photo - PAP/CAF Weglowski
Poland's culture minister Bogdan Zdrojewski said that Szymborska’s personality was a perfect blend of two extremes: while being a poet and someone very active on the cultural scene, she was at the same time a woman of great modesty, self-restraint and phenomenal tolerance.
“When I once asked her about the Nobel Prize, she told me that her life could be divided into two halves: before and after the Nobel Prize tragedy. It is only in her mouth that the use of the word ‘tragedy’ in this particular context sounded completely natural.”
In 1996 Wisława Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.”
She was one of four Polish laureates of the Nobel Prize for Literature, after the novelists Henryk Sienkiewicz (1905) and Władysław Reymont (1924) and the poet Czesław Milosz (1980).
The poet and prose writer Tomasz Jastrun said that Szymborska’s death marks the end of an epoch, in both the literary and social sense.
Her poetry is of the highest artistic merit, he said, and at the same time accessible to all. It can be read and appreciated not only in Poland but all over the world.
“She was a flesh and blood person, extremely modest and natural. The Nobel Prize did not make her head swell,” said Jastrun on hearing of her death last night.
The writer Janusz Głowacki describes her poetry as “great”.
“It has madness, wisdom, lyricism, despair and cynicism in it. Her poems are very complex and very simple, and at the same time terrible clever.”
The well known American journalist and former New Yorker correspondent in Poland, Lawrence Weschler, stresses that Szymborska’s poetry was profoundly existential in its character, exploring the motifs of life and death.
“Her poems are as light as a feather, at at the same time very deep. I am both very sad and grateful for the great gift of wisdom that we all received from Wisława Szymborska. She handed it out very generously. What else can one expect?”, he has said.
Weschler recalled that she did not want to visit he United States, saying that she did not like long journeys.
“When we tried to persuade her to come, she said: ‘I’d come if you arranged meetings with Woody Allen and Jane Goodall, the famous expert on chimpanzees.' Once we made all the arrangements, she said it was a joke.” (mk/pg)