Wislawa Szymborska Polish poetess; winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. Date of Birth: 02.07.1923 Country: Poland

Biography of Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish poet and the winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born on July 2, 1923, in the town of Kórnik, near Poznań. From the age of eight, she lived in Kraków, where she completed an underground Polish school during the German occupation and briefly worked as a railway employee. She studied Polish philology (language and literature) and sociology simultaneously at the historic Jagiellonian University.

Szymborska's first poems were published in Kraków newspapers in 1945, and her first two poetry collections appeared in 1952 and 1954. During this time, her style was traditionally realistic, even partially socialist-realist. She dedicated her poems to war, the army, and the homeland. In one of her poems, expressing the fate of Poland, Szymborska coined the aphoristic phrase, "Our military trophy - knowledge of the world," which became widely known.

In 1956, Poland witnessed workers' riots in Poznań, leading to the rise of Władysław Gomułka to power and reforms in the party and state. These were the years of Polish "thaw." In 1957, Szymborska's third collection of poems, "Calls to Yeti," was published. Critics perceived the yeti as an allusion and hint at the leader of the neighboring "snowy" country. During these years, Szymborska's style underwent significant changes, and she increasingly wrote in free verse, characteristic of contemporary poets in Western Europe. However, Szymborska's poems were distinct from both Polish and Western vers libre. They were concrete and comprehensible, devoid of opaque abstractions, deliberate strings of words and phrases understood only by the author, serving only the purpose of "simulating profound thoughts."

Wislawa Szymborska embodied a certain model of moral ethics. The Polish intelligentsia looked up to her, and this laid the roots of the "Solidarity" movement. She did not hesitate to sign protests against the arrests of dissidents in Czechoslovakia and other countries of the Soviet bloc. The Polish People's Republic government, which attempted to "tame" her, was powerless. Her subsequent books include "Silences" (1963), "Hundred Postures" (1967), "Everyday Life" (1972), "A Large Number" (1976), "People on the Bridge" (1986), and "The End and the Beginning" (1993).

Szymborska's works have been translated into English, German, French, Swedish, Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic. The first translations into Russian were published in the late 1960s. Her poems appeared in "Foreign Literature," "Novy Mir," and the anthology "Polish Poets" (1978). Some of her works were translated by prominent Russian poets Anna Akhmatova and David Samoylov. Later, Natalya Astafyeva and Asar Eppel translated many of Szymborska's poems. Szymborska herself was fluent in Russian and translated several Russian poets into Polish. Like her homeland, Wislawa Szymborska occupies a place somewhere in between the cultures of Western and Eastern Europe. Her own viewpoint on this matter is expressed in a poem that begins with the words, "I comprehend the world as a second, revised edition" (translated by D. Samoylov). Perhaps, this is the motto for all of Szymborska's works.

The majority of the poetess's poems are short, philosophical treatises and emotionally colored reflections. They are deeply dramatic lyrics, filled with irony and grotesque. In 1996, Wislawa Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for poetry that, with ironic precision, allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality."

Paradoxically, just before Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize, the two largest Swedish publishers refused to publish her poetry collections, and only after the prize was announced, they hurriedly released them. Wislawa Szymborska's works have been translated into 36 languages, and her books have been published in 18 countries worldwide. The poetess has received the Goethe Prize (1991), the Herder Prize (1995), and the Polish PEN Club Prize (1996). Szymborska is an honorary doctor of Poznań University.