The Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in literature, is a canny ironist and rapturous skeptic. She writes a poetry of sardonic individualism, and comes at common

experiences from her own angle, with her own perspective. "Four billion people on this earth,/but my imagination is still the same," she confesses in her poem "A Large Number"; "It’s bad with large numbers./It’s still taken by particularity." Szymborska is all too aware of how the world keeps escaping our various formulations about it: "But even a Dante couldn’t get it right," she admits, "Let alone someone who is not./Even with all the muses behind me."

Despite her modesty, Szymborska has mounted in her work a witty and tireless defense of individual subjectivity against collectivist thinking, and her poems are slyly subversive in a way that compels us to reconsider received opinion. No sooner does a familiar idea come her way than she starts turning it around to see what it will look like from different directions. She manages to question herself even as she exposes general assumptions and undermines political cant. Indeed, the rejection of dogma becomes the premise of a thoughtful personal ethics.

Szymborska was born in 1923 in the small town of Bnin in the Pozman area of western Poland. She moved with her family to Kraków when she was eight years old and has lived there ever since. She attended school illegally during the German occupation, when the Nazis banned Polish secondary schools and universities, and after the war studied Polish literature and sociology at Jagiellonian University. From 1952 to 1981, she worked on the editorial staff of the cultural weekly Zycie Literackie (Literary Life). She has published nine collections of poems and several editions of her selected verse, as well as a volume of newspaper reviews and columns. She is also known to Polish readers as a distinguished translator of French poetry, mostly of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Szymborska came of age during World War II, and spent much of her life under Stalinism. Thus she saw her country twice destroyed. She shares with Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rózewicz—the two other major Polish poets of the half-generation after Czeslaw Milosz—an absolute distrust of rhetoric, of false words and sentiments, of political creeds and ideologies, of general ideas and philosophies. The war was such a traumatic event for the writers of this generation that it called all moral and aesthetic values into question and, in a sense, poetry had to be rebuilt from the ground up, like the country itself. Hence, these poets have deliberately cultivated a cool, economical, and antirhetorical style, writing a stripped-down poetry of drastic simplicity. For these poets, stylistic clarity became a matter (and a form) of ethics, a response to ideological obfuscations, political double talk.

Szymborska is a philosophically oriented poet who raises universal subjects nonchalantly, with an offhand charm. She typically begins a poem with a question or a simple paradoxical assertion which the poem breezily sets out to explore. Her strategy is to run through all the ramifications of an idea to see what it will yield. Often she begins by seeming to embrace a subject and ends by undercutting it with a sharp, disillusioned comment. For example, in the poem "Children of Our Age," she takes a common assertion—"We are children of our age,/it’s a political age"—and examines it until it begins to leak and fall apart. She tries to find the human being— the human reality—obscured by political dogma.

One key to Szymborska’s style may be the way she works subversive variations on familiar rhetoric.

Szymborska’s poems—wise, funny, and personal—have the sting of long experience. She looks at the world with the eye of a disabused lover and understands something fundamental about our century. In the poem "Hatred," she writes, "See how efficient it still is,/how it keeps itself in shape—/our century’s hatred." In "The Century’s Decline," she writes, "Our twentieth-century was going to improve on the others":

Yet Szymborska’s bitterness about human fallibility—human cruelty— mingles with her sense of the world’s unfathomable richness. Despite the odds, she finds herself enjoying the world after all, revitalized by commonplace miracles, by what she calls in one poem "miracle fair": fluttering white doves, a small cloud upstaging the moon, mild winds turning gusty in a hard storm, the inescapable earth. In the end, she pits her dizzying sense of the world’s transient splendor against unbearable historical knowledge. Or, as she puts it: "My identifying features/are rapture and despair."

 

The Joy of Writing

 

Lot’s Wife

 

Under One Small Star

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.

My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.

Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.

May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.

My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.

My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.

Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.

Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.

I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.

I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.

Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.

Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.

And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,

your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,

forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.

My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.

My apologies to great questions for small answers.

Truth, please don’t pay me much attention.

Dignity, please be magnanimous.

Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.

Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then.

My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once.

My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.

I know I won’t be justified as long as I live,

since I myself stand in my own way.

Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,

then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

 

 

Reality Demands

Reality demands

that we also mention this:

Life goes on. It continues at Cannae and Borodino,

at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.

 

There’s a gas station

on a little square in Jericho,

and wet paint

on park benches in Bila Hora.

Letters fly back and forth

between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,

a moving van passes

beneath the eye of the lion at Cheronea,

and the blooming orchards near Verdun

cannot escape

the approaching atmospheric front.

 

There is so much Everything

that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.

Music pours

from the yachts moored at Actium

and couples dance on their sunlit decks.

 

So much is always going on,

that it must be going on all over.

Where not a stone still stands

you see the Ice Cream Man

besieged by children.

Where Hiroshima had been

Hiroshima is again,

producing many products

for everyday use.

 

This terrifying world is not devoid of charms,

of the mornings

that make waking up worthwhile.

The grass is green

on Maciejowice’s fields,

and it is studded with dew,

as is normal with grass.

 

Perhaps all fields are battlefields,

all grounds are battlegrounds,

those we remember

and those that are forgotten:

the birch, cedar, and fir forests, the white snow,

the yellow sands, gray gravel, the iridescent swamps,

the canyons of black defeat,

where, in times of crisis,

you can cower under a bush.

 

What moral flows from this? Probably none.

Only the blood flows, drying quickly,

and, as always, a few rivers, a few clouds.

 

On tragic mountain passes

the wind rips hats from unwitting heads

and we can’t help

laughing at that.

 

"The Joy of Writing," "Lot’s Wife," "Under One Small Star," and "Reality Demands," are reprinted from VIEW WITH A GRAIN OF SAND: SELECTED POEMS, copyright © 1993 by Wislawa Szymborska. English translation by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanaugh, copyright © 1995 by Harcourt Brace & Company. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.