Sad News...
 

Wislawa Szymborska has died at 88.

I love her poetry, and I loved (what I knew of) her puckish personality.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/polands-199...204551629.html

That is a real loss. I go back to her Collected quite regularly.

May she rest in peace. And may all of us (whether or not we win the Nobel) write a few poems as good as her best.

I don't know how I missed this news, but I haven't been listening to the radio for a while.

She was one of my favorite poets long before she won the Nobel. The day it was announced, I was waking up in a hospital ward after an operation and the first thing I asked (I kid you not) was who had won the prize in literature.

The others in the ward probably thought I had mental as well as bodily problems, of course, when I learned it was "some Polish woman, a poet" and I let out a big yippee and went back to sleep.

No one else there knew who she was, though she had even then an excellent Swedish translator.

Thank you for posting this.

Splendid poet! I have taught her poems to my classes for years.

That Wislawa! Smart career move.

Wislawa, glad you were here.

My favorite poem in the translation I like best: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs...bors/stats.htm,

Wislawa, glad to have read your art.

As she wrote:

Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.

In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you've come
can't be undone.

Translation by S Baranczak and C Cavanagh. The italics are mine.

Janice, thank you for that memory of Szymborska -- it tickled one of my own:

I had not known WS’s work until she won the Nobel. I picked up View With a Grain of Sand, and fell instantly in love with her. I was younger then, still sure that my aesthetic judgments were as irresistible to other mortals as the incoming tide.

That Fall, on a visit to some college friends (not really literary types), I remember spending a morning in their living room, reciting WS’s poems. My friends listened politely, and, I thought, even showed occasional ripples of appreciation; but my beloved scolded me, once we’d left, for being “overbearing”, even “importunate”. Not the first time, or the last, that I was reprimanded for such traits. Alas.

About a week later, I called my friends to apologize -- to learn that they had bought more than a dozen copies of the book to give as holiday presents, they so loved her, too.


PS: PBS has just posted this interview with Clare Cavanagh, translator, who knew WS...

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog...zymborska.html

Among her poems that I read long ago, this was one that made a lasting impression on me:

Nothing Twice

So many good poets that I don't know. My reading depth seems so inadequate at times. I'm glad members of the Sphere continually enlighten me.

A truly great writer, and so readable, such a satisfying mix of lightness and depth, it's hard to believe she's not even more famous than she was. Can I recommend to those who haven't read her, along with the Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak translations of her poems, a book called Nonrequired Reading?.

Richard, I think everyone feels (or should feel) inadequate.

The flip side is, the Great River never runs dry.

I again risk being importunate, but one more post -- and I’ll go underground.

Because what Jim and Terese and Mario and Will and Ann and Quincy and Janice all said is so true;

and because this little snippet from The Guardian’s obit shows a bit of what a great heart, and a great poet, she was:

In her Nobel speech, she spoke of the extraordinary nature of life, of how she would love to tell Ecclesiastes that "'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun", and of how, "in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world."