The End and the Beginning

“The End and the Beginning,” or “Koniec i poczatek” as titled in the original Polish, was written by the Nobel Prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska. “The End and the Beginning” was published in 1993 in Szymborska’s collection of poetry of the same name, and details how the horrors of war are amplified in the aftermath of the conflict. Translators Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak first translated the poem from Polish into English for Szymborska’s Poems: New and Collected (1998). However, the most recent English translation of “The End and the Beginning” was written by Joanna Trzeciak, appearing in Szymborska’s 2001 collection, Miracle Fair. Szymborska’s poetry is rarely sentimental, and instead, favors irony and wit, examining deceptively simple domestic scenes in order to explicate their larger, societal truths.

Szymborska’s poetry is rife with social and political commentary, centering around the lives of everyday citizens. “The End and the Beginning” serves as a prime example of Szymborska’s fixation with the domestic, shedding light on the traumas experienced by post-war populations. The Polish history of World War II into the age of Stalinism was another major influence on Szymborska’s work (see: Contextual Analysis “Historical Context”), as it was World War II that halted her education as a young adult, entirely altering the landscape of her everyday life.

“The End and the Beginning” is a unique addition to the established genre of war poetry (see: Poem Analysis), examining war from the perspective of everyday citizens as opposed to soldiers in the heat of combat. Szymborska’s poem adds a necessary female voice into an otherwise male-dominated genre and reveals that war does not end when the last battle is fought; instead, war continues the cycle of violence in its aftermath.

Poet Biography

Polish poet, essayist, and translator Wisława Szymborska was born in Kórnik, Western Poland, in July of 1923. Szymborska and her family relocated to the city of Kraków eight years after her birth, where she attended university in her early adulthood. Szymborska studied Polish Literature and Sociology at the Jagiellonian University from 1945-1948. Her first publication, “I am Looking for a Word,” or

“Szukam Slowa” in the original Polish, appeared in The Polish Daily during Szymborska’s first year of university (1945), defining the beginning of her writing career. Szymborska worked as a columnist and poetry editor for the Kraków Literary Weekly from 1953-1981, where she continued to improve her craft, taking inspiration from the vivid academic, artistic, and cultural life that surrounded her in Kraków.

Szymborska’s poetry examines the domestic, finding significance in the everyday details of human existence. Her poems are marked with an individual style of simplicity: Szymborska’s use of language is modest, free of any bells and whistles, but is at the same time speculatively curious and complex in its subject matter. Much of her poetry questions commonly held social and political opinions, juxtaposing the biographical information of her subjects against relevant historical contexts. Szymborska’s work carefully articulates what domestic life looks like for marginalized members of society, exposing readers to perspectives that are otherwise silenced within mainstream media through her unique humor and ironic slant.

Szymborska’s poems are widely translated into multiple languages (including English, German, Italian, Swedish, and Hebrew to name a few), and her work appears in many international anthologies of Polish poetry. Szymborska published a total of 16 collections of poetry throughout her career. The most notable English translations are her collections People on a Bridge (1990), View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (1995), Miracle Fair (2001), and Monologue of a Dog (2005). In 1996, Szymborska received the Nobel Prize for Literature, lauded as an invaluable talent whose work shed light on the fragments of human reality no other poet was writing about at the time. She earned many other awards during her lifetime including the Goethe Prize (1991), the Herder Prize (1995), and the Polish PEN Club Prize (1996).

Szymborska passed away peacefully in February of 2012 at the age of 88 after battling lung cancer. In the year following her death (2013), the Wisława Szymborska Award was established: an annual, international literature prize presented by the poet’s own foundation to honor her legacy.

Poem Text

Szymborska, Wisława. “The End and the Beginning.” 2001. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Wisława Szymborska’s “The End and the Beginning” (translated from Polish into English by Joanna Trzeciak) examines the unequal burden of war on everyday citizens. Szymborska lived through World War II, and directly witnessed the aftershock of the conflict on her community in Kraków, Poland (see: Contextual Analysis “Historical Context”). As such, she is able to depict, in startlingly intimate detail, the physical and mental duress humanity collectively experiences in the wake of a mass global conflict. “The End and the Beginning” highlights the ways in which domestic life is violently disrupted post-war, and acts as a critique of class relations and the lack of media representation that exists after the physical combat of war is over. Szymborska asserts that war does not mark the end of suffering, but rather, is the cause of more, lasting despair that echoes throughout affected communities as they reconstruct their infrastructure from the ground up.

The last few stanzas also summarize the complicity of everyday citizens in bringing about the so-called end of war as it relates to forgetting or moving on. These citizens, depicted by those cleaning, and in the last stanza by someone loafing about in the grass, eventually find talk of war “dull” (Line 32). Stanza 8 also refers to old arguments as “rusted-out” and worthy now of the “garbage pile” (Lines 35-36). At the end of the poem, the person lying in the grass looks instead at clouds—an often-touted symbol for transience.