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    A Study Guide for Wislawa Szymborska's "Conversation with a Stone"
    A Study Guide for Wislawa Szymborska's "Conversation with a Stone"
    A Study Guide for Wislawa Szymborska's "Conversation with a Stone"
    Ebook36 pages30 minutes

    A Study Guide for Wislawa Szymborska's "Conversation with a Stone"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    A Study Guide for Wislawa Szymborska's "Conversation with a Stone," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 2, 2016
    ISBN9781535821056
    A Study Guide for Wislawa Szymborska's "Conversation with a Stone"

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      A Study Guide for Wislawa Szymborska's "Conversation with a Stone" - Gale

      1

      Conversation with a Stone

      Wisława Szymborska

      1962

      Introduction

      Conversation with a Stone is one of the most widely read poems by 1996 Nobel Prize winner Wisława Szymborska. Published in 1962 in a collection called Salt, the poem is one of her earlier works. But it is often seen as a strong example of Szymborska's resistance to political and social ideologies, her accessible language, questioning poetic style and her detached lyric voice. Szymborska enjoys wild popularity in her native Poland.

      The idea of the self confronting the external world is played out in Conversation with a Stone by means of an imaginary dialogue between the speaker of the poem and a stone. The speaker knocks on the stone's door and asks the stone to see inside of it, and the stone refuses. Essentially, the speaker represents the human desire to know each detail of the world around us, and the stone represents the impossibility of knowing. For the stone, we find, has no door.

      Conversation with a Stone appears in Stanizław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh's 1995 award-winning translation of Szymborska, View with a Grain of Sand, published by Harcourt Brace & Company.

      Author Biography

      Szymborska was born on July 2, 1923 in a town in western Poland called Bnin (now Kornick.) Her family moved to Kraców in 1931, and Szymborska has remained there since—throughout the occupation of Poland during World War II and under the Soviet Communist state that controlled Poland until the mid-1980's. Much of her poetry reflects on the pain and political oppression of those years.

      Szymborska studied literature and sociology at the Jagiellonian University from 1945 to 1948. She made her literary debut in 1945 with her poem Szukam Slowa (Searching for a Word), published in the daily Dziennik Polski.

      Dlatego żyjemy (That's What We Live For), Szymborska's first collection of poems, appeared in 1952. It consisted of a highly revised version of a manuscript she had submitted four years earlier that had been rejected on the basis of being insufficiently socialist. Her second collection, Pytania zadawane sobie (Questions Put to Myself),

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