Wislawa Szymborska: THE END AND THE BEGINNING
Wislawa Szymborska was born in Prowent, Poland on July 2, 1923. She moved with her family to Krakow (the image used on the top of each page is an image of Krakow) in 1931. She lived there until her death in 2012. When World War II began in 1939, Szymborska went to underground classes to continue her education. In 1943, she had to work as a railroad employee to avoid being deported to Germany as a forced laborer. That was when she started writing and drawing. Beginning in 1945, Szymborska started studying Polish language and literature before switching to sociology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. There she became involved in the local writing scene, and met and was influenced by Czesław Miłosz. In March 1945, she published her first poem "Szukam słowa" (Looking for a word) in the daily paper and her poems continued to be published in various newspapers and periodicals for a number of years. In 1948 she quit her studies without a degree, due to her poor financial status, and the same year, she married poet Adam Włodek, whom she divorced in 1954. Around the time of her marriage she was working as a secretary for an educational biweekly magazine as well as an illustrator. Her first book was to be published in 1949, but it did not pass censorship, due to it not meeting socialist requirements. Szymborska was loyal to the People's Republic of Poland (PRL), like many other intellectuals. After writing and publishing some poems on Lenin and socialism, she joined the Polish United Workers' Party. Like all other Polish writers at the time, Szymborska eventually became estranged from socialist ideals. Szymborska then published other books and poems, and also joined the staff of the literary review magazine Życie Literackie (Literary Life), as well as other magazines. She left the Polish United Workers' Party in 1966. She even wrote for a period of time under the pseudonym "Stańczykówna" in Poland and France in the 1980s. Szymborska also translated French literature into Polish, in particular Baroque poetry and the works of Agrippa d'Aubigné. In 1996, she recieved the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died on February 1, 2012 of lung cancer, and was supposedly was still writing up to her death.