The Recent Poetry of Wislawa Szymborska [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 207-211]

Cross Currents 7 (1988)
A Yearbook of Central European Culture
"COUNTLESS SHADES OF THE COLOR GRAY"
THE RECENT POETRY OF WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA
Stanislaw Baranczak
Harvard University
If we asked any selected group of Polish critics today to compose
their individual lists of the five most important poetry selections published
in the 1980s, we could be sure that each of these lists would include a
book or two by Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert's Raport z oblezonego
miasta [Report from the Besieged City], and Wistawa Szymborska's Ludzie
na moscie [The People on the Bridge]. Miron Bialoszewski's Oho (which
I had a chance to write about in the 6th issue of Cross Currents) has also
been widely considered one of the major literary sensations of recent years
but Bialoszewski, though already a classic for some, is still too unorthodox
and anti-poetic for many critics to be treated as something more than
a literary experimenter. In contrast, Szymborska's equally well-deserved
fame seems to rest upon an exceptionally solid foundation of popular
acceptance. Except for Herbert, there is probably no other major poet
based in Poland who would enjoy such universal respect. And among many
highly accomplished woman poets whom today's Polish literature boasts
to have, Szymborska is definitely the best.
Her career, spanning the entire postwar period, seems far from abounding in dramatic events, even more so as Szymborska deliberately shuns
public life and very seldom comments directly on her own life and work.
Instead, her biography is punctuated by the appearances of her skimpily
published collections of poems, each of them even slimmer and even better
than the previous one. She was born on July 2, 1923 in the small town
of Bnin in the Poznari area. Since 1931 her life has been closely tied to
the city of Krakow where she majored in Polish literature and sociology
at the Jagellonian University between 1945 and 1948, and where she worked
after 1953 as the poetry editor of the weekly Zycie Literackie. She made
her debut in the literary press in 1945, but the planned publication of
her first collection in 1948 hit a political snag: the book was not ideologically orthodox enough for the Stalinist times. Szymborska's first
volume, entitled Dlatego zyjemy [That's What We Live For], came out only
in 1952, followed by Pytania zadawane sobie [Questions Put to Myself,
1954].
The semantic difference between these two titles is telling: from a
programmatic certainty implied in the statement that forms the first title,
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