Celebration of Wislawa Szymborska - The 92nd Street Y, New York

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Celebration of Wislawa Szymborska

Dec 17, 2015


Celebrate the life and work of Wislawa Szymborska upon publication of Map: Collected and Last Poems.

Renowned American poet Charles Simic will be joined by Szymborska's award-winning translator Clare Cavanagh; Szymborska's personal assistant, the writer and critic Michal Rusinek; and the poet and translator Krystyna Dabrowska, who won the first Wislawa Szymborska poetry prize in 2013.

Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012) is among Poland's most-read and best-loved poets. Her work spanned 60 years including the Second World War, the Communist period and the return of democracy after 1989. She began writing during the Second World War, and published her first poem in 1945. Her mature poetry emphasized human dignity and the wonder of the everyday, with a characteristic wit and humor.

The winner of many awards, Szymborska became Poland's fourth Nobel Prize for Literature laureate in 1996. The Nobel committee praised her "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality."

Map: Collected and Last Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) is a fitting monument to Szymborska's life and work. Gathering work from Szymborska's nearly 70 years of activity and rendered into beautiful English by Clare Cavanagh and the late Stanislaw Baranczak. The collection includes work never before published in English, including the entirety of Enough, her last publication published before her death.


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