The bomb in the bar will explode at thirteen twenty.
Now it's just thirteen sixteen.
There's still time for some to go in,
and some to come out.
The terrorist has already crossed the street.
The distance keeps him out of danger,
and what a view -- just like the movies:
A woman in a yellow jacket, she's going in.
A man in dark glasses, he's coming out.
Teen-agers in jeans, they're talking.
Thirteen seventeen and four seconds.
The short one, he's lucky, he's getting on a scooter,
but the tall one, he's going in.
Thirteen seventeen and forty seconds.
That girl, she's walking along with a green ribbon in her hair.
But then a bus suddenly pulls in front of her.
Thirteen eighteen.
The girl's gone.
Was she that dumb, did she go in or not,
we'll see when they carry them out.
Thirteen nineteen.
Somehow no one's going in.
Another guy, fat, bald, is leaving, though.
Wait a second, looks like he's looking for something in his pockets and
at thirteen twenty minus ten seconds
he goes back in for his crummy gloves.
Thirteen twenty exactly.
This waiting, it's taking forever.
Any second now.
No, not yet.
Yes, now.
The bomb, it explodes.
He came home. Said nothing.
It was clear, though, that something had gone wrong.
He lay down fully dressed.
Pulled the blanket over his head.
Tucked up his knees.
He's nearly forty, but not at the moment.
He exists just as he did inside his mother's womb,
clad in seven walls of skin, in sheltered darkness.
Tomorrow he'll give a lecture
on homeostasis in metagalactic cosmonautics.
For now, though, he has curled up and gone to sleep.
From September 1935 until the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Szymborska attended Gimnazjum Siostr Urszulanek (Academy of the Sisters of the Ursuline Order), a prestigious parochial high school for girls in Krakow. When the Gimnazjum was shut down during the Nazi German occupation of the city, she attended underground classes, passing her final exams in the spring of 1941. During the war, she began to write short stories, of which she has remained critical. After the war Szymborska studied first Polish philology and then sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow but never completed a degree.
In 1948 Szymborska assembled a collection of her poetry, which was to be titled simply Poezje (Poems), but the collection never found a publisher; its contents were deemed too “bourgeois” and “pessimistic,” clashing with the socialist realist aesthetic that was beginning to take hold. Socialist realism was a movement promoted by the government of the Soviet Union as a way to ensure that all art contributed positively to society; to this end, the movement emphasized optimism and pride in communist ideals and cultural triumphs. The movement also worked against those artists who sought to question those in power or the current state of society. One of Szymborska's poems, “Sunday at School,” even sparked a campaign against her, in which high school students were prodded to write letters of protest. She was accused of writing poetry that was inaccessible to the masses and too preoccupied with the horrors of war. A two-year poetic silence followed.
Szymborska worked as an assistant editor in publishing houses until 1953, when she became the editor of the poetry section of the Krakow-based weekly Zycie Liter-ackie (Literary Life), a position she held until 1968. She remained on the board as a regular contributor until 1976.
With the emergence of the Solidarity movement in 1980, the Society and similar initiatives found themselves briefly freed from earlier encumbrances. Szymborska began her affiliation with the newly formed Krakow journal Pismo (Writing), the editorial board of which included many of her closest friends, among them fiction writer and poet Kornel Filipowicz, her longtime companion. Following the declaration of martial law on December 13, 1981, the composition of the editorial board of Pismo shrank as the government imposed demands on it, and Szymborska began to distance herself. Similarly, Szymborska terminated her thirty-year association with Zycie Literackie during this period. Under martial law, she chose to publish underground and in the émigré press under the pen name Stanczykowna, a feminized derivation of the name of a sixteenth-century court jester noted for his forthrightness.
Szymborska won her most prestigious award, the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1996. Despite, or perhaps due to, giving the shortest acceptance speech in literary Nobel history, she went from being an intensely private person to a public figure, vigorously pursued by the media. Since then, however, Szymborska has continued to be known for her quiet way of life and unwillingness to embrace the status of a celebrity. She shuns public gatherings, rarely travels abroad, hates being photographed or interviewed, and, except for her human rights and democratic reform activities, refuses to be involved in partisan politics. She is nevertheless quite involved in the cultural landscape of Krakow and maintains lively contacts with a small circle of friends. Her dislike of being in the limelight is by no means a sign of antisocial inclinations. Rather, it stems from her recognition that the larger part of a writers' public functioning is an empty ritual and an unnecessary waste of their inner resources.
As a Polish poet gaining international prominence during the most frigid years of the cold war, she sought to write poems about people, about a common and simple humanity. This very emphasis on the human, however, has been identified as a part of an “apolitical politics” in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other Eastern bloc countries. That is, in totalitarian political systems, where even the most mundane activities and everyday life itself are “for the Party,” an insistence on humanness and connection without politics was itself a political statement.
Sounds, Feeings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems Although still not widely read outside her native Poland, Szymborska received critical acclaim for the first collection of her work to appear in English translation, Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems. “Of the poetic voices to come out of Poland after 1945, Wislawa Szymborska's is probably the most elusive as well as the most distinctive,” writes Jaroslaw Anders in the New York Review of Books. Anders comments further: “Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts contains poems from [Szymborska's] five books written since 1957, comprising more or less half of what the poet herself considers her canon. Its publication is of interest not only because of Szymborska's importance as a poet, but also because her work demonstrates that the diversity of poetic modes in Poland is much greater than is usually perceived.” Alice-Catherine Carls, in a review of Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts in Library Journal, calls the work “one of those rare books which put one in a state of ‘grace.”’ Robert Hudzik, also in Library Journal, claims: “This volume reveals a poet of startling originality and deep sympathy.”
View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems The 1995 collection View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems was also praised by the critics, who lauded Szymborska's directness and distinctive voice. For the Washington Post Book World, Stephen Dobyns praises both the humor of Szymborska's work and the imaginative integrity of this translation by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. Celebrated proponent of the idea of “cultural literacy” Edward Hirsch agrees, arguing in the New York Review of Books that the volume reveals “the full force of [Szymborska's] fierce and unexpected wit.” Louis McKee, in a Library Journal review, also praises the “wonderfully wicked” wit of Szymborska. Dobyns concludes his review by noting, “The poems are surprising, funny and deeply moving. Szymborska is a world-class poet, and this book will go far to make her known in the United States.”
German forces occupied Krakow in the 1940s during World War II, but Szymborska's mother refused to leave the city. Since the city's Polish residents were barred from the public schools, Szymborska continued her studies at an underground school and also joined an underground theater, where she worked as a prompter. In 1943, she worked for a railroad company in order to avoid being transferred to a labor camp in Germany. After the war ended, in 1945 she enrolled at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, where she studied Polish literature and sociology. During this time, she married Adam Wlodek and the couple lived in a tenement house at 22 Krupnicza Street that became a hub for writers. She left the university in 1948 without graduating. Szymborska and Wlodek divorced in 1954.
Szymborska joined the staff of the magazine Zycie literackie (Literary Life) in 1953. A second poetry collection, advancing similar themes as the first, Pytania zadawane sobie (Questions Put to Myself), was published in 1954. Szymborska's growing discontent with Communism was reflected in her next collection, Wolanie do Yeti (Calling Out to Yeti), published in 1957. In this work she advances deep–seated humanitarian concerns and, displaying what was to become a trademark blend of tragedy and humor, compares Soviet Communist leader Joseph Stalin to the Abominable Snowman. Sol (Salt) was published in 1962 and is largely regarded as Szymborska's first mature work. "Since then, Szymborska's popularity and critical acclaim have grown with every volume," remarked Joanna Trzeciak in Publisher's Weekly. The collection established Szymborska as a poet interested less in political issues as in poignant assessments of broad human emotions and acute observations of everyday objects and occurrences. The lack of political content in her later work set her apart from other well–known Polish writers such as Zbiegnew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz. Yet to examine one's inner life was an inherently political act in post–war Poland, argued then–United States Poet Laureate Robert Hass on PBS' Newshour. "It's one of the reasons that Poland has produced so many interesting poets I think—not that you'd wish this way of producing interesting poets on anybody—is that from 1939 to the early 1980s it was a country in which it was very hard to say the truth in public. And it produced an ironic, thoughtful poetry, fierce about the independence of everybody's private life, and of the privacy of thoughts. And a lot of the Polish poets made a music out of that—seems like a strong human response to the terrors of the 20th century."
Szymborska continued to publish volumes of poetry through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and became one of the best–known poets in Poland. Her work is taught regularly in the nation's schools and she received several local and national prizes. She remained politically committed as well, even while keeping such concerns separate from her work. In the 1980s, she joined Poland's growing democratic Solidarity movement and resigned from her position at Zycie literackie after her editor expressed opposition to the movement. She also published under the pen name Stanczykowna in the Paris–based exile journal Kultura paryska and the Polish underground magazine Arka. Szymborska told the Los Angeles Times in 1996 that her political life had no bearing on her poetics. "Beginning in 1954–55, I already started thinking differently—the same way I think now," she said. "Since then, I haven't changed the way I look at the world. After all those mistakes, after all that I lived through in the early '50s, my thinking was altered for good. My life as a citizen of this country has changed dramatically since Solidarity, but my life as a poet has not."
Sales of View with a Grain of Sand escalated immensely after Szymborska was announced the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. The announcement came as a surprise to many, as Szymborska was still little–known outside Poland and her work, unlike that of many Nobel Laureates before her, eschewed political themes. "In Wislawa Szymborska, the Swedish Academy wants to honor a representative—and a representative of unusual and unyielding purity and strength—of a poetic outlook. Of poetry as a response to life, a way of life, of the word–work as thought and responsibility," Birgitta Trotzig stated in her presentation speech, published on the Nobel Prize website. The publicity surrounding the award thrust the fiercely private Szymborska begrudgingly into the spotlight. "I am very happy, I am honored, but at the same time stunned and a little bit frightened with what awaits me," Szymborska told Poland's Radio Zet following the award, as quoted in the Houston Chronicle. "I'm afraid I will not have a quiet life for some time now, and this is what I prize most."
In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Szymborska stressed the importance of the poet approaching the world with a sense of naiveté. "[I]nspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists," she said. "There is, there has been, there 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—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 that they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous 'I don't know.' "
Szymborska told The Washington Post in 1998 that she aimed for a sense of duality in her work, relating the story of two back–to–back poetry readings. "After the first reading, someone said, 'Why are your poems so sad? We need some consolation, some humor in life,' And at the other reading, with the same poems, someone said, 'Why are your poems so happy and funny, when life is so sad?' I concluded that this is what I was aiming at—poems that are ambiguous, that are both happy and sad, like a coin with two sides."
Szymborska has continued to write and publish into the new millennium. In addition to several Polish–language collections, Harcourt Brace published the English–language volumes Poems, New and Collected, 1957–1997, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clair Cavanagh, in 1998, and a collection of book reviews, Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces, in 2002.
Since 1957, when she published her third collection, Wołanie do Yeti ("Calling Out to Yeti"), the number of volumes she published rose to about 20 by the end of the twentieth century. From 1953 to 1981 she worked for the important weekly Zycie Literackie (Literary Life), where she was poetry editor and wrote a book review column, the only other literary form she has practiced. These reviews have been collected and published in four separate volumes. She has also translated French poetry, mainly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, into Polish.
Szymborska has been as reticent to discuss her biography as to discuss theoretical aspects of her poetry. In one poem she asks what poetry is and replies firmly, "I don't know and I don't know and I hold on to that/like to a life raft." Her work is characterized by humility, a wry and frequently ironic sense of humor, and a profound sense of the joy and tragedy inherent in individual human existence and in the collective history of the species. Commentators generally agree with her that there is no need to know anything of her life to appreciate or understand her poetry. This is one of the few theoretical questions on which her position is unambiguously known, and while it may not apply equally well to all poets, it does seem to hold true for her work. Each of her poems successfully creates its own world, and there is little to connect them beyond some stylistic and methodological consistency. This makes it difficult to locate her views of the Holocaust within her opus, although some patterns do emerge. Three poems that bear directly on the Holocaust are "Hunger Camp near Jaslo," "Still" ("Jeszcze"), and "Hitler's First Photograph." Each of them manifests key elements of her poetic technique and fixes the reader's attention on the subject matter with a sense of urgency and newness, despite the familiarity of the thematic material. In "Hunger Camp near Jaslo," besides identifying the important role to be played by poets in addressing such atrocities, she tries to remove the numbing effect of large numbers by forcing our attention onto the importance of each individual and the tactile and personal elements of their existence. She has written a number of poems about numbers, including "Pi" and "A Large Number," where she says, "Four billion people on this earth,/but my imagination is still the same./It's bad with large numbers./It's still taken by particularity."
In "Still" she employs an extended metonymy, another frequently encountered technique in her work. She describes prisoners in a train headed for a concentration camp as if they were names only. The obvious Jewishness of these names marks them and sets them apart from their Slavic neighbors, making it easier for bystanders to ignore their situation. She describes with remarkable force the "crash of silence on silence." This poem, from the mid-1950s, carries a strong charge of shared complicity disguised as passivity: "and will they ever get out,/don't ask, I won't say, I don't know." "Hitler's First Photograph" is one of the most chilling poetic inspections of the psychopathological phenomena associated with its namesake and Nazism ever written. By describing Hitler in his first year of life from the perspective of his parents (any parents), she jolts us out of our complacency around the question of how this could have happened: "And who's this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?/That's tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers' little boy!" She prods us to question whether the signs were there and, if they were not, to ask what gives rise to such abominations and to recognize the need to be vigilant.
In these poems Szymborska explores aspects of the Holocaust in the same way as she approaches the minutiae of daily life, probing common details with phenomenological thoroughness to force us to reintegrate our experience of them with greatly increased and intensified awareness of their complexity, richness, and power.