LitHub Asks 'Where is Wisława Szymborska?'

For LitHub, Jonathan Russell Clark considers the accolades Wislawa Szymborska earned during her lifetime, such as the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, and the precarious position that her poetry occupies on bookshelves today.

With customary wit, the Polish poet and Nobel Prize-winner Wisława Szymborska, in 1962, wryly uses an imagined tombstone to communicate—prophetically, it turns out—with the people of the future:

Epitaph

Here lies, old-fashioned 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 burdock. Passerby,

take out your compact Compu-Brain and try

to weigh Szymborska’s fate for half a minute.

So, let us dignify the late poet by pausing on our smart phones (where you may be reading this), if only for the length of an autoplay commercial, to grant her request.

* * * *

By the point in her life that poem was written Szymborska had been through enough to justify such a grim view of her longevity—of existence in general, for that matter. Her secondary school days in Kraków coincided with the German occupation. To avoid deportation, Szymborska worked as a railway clerk, and many of her classes were clandestine. She began studying literature at Jagiellonian University in Kraków and abandoned it before graduating. Her marriage to a fellow poet had ended in divorce, and now, approaching 40, she was the poetry editor at Literary Life and had published three previous volumes of poetry—though she disavowed the first two books as “naïve and clueless,” a decidedly euphemistic (but perhaps understandable) characterization of her early pro-Stalinist poems like “For the Youth Who Are Building Nowa Huta,” which the Polish People’s Republic (transparently an extension of the Soviet Union) had pressured Szymborska to include. When she wrote “Epitaph” in the early 1960s, certainly such compromises weighed on her mind, but the more prevailing thought seems to have been that it didn’t really matter anyway: her books weren’t very popular.

Continue at Lit Hub. For more by and about Szymborska, turn the page here.