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