News: PEN Community Mourns the Loss of Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska
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 Szymborska, ‘The Joy of Writing’,
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
PEN International is deeply saddened to learn of the death of internationally celebrated poet and Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska, who passed away at her home on the evening of 1 Febraury 2012, aged 88.
Born in Kórnik in Western Poland in 1923, Szymborska spent most of her life living and working in Krakow and was described by Poland’s President Bronislaw Komorowski as the country’s “guardian spirit”.
Spanning over 40 years, her 16 collections of poetry reached international acclaim and have been translated into English, German, Italian, Danish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian, Romanian and many more.
She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996 “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality”. Her acceptance speech for the award was a testament to her modesty and humour and offered a moving personal meditation on the importance of questioning one’s own beliefs.
An intensely private and elusive figure throughout her life, Szymborska celebrated her own self-doubts, boldly asserting that “any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life”. She argued that poets were of fundamental importance in modern societies in order to interrogate the assumptions of a sometimes too complacent world.
Wislawa Szymborska was also the recipient of the Polish PEN Club prize and gave a powerful poetry reading on the opening day of the 66th PEN World Congress in Warsaw in 1999, a moment that will be fondly remembered by PEN members from around the world.
Her poetry was characterised by what she described as her “restless, questioning spirit” and her celebration of the “unfathomable life” of everyday experience.
She will sadly be missed by the PEN community.
For a collection of Wislawa Szymborska’s poetry in Polish, Swedish and English, please click here.
