A few weeks ago I finally made a long-awaited pilgrimage to the home of the great Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska in Krakow. I have written often about Szymborska, who spent most of her life in Krakow and died there at the age of eighty-eight in 2012. Her poetry first fell upon me, as it has on many others, like an anvil of feathers—bright but soft—after she received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. which readers love for her unique blend of humor, smoother than wit, perfectly combined with sudden turns of thoughtful reflection. Moreover, I had to go there in the company of her former secretary Michal Rusinek and Michal Choynski, a poet and scientist. Both teach at the ancient and sacred Jagiellonian University (where Szymborska herself studied), and Czojnski is also the author of, as incredible as it may sound, a long, original and ambitious history New Yorker recently published in Polish for a Polish audience.
Szymborska's last home, where she lived for fourteen years, was a three-room apartment in a residential area about twenty minutes from the city center. It seemed extremely modest, if not student-like, to me, although the slightly disapproving frowns from my Polish friends when I broached the idea made me realize that in Communist-era Krakow it would actually have been considered quite grandiose. But of course, the room where it happened, where the poems were written, was as modest as any college dorm room, with a small single bed next to the small desk where she wrote. (She lived there alone. She was married briefly after World War II, then had a long affair with the short story writer Kornel Filipowicz; a collection of their letters, which should be available in English, became a bestseller in Poland and was published in translation in Spain and Italy.)
In that little writers' room we talked about the great poetess, her chain-smoking, her love of silly puns, strange city names, and “Kentucky Fried Chicken,” which, when it came to Krakow, she liked, to the chagrin of her more fastidious friends. (However, in her favorite restaurant in old Krakow, in honor of Szymborska, there is a dish of “stroganoff with dumplings”. What this is delightful.) Although the conversation was about the details of life, the shadow hanging over our conversation, as over this life, was exclusively political.
Szymborska was not a political poet in any conventional sense of the word, but she was one, and a great one, as she went out of her way to articulate with charm and purpose the ways in which people seek power and pleasure in their public lives—to increase their usefulness, as drier political philosophers say—while interacting with family, friends, lovers, and fellow citizens in the daily struggle of perseverance. Not all engaged poetry must be from the battle front: in The Catcher in the Rye, Holden's little brother, Ellie, who is copying poetry onto his baseball glove, is asked who was the better war poet: Rupert Brooke, who actually fought in one, or Emily Dickinson, who didn't? The correct answer, from Salinger's point of view, was obviously Emily.
