The Routledge World Companion to Polish Literature

The aim of this article is to analyze Wisława Szymborska's poem Writing a Résumé, written in the late 1970s, which is a reflection on a seemingly simple event of filling in an official form. By juxtaposing incongruous details and playing with antinomies and paradoxes, the Polish poetess shows the process of reducing an individual biography to impersonal official information, prompting the reader to reflect on the relationship between authenticity and formality, intimate and official biography. The author tries to answer the question of why this poem, undoubtedly referring to the Polish realities of the time (including the phenomenon of censor-ship and self-censorship), has such a universal meaning that it has become one of Szymborska's most popular works worldwide. The author analyses Writing A Résumé against the background of its foreign and Italian reception, emphasizing not only its links with the 20th-century poetic tradition, but also its affinity with the technique of artistic and verbal collage, well known to the Surrealists, with whom Szymborska shares a desire to reverse perspective and acquire new, unexpected meaning.

Central European Literary Studies · History · Language and Culture · Polish Historical and Cultural Studies