Wislawa Szymborska

Translated with Notes by Joanna Trzeciak

Miracle Fair

Selected Poems of Wislawa Szymborska

"Miracle Fair is Szymborska at her very best."—Harvard Book Review END

Winner of the Heldt Prize for Translation. A new translation of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, with an introduction by Czeslaw Milosz. This long-awaited volume samples the full range of Wislawa Szymborska's major themes: the ironies of love, the wonders of nature's beauty, and the illusory character of art. Szymborska's voice emerges as that of a gentle subversive, self-deprecating in its wit, yet graced with a gift for coaxing the extraordinary out of the ordinary.

"What Szymborska calls 'the joy of writing' also becomes, in this book, the joy of reading."—Edward Hirsch

Wislawa Szymborska was born in Western Poland in 1923. Her poems have been translated (and published in book form) in 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, and is the1996 Nobel Laureate in Literature. Joanna Trzeciak's translations have appeared in The New Yorker and other magazines. Trzeciak received the Heldt Prize for translation of this volume. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

November 2002 / paperback / ISBN 0-393-32385-4 / 6" x 8" / 176 pages / Poetry