Wisława Szymborska
1923 – 2012 · Poland
Known for: Polish poet of ironic precision, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996
“She wrote few poems, and not one word too many.”
Biography
Wisława Szymborska was born on 2 July 1923 in Prowent, an estate hamlet now part of Kórnik in western Poland, the second daughter of Wincenty Szymborski, steward to Count Władysław Zamoyski, and of Anna Rottermund. The family moved to Toruń and then, in 1931, to Kraków, the city she lived in for the rest of her life. When the war closed the schools she studied in underground classes, and from 1943 she worked for the railway, a job that kept her from being deported to Germany as forced labour. She was drawing illustrations for an English textbook when she began to write seriously. In March 1945 the Kraków daily Dziennik Polski printed her first poem, Szukam słowa, and that autumn she enrolled at the Jagiellonian University, first in Polish literature and then in sociology, leaving in 1948 without a degree because she could not afford to stay.
Her early work followed the official line of the new state: her first collection appeared in 1952 with poems in praise of Lenin and of the young builders of Nowa Huta, and she belonged to the ruling party until 1966. She later disowned those poems and would not have them reprinted. What replaced them was a poetry of exact and patient doubt, written from unlikely angles, a cat in an empty flat, a grain of sand, a photograph from a war, in a plain vocabulary that turns on a single ironic word. From 1953 to 1981 she was on the staff of the review Życie Literackie, where from 1968 she wrote a column of notes on whatever book had come her way. In the 1980s she published in the underground journal Arka under the name Stańczykówna and in the Paris émigré monthly Kultura, and she translated French Baroque poetry into Polish.
The Nobel Prize in Literature came in 1996, cited for a poetry that lets historical and biological reality show through fragments of the human, and it brought a reserved woman a fame she had not sought. She kept her habits: few public appearances, a small circle, a body of work amounting to fewer than 350 poems, which she explained by saying that she owned a wastepaper basket. Dwukropek, the last collection published in her lifetime, appeared in 2006 and was voted book of the year by readers of Gazeta Wyborcza. She died at home in Kraków on 1 February 2012 of lung cancer, aged 88, leaving unfinished poems on her desk that were published later that year. A literary prize in her name was founded in 2013.