Poetry and writing of Cassandra Tribe

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Infinite Detail: Wislawa Szymborska and the constancy of life

"I'll remind you in infinite detail

Of what you expected from life besides death" (Archeology)

In the last moments before her demise, Szymborska imagines Lot's Wife discovering that she has looked back "despite herself". She knows her reasons for why she could desire to turn - loneliness, fear, anger - and within that moment of knowing, this woman who doesn't even have a name, becomes aware that she has no understanding of her action at all. Coming of age in Poland under Stalin, Wislawa Szymborska embraced and supported the regime and its ideals. Her first collection (Dlateyen Zyjany) was delayed from its planned publication in 1949 in order for her to "edit" the pieces to meet the Socialist requirements of the censors. Szymborska wrote in praise of Stalin, Lenin and the idealized socialist life. She joined the United Workers Party, participating beyond poetry and petitions, Szymborska was active in the effort to defame Catholic Priests before the Socialist Courts that allowed the priests to be condemned to death. "Dlatezen Zjjary" was finally acceptable to the censors and published in 1952.

By 1954, her new collection, "Questions I put to myself", appeared and marked the public beginning of the transformation of Szymborska from idealogue to a writer who would eventually be awarded the Noble prize for her ability to find within the details of human reality, questions that bring to light the puzzles of life. In only two brief years the mind and soul of Szymborska had begun to force to the surface questions that would attempt to define - not answer, the source of our actions and choices.

The power of her poetry lies not just in its content, but in her ability to use simple words and colloquial phrases that allow her readers to access the meaning of her work, layer by layer, as they become open to investigation. If one chooses to float on the surface, her details are such beautiful flowers to admire; one need not ever know what feeds their roots. Her philosophical themes and the puzzles of existence that she explores are sowed in the use of irony and paradox but the emotion, that has its potential for unraveling beneath the weight of awareness she reveals, is tightly controlled by her mastery of understatement and wit. It is no wonder, that in choosing ad copy for her first English translation, the emphasis was on the accessibility of her writing and not the complex subject matter of her poems.

Private in an age of public lives, Szymborska has been called "the Greta Garbo of Poetry". Yet she is careful, in her rare interviews, to clarify that she writes from the viewpoint of solitude and not isolation. For Wislawa, the distinction is important. For her, solitude is necessary to the soul for it is the time in which we are capable of examining our experiences. Within that examination, the purpose is not to discover answers, but to continue the process of revealing questions. Questions that permit change to occur.

Perhaps, as in no other of her poems Tortures captures the drive that has carried her to question not only her own experiences, allowing her to transform herself from Stalinist to ardent democrat, but to become capable of restating her experiences in such global terms that the privacy of her words becomes the experience of her audience. She writes of the unchangeable reality of tortures. "The body that suffers and fails," the "howl with which the body responds" are immutable realities. The changing things, "the manner, ceremonies and dances" are met by the timelessness of the body's response. It could be anyone, in any country, at any point in history expressing "the movement of the hands in protecting the head", as well, it could be any kind of torture suffered - of politics, of law or of the heart.

What Wislawa has discovered, and revealed in the last lines of this poem, is the reality that, no matter what our circumstances, our connection to each other lies in the sameness of our response, "where the body is and is and is/and has no place of its own." What unites us in our humanity is our desire for life. She winnows away the politics and details to reveal what lies beneath, a tangled weave of questions that is rooted in the sameness of our mortality. Questions that leave us without surety and that we try to cover with our adoption of absolutes.

Wislawa's understanding of life is not based upon a search for answers to provide relief or mastery and control of events. She seeks to find the questions that allow us to relate and understand our experiences in a manner where we can transcend the details we have and reunite with all of humanity. She offers her readers a chance to reconcile within themselves the contradictions of life by allowing us to see a constancy that survives all of our moments of "knowing" and allows for us to grow and change. As in her piece, Archeology, Wislawa plays the role of historian in many aspects, choosing to subtly and softly remind us of what is important in life. Like Lot's Wife, the goal here is not to have an answer, but an understanding of all the things that motivate our actions.

Her small body of work shines with a kind of light that shares not only what she has revealed to herself, but helps to illuminate our own lives. Little wonder that the Nobel committee found in this tiny and shy woman something to be celebrated the world over.

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