These days, finding like-minded friends is never a problem. You have your close circle of friends and your work buddies and clients. And because of the internet, you can meet a variety of people all over the world. I have been lucky to have found some of these friends.

I have a muse. My muse is a very sweet lady who lives in Krakow, Poland. We have found we share common interests. She often sends me inspiration for my series – this one you are reading right now, Great Women of the Past and Present.

I have written this article for her. She has been a very good friend and my inspiration for writing the article about the 1986 Nobel Prize laureate for medicine, Rita Levi-Montalcini – and today, Wislawa Szymborska. She is a poet, an illustrator, and truly a great woman.

Wislawa Szymborska was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, at the age of 73.

She has been called the Greta Garbo of World Poetry. She is a humble and a very private woman, with a mischievous personality, and is loved throughout the world. Wislawa has created her own skills based upon historical events, biological conditioning of human existence, philosophical systems, ideologies, stereotypes and inhibitions.

Her work is simplistic about everyday life and emotions, without using sentiment or being cynical, or repeating representation of certain themes or emotions. It’s called Leitmotif.

Wislawa says about her work:

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

Wislawa’s Early Life

Wislawa was born July 2, 1923 in Bnin, now Kornik, Poland. She is the second daughter of Anna Rottermund and Wincenty Szymborski. When Wislawa was 3 years old, the family moved to Torun in 1926. There she would began elementary school. The family then moved to Cracow in 1931, where she completed elementary school and continued her education at a convent school. Wislawa’s interest in writing was encouraged at an early age. At the age of 5, her father would reward her with a couple coins for her poetry.

Wislawa began writing during Socialist Realism. In 1945, she was allowed one to publish one poem titled Szukam slowa (I Seek the World) in the newspaper Dziennik Polski. Three years later, on the completion of her first collection of poems in 1948, she was denied publication. The communist cultural policy considered Wislawa’s poems to be too bourgeois and too complex. The direction of Wislawa’s poetry had changed over the years; she had begun expressing her pessimism about mankind and its future.

During World War II, when Germany occupied Poland, Wislawa attended illegal classes and joined an underground theater as a prompter, aiding actors who had forgotten their lines.

During the war, Wislawa wrote:

Hitler gives the Germans something to be enthusiastic about and offer up their lives for that, for those Germans, Hitler is great. Don’t you understand that the power of a movement depends on the human beings it produces?

She  started working for a railroad in order to avoid being sent to a German labor camp in 1943.  After the war, Wislawa studied Polish literature and sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow from 1945 to 1948.

In 1948, she married fellow poet and editor, Adam Wlodek. He had published some of her poems in the Walka newspaper. The couple collaborated on the children’s book Mruczek w Butachteh (Mruczek in shoes). My muse told me Mruczek is a typical cat’s name, meaning “the quite one, the one who purrs”. The illustrations were drawn by Wislawa in 1948. She also created the illustrations for Jan Stanislawki’s language dictionary and for her poetry The Monkey, which was inspired by artist Pieter Brueghel’s painting, Two Monkeys.

Moving On

Unfortunately, Wislawa’s first marriage was not meant to be and she divorced Adam in 1954. In 1953, she participated in the defamation of Catholic priests from Krakow who had been condemned to the death penalty by Communists.

In 1953, Wislawa began to work on the Krakow literary magazine Zycie Literacia as a poetry editor and columnist until1981. She also started a book review column entitled Lektury NadobowiÄ…zkowe (Non-compulsory Reading) in 1968.

Wislawa married again in 1969: Kornel Filipowicz, the distinguished novelist, screenwriter, and poet. The marriage lasted for 21 years; sadly Kornel died in February of 1990.

Martial Law

In the early 1980’s, Poland became a nation under martial law. Wislawa was forced to assume the pseudonym “Stanczykowna” and print her poetry in underground press publications in Polish magazines like Arka and Kultura Paryska.

The Joy Of Writing

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence – this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word “woods.

Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they’ll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what’s here isn’t life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof’s full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

Wislawa has become very well known throughout Europe and is considered everyone’s favorite literary grandma writing poems that are easy to memorize. The following one is one of my favorites – it’s a feline’s perspective of its departed owner. This poem is recited across Poland by young and old.

A Cat in an Empty Apartment

Die? One does not do that to a cat.
Because what’s a cat to do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls.
Caress against the furniture.
It seems that nothing has changed here,
but yet things are different.
Nothing appears to have been relocated,
yet everything has been shuffled about.
The lamp no longer burns in the evenings.

Footsteps can be heard on the stairway,
but they’re not the ones.
The hand which puts the fish on the platter
is not the same one which used to do it.

Something here does not begin
at its usual time.
Something does not happen quite
as it should
Here someone was and was,
then suddenly disappeared
and now is stubbornly absent.

All the closets were peered into.
The shelves were walked through.
The rug was lifted and examined.
Even the rule about not scattering
papers was violated.

What more is to be done?
Sleep and wait.

Let him return,
at least make a token appearance.
Then he’ll learn
that one shouldn’t treat a cat like this.
He will be approached
as though unwillingly,
slowly,
on very offended paws.
With no spontaneous leaps or squeals at first.

The Nobel Prize and other Awards

Upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Wislawa began to receive attention from all around the world. She avoided the paparazzi surrounding her saying,

I am very happy, I am honored, but at the same time stunned and a little bit frightened with what awaits me, I’m afraid I will not have a quiet life for some time now, and this is what I prize most.

Wislawa Szymborska is truly an amazing poet and woman. She continues to write and has been awarded for her many contributions to the world of poetry. She has received many awards from her beloved country of Poland. In 1954, Wislawa received The City of Cracow Prize for Literature; in 1963, The Polish Ministry of Culture Prize – then in 1991, The Goethe Prize, which is the highest German literary award. Karl Dedecius, a translator, has worked on popularizing Wislawa’s poetry in Germany.

The Herder Prize is a prestigious prize, given to Scholars and artists from Central and Southeastern Europe whose life and work have improved the cultural understanding of European countries and their peaceful interrelations, Wislawa was the recipient of the award in 1995. She was also given an Honorary Doctor of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan that same year. The following year, Wislawa receivd the Polish PEN Club Prize and in 1996, the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Image source: University of Buffalo, NY

Wislawa visited the United States in 1997. The Polish Arts Club at the Buffalo University in New York had an exhibit of her life’s work. It was called Poland in the Classroom.

The library at Jagiellonian University in Cracow also hosted an exhibition earlier the same year.

If you are looking for Wislawa’s books published in English: many have been translated from the Polish original since 1996. Her books are today sold internationally in many languages. Wislawa’s collection available at Amazon if you are interested in her books.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this article as much as I have enjoyed writing it. Wislawa Szymborska is a great writer and poet. There are so many wonderful prestigious women and men, past and present, we can learn from – Wislawa truly is one of them.

A few Wislawa Szymborska links I find interesting:

• A Domestication of Death: The Poetic Universe of Wislawa Szymborska on the Nobel Prize website
• A list of her poems in English on the Poland on the Web site of the University of Buffalo, NY
• Quotes by Wislawa Szymborska on Brainy Quote
• SFGate article, Why Wislawa Szymborska considers her trash can her most valuable piece of furniture