When the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska won the Nobel Prize for Literature in late 1996, [Czeslaw] Milosz was one of the first to congratulate her, telephoning from California. Szymborska's work was not well known in the West, but soon after the announcement of the prize, several translations of her poetry were published to fill the gap. Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Magnus Krynski and Robert Maguire, was put out in a new paperback edition by Princeton University Press, and these are the most literal, faithful renderings of her work. They are a good place for a reader to make the acquaintance of this remarkable poet.

The critic invariably feels clumsy when describing Szymborska's work. She is a highly accomplished craftsman but always covers her tracks—she leaves almost no signs of labor or awkwardness, approximate solutions, or grasping for meaning. She ends the poem “Under a Certain Little Star”:

Take it not amiss, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
and later try hard to make them seem light.

(147)

Szymborska approaches the concept of technique from a different angle in her poem “The Acrobat.” The poem is ostensibly about an acrobat in a circus and the acrobat's ability to make everything seem easy. The rhythms mimic the continuity of the acrobat's movements:

                                                                      Do you see
how he crouches to spring into flight, do you know
how he plots from head to foot
against such as he; do you know, do you see
how shrewdly he threads himself through his former shape and
to grasp in hand the swaying world
how he pulls from himself the new born arms—
beautiful above all else at just this
at just this—now it's gone—moment.

(105)

It is possible to speak of Szymborska as a metaphysical poet because she often deals with concepts and broader, universal meanings in her poems. But she transforms these at each step, with grace and sleight of hand, into the textures of everyday life, and the reader is often unaware of the intellectual content of the poem—that is, until the last possible moment, when the poem has reached its conclusion. In their introduction, Krynski and Maguire write that Szymborska's work is serious and lighthearted in equal measure; we would stress, however, that these two always overlap. The serious and lighthearted meanings occur simultaneously, and the overlap is complete.

For Szymborska, technique is a vehicle for meaning; she rarely calls attention to it for its own sake. She states clearly in one of her finest poems, “The Joy of Writing,” that writing is nothing less than a means to preserve life. The poem begins with an extended metaphor: as she writes, with a pen on white paper, the pen forms the letters that make up words, and a concrete scene takes shape. Gradually, a doe comes into being:

Poised on four fragile legs borrowed from truth
she pricks up her ears under my fingers.
Stillness—this word also rustles across the paper
and parts
the branches brought forth by the word “forest.”
Above the blank page, lurking, set to spring
are letters that may compose themselves all wrong,
besieging sentences
from which there is no rescue.

(59)

The act of writing gives rise not just to life, but to endangered life. She imagines hunters in her forest scene. But there is much more; the diversity and life of the setting she has imagined has no end. “The twinkling of an eye will last as long as I wish, / will consent to be divided into small eternities / full of bullets stopped in flight.” But if she commands it, nothing will happen at all—such is the power of verbal representation and of writing. The period or punctuation marks she might put on the paper are as lethal as any bullets (the metaphor is deft). It is not a matter of writing badly or writing well, but something more fundamental still: the imperative to create, and preserve, life by the act of writing. The poem ends by posing three questions, and succinctly answering them:

Is there then such a world
whose fate is my sole and absolute dominion?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence perpetuated at my command?
The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
The revenge of a mortal hand.

The themes Szymborska chooses to explore and develop are deceptively simple. They are based on the basic experiences shared by everyone without exception, and the things that surround us every minute of the day. Having chosen a theme, however, she deepens it in an unexpected way until it achieves a measure of universality. In an early poem from the volume Salt (1962), she writes about a museum, observing that it contains only inanimate objects. We all know that this is true—at first glance it might not seem to be a promising topic for a poem. She writes:

There are plates but no appetite.
Wedding rings but no reciprocation
for at least three hundred years.
There is a fan—where are the rosy cheeks?
There are swords—where is the anger?

(“Museum,” 37)

The initial ordinary observation is deepened, and gradually the poem's real theme is isolated, carried from each object that she describes to the next: this is the living context or living function that surrounds every object in a “museum” and defines it in its most real sense. But these are precisely what is absent in a museum; Szymborska has effectively turned the concept of the museum on its head.

Szymborska develops a similar procedure with the notion of possession (“Travel Elegy”). She writes that she owns … nothing. Everything she has done and experienced in the past—every object seen, touched, or encountered—has become fragmentary, smaller in time, and distorted in unexpected ways, turning into grotesque phantasms. The concept of a “tranquilizer” is subjected to a similar procedure in the poem “Advertisement”: through a series of everyday analogies it is deepened, a new theme is isolated, and in a surprising, ironic twist at the poem's end becomes the old-fashioned Christian devil. And so it is with the notion of a census (“Census”): it becomes a springboard for reflections on the difficulty of any act of selection and preservation among alternatives. Our most rudimentary notions are rethought, shown in an entirely new light, and redefined.

A large number of Szymborska's poems are about ostensibly scientific topics such as evolution or zoology, yet the reader probably does not think of these poems as “scientific.” Szymborska relates her subjects to familiar observations from ordinary human life in such a manner that the reader feels an immediate shock of recognition with each line. For example, in her poem on the sea cucumber (“Autonomy”) she is able to write: “We know how to divide ourselves, how true, we too” (137)—and proceeds to develop a persuasive analogy between sea cucumbers and human beings. Her procedure could be described as a kind of translation: she firmly grasps a metaphysical insight or universal and translates it into the most common textures of everyday life.

Many of the beginnings of Szymborska's poems appear like lists, yet the lists are deceptive, taking the reader far—very far—from their point of departure. In addition—and this is a procedure increasingly used in her recent poems—they often take the reader in the opposite direction from what is expected. A Szymborska poem almost always produces an effect of surprise.

If someone were to ask whether Szymborska is a poet of the intellect or of life we would probably answer “life,” but would this be the correct answer? She is a poet of powerful intellectual structures, and just as much a metaphysician as, for example, Wallace Stevens. One of the fascinations of Szymborska's poems is that they are powerfully conceptual and yet cling so closely to the familiar textures of life that any distinction between “intellect” or “life” becomes completely blurred. The two operate simultaneously. Stevens once wrote that he chose a language “above sea level”; Szymborska chooses a very different language that seems to be on the level of the ground, yet her breadth and range are vast.

The translations in Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts end with a generous selection from Szymborska's 1976 volume, A Great Number. Since then, Szymborska's poetry has become increasingly accomplished; Joseph Brodsky (who knew Polish) remarked around 1990 that Szymborska's work just seems to get better and better. To find English translations of Szymborska's poems written in the last decade, the reader should turn to the translations by Stanislaw Baranczak and Claire Cavanaugh in their volume View with a Grain of Sand (Harcourt Brace, 1995).

At present Szymborska is writing at the top of her form. The same can be said for the other Nobel Prize winner, Czeslaw Milosz. It is a pleasure to be alive at the same time as these two excellent poets and contemporaries, and to be able to follow their new work.