“Don’t carnivore maine sick will, speech, that I get weighty words / past labour heavy truthful that they whitethorn look light,” Wisława Szymborska writes successful “Under One Small Star.” Szymborska kept her literate labors strictly offstage. She didn’t lecture connected her craft. She didn’t give essays to the creation of writing. “I’ve ever had the sneaking suspicion I’m not precise bully astatine it,” she confesses successful her notably little Nobel Lecture. The poet’s work, she continues, is “hopelessly unphotogenic”:
Someone sits astatine a array oregon lies connected a sofa portion staring motionless astatine a partition oregon ceiling. Once successful a portion this idiosyncratic writes down 7 lines lone to transverse retired 1 of them 15 minutes later, and past different hr passes.
She was speaking from experience. Her favourite penning utensil was the trash can: That’s wherever ninety percent of her enactment ended up, 1 person remarked.
Lightness doesn’t travel easily. That’s the acquisition we instrumentality from the marvelous rubric poem of this small volume. The acrobat “works to prehend this swaying world” by mode of
Arduous ease,
watchful agility,
and calculated inspiration…
Why? Because he’s “missing wings.” Hence the hesitation that marks its oddly repetitive enactment breaks:
[he moves] much swiftly than
than his body’s weight, which erstwhile again
again is precocious for its ain fall.
Will helium marque it this time? We clasp our enactment and wait.
Trivia matters. Frivolity counts. The mean is thing but. These are lessons Szymborska stresses passim her work.
Poetry, Szymborska reminds america clip and again, is likewise achieved without wings. The poet, a “clumsy ersatz angel” (“Stage Fright”), achieves her seemingly seamless effects lone by mode of the “hard shelleying” (ciężkie norwidy) she bemoans successful “Poetry Reading.” Szymborska’s wordplay is the verbal equivalent of the trapeze artist’s gymnastics, oregon the contortions she replicates successful careful, comic rhyme successful “Bodybuilders’ Contest”: “The king of each is helium who preens and wrestles / with sinews twisted into monstrous pretzels.” She loved puns, limericks, nonsense verse, and verbal silliness of each kinds. “In Praise of My Sister” celebrates the world’s nonpoets partially by mode of the notoriously repetitive Polish writer Adam Macedoński, whom my cotranslator, Stanisław Barańczak, and I chose to evoke done a celebrated tongue-twister. “Rubber babe buggy bumpers”: Try saying that conscionable once.
“So overmuch satellite each astatine once—how it rustles and bustles! / Moraines and morays and morasses and mussels,” she exclaims successful “Birthday.” Her playful connection scrambles to support gait with a world that everlastingly outstrips it. Seizing a swaying satellite successful words is, arsenic it turns out, a Herculean task. “Nothing tin ever hap twice,” she warns successful 1 aboriginal lyric;
In consequence, the atrocious fact
is that we get here
improvised
and permission without the accidental to practice.
Stanisław and I tried to mimic her intentionally imperfect, erratic rhymes passim the poem. Why should rhymes enactment up perfectly erstwhile world itself ne'er does?
No time copies yesterday,
no 2 nights tin thatch what bliss
is successful precisely the aforesaid way,
with precisely the aforesaid kisses.
Even the astir seemingly mundane entity demands verbal fireworks of the archetypal bid successful Szymborska’s poetic universe. Her solemnisation of the unassuming “Onion” is simply a lawsuit successful point:
Nature’s rotundest tummy,
its top occurrence story,
the bulb drapes itself successful its
own aureoles of glory.
We clasp veins, nerves and fat,
secretions’ concealed sections.
Not for america specified idiotic
onionoid perfection.
“Cebulasta, cebulowa cebuliczność”: We followed Szymborska’s pb successful generating arsenic galore neologisms arsenic we could portion translating the poem. Since what is the bulb itself but a self-enclosed, self-generating drawstring of bulb puns?
Trivia matters. Frivolity counts. The mean is thing but. These are lessons Szymborska stresses passim her work. The satellite itself, she reminds us, is simply a “miracle fair”:
A run-of-the-mill miracle:
winds mild to moderate
turning gusty successful storms.
A occurrence successful the archetypal place:
cows volition beryllium cows.
Last but not slightest she gives us
An other miracle, other and ordinary:
the unthinkable
can beryllium thought.
Striving to deliberation the unthinkable: This mightiness beryllium 1 mode to presumption the trajectory of Szymborska’s work. “Whatever inspiration is,” she says successful her Nobel lecture, “it’s calved from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” Szymborska herself learned the worth of not knowing the hard way. She began her poetic vocation aft World War II, erstwhile Soviet powerfulness successful its peculiarly harsh Stalinist incarnation archetypal took clasp successful Poland. She came of property during the Nazi occupation, and similar galore of her generation, she longed for certainty to regenerate the chaos that had consumed her state for the amended portion of a decade. Like galore different young writers, she wholeheartedly embraced the caller state’s ideology.
A poem written respective years aft Stalin’s decease marks her interruption from the rigid doctrine she had earlier espoused. “Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition” (1957): The poem rates imaginativeness implicit ideology from the rubric on. The talker seeks to entice the mythical, mountain-dwelling snowman backmost to world by mode of everything from the sublime to the ridiculous:
Yeti, down determination we’ve got Wednesday,
bread and alphabets.
Two times 2 is four.
Roses are reddish there,
and violets are blue.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Yeti, we’ve got Shakespeare there.
Yeti, we play solitaire
and violin. At nightfall,
we crook lights on, Yeti.
Szymborska’s chap writers saw this poem some arsenic a tacit, post-humous apostrophe to Stalin himself and a rebuke to immoderate worldview that insists connected the large representation astatine the disbursal of peculiar lived acquisition with its inevitable missteps, mishaps, and misunderstandings. In 1 of her uncommon nationalist talks, she recalls a movie successful which Charlie Chaplin can’t unopen an overflowing suitcase and simply snips disconnected each the bits and pieces that don’t fit. “That’s however world fares erstwhile we effort to compression it into the suitcase of ideology,” she remarks. But the bits and pieces matter; they are the worldly that marque up our lives, that marque up beingness arsenic such. It each depends connected your constituent of view.
And what constituent of presumption should that be? Manifold, oregon truthful the poesy suggests. The Yeti of “Notes” sees humanity from connected precocious and frankincense misses each the oddities and splendors of mean quality life. But aren’t we humans blameworthy of the aforesaid failing? The talker of “Seen from Above” contemplates the ways we segregate the deaths of different creatures from our loftier demises. The writer spots a dormant beetle connected a way and ironically dissects this elevated perspective:
One glimpse astatine it volition bash for
meditation—Clearly thing overmuch has
happened to it. Important matters are
reserved for us, for our beingness and death, a
death
that ever claims the close of way.
We look down connected the beetle conscionable arsenic the Yeti looks down connected us. Szymborska draws upon the semantic peculiarities of her autochthonal lingua to underscore the point. Polish uses antithetic verbs to segregate animals’ endings from much dignified quality conclusions: “nie umierają, a zdychają,” “they aren’t deceased, they’re dead.” Language some illuminates and limits. “We telephone it a atom of sand, / but it calls itself neither atom nor sand,” arsenic she reminds america successful “View with a Grain of Sand.”
The storylines we signifier for ourselves—be they nationalist oregon private, immense oregon intimate—are by necessity partial astatine best. Setting the communicative consecutive means getting it wrong, her poems suggest.
“His speech’s idiosyncratic champion is the conditional,” 1 talker concludes successful “No End of Fun”; immoderate visitant from outer abstraction seemingly seeks to summarize our puzzling species. The poem is itself impervious of Szymborska’s speculative capacities: “what if” and “I don’t know” spell manus successful manus successful her work. Such otherworldly speakers aboveground periodically successful different poems. In “One Version of Events,” a acceptable of beings from outer space, oregon possibly a radical of disembodied souls, evaluates the options down below:
If we’d been allowed to choose,
we’d astir apt person gone connected forever.
The bodies that were offered didn’t fit,
and wore retired horribly.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Questions people arose, e.g.
who needs the achy birth
of a dormant child
and what’s successful it for a sailor
who volition ne'er scope the
shore.
“One Version of Events”: The rubric itself tells a communicative that Szymborska explores passim her work. Each mentation of events is incomplete. The storylines we signifier for ourselves—be they nationalist oregon private, immense oregon intimate—are by necessity partial astatine best. Setting the communicative consecutive means getting it wrong, her poems suggest. A wide representation is comforting precisely due to the fact that it deceives. “I similar maps, due to the fact that they lie,” she concludes successful a precocious poem:
Because they springiness nary entree to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they dispersed earlier maine a world
not of this world.
(“Map”)
Elsewhere she softly dismantles emotion stories and warfare stories alike:
They’re some convinced
that a abrupt passionateness joined them.
Such certainty is beautiful,
but uncertainty is much beauteous still.
(“Love astatine First Sight”)
After each warfare someone
has to tidy up. Things won’t pick
themselves up, aft all.
So begins her poem “The End and the Beginning,” which traces the messy, unsettling process by which warfare zones instrumentality to thing resembling normalcy aft “all the cameras person gone / to different wars”—a operation that haunts maine each clip I crook connected the news. Beginnings and endings are themselves a benignant of tidying up that Szymborska challenges clip and again: “Perhaps each fields are battlefields,” she reminds america elsewhere (“Reality Demands”).
Szymborska leaves 1 storyline mostly untouched successful her ain work: that of her ain life. Reading done her poems, you whitethorn glean a fewer unremarkable details: She was a child, she had a sister, she had parents, she fell successful love, she gave reluctant readings, she had friends. Is Poland ever adjacent mentioned? Not that I remember. When Stanisław and I wanted to instrumentality the rubric of our archetypal measurement from her poem “Cat successful an Empty Apartment,” she objected. The portion was excessively personal, she said. How so? The mystified feline appears to beryllium the lone mourner successful this oddly animal-centric elegy:
Footsteps connected the staircase,
but they’re caller ones.
The manus that puts food connected the
saucer has changed, too.
Wait a moment, though. Whose footsteps are these, and whose hand? The dormant antheral seemingly near idiosyncratic down to thin to his orphaned pet. And that idiosyncratic cautiously notes that she (so I assume) is not the lone grieving being successful the household. The cat’s baffled nonaccomplishment takes halfway signifier portion the quality mourner remains connected the sidelines. This was however Szymborska chose to commemorate the nonaccomplishment of her ain large love; quietly, obliquely, and with immense imaginative generosity.
This volume’s editors wisely decided to disregard chronological beginnings and endings successful assembling this volume: Straight lines were ne'er Szymborska’s beardown suit. The writer who wrote the lighthearted “Epitaph” (1958) that closes this enactment inactive had galore decades of beingness up of her. But her mocking self-elegy anticipates the mode she would orchestrate her ain past rites. A world-renowned Polish creator typically goes to his oregon her last resting spot accompanied by the patriotic strains of Chopin’s “Marche Funébre.” Szymborska chose to beryllium laid to remainder arsenic her beloved Ella Fitzgerald crooned “Black Coffee” done a loud-speaker. Her admirers not lone spot wreaths and candles connected the sedate site. They sometimes amusement their respect with the occasional cigarette, presumably truthful that the lifelong smoker could proceed her wont aft death. She would person liked that.
____________________________
From The Acrobat by Wisława Szymborska. Translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh. Copyright © 2026 by The Wisława Szymborska Foundation. Excerpted by support of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
English (US) ·