De la mort sans exagérer : poèmes : 1957-2009

When the Nobel Prize was awarded in 1996, Wislawa Szymborska's name was not, to say the least, very familiar to poetry readers, except in her native Poland. This sudden recognition was both surprising and justified. Surprising because Szymborska had always been completely out of step with any public or media scene, but justified because her work appeared singular, without equivalent, achieving the rare feat of using a writing style free of obscurities or formal affectations while addressing and developing the most profoundly philosophical and metaphysical themes. Another remarkable characteristic is the absence of heaviness, often accompanied by a dispassionate irony, and a sense of tragedy translated into quasi-pleasantry, which the title of this anthology illustrates excellently: "On Death Without Exaggeration." There is in Wislawa Szymborska a kind of happy disenchantment or happiness without illusion that, far from banishing great questions, continually throws them into the heart of everyday life. In this respect, she is a great disruptor of thought patterns, norms, and habits. With a constant art of the wink that, in a single movement, reassures and profoundly disturbs: There is no life that, even for a brief moment, is not immortal.