Wisława Szymborska : a Stockholm conference : May 23-24, 2003

THE ARTICLES PUBLISHED in this volume were presented at an international conference dedicated to Wistawa Szymborska’s poetry. The contributions from outstanding scholars and translators, specializing in Szymborska, from Denmark, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Norway and the USA focus on Szymborska’s poetry from many perspectives and theoretical/philosophical standpoints. Some contributors study Szymborska’s entire production in the context of Polish modernism or the political development in Poland after the Second World War, others look at it from a gender (and even queer) perspective, yet others try to discover the linguistic, thematic or metaphysic structures which organise (or maybe disorganise) her poetry, poetry collections or single poems. This poetry, full of paradoxes, brilliant surprises and profound philosophical inquiries (which are often questioned as well) puts the scholar/reader in a very uncomfortable, paradoxical situation: he or she has to grasp something that does not allow any grasping and hates the ones who grasp. The contributors are well aware of this fact and in many different ways they try to wrestle, each and everyone, with these paradoxes. This volume is the first book in English on Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish 1996 Nobel Prize-winner in Literature.