PrintWisława Szymborska Dies
On Wednesday evening Wisława Szymborska, one of the world’s greatest poets, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature, passed away, her private secretary Michał Rusinek has announced. She died peacefully in her sleep.
Wisława Szymborska was born on 2 July 1923 but her exact place of birth is unknown. Although her birth certificate records it as Bnin, according to family legend she was born in neighbouring Kórnik. The Szymborski family later moved from the Wielkopolski province to Kraków.
Szymborska’s first publication was the poem “I Am Looking For The Word” which appeared in a supplement to the daily newspaper Dziennik Polski. Her first published collection of verse was That’s Why We Are Alive (1952). According to the critics, it was not until her next collection, Calling to the Yeti, was published in 1957 that she made her real appearance on the literary scene, as only now were the characteristic features of her poetry fully in evidence, including the aphoristic nature of her writing and her use of paradox as a vehicle for rhetoric.
Her successive collections were then: Salt (1962), No End of Fun (1967), Could Have (1972), A Large Number (1976), People on the Bridge (1986), The End and the Beginning (1993), Moment (2002), Colon (2005) and Here (2008).
In their justification for awarding Szymborska the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature, the members of the Swedish Academy wrote that the prize was being awarded "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality".
"Epitaph" by Wisława Szymborska
Here lies, oldfashioned as parentheses,
The authoress of verse. Eternal rest
was granted her by earth, although the corpse
had failed to join the avant-garde, of course.
The plain grave? There’s poetic justice in it,
this ditty-dirge, the owl, the meek cornflower.
Passerby, take your PC out, press “POWER”,
Think on Szymborska’s fate for half a minute.
- translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh