Selected Poetry (Wiersze wybrane)

About the Author:Wisława Szymborska (1923–2012) was a poet, columnist, translator, collage artist, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. She studied Polish philology (from 1945) and sociology (from 1946) at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. In 1948, she married poet Adam Włodek (whom she divorced in 1954), and in 1967 she became involved with prose writer and poet Kornel Filipowicz. After Filipowicz’ death in 1990, Szymborska wrote one of her poetic masterpieces, the poem-lamentation Cat in an Empty Flat (Kot w pustym mieszkaniu). Starting in 1950, Szymborska belonged to the Polish United Workers’ Party, quitting again in 1966 as a gesture of solidarity with Leszek Kołakowski, a philosopher and reformer who had been expelled from the party. In 1975 she signed the Memoriał 59, an open letter by dissenting intellectuals against proposed changes in the Constitution of the Polish People’s Republic.