Critical Essay | Critical Review by Alice-Catherine Carls

Critical Review by Alice-Catherine Carls

SOURCE: A review of Poezje=Poems, in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 3, Summer, 1991, p. 519.

[In the following review, Carls detects "a grim reminder of taboos that are still bridling Polish society" in Poezji = Poems.]

Polish publishers have a tradition of publishing original works written in foreign languages. The present volume, a reprint of a 1981 bilingual selection of Wislawa Szymborska's verse (Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems), belongs to that category. Given the present shortage of paper in Poland and the resultant price tag of 2,500 zlotys—a student's entire monthly stipend in the 1970s—such an undertaking can only be justified by Szymborska's status as one of the finest postwar Polish poets and by the desire to acknowledge her popularity abroad.

Surprisingly missing from the Polish edition, however, are the comments and the bibliographic note contained in the American edition; the Polish volume remains silent as well about...
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