Wislawa Szymborska was born in Kórnik in Western Poland on 2 July 1923. Since 1931 she has been living in Krakow, where during 1945-1948 she studied Polish Literature and Sociology at the Jagiellonian University. Szymborska made her début in March 1945 with a poem "Szukam slowa" (I am Looking for a Word) in the daily "Dziennik Polski".

During 1953-1981 she worked as poetry editor and columnist in the Kraków literary weekly "Zycie Literackie" where the series of her essays "Lektury nadobowiazkowe" appeared (the series has been renewed lately in the addition to "Gazeta Wyborcza"-"Gazeta o Ksiazkach"). The collection "Lektury nadobowiazkowe" was published in the form of a book four times.

Szymborska has published 16 collections of poetry: Dlatego zyjemy (1952), Pytania zadawane sobie (1954), Wolanie do Yeti (1957), Sól (1962), Wiersze wybrane (1964), Poezje wybrane (1967), Sto pociech (1967), Poezje (197, Wszelki wypadek (1972), Wybór wierszy (1973), Tarsjusz i inne wiersze (1976), Wielka liczba (1976), Poezje wybrane II (1983), Ludzie na moscie (1986). Koniec i poczatek (1993, 1996), Widok z ziarnkiem piasku. 102 wiersze (1996). Wislawa Szymborska has also translated French poetry.

Her poems have been translated (and published in book form) in English, German, Swedish, Italian, Danish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian, Serbo-Croatian, Romanian, Bulgarian and other languages. They have also been published in many foreign anthologies of Polish poetry.

Wislawa Szymborska is the Goethe Prize winner (1991) and Herder Prize winner (1995). She has a degree of Honorary Doctor of Letters of Poznan University (1995). In 1996 she received the Polish PEN Club prize. She was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature.

From Nobelprize.org

And this is for Ptaszek  Now we can continue posting, not spoiling other threads 

Unexpected meeting

We are very courteous to each other,
Because it is nice to meet years later.

Our tigers drink milk.
Our hawks go on foot.
Our sharks drown.
Our wolves do a runner from open cage.

Our vipers shook off lightning,
Monkeys shook off inspiration, peacocks shook off feathers.
Bats so long ago flew away from our hair.

We fall silent in the middle of the sentence
Smiling without hope.
Our people
Cannot talk to each other.

Beklenmedik karşılaşma

 
Ne kadar da naziğiz birbirimize,
Israrla tekrarlıyoruz, bunca yıl sonra karşılaşmak ne kadar da hoş diye.
Süt içiyor kaplanlarımız.
Şahinlerimiz yerlerde.
Suda boğuluyor köpekbalıklarımız.
Kurtlarımız açık kafeslerinin önünde esnemekte.
Yılanlarımız yıldırımdan arınmış,
Maymunlarımız meraktan,
Tavus kuşlarımız tüylü taçlarından.
Yarasalar, çoktandır dolanmıyor başımızda.
Sözümüz cümlenin ortasında kesilmiş,
Gülümsememiz çaresiz.
İnsanlarımız,
Birbirlerine diyeceklerini yitirmiş.

Wislawa Szymborska

Türkçe çeviri G.Vassaf

Thank you

Wonderful poems she has, I like them.

Thank you Slavica for this thread! I never enjoyed poetry until I found out about Szymborska, she was the first poet that would ever make sense to me.. I think that her writing style is really unique, somewhat straightforward, yet so powerful.

 and pls forgive spoiling other thread,but anyway W.Szymborska deserves it

Jaysus, Ptaszek, control the length of your qotes please! It takes me two or three scrolls to read one sentence...grrr...I hate that!

I´m not a huge fan of Szymborska but some of her poems are brilliant. She´s famous for the statement that there are two kinds of poems: the inspired ones and the ordered ones; and she´s always liked the ordered ones better That explains the pro-communist Stalin praising poems she committed

 oki doki..was just about to go peacefully to bed and saw your complaint

We can all forgive her these incidents..and here sth only for my compatriots,a delight of Miłosz written as ordered to praise Stalin but being read in special way it is communism mockery..sorry..in our native.The poem got a special Stalin´s prize..Miłosz ..he was naughty!!!!

http://www.karpaty.pl/ciekawostki/wiersz/wiersz_milosza.htm

good night DD

OK girls, if you have finished with your compatriots  stuff, cen we get some poetry here?

Let me start with my favorite

Cat in an empty apartment

Die - you can´t do that to a cat.

Since what can a can do

in an empty apartment ?

Climb the walls ?

Rub up against the furniture ?

Nothing seems different here,

but nothing is the same.

Nothing has been moved,

but there´s more space.

And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,

but they´re new ones.

The hand that puts fish on the saucer

has changed, too.

Somethig doesn´t start

at its usual time.

Something doesnt happen

as it should.

Someone was always, always here,

then suddenly disappered

and stubbornly stays disappered.

Every closet has been examined.

Every shelf has been explored.

Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.

A commancdment was even broken:

papers scattered everywhere.

What remains to be done.

Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,

just let him show his face.

Will he ever get a lesson

on what not to do to a cat.

Sidle toward him

as if unwilling

and ever so slow

on visibly offended paws,

and no leaps or squeals at least to start.

NOTES:

Instincts make an animal to look for its dead owner and believe that he will come back. We suffer as we know that it won´t happen.

This poem was written after Szymborska´s husband died. The feelings for the close person and the emptiness after his death is shown from the animal perspective. It helps to handle calmly the emotions associated with dying.

Exactly, give the woman a break, she didn´t kill anyone.

Thank You Note

I owe a lot to those I don´t love.
Relief, with which I approve
that they are closer to someone else.

Joy that it´s not me who the wolf
among their sheeps.

I have peace with them
and I am free with them,
and this is what love can
neither give nor take.

I don´t wait for them
from window to door.
Patient
almost like a solar clock,
I understand
what love doesn´t,
I forgive,
what love would never forgive.

Between a meeting and a letter
there is not an eternity,
but simply a few days or weeks.

My journeys with them are always successful,
concerts heard,
cathedrals visited,
landscapes clear.

And when we´re separated
by seven mountains and rivers,
they are mountains and rivers
well known from the maps.

It´s only thanks to them,
that I live in three dimensions,
in space unlyrical and unrhetorical,
with real since stable horizon.

They don´t know themselves,
how much they carry in their empty hands.

´I don´t owe them anything´ -
love would say
about this open topic.

Allegro ma non troppo

Life, you´re beautiful (I say)
you just couldn´t get more fecund,
more befrogged or nightingaily,
more anthillful or sproutspouting.

I´m trying to court life´s favor,
to get into its good graces,
to anticipate its whims.
I´m always the first to bow,

always there where it can see me
with my humble, reverent face,
soaring on the wings of rapture,
falling under waves of wonder.

Oh how grassy is this hopper,
how this berry ripely rasps.
I would never have conceived it
if I weren´t conceived myself!

Life (I say) I´ve no idea
what I could compare you to.
No one else can make a pine cone
and then make the pine cone´s clone.

I praise your inventiveness,
bounty, sweep, exactitude,
sense of order – gifts that border
on witchcraft and wizardry.

I just don´t want to upset you,
tease or anger, vex or rile.
For millennia, I´ve been trying
to appease you with my smile.

I tug at life by its leaf hem:
will it stop for me, just once,
momentarily forgetting
to what end it runs and runs?

    Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh  

Her poems lose a bit in translation although Baranczak did his best.And thank him for it.