Wislawa Szymborska


After posting six poems by the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, I wonder why it took me so long to discover her.


Wislawa Szymborska, a gentle and reclusive Polish poet who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Wednesday in Krakow, Poland. She was 88.

"In her Nobel lecture, Ms. Szymborska joked about the life of poets. Great films can be made of the lives of scientists and artists, she said, but poets offer far less promising material.
“'Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic,' she said. 'Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines, only to cross out one of them 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens. Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?'”




Click here to go an online source for more of her poems in English.
Click here to go to the NYT's obituary.




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