Miracle Fair: Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska
Written by Wislawa Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak
Forward by Czeslaw Milosz

This long-awaited volume samples the full range of Nobel Prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska's major themes: the ironies of love, history lessons unlearned, our parochial human perspective, humanity's place in the cosmos, and the illusory character of art. Szymborska's voice emerges as that of a humanitarian graced with a gift for coaxing the extraordinary out of the ordinary in life and language.

Winner of the Heldt Prize for Translation in Slavic Studies

"Wislawa Szymborska's poems are themselves a kind of miracle fair--the festival of a ruthlessly skeptical intelligence called back in wonderment to the world--and Joanna Trzeciak brings to them a fresh vocabulary of understanding, a quick linguistic agility, and a keen poetic intelligence. What Szymborska calls 'the joy of writing' also becomes, in this book, the joy of reading."
EDWARD HIRSCH

"Miracle Fair shows how a great poet takes the intractable givens of experience and turns them into a gift."
Providence Sunday Journal

WISLAW SZYMBORSKA was born in Western Poland in 1923. Her poems have been translated into many international languages. She is the Goethe Prize winner (1991) and Herder Prize winner (1995). She has a degree of Honorary Doctor of Letters of Poznan University (1995). In 1996 she received the Polish PEN Club prize. Szymborska is the winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature, she lives in Krakow.

JOANNA TRZECIAK's translations have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines. Trzeciak received the Heldt Prize for translation of this volume. She teaches at Reed College and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Publishing House: W.W. Norton & Company, New York 2002
Softcover book measuring 5.5" x 8.2"
176 pages, biographical note
English Language Version

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