There are many treatises concerning the soul. Plato was not the first to write on the subject. From Greek philosophy and religion the soul wandered over to Christianity. According to this religion, the soul accompanies the body, which it inhabits for a short while in order to then return to its primary homeland embodied in areas of primary existence and truth. There are many treatises concerning the soul. Plato was not the first to write on the subject. Wisława (...) class='Hi'>Szymborska, in her collection of poems published in 2002 and titled A Moment, poses the most essential questions: Why does man exist? Why isn’t there nothingness? She also asks: What is the soul? Does man really possess a soul? What is the relationship between man and soul – to whom does the soul really belong? This is a treatise in the form of a poem which appears to be plain and modest, yet the questions it asks are fundamental. This interpretation aims to develop and translate from the language of poetry the religious and philosophical questions embraced by Szymborska’s poem. (shrink)

This essay examines the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska as sharing key similarities with modern feminist practice in science. Szymborska’s poetry invites such an analysis because of its interest in anthropology and the natural sciences, and because of its preoccupation with the creation, limitations, and effects of knowledge. I argue that Szymborska’s privileging of uncertainty, of the personal, the particular, and the ‘insignificant’, as well as her process- and question-oriented method of creating meaning aligns her with feminist science. (...) Szymborska’s poetry explores such key feminist ideals as contextualization of all knowledge, relationship of equality and unity of scientist and subject (expert and non-expert), coexistence of contradictions, and an emphasis on process and questioning rather than on knowledge and findings. Wislawa Szymborska practises in poetry the very same decentring of the patriarchal standards of expertise, objectivity, and absolute truth that is taking place in feminist science. (shrink)

My reading of the following poems Wieczór autorski [An Author Reading], from the volume Sól [Salt], 1962; and Trema [Stage Fright], from the volume Ludzie na moście [People on the Bridge], 1986, is an attempt to define, at least in outline, the essence of the transformation which has occurred in the works by the author of Koniec i początek [The End and the Beginning] over the last several dozen years. The essence of the transformation is gradualy opening of Wisława (...) Szymborska’s poems to the sphere of metaphysics or - as she herself put it in one of the interviews - a quest for ‘the less obvious which does exist in us, in our consciousness’. (shrink)

This essay examines the work of Ewa Lipska, who, since the publication of her first book in 1967, has been among the most acclaimed of recent Polish poets but less well known in the West than Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, or Adam Zagajewski. She is a philosophical poet, making frequent reference to the tradition of the Frankfurt School, in order to ironize the Enlightenment, Marxism, and Critical Theory, but also in order to assess the dangers of globalization. The (...) focus of the analysis is Lipska’s volume 1999, the linchpin of a poetic project that engages centuries of social systems (political, economic, scientific, technological, artistic) and their vocabularies in order to examine the viability of human knowledge and the motivations underlying its creation. (shrink)

There are not enough mouths to utterAll your fleeting names, O water.– Wisława Szymborska, “Water”Wisława Szymborska’s poetic take on water is driven by a paradox. On the one hand, the poem speaks...

Este texto sencillamente se ocupa de una relación, la relación entre poesía (o una forma de leer poesía) e infancia, cuando estas coinciden en alguien que de lunes a viernes trabaja en una escuela para niños y niñas de los 0 a los 3 años. Este texto sencillamente intenta comunicar una forma singular de mirar, donde la voz que escribe sólo funciona para hilvanar la voz de los que al frotar, dan calor. Un pequeño recorrido por Martin Heidegger, Wislawa (...) class='Hi'>Szymborska, Walter Benjamin, Alberto Caeiro, Dominique Sampiero, Clarice Lispector, Peter Handke, Jorge Larrosa y la vida/mirada cotidiana en una escuela infantil. Nada más. (shrink)

In her books Szymborska touches many diverte subjects but it is easy to notice her predilection for some topics with which she deals in her successive books of poems. Unplanned haphazard happenings, their category and their role in the life of the man, in reality and in the world, are her main preocupations. As our century has witnessed a breakthrough in indeterminacy due to surprising discoveries in natural sciences the question of haphazard happenings has become more important and intriguing. (...) It has a great fascination for artistics. W. Szymborska giving so much attention to the category of haphazards familiorizes the man with the reality in dissaway that can result in a chaos. In her poems influenced by natural sciences the category of haphazards is not only a leitmotif but also a fascinating enigma. For her casualness and situations resulting from chance are the main mechanism that controls the course of events. In her many poems she focuses on the mystery of haphazards and their inevitability. Her poem Wszelki wypadek (It Might Have Happened) is, perhaps, her first work where she doesn’t deal but with the role of haphazards played in the life of the man. She directs her attention to situations happening in unplanned or disorderly manner thus making possible to save one’s life. Haphazards not only can save the man’s life but they also determine the angle from which he sees the world where the haphazard is ruling. Haphazards can influence all the spheres that are important for the man. The world full of haphazards pictured in the poem is mosaic-like – a number of happenings, various possibilities for the course of particular events. The language describing those events matches the structure of composition. What is happening in the sphere of the language it is precisely reflected in the meaning. Her symmetric and precise structure of the poem results in a scheme called “the tree of decision” transformed by Szymborska in a “tree of possibilities”. In the poem Terrorysta, on patrzy (He is Watching, the Terrorist) the poetess tries to paint the ruthless mechanism of a haphazard meaning the life of people. A terrorist, after having planted a bomb in a bar, is watching people coming in and out of the bar. The whole poem is a silent question about the aim and the sense of the events impossible to understand for people who are involved in them. Szymborska’s latest book of poems (Koniec i początek, The End And The Beginning) confirms her strong interest in haphazards (especially in the poem Seans). The title of the poem is a metaphor between the casualness and the man. Again one focuses on the surprised man who cannot understand the sense of the events happening with his participation. The spectators are surprised because they don’t know the way the illusionist plays his tricks. Szymborska’s man is dependent on something over which he has no influence. He is the passive protagonist of events he takes part in. At the same time the category of haphazard stresses the joyful aspect of human existence. For Szymborska both haphazards are important: the one that threatens the man’s life and the other that makes possible to save his life. So the pessimism in the poem It Might Have Happened is balanced by optimism. The poetess, inspired by everyday world and new achievements in sciences, pictures a world where the haphazard and invitability coexist and integrate and interrelate. Szymborska, in her poetry, surmounts the contradiction between those categories. (shrink)