Anna Swir

1909-1984 / Polish

will18 body10 life5 happy4 window4 large4 person4 laughter3 years3 three3 minutes3 till3 leave3 brain3 laugh3 death3 hair3 intestine3 belly3 knee3 longing3 walk3 evil3 minus3 sea3 unimportant2 matter2 reason2 tail2 yell2 wall2 dead2 sleep2 day2 head2 woman2 child2 sixty2 times2 human2 open2 long2 aloneness2 waiting2 enter2 slowly2 failure2 gangrene2 common2 kidney2 expire2 running2 face2 moments2 company2 feel2 clearly2 love2 greatest2 dear2 wind2 virginity2 live2 fashions2 ten2 unbirth2 born2 nonexistence2 thump2 birth2 steps2 trite2 remember2 mocked1 prize1 mockery1 free1 prizes1 mocks1 serious1 thing1 executed1 help1 resting1 lice1 jump1 carving1 ironing1 girl1 bore1 sweater1 young1 garret1 saint1 finger1 resurrections1 thunderbolt1 fire1 rise1 putting1 killed1 knock1 hungry1 roof1 knocked1 cracked1 teenager1 order1 waited1 shoes1 tonight1 heard1 purity1 measure1 bones1 rarely1 skeletons1 misfortune1 enlarge1 going1 animal1 grind1 converse1 walls1 hear1 clatter1 tragedy1 thoughts1 hygienic1 loved1 room1 concerns1 lasted1 air1 sternly1 healthy1 softly1 saintliness1 silence1 embrace1 bedclothes1 bone1 frosty1 blind1 family1 chance1 bound1 hollow1 alien1 chain1

Classics

Anna Swir

1909-1984 / Polish

Anna Swir (Świrszczyńska) was born in Warsaw, Poland, to an artistic though impoverished family. She worked from an early age, supporting herself while she attended university to study medieval Polish literature. In the 1930s she worked for a teachers’ association, served as an editor, and began publishing poetry. Swir joined the Resistance during World War II and worked as a military nurse during the Warsaw Uprising; at one point she came within an hour of being executed before she was spared. In addition to poetry, Swir wrote plays and stories for children and directed a children’s theater. She lived in Krakow from 1945 until her death from cancer in 1984. Her poems have been collected in English translation in Building the Barricade (1974), Happy as a Dog’s Tail (1985), fat like the sun (1986), and Talking to My Body (1996), translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan. Swir’s poems about war and death use direct, simple language. In Building the Barricade she includes a section called “Poems about My Father and My Mother,” which affectionately describes scenes of her parents. Swir also wrote candidly and passionately about the female body; in his introduction to Talking to My Body, Milosz identified her central theme as “Flesh. Flesh in love and ecstasy, in pain, in terror, flesh afraid of loneliness, giving birth, resting, feeling the flow of time or reducing time to one instant.” Eva Hoffman, reviewing Happy as a Dog’s Tail for the New York Times, commented on Swir’s adept depictions of erotic love: “The quick, decisive strokes in which she registers moments of meeting, coupling or parting are almost abstract in their lack of surface detail, but they give us glimpses of a turbulent, even ferocious internal life.” Swir’s awards include the Krzyzem Kawalerskim Oderu Odrodzenia Polski (1957), Krzyzem Oficerskim Orderu Odrodzenia Polski (1975), Nagroda miasta Krakowa (1976), and Medal Komisji Edukacji Narodowej.