Wislawa Szymborska

“There is nothing more animal-like than a clear conscience on the third planet of the Sun.”

So wrote the Polish poet, essayist, and translator Maria Wislawa Szymborska, whose 99th birthday was marked on 2 July.  Another famous quote of the Nobel Prize winner: "I think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised."

Avishay Gerczuk, of Bar-Ilan’s Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, writes about the woman whom the Nobel Prize Committee called "A Mozart of poetry."

Szymborska was born in 1923 in Poland. In 1945 she enrolled in the Hegelian University in Krakow, where she began studying Polish language and literature. During her studies she began writing her first poems and even published them. At the outset of her career, she praised Lenin, Stalin, and socialism in her poetry. Later, however, she abandoned socialist ideology.

In 1996, Szymborska won the Nobel Prize for Literature "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality." In her acceptance speech, she said: “There are no professors of poetry. This would mean, after all, that poetry is an occupation requiring specialized study, regular examinations, theoretical articles with bibliographies and footnotes attached, and finally, ceremoniously conferred diplomas. And this would mean, in turn, that it’s not enough to cover pages with even the most exquisite poems in order to become a poet.”

Later in life, Szymborska began translating French literature, particularly Baroque poetry, into Polish. She mainly translated the poems of Théodore-Agrippa d'Aubigné, a Huguenot soldier-poet who served in the religious wars in France in the 16th century. She also translated German works, and in 1991, won the prestigious Goethe Prize.

Szymborska’s dizzying success is also evident in the number of languages into which her work has been translated: over 40 languages, including English, German, Hungarian, Swedish, Japanese, and Hebrew! The fact that her works have been translated into so many languages attests to the uniqueness of her poetry. In Israel, as in many other countries, Szymborska gained popularity among the public and literary critics, and she even visited Israel in 2004.

Rafi Weichert, who translated most of her poetry into Hebrew, says: “Szymborska has penetrated the Israeli bloodstream. She won us, the Jews, over, when in her Nobel speech she referred to the Bible, to the book of Ecclesiastes." He said of the translation process that “when one perceives its accent and warm irony, the music in her poetry easily plays out in Hebrew.”