[Michael F]

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

[Quincy Lehr]

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

[Chris O'Carroll]

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.

[Janice D. Soderling]

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.

[Terese Coe]

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

[Orwn Acra]

That Wislawa! Smart career move.

[Will Gourley]

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.

[Ann Drysdale]

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.

[Michael F]

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

[Mario Pita]

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

Nothing Twice