Wislawa Szymborska
Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1996
The Poet and the World
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
brush-stroke. 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 Polish
by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh