To Think the Unthinkable: On the Work of Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska

“Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words / then labor heavily so that they may seem light,” Wisława Szymborska writes in “Under One Small Star.” Szymborska kept her literary labors strictly offstage. She didn’t lecture on her craft. She didn’t devote essays to the art of writing. “I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion I’m not very good at it,” she confesses in her notably brief Nobel Lecture. The poet’s work, she continues, is “hopelessly unphotogenic”:

Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes.

She was speaking from experience. Her favorite writing utensil was the trash can: That’s where ninety percent of her work ended up, one friend remarked.

Lightness doesn’t come easily. That’s the lesson we take from the marvelous title poem of this little volume. The acrobat “works to seize this swaying world” by way of

Arduous ease,

watchful agility,

and calculated inspiration…

Why? Because he’s “missing wings.” Hence the hesitation that marks its oddly repetitive line breaks:

[he moves] more swiftly than

than his body’s weight, which once again

again is late for its own fall.

Will he make it this time? We hold our breath and wait.

Trivia matters. Frivolity counts. The ordinary is anything but. These are lessons Szymborska stresses throughout her work.

Poetry, Szymborska reminds us time and again, is likewise achieved without wings. The poet, a “clumsy ersatz angel” (“Stage Fright”), achieves her seemingly seamless effects only by way of the “hard shelleying” (ciężkie norwidy) she bemoans in “Poetry Reading.” Szymborska’s wordplay is the verbal equivalent of the trapeze artist’s gymnastics, or the contortions she replicates in careful, comic rhyme in “Bodybuilders’ Contest”: “The king of all is he who preens and wrestles / with sinews twisted into monstrous pretzels.” She loved puns, limericks, nonsense verse, and verbal silliness of all kinds. “In Praise of My Sister” celebrates the world’s nonpoets partly by way of the notoriously repetitive Polish poet Adam Macedoński, whom my cotranslator, Stanisław Barańczak, and I chose to evoke through a famous tongue-twister. “Rubber baby buggy bumpers”: Try saying that just once.

“So much world all at once, how it rustles and bustles! / Moraines and morays and morasses and mussels,” she exclaims in “Birthday.” Her playful language scrambles to keep pace with a reality that forever outstrips it. Seizing a swaying world in words is, as it turns out, a Herculean task. “Nothing can ever happen twice,” she warns in one early lyric;

In consequence, the sorry fact

is that we arrive here

improvised

and leave without the chance to practice.

Stanisław and I tried to mimic her intentionally imperfect, erratic rhymes throughout the poem. Why should rhymes line up perfectly when reality itself never does?

No day copies yesterday,

no two nights can teach what bliss

is in precisely the same way,

with exactly the same kisses.

Even the most seemingly mundane object demands verbal fireworks of the first order in Szymborska’s poetic universe. Her celebration of the unassuming “Onion” is a case in point:

Nature’s rotundest tummy,

its greatest success story,

the onion drapes itself in its

own aureoles of glory.

We hold veins, nerves and fat,

secretions’ secret sections.

Not for us such idiotic

onionoid perfection.

“Cebulasta, cebulowa cebuliczność”: We followed Szymborska’s lead in generating as many neologisms as we could while translating the poem. Since what is the onion itself but a self-enclosed, self-generating string of onion puns?

Trivia matters. Frivolity counts. The ordinary is anything but. These are lessons Szymborska stresses throughout her work. The world itself, she reminds us, is a “miracle fair”:

A run-of-the-mill miracle:

winds mild to moderate

turning gusty in storms.

A miracle in the first place:

cows will be cows.

Last but not least she gives us

An extra miracle, extra and ordinary:

the unthinkable

can be thought.

Striving to think the unthinkable: This might be one way to view the trajectory of Szymborska’s work. “Whatever inspiration is,” she says in her Nobel lecture, “it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” Szymborska herself learned the value of not knowing the hard way. She began her poetic career after World War II, when Soviet power in its peculiarly harsh Stalinist incarnation first took hold in Poland. She came of age during the Nazi occupation, and like many of her generation, she longed for certainty to replace the chaos that had consumed her country for the better part of a decade. Like many other young writers, she wholeheartedly embraced the new state’s ideology.

A poem written several years after Stalin’s death marks her break from the rigid doctrine she had earlier espoused. “Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition” (1957): The poem rates imagination over ideology from the title on. The speaker seeks to entice the mythical, mountain-dwelling snowman back to earth by way of everything from the sublime to the ridiculous:

Yeti, down there we’ve got Wednesday,

bread and alphabets.

Two times two is four.

Roses are red there,

and violets are blue.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Yeti, we’ve got Shakespeare there.

Yeti, we play solitaire

and violin. At nightfall,

we turn lights on, Yeti.

Szymborska’s fellow writers saw this poem both as a tacit, post-humous apostrophe to Stalin himself and a rebuke to any worldview that insists on the big picture at the expense of particular lived experience with its inevitable missteps, mishaps, and misunderstandings. In one of her rare public talks, she recalls a film in which Charlie Chaplin can’t shut an overflowing suitcase and simply snips off all the bits and pieces that don’t fit. “That’s how reality fares when we try to squeeze it into the suitcase of ideology,” she remarks. But the bits and pieces matter; they are the stuff that make up our lives, that make up life as such. It all depends on your point of view.

And what point of view should that be? Manifold, or so the poetry suggests. The Yeti of “Notes” sees humanity from on high and thus misses all the oddities and splendors of ordinary human life. But aren’t we humans guilty of the same failing? The speaker of “Seen from Above” contemplates the ways we segregate the deaths of other creatures from our loftier demises. The poet spots a dead beetle on a path and ironically dissects this elevated perspective:

One glance at it will do for

meditation, Clearly nothing much has

happened to it. Important matters are

reserved for us, for our life and death, a

death

that always claims the right of way.

We look down on the beetle just as the Yeti looks down on us. Szymborska draws upon the semantic peculiarities of her native tongue to underscore the point. Polish uses different verbs to segregate animals’ endings from more dignified human conclusions: “nie umierają, a zdychają,” “they aren’t deceased, they’re dead.” Language both illuminates and limits. “We call it a grain of sand, / but it calls itself neither grain nor sand,” as she reminds us in “View with a Grain of Sand.”

The storylines we shape for ourselves, be they public or private, vast or intimate, are by necessity partial at best. Setting the story straight means getting it wrong, her poems suggest.

“His speech’s personal best is the conditional,” one speaker concludes in “No End of Fun”; some visitor from outer space apparently seeks to summarize our puzzling species. The poem is itself proof of Szymborska’s speculative capacities: “what if” and “I don’t know” go hand in hand in her work. Such otherworldly speakers surface periodically in other poems. In “One Version of Events,” a set of beings from outer space, or perhaps a group of disembodied souls, evaluates the options down below:

If we’d been allowed to choose,

we’d probably have gone on forever.

The bodies that were offered didn’t fit,

and wore out horribly.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Questions naturally arose, e.g.

who needs the painful birth

of a dead child

and what’s in it for a sailor

who will never reach the

shore.

“One Version of Events”: The title itself tells a story that Szymborska explores throughout her work. Each version of events is incomplete. The storylines we shape for ourselves, be they public or private, vast or intimate, are by necessity partial at best. Setting the story straight means getting it wrong, her poems suggest. A clear picture is comforting precisely because it deceives. “I like maps, because they lie,” she concludes in a late poem:

Because they give no access to the vicious truth.

Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly

they spread before me a world

not of this world.

(“Map”)

Elsewhere she quietly dismantles love stories and war stories alike:

They’re both convinced

that a sudden passion joined them.

Such certainty is beautiful,

but uncertainty is more beautiful still.

(“Love at First Sight”)

After every war someone

has to tidy up. Things won’t pick

themselves up, after all.

So begins her poem “The End and the Beginning,” which traces the messy, unsettling process by which war zones return to something resembling normalcy after “all the cameras have gone / to other wars”, a phrase that haunts me each time I turn on the news. Beginnings and endings are themselves a kind of tidying up that Szymborska challenges time and again: “Perhaps all fields are battlefields,” she reminds us elsewhere (“Reality Demands”).

Szymborska leaves one storyline largely untouched in her own work: that of her own life. Reading through her poems, you may glean a few unremarkable details: She was a child, she had a sister, she had parents, she fell in love, she gave reluctant readings, she had friends. Is Poland ever even mentioned? Not that I remember. When Stanisław and I wanted to take the title of our first volume from her poem “Cat in an Empty Apartment,” she objected. The piece was too personal, she said. How so? The mystified cat appears to be the only mourner in this oddly animal-centric elegy:

Footsteps on the staircase,

but they’re new ones.

The hand that puts fish on the

saucer has changed, too.

Wait a moment, though. Whose footsteps are these, and whose hand? The dead man apparently left someone behind to tend to his orphaned pet. And that someone carefully notes that she (so I assume) is not the only grieving being in the household. The cat’s baffled loss takes center stage while the human mourner remains on the sidelines. This was how Szymborska chose to commemorate the loss of her own great love; quietly, obliquely, and with vast imaginative generosity.

This volume’s editors wisely decided to disregard chronological beginnings and endings in assembling this volume: Straight lines were never Szymborska’s strong suit. The poet who wrote the lighthearted “Epitaph” (1958) that closes this selection still had many decades of life ahead of her. But her mocking self-elegy anticipates the way she would orchestrate her own last rites. A world-renowned Polish artist typically goes to his or her final resting place accompanied by the patriotic strains of Chopin’s “Marche Funébre.” Szymborska chose to be laid to rest as her beloved Ella Fitzgerald crooned “Black Coffee” through a loud-speaker. Her admirers not only place wreaths and candles on the grave site. They sometimes show their respect with the occasional cigarette, presumably so that the lifelong smoker could continue her habit after death. She would have liked that.

____________________________

From The Acrobat by Wisława Szymborska. Translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh. Copyright © 2026 by The Wisława Szymborska Foundation. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.