ANCIENT&
not so ancient
WISDOM
offering a weekly positive perspective
July
29, 2004
 "There
is no life / that couldn't be immortal / if only for a
moment".
- Wislawa Szymborska (1923 - )
Wislawa
won The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996 "for poetry
that with ironic precision allows the historical and
biological context to come to light in fragments of human
reality".
(The
following bio is taken from the Nobel e Museum. http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/1996/press.html
)
Wislawa
Szymborska was born July 2 1923 in the small western Polish
town of Bnin (now a part of Kórnik), near Poznan. Since
1931 she has been living in Cracow, where she studied Polish
literature and sociology at the Jagellonian University
between 1945 and 1948. In March 1945 she made her début
with the poem "Szukam slowa" ("I seek the
word") in a weekly supplement of the daily paper
Dziennik Polski, and during the period immediately after the
war she continued to publish poems in various newspapers and
periodicals. From 1953 to 1981 she was on the editorial
staff of the weekly magazine Zycie Literackie (Literary
Life), where in a column entitled "Non-compulsory
reading" she reviewed books on a wide variety of
subjects: from tourism, cooking, gardening and witchcraft to
the history of art, T.S. Eliot's cat poetry and Edward
Lear's nonsense verse. Szymborska has also translated a fair
amount of lyric poetry, especially French Baroque poetry and
Agrippa d'Aubigné. During the 1980s she collaborated under
the pseudonym Stanczykówna in the Polish
"samizdat" publication Arka and in the exile
magazine Kultura, which was published in Paris. Her poetry
can be found in a large number of European languages, and
also in Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese.
You
may ask, ‘What has this to do with business?’
Everything. The essence of success in branding and marketing requires a melding of passion and performance.
A nationally recognized copywriter writes 500 headlines in
an attempt to find the ‘one’. Why? Because in the
struggle, he learns the true value of the offering. A
designer of clothes throws beach parties ‘of love’ to
introduce a new line. Why? Because their market doesn’t
attend fashion shows. A company pays a radio station to give
their product away by the 10’s of thousands. Why? A repeat
customer will use an almost unlimited amount once they
experience it (No, it's not Pepsi or heroin). The soul
searching, the risk, and the exactness required to execute
these ideas is much like writing poetry. (By the way, I find
it takes great effort for me to read poetry which means it
is an area I can learn new concepts from.)
Wishing
you great and continued success in all pursuits of business
and your life.
Sincerely,
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