How do we endure tyranny? The New Yorker

A few weeks ago, I finally made a long-awaited pilgrimage to the home of the great Polish poet Wislaw Szymborska, in Krakow. I have written extensively about Szymborska, who spent most of her life in Krakow and died there, at the age of eighty-eight, in 2012. Her poetry first struck me, as it did with so many others, like an anvil made of feathers – striking yet soft – after she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. There was no literary shrine I would have liked to go to more, to take off my spiritual hat and drink in the ocean of a poet beloved by readers. For its unique blend of humour, even more so than wit, beautifully blended with surprising turns of pensive contemplation. What’s more, I had to go there in the company of its former writer, Michal Rösink, and Mikael Choński, the poet and scholar. Both men teach at the ancient and hallowed Jagiellonian University (where Szymborska herself studied), and Choinski is also the author, however improbable it may seem, of a long, original, and ambitious history of history. new yorker, Recently published in Polish for Polish audiences.

Szymborska’s last home, where she lived for fourteen years, was a three-room apartment in a residential neighborhood about twenty minutes from the city center. It seemed to me very modest, if not demanding, although the frowns of my Polish friends when I volunteered this idea made me realize that in Communist-era Krakow, it would have been considered rather grandiose. But it is certain that the room in which it happened, where I wrote poetry, was as modest as any college dorm room, with a small single bed next to the small desk in which I wrote. (She lived there alone. She was married briefly, after World War II, and then had a long love affair with the short story writer Kornel Filipowicz; their collected letters, which should be available in English, were bestsellers in Poland, and were published in Spain and Italy in translation.)

In that little writing room, we talked about the great poet—about her chain-smoking and her love of silly puns, quaint town names, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, which she delighted in when it came to Krakow, much to the chagrin of her more sensitive friends. (However, there is a stroganoff with dumplings called Szymborska at her favorite restaurant in old Krakow. Which Delicious.) Although the talk was about the details of life, the shadow that hung over our conversation, as one commented over that life, was intently political.

Szymborska was not a political poet in any conventional sense, but she was one and the great, insofar as she strove to express, with charm and purpose, the way in which people seek power and pleasure in their social lives—to increase their own benefits, as the drier political philosophers say—while engaging with family, friends, lovers, and fellow citizens in the daily struggle for perseverance. Not everything He gets engaged Poetry Must Be From the Battlefront: In “The Catcher in the Rye,” Allie, Holden’s little brother, who copies poetry onto his baseball glove, is asked who is the better war poet, Rupert Brooke, who actually fought in a battle, or Emily Dickinson, who did not? Clearly, in Salinger’s view, the correct answer was Emily.