Polish Poet Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska was born in 1923 in Prowent, Poland (current Kórnik, Poland). She and her family relocated to Kraków, Poland when she was eight. The Holocaust occurred on primarily Polish soil. All of the Nazi death camps and majority of the concentration camps were located in the proximity of Krawkow, Poland where Szymborska lived. Out of the six million jews that were killed in the Holocaust, three million were Polish (Blum 133). After the Nazi invasion and the succeeding shut down of schools, Szymborska attained her high school diploma through secret study groups. When World War II (the most traumatic event in Polish history) began, she continued her education by taking underground university classes. She was only sixteen when the war broke out. She witnessed terror, hunger, and the deportation and execution of Jews and Poles. She was twenty-one when the war ended. She studied Polish Literature and sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. While still a student, she published published her first poem 'I Seek the Word' in 1945. She was a member of the communist youth group around the same time. Her first two collections of poetry succumbed to the officially publicized communist newspaper, Polish Daily in the 1950’s.

Her first manuscript was ready for publication in 1948 but due to its content regarding the war’s aftermath, a campaign against Szymborska’s poetry was constructed; this represents the distinctions in communist groups as they fought for power. Students were told to send in letters that shamed her bourgeois poetry, which resulted in the cancellation of her first book, Poems. Polish History Behind Poetry Szymborska’s "Conversation With a Stone" was published in 1962 in a collection called Salt. This poem is one of her earlier works yet, it described as an example of her resistance towards to political and social ideologies during the time. It was quite popular at the time because it embodied her method of questioning the world around her. Another poem by Szymborska written thirty years later still touches obliquely on the Holocaust, "Among the Multitudes" is a good representation of individuality (from Poems New and Collected (1993-1997)). At the time, Poland had just started to make progress towards full democratic government and a free market economy. In 1990, Poland held its first presidential election.

Wislawa Szymborska turned to communism in hope of transforming her war-torn country. Szymborska said, "At first I admired the communist system and wrote socialist-realist poems. I honestly thought communism was a way to liberate everyone who had lived under the Nazi occupation." (2) When she realized she had been committed to what she called "magical thinking" and implicating the deaths of her Poles, she discarded communism to question the ways stories formed (Biele 168). As a result, Szymborska joined the Polish Writers’ Union and the Socialist Party. It was not until 1966 when she broke from the communist party. She and many other Polish poets were disappointed with the government so they attempted to make amends for past beliefs. Szymborska was very politically-oriented; in truth, politics provided a stationary framework for her work from the start. A couple of Szymborska’s poems from her early years worshiped communism; they praised Stalin- a time that she regrets but gradually broke free. She therefore spent her latter years working towards publications that put her in the anti-communist camp of liberals. In 1964, she disputed against a Communist-backed protest to The Times, demanding freedom of speech. Polish poets like Szymboska, kept the Polish identity alive until the fall of communism in 1989.

Under martial law in the 1980’s, Szymborska published poetry underground with the pseudonym “Stanczykowna” because of the hostile communist environment. In 1996, the relatively unfamiliar Szymborska won the Noble Prize for Literature. Szymborska was shocked as was everyone else in Poland because of her universal themes rather than close-minded political subjects that have encompasses poetry in Eastern Europe since World War II. Szymborska is a private woman. She despises crowds and public appearances, and refuses to give readings of her poems (Murphy). Her main contact with the outside world was through a longtime newspaper column, "Non-Compulsory Reading." She made her first speech when she was awarded the Noble Prize in 1996.

There are no literary considerations in regard to Szymborska’s location at the time of publication of the two poems. This is what makes her so different from other Polish poets at the time. The Poles were all writing about the Holocaust or communism but Szymborska seemed to finally escape the restrains of the communist party. She set herself apart as a poet. In "Conversation with a Stone" she historically touches on the concept of “the other” which designates how a dominant, imperialist culture views the other cultures in the world. Dominant cultures sometimes see others are exotic and inferior because the latter cannot understand the former. She is quite aware of totalitarian ideologies so she submits that her knowledge is never fixed rather, it must be constantly questioned and revised.

"Among The Multitudes"

I am who I am.

A coincidence no less unthinkable

than any other.

I could have different

ancestors, after all,

I could have fluttered

from another nest or

crawled bescaled from under another tree.

Nature’s wardrobe holds

a fair supply of costumes:

spider, seagull, field mouse.

Each fits perfectly

right offand is dutifully worn

into shreds.

I didn’t get a choice either,

but I can’t complain.

I could have been

someone much less separate.

Someone from an anthill, shoal, or buzzing swarm,

an inch of landscape tousled by the wind.

Someone much less fortunate,

bred for my furor Christmas dinner,

something swimming under a square of glass.

A tree rooted to the ground

as the fire draws near.

A grass blade trampled by a stampede

of incomprehensible events.

A shady type whose darkness

dazzled some.

What if I’d prompted only fear,

loathing,

or pity?

If I’d been born

in the wrong tribe,

with all roads closed before me?

Fate has been kind

to me thus far.

I might never have been given

the memory of happy moments.

My yen for comparison

might have been taken away.

I might have been myself minus amazement,

that is,

someone completely different.

"Conversation with a Stone"

I knock at the stone's front door

"It's only me, let me come in.

I want to enter your insides,

have a look around,

breathe my fill of you."

"Go away," says the stone.

"I'm shut tight.

Even if you break me to pieces,

we'll all still be closed.

You can grind us to sand,

we still won't let you in."

I knock at the stone's front door.

-"It's only me, let me come in.

I've come out of pure curiosity.

Only life can quench it.

I mean to stroll through your palace,

then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.

I don't have much time.

My mortality should touch you."

"I'm made of stone," says the stone.

"And must therefore keep a straight face.

Go away.

I don't have the muscles to laugh."

I knock at the stone's front door.

-"It's only me, let me come in.

I hear you have great empty halls inside you,

unseen, their beauty in vain,

soundless, not echoing anyone's steps.

Admit you don't know them well yourself.

"Great and empty, true enough," says the stone,

"but there isn't any room.

Beautiful, perhaps, but not to the taste

of your poor senses.

You may get to know me but you'll never know me through.

My whole surface is turned toward you,

all my insides turned away."

I knock at the stone's front door.

-"It's only me, let me come in.

I don't seek refuge for eternity.

I'm not unhappy.

I'm not homeless.

My world is worth returning to.

I'll enter and exit empty-handed.

And my proof I was there

will be only words,

which no one will believe."

"You shall not enter," says the stone.

"You lack the sense of taking part.

No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.

Even sight heightened to become all-seeing

will do you no good without a sense of taking part.

You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,

only its seed, imagination."

I knock at the stone's front door.

"It's only me, let me come in.

I haven't got two thousand centuries,

so let me come under your roof."

"If you don't believe me," says the stone,

"just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same.

Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said.

And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.

I am bursting from laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter,

although I don't know how to laugh."

I knock at the stone's front door.

"It's only me, let me come in.

"I don't have a door," says the stone.

Works Cited

Biele, Joelle. "Here and There: Wislawa Szymborska and the Grand Narrative." The Kenyon Review 35.1 (2013): 168+. Literature Resource Center. Print.

Blum, Lawrence. "The Poles, the Jews and the Holocaust: Reflections on an AME Trip to Auschwitz." Journal of Moral Education 33.2 (2004): 131-48. Print.

Dean Murphy, "Creating Poetry Amid Political Chaos," Los Angeles Times , October 13, 1996; "Rebeldia del Nobel: Wislawa Szymborska," Magazine (Barcelona), March 13, 2007,

Gajer, Ewa. "Polish Poet Wislawa Szymborska." Hecate.1 (1997): 140+. Print.

Szymborska, Wislawa, Clark, Phillip. "Wisława Szymborska’s Poems New And Collected." Musings on Life & Literature. Phillip H Clark, 31 May 2013. Web.

---.Vuyelwa Carlin, and Sylwester Cygan. "Conversation with a Stone." The Kenyon Review 23.2, Cultures of Creativity: The Centennial Celebration of the Nobel Prizes (2001): 90-3. Print.