Details
Synopsis
Poems from the 1996 Nobel Laureate for literature.
| Size | | Length: | 214 pages | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.8 in | | Thickness: | 1.0 in | | Weight: | 9.6 oz |
Publisher's Notes
First Line: ""I borrow weighty words
Then labor heavily so that they might seem light.""
Industry Reviews
"No lyric writer has ever been more confident of the universality of human response. Szymborska writes not for Poles alone, nor for women alone, nor for the 20th century alone: she believes fiercely in a common epistemology and a common ethic, at least within the Western culture she writes from and to...The universality of suffering is Szymborska's chief life-theme, and reiterative narration (interspersed with epigram) is her usual rhetorical mode...In a time when it is being metaphysically denied that any human universals exist, it is salutary to read Szymborska on the ancientness of human evil. Mercifully, Szymborska also notes the perpetual resurgence of hope and the deep rewards of human attachment."
New Republic - Helen Vendler (01/01/1996)
"Wislawa Szymborska is not only one of the finest poets living today, but also one of the most readable. In these dazzling new translations Baranczak and Cavanagh convey the full range of her wit and humor in poems that read as if they were written in English."
Bookjacket - Charles Simic
"This is the third selection, by my count, of her poems in English. It is also the most dapper, the most fastidious, a crystallization entirely appropriate to this maker, whose poems depend so much on transparence. As with Cavafy, with Alberti, those saints of metaphorical intonation, everything depends on the envisioned vocalisation. Accumulated versions, over the years, reveal that Szymborska is a subtle, even subversive muse of vulnerability and a great European poet."
book jacket - Richard Howard
"These skillful new translations should widen the American audience for a Polish poet who is a modern European master...she captures the nightmarish contingency of human survival, and the human callousness toward nature, with an ironic elegance miraculously free of bitterness."
Vendler
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