[In the following excerpt, Kryński and Maguire acknowledge Szymborska's popularity in Poland and her significance to world literature despite being relatively unknown outside her homeland.]

Wisława Szymborska is a contemporary of such important Polish poets as Tadeusz Różewicz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Miron Białoszewski. She was born in 1923 in Kórnik (the Poznań region), but moved to Cracow at the age of eight and has lived there to this day. Her first published poem dates from 1945. As with most Polish writers who made their debuts after World War II, much of her early work was infused with the ideology of socialist realism as then forcefully propagated by the Communist Party. These poems were collected in the volumes Dlatego żyjemy (That's What We Live For, Warsaw, Czytelnik, 1952), and Pytania zadawane sobie (Questions Put to Myself, Cracow, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1954). In retrospect, the best that can be said about them is that they are not so strident in tone as similar exercises produced at the time, and that they do contain a few personal lyrics. It was in 1957, with the volume Wołanie do Yeti (Calling Out to Yeti, Cracow, Wydawnictwo Literackie), that Szymborska abandoned overtly political themes, found her true voice, and began to build the enormous reputation she enjoys in Poland today.

A painstaking craftsman, she has published a volume of twenty-five to thirty-five poems every five years or so since 1957. They are: Sól (Salt, Warsaw, PIW, 1962); Sto pociech (A Million Laughs, Warsaw, PIW, 1967); Wszelki wypadek (There But for the Grace, Warsaw, Czytelnik, 1972); Wielka liczba (A Great Number, Warsaw, Czytelnik, 1976).¹ Though slim, each volume has been hailed as a major event in Polish literature. The most recent of them, Wielka liczba, appeared in a printing of 10,000 copies and was sold out within a week. Szymborska is that rare phenomenon which has not been seen in Poland since the days of “Skamander”: a serious poet who enjoys a large audience. Perhaps even rarer, she scarcely ever gets a bad review. All the important critics of poetry in Poland—Artur Sandauer, Ryszard Matuszewski, Jerzy Kwiatkowski—are consistently enthusiastic about her work. Her readers are attracted by the unusually wide range of themes; by her skill at blending the traditional and the avant-garde; by the innovative uses of lexicon and syntax; by the balance struck between skepticism and love in her view of the human condition; by the combination of high seriousness, gentle humor, and indulgent irony. Better than any other contemporary Polish poet, her work exemplifies the ideal of poetry put forth by Pushkin in Eugene Onegin: “ishchu soiuza / Volshebnykh zvukov, chuvstv i dum” (I seek the union / Of magic sounds, feelings, and thoughts).

As is true of all great poets, Szymborska's importance transcends national boundaries. Yet she is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. Only fifteen poems have so far been translated, by five different hands. Some have been done more than once; some are scattered in small journals that are hard to come by. Excellent though some of these translations may be, they do, by and large, take poems which, in the language of the theater, “play themselves,” that is, poems which make an immediate appeal to the emotions, whether through the themes of love or wartime atrocities. Altogether they convey only a faint impression of Szymborska's scope, versatility, and power. The situation is roughly the same in other European languages. So far there has been only one translator who has seen fit to devote an entire volume to Szymborska's work. That is Karl Dedecius, the talented and dedicated West German specialist in Polish literature, who has published a selection of forty-one poems: Salz. Gedichte (Frankfurt a/M, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973).

Note

1. There are also three volumes which contain previously published poems: Wiersze wybrane (Selected Poems, Warsaw, PIW, 1964); Poezje wybrane (Selected Poetry, Warsaw, LSW, 1967); Poezje (Poetry, Warsaw, PIW, 1970); and Wybór wierszy (A Selection of Poems, Warsaw, PIW, 1973). Poezje also has ten previously unpublished poems included in a section entitled “Z nowych wierszy”; four are translated in the group offered here, and are indicated accordingly. Szymborska has written very little prose. The one published instance is a collection of reviews entitled Lektury nadobowiązkowe (Recommended Reading, Cracow, Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1972): these are not only brilliant pieces in their own right, but to a perceptive reader, they may well shed new light on many of the themes that are explored in the poetry.