Wislawa Szymborska, a Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, dies at 88

Wislawa Szymborska, a Nobel Prize-winning poet who used the imagery of everyday objects and a mordant style to explore dramatic themes of human experience including love, war and death, died Feb. 1 at her home in Krakow, Poland. She was 88.

She had lung cancer, her secretary Michal Rusinek told the Associated Press.

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(Janek Skarzynski/AFP/Getty Images) - Wislawa Szymborska, a Nobel Prize-winning poet who used the imagery of everyday objects and a mordant style to explore dramatic themes of human experience including love, war and death, died Feb. 1 at her home in Krakow, Poland. She was 88.

Ms. Szymborska (whose full name is pronounced vee-SWAH-vah, shim-BOR-ska) was virtually unknown outside Poland before the Swedish Academy honored her with the 1996 Nobel Prize in literature.

Having spent nearly all her life in Krakow, Ms. Szymborska had endured the trauma of Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, the carnage of World War II and decades under communist rule, including martial law in the 1980s. The Swedish Academy lauded her poetry for the “ironic precision” with which it illuminated 20th-century history and the way it explored the modern world in “fragments of human reality.”

In her 1957 collection “Calling Out to Yeti,” she compared the late Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to the Abominable Snowman — a daring act that could have cost her her life only a year or two earlier. The work, poet and critic Edward Hirsch wrote, was a denunciation of the restrictions placed on human and artistic freedom under Communism.

The speaker of the verse, standing in the Himalayan Mountains, shouts to the Abominable Snowman:

Yeti, not only crimes

are possible among us.

Yeti, not all words

are death sentences.

In a memorable poem that appeared decades later, “Hitler’s First Photograph,” Ms. Szymborska mocked the image of Hitler as a baby (“And who’s this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?”).

Ms. Szymborska shunned the idea of being a political poet, though she recognized the personal could bleed into the political while living under a communist regime.

“When I was young, I had a moment of believing in the communist doctrine,” she told Hirsch in 1996. “I wanted to save the world through communism. Quite soon, I understood that it doesn’t work, but I’ve never pretended it didn’t happen to me.

“At the very beginning of my creative life, I loved humanity,” she continued. “I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon, I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind. There’s no need to love humanity, but there is a need to like people. Not love, just like. This is the lesson I draw from the difficult experiences of my youth.”

In other poems, she deconstructed seemingly ordinary concerns. In one, called “Writing a Résumé,” she used the image of a simple typed page to convey how little people can know about one another.

Concise, well-chosen facts are de rigueur.

Landscapes are replaced by addresses,

shaky memories give way to unshakable dates.

Of all your loves, mention only the marriage;

of all your children, only those who were born.

In another poem, “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” she reflected on the grief of loss and death from the perspective of a pet.

Die — you can’t do that to a cat.

Since what can a cat do

in an empty apartment?