Reclusive Polish Poet Awarded Nobel Prize

Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, a reclusive widow whose seductively simple verse has captured the wit and wisdom of everyday life for the past half century, has been awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy announced Thursday in Stockholm.

Unassuming, shy and obsessively protective of her privacy, Szymborska had been considered a longshot for the prestigious prize, which was presented to another poet, Irishman Seamus Heaney, last year. Although she is perhaps Poland’s most famous woman writer, Szymborska is often overshadowed in Polish literary circles by poets Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz, both of whom have been mentioned as Nobel contenders.

“She has gone through a long evolution and has reached maturity,” said renowned Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, a professor at UC Berkeley, who won the Nobel Prize in 1980. “Polish poetry in the 20th century has reached a strong international position on the European continent. Szymborska represents it well.”

Szymborska reacted to news of her award with characteristic humility and humor. She granted several brief telephone interviews from a faraway mountain retreat she frequents in southern Poland, then took an afternoon nap--with strict orders not to be disturbed.

“I have accepted it with surprise, of course with great joy, but also with bewilderment and embarrassment,” she told a gathering of reporters later in the day, after relenting to demands for a public appearance. “My poetry is quite private. I am a private person. . . . I will have to be a bit of an official person, and I don’t like this, because I’m not a movie star.”

At 73, Szymborska is the matriarch of Polish poets, with her first collection of poems published in 1952 and her latest still being penned when the telephone call came from Stockholm. Although the volume of her work is relatively modest, the Swedish Academy referred to it as powerful art that combines “esprit, inventiveness and empathy.”

Critics describe her poetry as emotional, striking--sometimes even arresting--but rarely personal. Milosz characterizes Szymborska’s style as “reverse-confessional,” directing her art from a carefully detached perch. When her poems do erupt from the depths of her soul, the result is so distilled that only her closest associates recognize the inspiration.

One recent poem about the death of a longtime companion, for example, told the story of their cat suddenly finding itself alone in an empty apartment. To the unknowing reader, the poem offers no clue to its intensely personal subject matter.

“This poem really moved me very much, because I knew the story behind it,” said Jan Jozef Szczepanski, a prominent Polish author and friend of Szymborska. “They both cared very much for this animal, and it was her way of dealing with the death.”

As with many Polish writers of her generation, Szymborska briefly dabbled in social realism--two early works glorified communism--but she quickly went on to write critically about totalitarianism, including one poem that likened Josef Stalin to the Abominable Snowman. In a later verse, “Children of Our Age,” Szymborska cast politics as the obsession of our time.

Whether you like it or not,

your genes have a political past,

your skin, a political cast,

your eyes, a political slant.

Whatever you say reverberates,

whatever you don’t say speaks for itself.

So either way you’re talking politics.

In the 1980s, Szymborska collaborated under a pseudonym in a Polish samizdat, or underground publication, as well as an exile magazine published in Paris. Earlier, she worked for nearly four decades as a book critic for a now-defunct Polish literary magazine, reviewing everything from T. S. Eliot cat poems to gardening manuals.

Her keen wit, clever mastery of the Polish lexicon and no-nonsense commentary on basic issues of human existence have made her Poland’s most popular woman poet, with her most recent collection of works in its second printing.

“She writes very wise poetry, and part of its magic is that it doesn’t give you any resistance when you read it,” said Ryszard Krynicki, a Polish poet who publishes Szymborska’s Polish-language works. “This doesn’t mean that it is simplistic poetry--just that the more of her poetry you read, the more you discover new meanings.”

Her poems have been translated into numerous languages, including English, but she remains relatively obscure outside her homeland. The subtleties of her poetry, the Swedish Academy said, do not always translate well, something that may contribute to her lack of an international reputation. The academy acknowledged, however, that a 1989 Swedish translation of selected poems strongly influenced members’ impressions of her writing, and Szymborska credited her Swedish translator with securing the Nobel.

“If this had been a mediocre translator, we would not be talking today,” she said.

Three books of her poetry have been published in English, including “View With a Grain of Sand,” released last year by Harcourt Brace & Co. Last January, the Village Voice described Szymborska as “a tremendous find” when previewing a public reading of her translated work in New York. “Her humor is mournful, her sadness antic, her sense of interiority completely available to the senses,” the newspaper said.

In announcing the award, the Swedish Academy praised Szymborska for poetry that “with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.”

The academy drew special attention to a 1980 poem, “Nothing Twice,” as illustrative of “a streak of lightning” in her art. The final stanza reads:

With smiles and kisses, we prefer

to seek accord beneath our star,

although we’re different (we concur)

just as two drops of water are.

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Winning Words

Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska won the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The prize citation notes that she is a fastidious writer who has been called the Mozart of poetry--but also attributes to her the fury of Beethoven, pointing out that she is often a scathing ironist.

ABOUT THE POET

* Born: July 2, 1923, in the western Polish town of Bnin, near Poznan

* Education: Studied Polish literature and sociology at Jagellonian University

* Career: Eight volumes of poetry, beginning with “That’s Why We Are Alive” in 1952; she is also a literary critic.

****

“IN PRAISE OF DREAMS” by Wislawa Szymborska

In my dreams

I paint like Vermeer Van Delft

I speak fluent Greek

and not only with the living.

I drive a car

that does what I say.

I am talented,

I write epic poems.

I hear voices

no less often than saints do.

You would be amazed

at my skill in piano playing.

I fly properly

all by myself.

Sliding off the roof

I fall onto soft grass.

I do not find it hard

to breathe underwater.

I cannot complain:

I discovered Atlantis.

It’s a relief to wake up

just before dying.

I turn sideways comfortably

when wars break out.

I am, but am not forced to be,

a child of this age.

Some years ago

I saw two suns.

And the day before yesterday a penguin.

I saw it quite clearly.

--from “View With a Grain of Sand,” translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh; copyright Harcourt Brace & Co.