Wislawa Szymborska

Over at Paper Cuts, Barry Gewen's post 'A Poem for the Pentagon' reminded me of one of my favorite poets, Wislawa Szymborska.

He mentions comparing notes with a friend, and finding they both loved Szymborska's work. I'm not going to go into his comment about contemporary poetry in general, because entire books could be written defending or criticizing his statement, and I want to focus on Szymborska.

It was interesting to me that she was the poet that came up with the conversation, because the same thing has happened to me several times. I am an inveterate bookshelf examiner, when I go somewhere with a bookshelf, I will look to see what is on it. One or another of Szymborska's books appeared surprisingly frequently on my friends shelves. This is hardly scientific evidence of her popularity, but I think among the group of people likely to read poetry, her popularity is pretty real. I've had great conversations with a number of my friends about our fondness for Szymborska's work. Even more surprising to me was the number of people I know who all independently acquired a love not only of her poetry, but also of her truly marvelous collection of short essays Nonrequired Reading. At the same time, I was speaking to a Polish woman who's mother taught Polish Literature in Poland, and she was quite surprised at my fondness for Szymborska. Not because she didn't like her, but because she didn't expect Americans to like her. This was partly from having seen the typical American lack of interest in writing from other countries.

Somehow or other, I have ended up with a bookshelf full of Polish poets, at present the collections outnumber the American poetry books on my shelf. This is partly because I have so many books by Zbigniew Herbert. Still, it's a lot. Polish poets were one of my earliest claims to reading things that weren't originally written in English. While Herbert is my hands down favorite, I think that if I were to recommend any one poet as an introduction to the beauty of Polish poetry, it would probably be Szymborska. Further, in Polish poetry we seem to be blessed with some particularly excellent translators. Even the much criticized Alissa Valles translation of Herbert's poems still allows the beauty of his poetry to really shine. I quite like the fact too that with these poets, from collection to collection they've been translated by one or the other of this small group of excellent translators. Reading the different translators work gives a great opportunity for those of us who don't read Polish, to try to observe where the difference between the poets and the different translators are.