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Spring 2001 • Vol. XXIII No. 2 • Poetry |

The Silence of Plants

By Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Vuyelwa Carlin and Sylwester Cygan

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Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012) was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her poetry is full of wisdom, wit, and a haunting, surreal quality. One of her major themes is differentness, or otherness: the lack of mutual comprehension between different conditions, species, kinds of matter.

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