2023-07-02 10:55:28
Wisława Szymborska always had a very clear opinion on whether a poem was successful. From 1968, while she was an editor at the Kraków weekly “Życie Literackie” (Literary Life), she and a colleague wrote an anonymous column called “Literary Mailbox”, which was aimed at authors of rejected manuscripts: “We have to give you something shocking say,” it says, for example, to a Halina W. from Białystok: “You are too gullible and have a too pure heart to be able to write well.”
And Ewa from Bytom receives the following message: “Who knows, maybe poetic powers lie dormant in the depths of your soul, but the fact is that they cannot unfold yet. They piled up metaphors as obstacles, so you can’t see the world at all.”
unknown facet
No, Wisława Szymborska is not particularly considerate of the mostly young people who dream of (or, even worse, are already convinced) of being poets. The texts, published for the first time in German on the occasion of the 100th birthday of the Polish Nobel Prize winner, who died in 2012, show a previously unknown facet of Szymborska, who, especially in her late poems, appears warm-hearted, melancholic and philanthropic, full of indulgence for the weaknesses of the species Homo sapiens.
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But woe betide if the conspecific thinks itself a poet, then for its mixture of ultra-modernity and worn-out images it can already be heard that it is “like an Alfa Romeo that doesn’t move because it was given oats instead of petrol”. “You really need to change your pen. Suggestions for aspiring writers”is the ironic title of the volume translated by Renate Schmidgall (Suhrkamp, 12 Euro), who is actually more suggestions for critic contains a small school of intelligent maliciousness, which in the current literary scene only occurs in trace elements.
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The harsh judgments of the author, who was already established in the 1960s, about the next generation are all the more interesting because she herself was by no means a child prodigy, as is shown in Marta Kijowska’s Szymborska biography “Nothing comes twice” (Schöffling, 28 euros) can be read.
The fact that Szymborska, who came from an educated middle-class but economically precarious background, was successful in the Kraków literary scene after the war had a lot to do with coincidences, personal contacts, and also with ideological flexibility – at a time when in the country, as elsewhere in the Eastern bloc, under Stalinist guidance, the Courses were set in the direction of the socialist “People’s Poland”.
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Author of “Landgericht”
Szymborska owed her first publications as a poet to her relationship with her older colleague Adam Włodek, an enthusiastic and loyal communist, whom she married in 1948. However, her debut volume could not be published, for reasons that are not completely clear. Szymborska joined the party in 1950, and two years later her first book, Therefore We Live, was published.
True to line beginnings
It contained poems with titles such as “Welcome to the construction of a socialist city”, “Youth building Nowa Huta” or “Our worker speaks of imperialism”. In the volume also published for the anniversary “Collected Poems” (Suhrkamp, 25 euros) are these works, different than in the new complete Polish edition that has just been published (by Znak).unfortunately not included.
But how does a well-behaved, socialist-realist rhyming opportunist become an internationally celebrated poet of the century with an unmistakable signature? Interestingly enough, even a biographer as knowledgeable as Kijowska does not succeed in making this astonishing change really understandable: In 1957 Szymborska’s volume “Calls to Yeti” appears. Here is suddenly the typical, artfully kept simple tone of statements and rhetorical questions, in which historical-philosophical and metaphysical problems are casually pointed out.
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world formula of conservatism
In “Of an expedition into the Himalayas that never happened” the lyrical ego has to justify the human species to the snow creature, far removed from earthly horrors: “Yeti, below is Wednesday, the Abece, the bread,/ and two times two is four,/ and the snow is thawing./ A cross-divided/ red apple is there.// Yeti, not only crimes/ are possible with us./ Yeti, not all words/ are a death sentence.” That’s Szymborska-like perfection.
Certainly, in the mid-1950s, world-historical upheavals took place – the onset of the thaw period after the XX. Party congress of the CPSU, uprisings in Hungary and Poland – and also privately a lot is in flux; Szymborska gets divorced, moves in the environment of the new Polish “Generation 56” in literature, theater and film and enthusiastically absorbs Western currents such as existentialism. A trip to Paris in 1957, including with Sławomir Mrożek, becomes an awakening experience.
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However, the break with the party only came in 1966 after the dismissal of the dissident philosopher Leszek Kołakowski – a key event for the alienation of intellectuals from the socialist state, which finally led to the establishment of illegal courses and underground publishing houses at the end of the 1970s. At that time, Szymborska’s partner from the late 1960s, the charismatic writer Kornel Filipowicz, played a central role in the cultural opposition that ultimately decided the fate of the entire Eastern bloc.
In those years, with books such as Hundred Joys (1967) and All Cases (1972), Szymborska became one of the leading voices in a genre that Poles have always rightly been particularly proud of. And the density of Polish master poets was actually unusually high in those decades: Just think of Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, Tadeusz Różewicz or Halina Poświatowska, who was promoted by Szymborska and died young.
renunciation of religious consolation
What makes Szymborka’s poems timeless is her view of the fundamentals of human life, which are similar throughout all epochs: pain and suffering, violence and death, but also love and happiness, the existence of which she insisted on despite all transience. What makes the poems modern is their renunciation of religious comfort, of fleeing into hopes of salvation, be it in the afterlife or in this world of some utopia.
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Even in view of the terrible crimes of the 20th century, which she has always had in mind since her youth in occupied Kraków, she does not give death the last word: “Death/ always comes that one moment too late.// In vain he shakes the handle of the invisible door./ He cannot undo what someone has achieved/.
In “Joy of writing” she opposes the merciless reality with her own laws of art. “Where does the written doe run through the written forest?” This is how this description of a hunt begins, which opposes the – also only written – hunters with “a time that I bind with chains of signs”. Here the author determines if and when something dies or passes away. “Joy in writing / possibility of preservation / revenge of the mortal hand”, is how she summarizes this poetics of poetic salvation in the final stanza as briefly as possible.
“Consolation” is what she calls, only half ironically, a poem about Charles Darwin, who allegedly could only endure literature if it contained a happy ending, no matter how kitschy, in view of the countless extinct genres, the triumphs of the fittest, the futile attempts to survive in the course of the senseless blind natural history.
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AL Kennedy’s Britain
You can find that naive, maybe even cynical. Each reader must decide for himself whether a consolation that can only be found on paper is sufficient. Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, Wisława Szymborska wrote a poem that disturbed many at the time, but which, like the pictures of that day, will probably never be forgotten by anyone who reads it. In “Photography from September 11” she describes the people who jumped down from the burning towers and were arrested in the event of death: “Photography stopped them in life/ and now they keep them/ above ground to ground.// Everyone is still whole/ with a face of its own/ and blood well hidden.”
The ending of the poem may be confusing. It is the bold arrogance of poetry to at least offer words, to yell, to whisper in response to the powerlessness and the nothingness: “There are only two things I can do for you -/ describe this flight/ and not add the last sentence.”
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