Volume 43, Number 7 · April 18, 1996
Subversive Activities
By Edward Hirsch
View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems
by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak, translated by Clare Cavanagh
Harcourt Brace, 214 pp., $20.00; $12.00(paper)
Wislawa Szymborska, with Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rózewicz, is one of the major living Polish poets of the generation after Milosz. Of the four Szymborska is the least well-known in America, perhaps because she has remained in Poland, and because she shuns the public eye. Little is known about her private life; she has rarely been interviewed. Yet, as in the case of Elizabeth Bishop, her reticence is accompanied by considerable literary ambition. Like Herbert, she has mounted in her work a witty and tireless defense of individual subjectivity against collectivist thinking, and her poems, like his, are slyly subversive in a way that compels us to reconsider received opinion. In both, the rejection of dogma becomes the basis of a canny personal ethics.
Review, 2832 words
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