In the years that followed, she has become one of the most popular poets in English, "My identifying features / rapture and despair" ("Sky") translated in a syntactically clear and accessible style by the team of Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak (more on them later). Nevertheless, Szymborska earned the Nobel with a relatively modest body of poetry, one that is less baroque and immediately political than Milosz's and less classical and bitingly ironic than Herbert's, but which is by turns curious, empathetic, accessible, unflinching in the face of suffering, and astonished in the face of creation. Though known in Polish literary circles and through her Samizdat contributions, she lacked the public profile of her countryman, the poet Czeslaw Milosz, who received the Nobel Prize in 1980, or of Zbigniew Herbert, who was viewed as the next Polish poet likely to receive the honor. It came as something of a surprise in 1996 when Szymborska received the Nobel Prize in Literature. In this remarkable, final collection, Szymborska (who died in 2012) proves herself as clear-headed as that later generation of cartographers, yet equally capable of creating lyric poems that seem worlds unto themselves, worlds that offer shelter to the most marginalized, weak, and mute members of society. Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
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