry about, and worry with, more than someone to merely pay the blank tribute of “admiration.” She had no mere “admirers,” really, though her friends and fans, in this American neighborhood alone, ran from Jane Hirshfeld and Billy Collins to Woody Allen.

Of course, obituaries are not—or shouldn’t be—a competitive sport, so we shouldn’t spend too long complaining that the New York Times, this morning, announcing her death—from lung cancer, just as my wife had feared and the photo presaged—badly underplayed it, pushing her off to the margins with a much shorter notice than they gave the death of the artist Mike Kelley. Bitching about obituaries (to invent a rather Szymborksian title for a poem) is a mug’s game, so: not too long—but a moment. A poem of hers should have appeared on the front page, but, allowing that that’s too much to ask, the notice might have given those unfamiliar with her work some sense of why she mattered so much. Nothing in the Times obit—which oddly made much of her early unimportant political writing and was inadvertently chauvinist in its implication that the Nobel Prize overburdened her in a way that it might not have some other, more burly, pundit-minded male writer—would give a non-Szymborska-reader a clear sense of why she won it, or why hers was perhaps the one recent “obscure” Nobel in Literature to which everyone who knew the author’s work already assented. (Everyone who didn’t know her work, and was puzzled, read it, and then they assented, too.) She is that kind of good.

Though hardly a happy poet in the usual sense—born in Krakow in 1923, possibly the worst moment and place ever to arrive on this planet, with Hitler waiting to greet her on her sixteenth birthday and Stalin evilly coming along behind, how could she be?—Szymborska’s poetry had the gift of creating both the happiness of wisdom felt and the ecstatic happiness of the particulars of life fully imagined. From the experience of armies and dogmas and death that shaped her early life, she found a new commitment to the belief that the poetic impulse, however small its objects, is always saner than the polemical imperative, however passionate its certitudes.

Szymborska took as subjects “chairs and sorrows, scissors, tenderness, transistors, violins, teacups, dams and quips,” to use a list from the title poem in that last collection. Though determinedly microcosmic, she was never minor. Szymborska takes on an onion, and that onion is peeled, down to its essence. A Szymborska poem is always charming, wonderfully charming, charming as a small child singing, charming as a great pop-song lyric. But her poems are also, to use an old word, “deep,” mysteriously so, about the very nature of existence. The sum effect of a Szymborska poem, at least as rendered in American English, is often of an odd but happy collaboration between Ogden Nash and Emily Dickinson. (Though she is less easily defeated than Ogden, and more worldly than Emily.)

In her poetry, a child about to pull a tablecloth from a table becomes every scientist beginning an experiment; a visit to the doctor, with its stripping down and piling on of clothes, a metaphor for the company and odd mechanisms of our naked bodies; she ponders the grammar of divorce (“are they still linked with the conjunction ‘and’ or does a period divide them?”) and the inner life of Hitler’s dog. In my favorite of all her poems, “A Tale Began” (which I was overjoyed to be able to use for the epigraph for my own book “Through The Children’s Gate”), she writes about the range of human difficulties that, over time, make the decision to have a child impossible. “The world is never ready for the birth of a child,” she writes, and goes on:

Our ships are not yet back from Winland
We still have to get over the S. Gothard pass
We’ve got to outwit the watchmen on the desert of Thor
Fight our way through the sewers to Warsaw’s center…

But the child, arrives anyway, and she wishes that:

May delivery be easy,
may our child grow and be well.
Let him be happy from time to time
and leap over abysses.
Let his heart have strength to endure
and his mind be awake and reach far.

But not so far
that it sees into the future.
Spare him
that one gift,
O heavenly powers

In a way, Szymborska supplied her own best epitaph, and obituary, in the text of her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which she took on the “astonishment” of normal life:

“Astonishing” is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We’re astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we’ve grown accustomed to. Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events.” …But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

Not a single existence unastonishing. So perhaps a notice merging her existence into so many others, not making too much of it, would have been the one she wanted, and found truly astonishing. In any case, the poems are there this morning as much as they were there last night, with the poet still smoking and smiling on the cover of her final book. Though doubtless to those who loved her as Wislawa the loss is immense, is it too terrible to admit that I can’t recall a literary loss I’ve felt with more emotion but less grief. We can now press Szymborska on to the next receptive reader. “You now have a curated body of work that you can love and contemplate,” that same wife said this morning. While the poet lived, it was cheering to think, as her readers did almost every day, that another poem might be coming. Now that’s she gone, we’re happy—truly happy, astonishingly happy—to know the poems came.

Poems by Wislawa Szymborska:

http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/S/SzymborskaWi/

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