SOURCE: "Polish Poet, Observer of Daily Life, Wins Nobel," in The New York Times, October 4, 1996, p. C5.

Wislawa Szymborska, a self-effacing 73-year-old Polish poet who collects trashy postcards because she says trash has no pretensions, won the Nobel Prize for Literature today.

This year's prize is the biggest ever, $1.12 million The announcement by the Swedish Academy surprised some in the literary world who had expected the 1996 award to go to a novelist because last year's winner was the Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

Ms. Szymborska, whose name is pronounced vees-WAH-wah sheem-BOR-ska, is little known outside Poland, where she is revered as a distinguished poet from the intellectual center of Cracow. She stresses the quirks and unexpected nature of daily life and of personal relations in poetry that spans five decades. Her early work, which she has since renounced, embraced the Socialist Realism of the Stalinist era.

In its award citation the Swedish Academy noted that Ms. Szymborska has been described as "the Mozart of poetry, not without justice in view of her wealth of inspiration and the veritable ease with which her words seem to fall into place."

Word of the prize reached Ms. Szymborska in the southern mountain town of Zakopane, where she was staying at a writers' retreat. Staff members there said she was having lunch and could not be disturbed.

But after a flurry of congratulatory phone calls, including one from Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish-born poet who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, Ms. Szymborska, a diminutive woman with slightly graying hair, a cigarette always between her fingers, got up the gumption for a news conference.

"I don't think much of myself, but I'm afraid that saying that will be taken as trying to charm the audience," she said. But she added, "The poet as a person is in a way self-conceited: she has to believe in herself and hope she has something to say."

The citation quoted one of her poems, "Nothing Twice," from 1980, the year before martial law was declared in a crackdown on the democracy movement in Communist Poland.

The final stanza reads in the English translation:

      With smiles and kisses we prefer
      to seek accord beneath our star,
      although we're different (we concur)
      just as two drops of water are

In a telephone interview from Zakopane, Ms. Szymborska said her work was personal rather than political.

"Of course, life crosses politics," she said, "but my poems are strictly not political. They are more about people and life."

An ebullient Mr. Milosz said in an interview from his home in Berkeley, Calif., that Ms. Szymborska's award represented a "triumph for Polish poetry in the 20th century" and added, "Two Nobel poet laureates from a given country is quite good"

Ms. Szymborska's first poem was published in a Cracow newspaper in 1945 Her early work dealt with Western imperialism and depicted the suffering of the proletariat under capitalism.

But in 1954 in a collection, Questions Put to Myself, there were glimmers of the sparse style that characterizes her later work. By 1957 she was disillusioned enough to draw a parallel between Stalin, who died in 1953, and an Abominable Snowman in a collection titled Calling Out to Yeti.

The literary critic Edward Hirsch noted in The New York Review of Books earlier this year that Ms. Szymborska had concluded that believing in Communism was like believing in the Abominable Snowman: neither offered human warmth or artistic comfort.

Mr. Milosz said that Ms. Szymborska passed through a long evolution as a poet. "I didn't like her early work," he said. "She went through a Stalinist phase. But every volume is better." Her later work was unusual for the 20th century, he said. "As a person and in her poetry, she is very attenuated. It is just a whisper."

One of Ms. Szymborska's handful of close friends, Jan Pieszczachowicz, the president of the Cracow branch of the Polish Writers' Union described her as "delicate" and "sensitive," with "a wonderful sense of humor."

"In her poems there is a certain sadness, and nostalgia, a general fear of civilization and the crisis of values," Mr. Pieszczachowicz said. "But contrary to other poets, Szymborska says that one can still live nobly in her poems, she talks about ordinary everyday things, which, according to the poet, live their own separate lives. In her poetry there is no cheap sentimentalism."

Ms. Szymborska, who also won the Polish PEN club's poetry award this week, lives in a modest two-room apartment in the center of Cracow, where a cherished tall poplar grazes the balcony

She avoids literary gatherings and conferences and traipses around in old coats and sweaters, Mr. Pieszczachowicz said. As much as she disdains crowds, she likes to surround herself with a few friends "She likes herring, beans Breton style and a glass of vodka," he said.

In a poem, "Kiczowaty" ("Kitschy"), dedicated to his daughter, Mr. Pieszczachowicz said, Ms. Szymborska referred to the intrinsic value of the postcards she collects, explaining that "trash does not pretend to be anything better than it is."

Born in 1923 in Kurnik, a small town near the western city of Poznan, Ms. Szymborska moved with her parents to Cracow at the age of 8. She attended Jagiellonian University there.

Mr. Pleszczachowicz said Ms. Szymborska was married twice. Her first husband was a poet, Adam Wlodek, whom she divorced. Her second husband, Kornel Filipowicz, was a writer with whom she shared a love of fishing. Mr. Filipowicz's death in the early 1990's inspired a collection of poems that appeared in 1993, The End and the Beginning.

Beata Chmiel, the editor of Ex Libris, a leading Polish literary magazine, said that collection included "Cat in the Empty Apartment," which she described as "the best poem I have read about death." Ms. Chmiel translated the first lines thus:

      To die
      This we cannot do to a cat
      What can a cat do in the empty apartment.

"Her poetry is something very personal," Ms. Chmiel said, "and this is the victory of the Nobel Prize committee. They have given the prize to an unknown poet of Poland, but this poet can be very close to people all over the world: men, women, black and white."

In an interview with Ms. Chmiel in Ex Libris in 1994, Ms. Szymborska scoffed at the idea that there should be anything like "womanly" poetry.

"I think that dividing literature or poetry into women's and men's poetry is starting to sound absurd," she said. "Perhaps there was a time when a woman's world did exist, separated from certain issues and problems, but at present there are no things that would not concern women and men at the same time. We do not live in the boudoir anymore."

Ms. Szymborska is the fifth Polish-born writer to win the Nobel literature prize. The novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz won in 1905 for his book Quo Vadis, and Wladyslaw Reymont won in 1924 for his rendition of rural life, The Peasants. Isaac Bashevis Singer, who wrote about Polish-Jewish life from his perch in New York City, was awarded the prize in 1978, and Mr. Milosz, who is based at the University of California, Berkeley but keeps an apartment in Cracow, won in 1980.

The elusive Ms. Szymborska confessed that the prize would bring some unwelcome changes. "I have no defense mechanism," she told Mr. Milosz when he called from California. "I'm a private person. The most difficult thing will be to write a speech. I will be writing it for a month. I don't know what I will be talking about, but I will talk about you"

By the end of the day, Ms. Szymborska said she had had enough, and was retreating to a place in Poland even more remote than Zakopane, where nobody, and certainly not reporters, could find her.