Nobel Lecture

The Poet and the World

by Wislawa Szymborska

Polish Poet/Nobel Literature Prize 1996

December 10, 1996 at the Stockholm Concert Hall, Stockholm, Sweden

They say the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one's behind me, anyway. But I have a feeling that the sentences to come - the third, the sixth, the tenth, and so on, up to the final line - will be just as hard, since I'm supposed to talk about poetry. I've said very little on the subject, next to nothing, in fact. And whenever I have said anything, I've always had the sneaking suspicion that I'm not very good at it. This is why my lecture will be rather short. All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.

Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspicious even, or perhaps especially, about themselves. They publicly confess to being poets only reluctantly, as if they were a little ashamed of it. But in our clamorous times it's much easier to acknowledge your faults, at least if they're attractively packaged, than to recognize your own merits, since these are hidden deeper and you never quite believe in them yourself ... When filling in questionnaires or chatting with strangers, that is, when they can't avoid revealing their profession, poets prefer to use the general term "writer" or replace "poet" with the name of whatever job they do in addition to writing. Bureaucrats and bus passengers respond with a touch of incredulity and alarm when they find out that they're dealing with a poet. I suppose philosophers may meet with a similar reaction. Still, they're in a better position, since as often as not they can embellish their calling with some kind of scholarly title. Professor of philosophy - now that sounds much more respectable.

But there are no professors of poetry. This would mean, after all, that poetry is an occupation requiring specialized study, regular examinations, theoretical articles with bibliographies and footnotes attached, and finally, ceremoniously conferred diplomas. And this would mean, in turn, that it's not enough to cover pages with even the most exquisite poems in order to become a poet. The crucial element is some slip of paper bearing an official stamp. Let us recall that the pride of Russian poetry, the future Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky was once sentenced to internal exile precisely on such grounds. They called him "a parasite," because he lacked official certification granting him the right to be a poet ...

Several years ago, I had the honor and pleasure of meeting Brodsky in person. And I noticed that, of all the poets I've known, he was the only one who enjoyed calling himself a poet. He pronounced the word without inhibitions. Just the opposite - he spoke it with defiant freedom. It seems to me that this must have been because he recalled the brutal humiliations he had experienced in his youth.

In more fortunate countries, where human dignity isn't assaulted so readily, poets yearn, of course,

to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind. And yet it wasn't so long ago, in this century's first decades, that poets strove to shock us with their extravagant dress and eccentric behavior. But all this was merely for the sake of public display. The moment always came when poets had to close the doors behind them, strip off their mantles, fripperies, and other poetic paraphernalia, and confront - silently, patiently awaiting their own selves - the still white sheet of paper. For this is finally what really counts.

It's not accidental that film biographies of great scientists and artists are produced in droves. The more ambitious directors seek to reproduce convincingly the creative process that led to important scientific discoveries or the emergence of a masterpiece. And one can depict certain kinds of scientific labor with some success. Laboratories, sundry instruments, elaborate machinery brought to life: such scenes may hold the audience's interest for a while. And those moments of uncertainty - will the experiment, conducted for the thousandth time with some tiny modification, finally yield the desired result? - can be quite dramatic. Films about painters can be spectacular, as they go about recreating every stage of a famous painting's evolution, from the first penciled line to the final brushstroke. Music swells in films about composers: the first bars of the melody that rings in the musician's ears finally emerge as a mature work in symphonic form. Of course this is all quite naive and doesn't explain the strange mental state popularly known as inspiration, but at least there's something to look at and listen to.

But poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens ... Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?

I've mentioned inspiration. Contemporary poets answer evasively when asked what it is, and if it actually exists. It's not that they've never known the blessing of this inner impulse. It's just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don't understand yourself.

When I'm asked about this on occasion, I hedge the question too. But my answer is this: inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."

There aren't many such people. Most of the earth's inhabitants work to get by. They work because they have to. They didn't pick this or that kind of job out of passion; the circumstances of their lives did the choosing for them. Loveless work, boring work, work valued only because others haven't got even that much, however loveless and boring - this is one of the harshest human miseries. And there's no sign that coming centuries will produce any changes for the better as far

as this goes.

And so, though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune's darlings.

At this point, though, certain doubts may arise in my audience. All sorts of torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues struggling for power by way of a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they too perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes, but they "know." They know, and whatever they know is enough for them once and for all. They don't want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish their arguments' force. And any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.

This is why I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself "I don't know," the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself "I don't know", she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying "I don't know," and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

Poets, if they're genuine, must also keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their "oeuvre" ...

I sometimes dream of situations that can't possibly come true. I audaciously imagine, for example, that I get a chance to chat with the Ecclesiastes, the author of that moving lament on the vanity of all human endeavors. I would bow very deeply before him, because he is, after all, one of the greatest poets, for me at least. That done, I would grab his hand. "'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun. And the poem you created is also new under the sun, since no one wrote it down before you. And all your readers are also new under the sun, since those who lived before you couldn't read your poem. And that cypress that you're sitting under hasn't been growing since the dawn of time. It came into being by way of another cypress similar to yours, but not exactly the same. And Ecclesiastes, I'd also like to ask you what new thing under the sun you're planning to work on now? A further supplement to the thoughts you've already expressed? Or maybe you're tempted to contradict some of them now? In your earlier work you mentioned joy - so what if it's fleeting? So maybe your new-under-the-sun poem will be about joy? Have you taken notes yet, do you have drafts? I doubt

you'll say, 'I've written everything down, I've got nothing left to add.' There's no poet in the world who can say this, least of all a great poet like yourself."

The world - whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we've just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don't know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we've got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world - it is astonishing.

But "astonishing" is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We're astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we've grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn't based on comparison with something else.

Granted, in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like "the ordinary world," "ordinary life," "the ordinary course of events" ... But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.

It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.

Translated from the Polish: Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

诗人与世界

——希姆博尔斯卡诺贝尔奖受奖演说

张振辉译 云也退录入

演说中的第一句话总是最难讲的，我算是已经讲过了……但是我觉得接下来的话也很难讲，第三句、第六句、第十句，一直到最后一句，因为我讲的是诗。 这个题目我过去谈得很少，几乎从来没有谈过。我总觉得我谈不好，因此我的报告不会很长，任何不完善的东西只要给的分量小一点，就比较容易接受。

今天的诗人都是怀疑论者，甚至——也许首先——对自己就表示怀疑。他不愿当众说他是诗人，仿佛这么说有点害臊。在我们这个吵吵嚷嚷的时代，如果缺 点已经明显地表现出来，要承认它并不难，但要说出自己的优点就难多了，因为它们隐藏得很深，连自己都不很相信……一个诗人在填写各种表格或者和偶尔相识的 人交谈时，他不得不说出他的职业，于是便笼统地说他是一个“文学家”，或者再加一个他附带完成的什么著作的名称。不论是公务

员还是同乘一辆公共汽车的旅 客，一听到要和诗人打交道，总觉得有点信不过，有点不安。我料定，哲学家也会遇到这样的麻烦，但他们的情况好些，因为他们常常可以给自己的职业装点一个科 学的头衔。哲学教授——听起来神气得多。

可是没有诗的教授。因为这意味着，要求专业化的学习，通过正规的考试，撰写附有丰富的参考书目和注释的理论文章，最后还要正儿八经地取得毕业证 书。这还意味着，成为一个诗人有一大叠写了诗的稿纸是不够的，即便上面写了最好的诗，而首先是要有盖了印鉴的文件。我们记得，正是由于这个原因，对俄国诗 歌的骄傲、后来的诺贝尔文学奖获得者约瑟夫·布罗茨基判处了流放。他因为没有一份官方许可他当诗人的证明书，被看成是“寄生虫”……

几年前，我很高兴也很荣幸地结识了他。我注意到，他在我认识的诗人中，是一个爱说自己是“诗人”的人。他这么说的时候，并没有什么抵触，而且还带有一种含有挑衅的自由自在。我想，这是因为他想起了年轻时遭受过的那些粗暴的侮辱。

在一些更为幸运的国家里，人的尊严不会轻易地被侵犯，诗人们当然希望自己的诗歌能够发表，能够拥有读者，能够被人理解，但他们并不极力或者不很极 力要使自己每天都显得与众不同。在不远的过去，也就是在我们世纪最初的那几十年，诗人们爱身着奇装异服，做出一些古里古怪的样子，引起人们的注意，这在当 时，对公众来说是有好处的。可是后来，诗人们关起门来呆在家里，去掉了身上所有的打扮，抛弃了那些美丽的姿态，也不要什么诗的道具，一个人静悄悄地等着自 己在那张没有写字的纸上发挥。他们认为，这才是最重要的。

有一件事最能说明问题，就是现在不断产生了许多反映大学者和大艺术家生平的影片。那些有雄心壮志的导演把真实介绍重大科学发现或者产生最著名的艺 术作品的整个过程当成他们的任务。他们一般都能真实地反映出一些科学家的工作状况：实验室、各种不同的仪器、正在运行的机器，并在一定的时间内吸引住观众 的注意力。此外，还可以表现一些非常富于戏剧性地失去信心的时刻，但是经过千百次的实验，只要每次实验都作一点小的改进，就一定会获得成功。一部关于画家 的影片能够再现一幅画产生的全过程，从开始落笔到最后完成。反映音乐家的影片中则始终贯穿着音乐，从作曲家心中听到他最初的一些拍节直到谱上了各种乐器的 一部成熟的作品。这些过程虽然显得幼稚，一点也没有反映出灵魂中一般称之为灵感的奇特状态，但这些影片至少是有东西可以看有东西可以听的。

诗人的情况最糟，他们的工作根本不能拿去拍摄。一个人坐在桌子旁边或者睡在沙发床上，两眼一动也不动地望着墙壁或者天花板，有时写上七行诗，过了一刻钟又划掉一行，接着一小时，他什么事也没有干，那个观众受得了这种场面？

我谈过灵感，灵感是什么？如果真的有灵感，当代诗人也作不出明确的回答。这并不是因为，他们从内心的冲动中从来没有得到过好处，而是因为他们自己不懂，也就很难向别人讲清楚了。

我也一样，我有时遇到这样的问题，想回避它的实质。我的回答是这样：灵感并不是诗人或者广义地说艺术家们所特有的权利。不管是过去还是现在都有一 些人有过灵感，将来也永远有一些人离不开灵感。这就是那些根据自己的意愿选择了一项工作，并且以对这项工作的喜爱和想象完成了它的人，他们中有医生，有教 师，有园艺师，还有千百个其他职业的人。他们如果在工作中不断地遇到了新的挑战，那么他们的工作就会永远成为一种冒险，在这种冒险中会遇到困难和失败，但 是他们不会失去对它的兴趣。随着问题不断地得到解决，他们又会遇到一大堆新的问题。灵感，它究竟是什么？回答将是不断出现的“我不知道”。 像这样把工作看成是冒险的人并不很多。世界上大部分人工作都是为了谋生，他们工作是因为他们不得不工作。他们的工作并不是他们高高兴兴自己选的， 而是生活环境给他们选的。他们不喜欢它，对它很厌倦，他们之所以重视它是因为即使像这样的工作也是别的人得不到

的。这是人类最沉重的不幸之一，而且这种不 幸状况在最近几百年内不会改善。

因此我要说的是，我确实剥夺了诗人对灵感的垄断权，但我把他们列入了那群为数不多的自己选择命运的人。

可是这也许在听众中会引起一些疑问。形形色色的虐待狂、专制主义者、宗教狂热分子和蛊惑家为了争得权力，往往借助于几个极力宣扬的口号。他们都很 喜爱他们的这项工作，并且以自己的机智和努力去完成它。他们“知道”，对他们来说，这些知道的东西只要知道一回就够他们永远使用了。除此之外，他们对别的 都不敢兴趣，因为别的一切都会使他们的证据变得没有说服力。可是所有提不出新的问题的知识很快就会成为僵死的东西，对生活产生不利的影响。我们在古代和当 代的历史中都可以清楚地看到，在极端的情况下，这种知识能够使社会遭到毁灭。

正因为如此，我对“不知道”这两个小小的词才作出了这么高的评价。这两个词虽然小，但却长上了坚强有力的翅膀。它们扩大了我们内心中的生活范围， 以及我们这个微不足道的地球悬于其中的天地。如果伊萨克·牛顿没有对自己说“我不知道”，一个苹果掉在他的果园里在他看来就象掉下一个冰雹一样，最多也只 不过躬下身去把它拾起来，津津有味地吃下去。如果我的同胞玛丽亚·斯克沃多夫斯卡—居里没有对自己说“我不知道”，她肯定只能当一个化学教师，教那些良家 闺女，靠薪水吃饭，靠这项——从另一方面来说是诚实的——工作庸庸碌碌地度过她的一生。但她毕竟对自己说了“我不知道”，这两个词两次把她送到了斯德哥尔 摩这个给那些永远怀着不安心请进行探索的人们授予诺贝尔奖的地方。

诗人也是一样，如果是一位真正的诗人，她就应当不断地对自己说：“我不知道”。他在他的每一个作品中都想这么说，但是当他给作品画上最后一个句号 的时候就犹豫了，因为他知道这只是一个暂时的说法，这么说是绝对不够的。因此他要再说一次，再说一次，然后提出一系列自己不满意的理由，文学史家于是给他 的作品夹上一个大的夹子，称为“成果”。 我有时想到过一些根本就不可能出现的情况。例如我会大胆地幻想我会有机会和《传道书》*的作者谈话，这也是一位哀叹人的一切行为都毫无价值的诗 人，他是最重要的诗人之一——至少我是这么看的——因此我要向他深深的行一个鞠躬礼。但我也要抓住他的手对他说：《传道书》！你说过，太阳下面没有任何新 的东西。可你自己不就是在太阳下面诞生的一个新人么？你的那首长诗就是在太阳下面产生的一首新的长诗，因为在你之前谁都没有写过这样的长诗。你的读者也都 是一些新的读者，因为他们在你之前没有可能读到这样的长诗。还有这株柏树，你坐在它的阴影下，但它并不是世界诞生的时候就生长在这里的，因为那时候这里还 有一株柏树，它和你见到的那株柏树很相像，但它并不是你见到的那株柏树。我还要问你，《传道书》！在太阳下面，你还打算写些什么新的作品呢？你是不是在思 想上还要充实你的作品或者要删改其中的一些章节呢？你在前一首长诗中也见到了欢乐，虽然这是一种昙花一现的欢乐，哪有什么关系呢？关于欢乐，你是不是还要 写一首新的长诗呢？你是不是已经做了一些笔记，或者已经写了一些段落呢？你大概不会说：“我什么都写了，不用在补充了”吧！因为世界上任何一个诗人都不能 这么说，更何况像你这样伟大的诗人呢！ 我们一想起世界的巨大和我们自己的弱小就感到害怕。尤其是我们看到它是那么不关心人类、动物甚至植物的痛苦，更觉的它太残酷无情了。但怎么可以认 定植物可以避免这种痛苦呢？也许我们还会想到星光布满的宇宙空间，在这些星星旁边还发现了一些行星，可为什么这些行星是死的呢？难道它们真的没有生命？我 不知道。我们既然得到了进入这个无限广阔的剧场的入场券，关于这个剧场我们就可以说点什么了，只可惜我们的入场券的有效期太短了，它只限定在两个决定性的 日期内。关于这个世界我们还要说些什么呢？那就是它令人惊奇。

“令人惊奇”这个定理隐藏着一个逻辑的圈套，因为只有那些脱离了众所周知和普遍承认的规范的东西，那些不符合我们的习惯、因此也不是理所当然的东西才是令人惊奇的。这么说来，

一个理所当然的世界根本就不存在，我们的惊奇是一个单独的存在，它并不是和什么比较而产生的。

是的，如果用一种通俗的语言，就不用仔细考虑每个词的用法，我们大家都用这么一个说法：“日常生活”、“普通世界”、“事物的一般顺序”……但是 在诗的语言中，用每个词都要斟酌一下，这就不是普通和一般的了。任何一块石头和它上面的云彩，任何一天和任何一个晚上都不是普通和一般的。首先，这个世界 的存在不属于任何人。

这么看来，诗人总是会有许多工作要做的。

*《传道书》为《圣经·旧约》中的一卷，犹太教和基督教认为是所罗门所作。