SOURCE: Carpenter, John R. “Three Polish Poets, Two Nobel Prizes.” Kenyon Review 20, no. 1 (winter 1998): 153-56.

In the following excerpt, Carpenter evaluates the underlying themes in Szymborska's poetry and studies the subtle differences between translations of her poems.

When the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska won the Nobel Prize for Literature in late 1996, [Czeslaw] Milosz was one of the first to congratulate her, telephoning from California. Szymborska's work was not well known in the West, but soon after the announcement of the prize, several translations of her poetry were published to fill the gap. Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Magnus Krynski and Robert Maguire, was put out in a new paperback edition by Princeton University Press, and these are the most literal, faithful renderings of her work. They are a good place for a reader to make the acquaintance of this remarkable poet.

The critic...