Szymborska e la tradizione. Dialoghi con il passato

Abstract

The subject of this paper is intertextual references to literary and cultural traditions that testify to the originality of the Nobel Prize winner’s poetic language. In modem Polish lyric poetry, the memory of literary forms and genres, styles and conventions, and - most generally - of the old ways of creating and understanding the world, of inherited images and winged words functioning in the contemporary consciousness of the audience takes many forms, but Szym- borska’s approach is eminently individual. The poet often draws comparisons between images and rhetorical modes of expression acquired from the cultural past with our contemporary sensibility. Literary tradition in Szymborska’s work is revealed on several planes: microquotations, transformations of well-known literary and philosophical aphorisms and phrases, inventive renewals of historical styles and worldviews. The spectrum of traditions in Szymborska’s work is vast, as it includes antiquity, the biblical world, Shakespearean theater, Baroque literature and art, excursions into classicism, selected areas of Romanticism and finally - the 20th century avant-gardes. In these confrontations, it is important for her to take a critical look at the cultural heritage and the lessons that come from creative dialogue with the past.