BY Aleksandra Kneifel
 
 “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.”
-from Wisława Szymborska’s Nobel Prize speech
 
Wisława Szymborska was born on July 2, 1923 in Bnin (now Kórnik) near Poznań, in Poland. Her father, Wincent, was the property manager of Count Zamoyski in Zakopane, and her mother was Anna Maria Szymborska née Rottermund. At first, Wisława lived in Toruń, but in 1931 her family moved to Kraków, where she attended elementary and middle school.
 When World War II broke out in 1939, she continued her education in underground gatherings. From 1943 she began work as a railroad employee in order to avoid being deported to Germany as a forced laborer. She then started to write her first stories and poems; she was also the author of illustrations for the English textbook "First steps in English" by Jan Stanisławski.
 
After the war, she studied Polish Studies and then Sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. She did not finish her studies due to her bad financial situation. Since 1945, she has been permanently associated with Kraków, which she often emphasized during her life.
 Her debut was the poem "Looking for a word" published in 1945 in "Walka"(The Fight), a literary supplement to "Dziennik Polski" (The Polish Journal). After the war, Szymborska was connected with the community of people accepting the socialist system (which many people later resented her for). She belonged to the Polish United Workers’ Party (up to 1966) and the Polish Writers' Union. Her debut publication "That’s Why We’re All Alive" (1952) included poems such as "For the  Youth who are building Nowa Huta" or "Lenin". The previous volume, "Wiersze" (Poems), was not printed because "it did not meet socialist requirements".
 
In 1948 she married the poet Adam Włodek, however, the couple divorced in 1954.
 
From 1953, she was a member of the editing team of "Życie Literackie" (Literary Life), where she ran a regular column "Lektury nadobowiązkowe" (Non-required reading). She was also a member of the editorial team of the monthly "Pismo" (Magazine). In 1988 she co-founded the Polish Writers' Association. Since 1995 she was a member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as doctor honoris causa of the Adam Mickiewicz University, and since 1998 an honorary citizen of Kraków.
 
In 1991 she received the Goethe Prize and later the Herder Prize.
In 1996, she received the Nobel Prize for "poetry which with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to appear in fragments of human reality". She became better known internationally as a result of this. Her work has been translated into English and many European languages, as well as Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Persian and Chinese.
 
The final collection published while Szymborska was still alive, Dwukropek (Colon), was chosen as the best book of 2006 by readers of Poland's Gazeta Wyborcza. She also translated French literature into Polish, especially Baroque poetry and the works of Agrippa d'Aubigné.
 
Her works have also inspired many other artists and allowed for many pop-culture developments. Three Colors: Red, a film directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski, was inspired by Szymborska's poem, "Love At First Sight". Her poem "People on the Bridge" was made into a film created by Beata Pozniak. It was shown around the globe and at a film festival in New Delhi as an award; it was screened an additional 36 times in 18 cities in India. The Polish Nobel Prize winner not only loved but also appreciated animals, especially monkeys, which she expressed in her poems. She admired Jane Goodall, who devoted her life to protecting chimps. In 1996, she was awarded the title of “Person of the year" awarded by the "Wprost" weekly magazine and the Pen Club prize. In 2011, she was awarded the Order of the White Eagle - Poland's highest order awarded to both civilians and the military for their merits.
 
Wislawa Szymborska died of lung cancer in her sleep at home in Kraków in 2012, aged 88. Although she was working on new poetry at the time of her death, she was unable to arrange the publication of her final poems in the way she wished. Her last poetry was published later in 2012. In 2013, the Wisława Szymborska Award was established in honor of her literary legacy.
 
Szymborska mainly cultivated personal reflective lyrics of an intellectual and moralistic character, focused around the motive of the existential situation of man and the relationship of the individual to history. The poet, not finding fully satisfactory solutions and quite skeptical about the possibility of drawing "appropriate" teachings from the experiences of the past, does not, however, fall into extreme pessimism or cognitive relativism. The hero of her poems "lives, so he is mistaken" - this is the starting point of Szymborska's attitude towards the world and art. Her poems are full of melancholy and humor, irony, wit and a deeper semantic joke. Man, in these works, is a creature subject to the laws of biology and the inevitability of history, defenseless and fallible, subject to alienation and unfulfillment, constantly threatened in his human hopes, communicating with difficulty with others. These philosophically and psychologically complex problems are addressed in Szymborska's poetry with the great emotional discretion and detachment of a thinker ironically indulgent towards human weaknesses and delusions. Increduble skill and grace of metaphors, combining word frolic and wit with seriousness have led to a great readership in Poland and over a dozen countries around the world, where her works have been translated.
Her closest surroundings remembered her as a modest person who values peace. She did not accept questions interfering with anyone's privacy, nor did she consider it appropriate to speak about herself. She endured badly any the ostentation or celebrations of her person, hence the announcement of her being a laureate of the literary Nobel prize, when she had to give more than a month of interviews throughout her entire life, is in her life a censure, named by her friends "the Stockholm tragedy".
 
The poet also disliked conversations about literature or the secrets of poetic technique, assuming that the author should speak only in his or her works. The first-class sense of humor that emanated from Szymborska's texts accompanied her every day. It manifested even in giving friends and acquaintances cards with witty homemade collages or organizing lotteries, in which the prizes were small gifts, most often lovably kitschy ones.
 
In the New York Times Book Review, Stanislaw Baranczak wrote, “The typical lyrical situation on which a Szymborska poem is founded is the confrontation between the directly stated or implied opinion on an issue and the question that raises doubt about its validity. The opinion not only reflects some widely shared belief or is representative of some widespread mind-set, but also, as a rule, has a certain doctrinaire ring to it: the philosophy behind it is usually speculative, anti-empirical, prone to hasty generalizations, collectivist, dogmatic and intolerant.” 
 
She frequently employed literary devices such as ironic precision, paradox, contradiction and understatement, to illuminate philosophical themes and obsessions. She wrote from unusual points of view, such as a cat in the newly empty apartment of its dead owner. This poem (Cat in an Empty Apartment), due to its unusual narrator, quirky tone, and a brilliant English translation is perhaps her best-known. Her reputation rests on a relatively small body of work, fewer than 350 poems. When asked why she had published so few poems, she said: "I have a trash can in my home".
 
 
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