Wiersze wszystkie

The books of even outstanding poets can usually be gathered on one shelf. It would appear that the oeuvre of Wisława Szymborska also needs the same amount of space. She published small, diligently-edited volumes of poetry across large intervals of time. Thirteen were published – beginning with her debut collection This Is Why We Live in 1954 – until 2012, although the last was published posthumously. The latter bore the title Enough. Ryszard Krynicki completed it with partly unfinished manuscripts. However, in 2014, some earlier poems gathered under the title The Black Song were published. But only now, on the hundredth anniversary of Wisława Szymborska’s birth, may we read all her poems, including the ones she discarded, didn’t complete or didn’t regard as worth being reprinted.

This jubilee volume is a major event in Polish literary life, not only owing to its amazing size (794 pages) and its very thorough editing. And not just due to the excellent afterword by Wojciech Ligęza, An Incomprehensible Life, which discusses synthetically all the main traits of her work. Remarkable for readers is the fact that the book reveals the entire mode of work of the poet, known for her meticulous work on her texts. Perfect poems are mixed up here with less successful ones or various iterations of texts. Profound and wise works are placed alongside humorous, satirical or trifling ones. Earlier avant-garde poems accompany completely traditional, rhyming, easy ones. Various genres and moods are on show here.

Would the poet be happy for her legacy to be thus presented? For all her work is being shown as her collected output. As a process, a road fraught with searching, discovery, multiple masterpieces, but also slips. The question should, however, be posed differently: can one pay greater homage to a creator in the year of their jubilee than by a diligently-selected collection of marks made by their hand on paper; the traces of a vast wealth of thought and feeling rendered in words? After reading All The Poems we have no doubt that by way of this edition, Wisława Szymborska’s oeuvre loses nothing of her mastery, and by revealing difficulties in the “search for the word”, gains in authenticity.