Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast.

Some of my regular listeners may recall that on a previous episode,

I talked about a Polish poet called Tadeushebrovsky,

and I talked then about translation and the problems of reading poetry in translation.

Today I'd like to look at the work of another Polish poet called Vyashava Zimburska.

And she was born in 1923 and died in 2012 at the age of 88.

She's something of a legend in Polish poetry, I think it's fair to say,

and she actually won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996.

I'll tell you, if you like, the motivation that was given.

They do a thing which explains why people have won the prize called the motivation.

This is what they said, that she won it, and I quote, for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.

And relax.

So I think that probably means that she writes about small things in order to illustrate big things,

but it might not mean that.

I read a lot of reviews of poetry in newspapers and magazines.

When I say I read a lot of reviews of poetry, I read the first three paragraphs of a lot of reviews of poetry,

and I come out of it feeling worthless, empty, and certainly unworthy of doing a poetry podcast, but I'm battling on.

I don't know what people are talking about most of the time.

To be fair to them, I'm probably less inclined to put the effort into the review

than I am to put the effort into the poetry.

But in saying that, of course, I met myself sound all grand and suggest that I have

tremendous clarity and lucidity and I'm free from pretension, whereas in fact pretension is one of my

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