[Below, Baranczak discusses Szymborska's poetics, citing the poet's wisdom for realizing "that what attracts people to poetry today is … its art of asking questions."]

"The Greta Garbo of World Poetry," trumpeted a headline in the Italian daily La Repubblica; it has so far been easily the most amusing among the attempts of the news media worldwide to attach some identity tag to this year's Nobel laureate in literature. What makes the comparison genuinely funny is that it's true and untrue at the same time. Those who know Wislawa Szymborska personally will be the first to admit that she indeed has something of the famous Swede's charm and subtlety. Yet her reticence and dislike of being in the spotlight have never turned her into a recluse. Wit, wisdom and warmth are equally important ingredients in the mixture of qualities that makes her so unusual and every poem of hers so unforgettable. We love her poetry because we instinctively feel that its author genuinely (though by no means uncritically) loves us.

I have mentioned reticence, and the 1996 decision of the Stockholm committee represents, among other things, a triumph of quality over quantity. Ms. Szymborska is among the least prolific major poets of our time; there has perhaps been no Nobel Prize-winning poet who has written less verse. Over the past three decades she has published very sparingly in the Polish literary press, and her slim collections, published at seven- to ten-year intervals, recall in their infrequency those of Philip Larkin or Elizabeth Bishop. This has nothing to do with writer's block: rather, she writes deliberately little because she holds the highest standards for herself. Wislawa Szymborska, quite simply, does not write irrelevant poems. She is a poet for whom each and every poem matters.

Born in 1923, she made her debut with a Socialist Realist collection titled That's What We Live For in 1952. (The manuscript was initially considered not ideologically correct enough, and its publication dragged on for years.) Her second collection, Questions Put to Myself, came out in 1954. It is in the semantic hiatus between these two titles that we can catch the first glimpse of the genuine Szymborska, who reached her maturity with her third collection, in 1957, Calling Out to Yeti. The youthful self-confidence of the first book's title gives way to self-doubt; perhaps most significant, the plural "we" is replaced with the singular "myself."

In one of the very few interviews Ms. Szymborska has given in the course of her career, she said that in her early writing she tried to love humankind instead of human beings. One might add that the esthetics of Socialist Realism demanded love for nothing less than humankind while at the same time, ironically, narrowing the multidimensionality of human life down to just one, social, dimension; it is Ms. Szymborska's focus on the individual that allows her to view human reality in all its troublesome complication.

The most extraordinary thing about her achievement is that, in some mysterious and enviable way, the uncompromising profundity of her poems never prevents them from being accessible. Over the past decade her popularity in Poland has reached staggering proportions; some of her recent poems, like the amazing and moving "Cat in an Empty Apartment" (in which the absence of someone who is dead is presented from the perspective of the house pet he left behind), have already acquired the status of cult objects among Polish readers. As a rule, a poet's popular appeal is a commodity purchased in exchange for some concessions, for the poet's renunciation of at least a part of what constitutes the natural complexity of his or her self. In contrast, Ms. Szymborska seems to be endowed with an almost superhuman ability to be complex yet comprehensible, ambitious yet approachable, individualistic yet involved.

If this secret can be explained, it will have to do with Ms. Szymborska's being wise enough to realize that what attracts people to poetry today is not its potential for making statements but rather its art of asking questions. The model of inquiry or self-inquiry makes its presence felt with striking frequency and insistence throughout her entire work. In the concluding part of her poem "The Century's Decline" she uses an apt but surprising adjective to denote the specific quality that marks all the questions she asks:

      "How should we live?" someone asked me in a letter.
      I had meant to ask him
      the same question.
 
      … The most pressing questions
      are naive ones.

The accessibility of Ms. Szymborska's poetry stems from the fact that the pressing questions she keeps asking are, at least at first sight, as naive as those of the man in the street. The brilliance of her poetry lies in pushing the inquiry much farther than the man in the street ever would. Many of her poems start provocatively, with a question, observation or statement that seems downright true, only to surprise us with its unexpected yet logical continuation. What can be more banal than noting that nothing happens twice? And yet the next three lines, by pursuing this thought to its end, offer a startling view of human existence:

      Nothing can ever happen twice.
      In consequence, the sorry fact is
      that we arrive here improvised
      and leave without the chance to practice.

Similarly, the title poem in Ms. Szymborska's latest collection, The End and the Beginning (1993), opens with a statement that sounds so disarmingly trivial that it seems not to contain any revelation at all:

      After every war
      someone has to tidy up.
      Things won't pick
      themselves up, after all.

Yet the naive question implied in this poem concerns no less pressing an issue than the meaning of human history or perhaps the senselessness of it. What makes this poem typically Szymborskian is that its initial naiveté almost imperceptibly moves to another plane. The action of cleaning up the mess turns, by metaphoric equation, into the process of forgetting. Just as you must remove the rubble after the war, you must remove the remembrance of human evil; otherwise, the burden of living would be unbearable. But this means that we never learn from history. Our ability to forget makes us, at the same time, repeatedly commit the same tragic blunders.

The typical lyrical situation on which a Szymborska poem is founded is the confrontation between the directly stated or implied opinion on an issue and the question that raises doubt about its validity. The opinion not only reflects some widely shared belief or is representative of some widespread mind-set but also, as a rule, has a certain doctrinaire ring to it: the philosophy behind it is usually speculative, anti-empirical, prone to hasty generalizations, collectivist, dogmatic and intolerant.

Ms. Szymborska's finest point is that it is the very dogmatism of the opinion that prompts the naiveté of the question. Being dogmatic, the opinion is naturally self-confident and categorical as well, and may end up patching its logical, moral holes with blatant oversimplifications, unjustified generalizations and blindly optimistic (or blindly pessimistic) predictions. Such patches, particularly easy to discern, almost invite the irony of the skeptic. Thus, Ms. Szymborska's notion of the function of the poet: the poet should be a spoil-sport. The poet should be someone who calls any bluff and lays bare any dirty trick in the game played by the earthly and unearthly powers, where the chief gambling strategy is dogmatic generalization and the stakes are the souls of each and every one of us.