Halina Poświatowska (1935–1967)

Halina Poświatowska, née Myga, was born in Częstochowa, Poland. She suffered from serious heart disease, possibly as a result of a strep infection acquired as a child during the last days of the German Occupation in World War II. In 1954, she married Adolf Richard Poświatowskiego, a young painter and filmmaker whom she met at a sanatorium in Kudowa for heart disease patients. He died two years later, leaving her a widow at age 21. She began publishing poems in periodicals, and her first book of poems, Hymn bałwochwalczy (Idolatrous hymn), appeared in 1958. Thanks to a collection of funds by Polish-Americans, she was able to travel to the USA for complicated heart surgery that year. With a scholarship, she enrolled at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she studied for three years despite her very limited English. Homesick for her family and native country, she returned to Poland and studied philosophy at the Jagellonian University in Krakow. She also went to Paris to study on a French government scholarship. She died at age 32 in 1967 after a second heart operation.
Her works were collected in four volumes published in 1997 under the collective title Dzieła (Works); the first two volumes are poems, and the latter two consist of prose writing and letters. Today she is considered one of the most important figures in modern and contemporary Polish literature, and new translations of her work have increased her importance to world literature. She is the subject of several scholarly books and many reprints.