A Grain of Sand in the Anthropocentric Machine: Entanglements and Otherness in the Poetry of W. Szymborska

Widely acknowledged as one the most original and compelling European writers of our time, polish poet W. Szymborska has received international recognition when she received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. When attributing the award, the Academy praised her “poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” Selections of her poems were published in collections such as People on a Bridge (1990), View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (1995), Miracle Fair (2002), Monologue of a Dog (2005), Enough (2012), Here (2013), and Map: Collected and Last Poems (2015). This chapter aims at exploring the Szymborskian worldview, in which the natural world reveals itself as alien to the anthropocentric pretensions of human intellection in such a way that mankind is only one of the many forms of existence. Such an understanding, conductive to a post-humanist paradigm, is fully operative, albeit in different levels, in several poems by the Polish writer, such as: “View with a grain of sand,” “Among the multitudes,” “Tarsius,” “A speech at the Lost-and Found,” “The silence of plants,” “Dinosaur skeleton” or “Conversation with a stone.” Author will demonstrate how, by virtue of espousing a post-anthropocentric outlook, Szymborska’s poetry is able to radically challenge rigid boundaries between the self and its other(s), thus allowing to convey a renewed portrayal of otherness as a haunting specter that pushes the self to become more acutely aware of its nomadic and plural constitution.