World Book Day

Wondering what book to read next? Looking for a book to motivate you? Keen to try a new author in English? We’d like to celebrate World Book Day by creating a new section in this blog that will help you discover your next read: Students recommend books to students.

Yolanda Ferro is a C2 student in Sar and also a member of our book club. In order to inspire you, Yolanda has chosen the work of a wonderful writer, Polish poetess Wislawa Szymborska:

I happened to learn about the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska back in 2002, when I was living in Krakow, Poland, the very same town she inhabited at that time and where she died in 2012, aged 88. Some years earlier, in 1996, she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality."

Surfing the net I came through this excerpt that I reckon perfectly expresses her uniqueness:

“Szymborska frequently employed literary devices such as ironic precision, paradox, contradiction and understatement, to illuminate philosophical themes and obsessions. (…). It is, however, important to note the ambiguity of her poetry. Although her poetry was influenced by her experiences, it is relevant across time and culture. She wrote from unusual points of view, such as a cat in the newly empty apartment of its dead owner. Her reputation rests on a relatively small body of work, fewer than 350 poems. When asked why she had published so few poems, she said: I have a trash can in my home.” 

Source

The two poems below will allow you to have a taste of what I find to be her profound and serene vision of existence, her joyful wisdom concerning life. When living in Poland, I spent many consecutive hours in her poems´ company. So, it is from my own experience that I can tell that her words have a very powerful "healing" effect:

"The Three Oddest Words"

 When I pronounce the word Future,

the first syllable already belongs to the past.

When I pronounce the word Silence,

I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,

I make something no non-being can hold.

 

"Possibilities"

I prefer movies.

I prefer cats.

I prefer the oaks along the Warta.

I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.

I prefer myself liking people

to myself loving mankind.

I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.

I prefer the color green.

I prefer not to maintain

that reason is to blame for everything.

I prefer exceptions.

I prefer to leave early.

I prefer talking to doctors about something else.

I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems

to the absurdity of not writing poems.

I prefer, where love’s concerned, nonspecific anniversaries

that can be celebrated every day.

I prefer moralists

who promise me nothing.

I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.

I prefer the earth in civvies.

I prefer conquered to conquering countries.

I prefer having some reservations.

I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.

I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages.

I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.

I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.

I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.

I prefer desk drawers.

I prefer many things that I haven’t mentioned here

to many things I’ve also left unsaid.

I prefer zeroes on the loose

to those lined up behind a cipher.

I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.

I prefer to knock on wood.

I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.

I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility

that existence has its own reason for being.

Thanks, Yolanda, for sharing the exquisite work of such an exceptional poetress. We're really moved by how wonderfully both poems capture the greatness of ordinary life.