No end of fun with Wisława Szymborska

1996 Nobel Prize for Literature

Wisława Szymborska is my favourite poet. Her poetry is profound, disarming, and comic. She knows our lives are but rolls of the dice in history. Yet she loves them with kind punning laughter. 

Szymborska’s whole published opus is less than 350 poems. When asked why she did not publish more poems, she replied that she had a trash can at home. She discarded many poems. She shed the poetic personas of prophet, stranger, legislator, campaigner for justice, or even dissident, so common in the 20th century. She did not see solutions to life in grand politics or grandiose art. Szymborska played the court jester. Wisława found compassion in the comedy.

I found Szymborska first when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. I have since cherished my collections of her translated poetry, View with a Grain of Sand and Map. She is my feature writer from the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature between 1996 and 2002.

The seven winners of this period were:

• 1996 Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) Poland

• 1997 Dario Fo (1926–2016) Italy

• 1998 José Saramago (1922–2010) Portugal

• 1999 Günter Grass (1927–2015) Germany

• 2000 Gao Xingjian (b. 1940) China

• 2001 Vidiadhar Surajprasad (V.S.) Naipaul (1932–2018) Trinidad

• 2002 Imre Kertész (1929–2016) Hungary

I will profile them all on the Burning Archive Youtube Channel on Sunday night.

This post celebrates Wisława Szymborska, after this question for you.

Who will win the 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature?

The 2024 Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced on 10 October, just four weeks away! Over the month ahead, I will provide snapshots, on Substack Notes, of writers who are predicted by critics or gamblers to win in 2024. To get the party started, here is my high-odds shortlist list of twelve writers

• Can Xue

• Haruki Murakami

• Laszlo Krasznahorkai

• Gerald Murnane

• Mircea Cartarescu

• Lyudmila Ulitskaya

• Alexis Wright (Praiseworthy, Miles Franklin Award in 2024)

• Anne Carson

• Margaret Atwood

• Salman Rushdie

• Geetanjali Shree (Tomb of Sand, International Booker Prize in 2022)

• Serhiy Zhadan

Many think the Committee will choose an Asian or Oceanic writer and a woman this year. Both regions and gender have received too few of the last 120 Prizes. Hence, the Chinese novelist, Can Xue, is the bookies’ favourite. However, I have a hunch Geetanjali Shree will win. But it is just guesswork!

The Swedish Academy’s mind is hard to read. As we have learned, the committee often rides a wave of political fashion. Let me know your pick with this comment button.

My focus this week is Wisława Szymborska, the Polish poet.

Voiceover is available. Please enjoy it while you go for a walk or do some chores.

Wisława Szymborska

Szymborska’s poems keep appearing serendipitously in my life. This week I recorded an audio mini of Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (the first mini in this series for paid subscribers is here, and the next comes out on Monday). Close to the end of that book, Clendinnen wrote about her ethical response as a history writer to a photograph of an act of violence from the Holocaust:

An awakened, outraged sensibility demands systematic inquiry… it is not enough to loathe the perpetrator and to pity the victim, because in that scene they are bound together. We must try to understand them both. 

Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust

Clendinnen spoke for me. History is necessary because:

only disciplined, critical remembering will resist the erasure of fact and circumstance effected by time, by ideology, and by the natural human impulse to forget. 

Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust

And then with a graceful turn, Clendinnen turned to the words of Wisława Szymborska and her poem, ‘Could Have.’ What a coincidence! I could have read these words when I drafted this post on Szymborska. Clendinnen ended her book by citing the poem in full (listen to the audio mini on Monday for my rendition) and observed that Szymborska “says much of what I have been trying to say over these many pages in as many words.” 

Szymborska’s Biography

Szymborska herself lived through the Holocaust in Poland. She was not a victim, although she suffered as a Pole under German occupation. She was not a perpetrator, although Polish society was not without guilt. She was not a forthcoming witness, although some later poems returned to the themes. She endured and lived to deal with the consequences. In Poland’s case that was four decades of Communist rule.

Szymborska lived most of her life in Krakow. She travelled little beyond the city. Her father served the Polish upper class as an administrator, but he died when Wisława was thirteen. As an adolescent, she read many reference books, and the memories of these facts recurred in her poetry. During the Second World War and German occupation of Poland, her Polish elite school was shut down. The talented writer was forced to learn underground. After 1945, she studied at Jagiellonian University, but never completed her earnest degrees in philology and sociology. She began her adventure as a poet when Poland began its trial by Socialist Utopia and Soviet Bloc membership.

Her first volume of poetry was a failure. Then in the early 1950s, the last years of Stalinism, Szymborska embraced the new aesthetic protocols of Socialist Realism. How enthusiastic was her embrace? Scholars debate that point and I will leave it to them. She was barely thirty years-old and wanted to make a life. To fit in with any official role, she became a member of the Communist Party. But was it a mask? In any case, the post-Stalinist thaw soon came to Poland and the Soviet bloc after 1956. The thaw released her poetry from doctrine. From then she wrote her distinctive poetry, concerned with ordinary individuals and the disappointments of all Utopias.

She became poetry editor of a major Polish literary magazine until 1966. In these years, Polish and Soviet life and culture liberalized. Censorship weakened. Writers could speak in modes other than those dictated by the Party and Union of Writers. Szymborska bloomed as a distinctive, quirky humane poet outside official circles.

But Poland experienced the contending motions of thaws and crackdowns, such as occurred in Czechoslovakia with Jaroslav Seifert (1984 Nobel Prize) and the Prague Spring of 1968. In 1966, a leading Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski was expelled from the Communist Party for his unorthodox interpretations. On a side note, I owned his three-volume Main Currents of Marxism and regret selling them to pay the bills in 1989. In response, Szymborska relinquished her party membership. The Party stood her down as poetry editor. From then until 1990 her publishing was restricted. She received little recognition under the Polish Communist regime for her poetry.

In the 1970s and 1980s the Polish resistance to Communism grew under the leadership of Lech Walesa, Solidarity, and the Catholic Church. Szymborska associated with Solidarity, but did not advocate its cause. After her early “fruitful mistake” - to embrace the ideological conventions of socialist realism - Szymborska rejected religious belief, unlike many in the dissident movement, and was disappointed with the susceptibility of the Polish elite to forget its history and succumb to the latest restrictive ideology.

But association with the dissidents who threatened Communist rule was enough for the regime. In 1981 martial law was declared in Poland. Szymborska’s poetry and book reviews were suppressed. She was forced to publish underground and in the emigre press. She used a feminised pseudonym, Stanczykowna. It referred to a legendary sixteenth-century Polish court jester, Stańczyk, who served three Polish kings in Poland’s heyday. In Poland’s difficult twentieth century, Szymborska had, with a laugh, refused service to three ideological regimes.

After 1990 this court jester’s book reviews returned to the major Polish press. Their distinctive whimsical style became among her most popularly celebrated arts. Her poetry was published again.

Then in 1996, she was awarded the Nobel Prize. Some Poles resented this wry woman receiving the Prize, rather than more heroic members of the party of dissidents, such as Zbigniew Herbert. Szymborska hated the publicity and struggled with the disruption to her life. She did not write poetry again for four years after the Prize. But thankfully, it came back. She published several collections until her death in 2012.

Szymborska’s Poetry

Despite the ups and downs of her life, from the mid-1950s, Szymborska found a way to write poetry that gracefully stepped away from social ritual and political conventions. She refused to fall for faith. She denied the dream of the Western modernist artist: to be the gifted, monstrous stranger. She became an extraordinary poet, who as one friend observed, practised a lifelong impression of being an ordinary woman.

The titles of her poetry volumes collected in Map: Collected and Last Poems express the tenor of her wit:

• Why We Live (1952)

• Questions You Ask Yourself (1954)

• Calling Out to Yeti (1957)

• Salt (1962)

• No End of Fun (1967)

• Could Have (1972)

• A Large Number (1976)

• The People on the Bridge (1986)

• The End and the Beginning (1993)

• Moment (2002)

• Colon (2005)

• Here (2009)

• Enough (2011)

Her poetry takes many viewpoints, but never takes a stand. She looks at a view from the viewpoint of a grain of sand. She looks at history from the perspective of the long forgotten, sadly mistaken, helpless dead. Her poetry has irony, humour, questions, and doubts. She spurns the grand visions of reality propounded by Art, Politics or Science. She seeks harmony instead in the private reality of intimate events.

She inverts readers’ expectations. What is this view, to the grain of sand? What is art? What is truth? What is marvellously ordinary? What is painfully extraordinary?

Her rhetoric often contained ironic aphorisms that are pastiches of maxims, like the start of the poem, “The End and the Beginning”: “After every war/ someone has to clean up.” She questioned history in her poetry, just as this poem is an oblique coda on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, written by a woman who endured the wars of the twentieth century. But her poetry does not transcend history. It salvages from time’s cruel advance, precious moments that might hold onto a place in the memory of culture. Szymborska sparks what I called the “infinite conversation” in my essays, From the Burning Archive.

Szymborska reflected often on the past. She apprehended the terrors of the world – after all she survived East European socialism – and set them aside with a fetching lightness of touch. In “The Letters of the Dead,” she wrote:

We read the letters of the dead like helpless gods,
but gods nonetheless, since we know the dates that follow.
We know which debts will never be repaid
Which widows will remarry with the corpse still warm
Poor dead, blindfolded dead
gullible, fallible, pathetically prudent.

And then at the end of this poem:

Everything the dead has predicted has turned out completely different.
Or a little bit different – which is to say, completely different.
The most fervent of them gaze confidingly into our eyes:
their calculations tell them that they’ll find perfection there.

In reviews and poems, Szymborska authored comic essays of common suffering. The critic, Stanisław Barańczak, observed that “Questions You Ask Yourself,” the title of her 1954 volume, “have been the essence of Szymborska’s work for forty years.”

Moreover, Szymborska saw herself as belonging to a tradition of essayists, long weary of the service of the court, which began in Europe with Michel de Montaigne. She wrote:

For me, [Montaigne] is one of the greatest writers in the world…. He wondered about everything. In fact, he taught me to wonder at the world and its diversity.

But she did not diminish writing as lame words with no magic. In the “The Joy of Writing” she wrote:

They forget that what’s here isn’t life.

Other laws, black on white, obtain.

The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,

and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,

full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.

In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, she commented that poets, despite their vaunted reputations and Nobel acclaim, found their inspiration in the common ground of ordinary life.

inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners – and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”

There aren’t many such people. Most of the earth’s inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn’t pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven’t got even that much, however loveless and boring – this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there’s no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far as this goes.

As the Gale Dictionary of Literary Biography put it:

She refuses to wear the cloak of the prophet and harbours no pretence of changing the world or local political landscape. She writes with the liberation of someone who has renounced the role of sage, preferring instead to play the jester. By subverting parochialism and anthropocentrism, her poetry affords readers the distance to laugh at themselves.

Her perspective is encapsulated in the poem “The End and the Beginning.” Its first two stanzas in English are:

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

In Polish these stanzas are 

Po każdej wojnie

ktoś musi posprzątać.

Jaki taki porządek

sam się przecież nie zrobi.

Ktoś musi zepchnąć gruzy

na pobocza dróg,

żeby mogły przejechać

wozy pełne trupów.

You can read the full poem online here. And you can listen to my reading of this poem on YouTube here.

As I said early in this post, Szymborska keeps showing up serendipitously in my life. As the Ukraine War ground on, and new wars began, I recorded this recital of “The End and the Beginning.” I hope you find in the poem some inspiration to clean up after the endless wars. 

Szymborska, like Milosz, Havel, or Zbigniew Herbert, represented a life of writing hidden below the whirligig of celebrity, consumption, and false fame. She made her writing smile back to an often-hostile world. It is more courageous and authentic for its avoidance of defiance and alliance. In her early writing career, she adopted the values and propaganda of the socialist party. She broke with all Utopias in the 1960s. Then later in her career, if that is really the right word, Szymborska contributed to samizdat publications as part of the dissident movement. She turned away from socially sanctioned words. She carried on the infinite conversation with no delusions of grandeur. She followed the words to where they took her.

Is it really any wonder that she is my favourite poet?

You might enjoy this celebration of Wisława Szymborska in which her translator, assistant for the last twenty years of her life, and the poet Charles Simic all speak.

Thanks for reading and supporting the Burning Archive.

Jeff