The Mozart of Poetry

There was something unspeakable or unknown gnawing at my heart as I landed in Poznan, an old city in western Poland, early this March. The sky was wan and ashy, and the air cold and thin.

Coming from a festival of colours and the din and cacophony of sounds and noises in India, and from streets milling with people, I found the streets of Poznan empty and deserted. In the last vestiges of winter, the trees were still without leaves with dark, slender branches looking upwards.

Gerard Ronge, a young and amiable man from Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU), was waiting for me as I came from the airport. In the next 10 days he was to be my guide in the city.

As we drove out of the airport towards my hotel, I looked around at the buildings, the lean trees and the statues, but mostly at the streets with almost no pedestrians.

The leanness of the streets reminded me of the ‘chiselled’ and lean lines of Wisława Szymborska, the Nobel-winning poet who was born in a remote village, 20 kilometres from the city, a century ago today.

As we were driving to the hotel, I asked Gerard for a favour. He looked at me. “Please take me to Szymborska’s birthplace Kornik.” Gerard’s eyes had a sudden glint. “Sure, sure…dobra!” he said.

It was Manu Remakanth, professor of English literature at the University of Kerala, and an ardent lover of world poetry, who years ago introduced me to the Polish poet. I was immediately struck by its subjective, personal note and the economy of words; still, there was a sardonic smile tucked somewhere between the lines.

I mostly read and reread the late American poet Jane Kenyon for the simplicity of diction, the pastoral and day-to-day imagery, and the personal point of view. But Szymborska, though she wrote about rural life, cannot be categorised as a poet of the villages. True, she loved to be away from the hustle and bustle of the city and away from the glare of the world. Yet she wrote about the nuances of urban life or rather reflected the many facets of it.

Szymborska didn’t write the ‘we’ but the ‘I’. She distilled all that she saw and observed into fine threads of subjective poetry, lacerating the readers’ mind subtly yet sharply, leaving them bleeding.

Personal is universal, and personal is powerful—both poets prove this through their simple yet powerful poetry.

Szymborska lived under two occupations—the German and the Russian. Though her early poems supported communism, she soon moved away and regretted it as a mistake in her youth.

She lived through the war.

In ‘The End and the Beginning’, she writes so powerfully about the ruins of the war with such simplicity that it haunts you for a long time.

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

 Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

 Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

Magdalena Filipczuk, Acting Director of the Polish Institute Delhi, who as a student of Polish philology in Jagiellonian University in Krakow had met Szymborska, says: “What I love in her the most is the philosophical depth of her poetry. She almost never referred to philosophers but engaged in serious conversation with them. The world is a puzzle for her. She thinks always for herself and captures reflection in most lapidary Polish haiku.”

Szymborska was an extremely private person. When she won the Nobel for literature in 1996, she was away in her private place in Zakopane, and no reporter could get her on the phone. She didn’t take any calls, preferring to finish her lunch privately. Finally, it was another Polish Noble laureate, Czesław Miłosz, who was a friend of hers, who encouraged her to speak to the media. Calling the Nobel prize “Stockholm Tragedy”, Szymborska found the sudden global fame too much to handle. After speaking to the reporters she withdrew into a more remote place, hoping no media would reach her.

The opening line of her Nobel acceptance speech, one of the shortest acceptance speeches, was an example of her wit and humour. “They say the first line of any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one’s behind me, anyway,” she said in her beautiful speech called ‘The Poet and the World’.

“Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating ‘I don’t know.’ Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realise that this particular answer was pure makeshift that’s absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their ‘oeuvre,’” said Szymborska, whom the Nobel committee called the “Mozart of Poetry”.

Though she didn’t cherish reading her own poems, they have inspired musicians in Poland and other countries. Popular Polish singer Łucja Prus performed a rendition of Szymborska’s ‘Nothing Twice’ at Sopot International Song Festival in 1965, making it so popular that singers like Kara Jackowska gave their own rendition in the 1990s.

Though it was her poetry that was published all around the world, Szymborska wrote prose as well. Her column ‘Non-Required Reading’ appeared in many newspapers, and was compiled into a volume under the same title. The columns explored an eclectic mix of her interests like absent-minded professors to demonisation of smokers in the US.

The poet was also known for the postcard collages she made and sent to her friends. She began making them in late 1960s because she was unhappy with those available then. Szymborska, who died in 2012 at the age of 88, was also an avid collector of ‘quirky objects’.

Alena Aniskiewicz, writer and a researcher in Polish culture, writes about the poet’s habit of collecting stuff she liked: “Commenting on Szymborska’s habit of collecting trinkets in her small Kraków flat, Michał Rusinek, Szymborska’s longtime secretary and the president of the Szymborska Foundation, underscores the poet’s appreciation of drawers. Filled with various kitschy objects, Szymborska’s apartment was nicknamed ‘the drawer’ by her friends. Such storage housed her collection of quirky objects, many obtained from friends – a pig with a music box in its tail, a lighter in the shape of a submarine, a miniature chest of drawers from Czesław Miłosz. She also collected cuttings for her collage projects, and drawer upon drawer was filled with stacks of cut-out heads, amusing texts, and decorative embellishments.”

Filipczuk says: “I visited this very special place – Szymborska’s flat – when Ukrainian poet and translator, Natalia Belczenko, at that time war refugee, was staying there in 2022 thanks to hospitality of Szymborska Foundation. Szymborska played special part in my life. When I studied Polish Philology in Jagiellonian University (2003-2008) my master and advisor in both literature interpretation and theory of literature was prof. Stanisław Balbus, author of several books and many articles on Wisława Szymborska. He was her close friend and for many years neighbour as they all lived in famous Krupnicza 22, called “dom literatów”.

Krupnicza Street in Krakow is a unique place in the world as it had become a heaven for homeless writers after the war. In the years 1945-1996, over a hundred writers lived there (including Szymborska, Kisielewski, Mrożek, Różewicz and Gałczyński).

“[Therefore,] Szymborska was very much present not only theoretically during my studies but also as persona—I attended to at least two meetings in which she was present. Though very famous among students and scholars of Krakow, she was always very shy. I remember that I thought to myself its very accurate when scholars from Jagiellonian titled journal dedicated to her ‘Szymborska private and embarrassing.’

“Thanks to discussions on her poems with friends from India I can rediscover her in beautiful, transparent English translations. That world of Stanisław Balbus, Tadeusz Nowak, Wisława Szymborska, Kornel Filipowicz was already fading in my youth but it’s my precious memory. It shaped my sensitivity and my reading habits. Anyone visiting Krakow can still feel this old world has never entirely died,” she says.

**

The village of Kornik has less than 10,000 residents. It is so quiet that you can hear tremors in your own breath.

Gerard parked the car in the small clearing in front Szymborska’s red-tiled house, where was she born in 1923. Her family moved to Krakow soon, and she lived the rest of her life in the now UNESCO City of Literature. There was no one in the house. We walked down to Lake Kornik behind the house. A wind blew, leafless tress shivered, dimples appeared on the grey waters of the lake. We walked along the Szymborska Promenade behind her house. The walkway zigzagged, and bent away. On the side there were stone benches, and on one of them sat a metal statue of the poet’s cat from ‘Cat in an Empty Apartment’. It sat on a couple of metal sheaves on which the poem was etched. At the edge of the bench stood a bronze statue of the poet, in her walking attire, looking at the cat with a pregnant smile.

My heart beat faster.

The cat found the apartment empty, and its owner missing, probably dead. I, the reader, found the poet’s house empty, and the poet dead, but living through her poetry.

Manu Remakanth. The End and the BeginningNobel-winning poetPolandWisława Szymborska