Wisława Szymborska’s
Lecture upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature
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
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
Copyright
© The Nobel Foundation 1996
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1996/szymborska-lecture.html