SOURCE: Gömöri, George. Review of View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, by Wisława Szymborska. World Literature Today 71, no. 2 (spring 1997): 415.

In the following review of View with a Grain of Sand, Gömöri generally approves of Stanisław Barańczak's and Clare Cavanagh's English translations of Szymborska's “conceptualist” poems.

The award of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature to Wisława Szymborska took most people by surprise. Outside her native Poland relatively few poetry lovers—or even critics for that matter—had heard anything about Szymborska, although two of her verse collections had been translated into English. In England, Forest Books published People on a Bridge in 1990, and in the United States Harcourt Brace was responsible for a 1995 collection which has now been reproduced in paperback form by an eminent British publishing house. View with a Grain of Sand provides the best introduction in...