SOURCE: Osherow, Jacqueline. “‘So These Are the Himalayas’: The Poetry of Wisława Szymborska.” Antioch Review 55, no. 2 (spring 1997): 222-28.

In the following essay, Osherow takes delight in Szymborska's poetic imagination and view of the commonplace.

Let me begin by making a peculiar confession: I love reading poetry in translation. I suppose this has to do with the way you experience what you're reading as inaccessible, so that the poem, elusive as it necessarily is, becomes, itself, almost an object of poetic longing. But there are also less heady reasons for reading poems in languages we don't know. One can go on and on about what is not translatable in poetry—and certainly no dearth of eloquence has been expended on this subject—but I want to focus here (as indeed I must, since I don't know Polish) on what isn't lost in translation. It seems to me that...