Szymborska's 'View': Small Truths Sharply
Etched
Every
other year, it seems, the Nobel Prize in literature goes to an obscure European
writer, full of hard consonants and solemn purposes, whom
we all agree to honor for a day and forget all about
right after.
This
list of the Great Obscure is long, but the bright exception to it is the Polish
poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel in 1996.
Szymborska is not merely a great writer, like many others; she is a necessary
writer, as necessary as toast. Every month, it seems, I give to someone a copy
of one of her books and get for her work, in response, not mere admiration or
respect but eyes alight with delight, recognition, laughter and that special
kind of happiness that comes from seeing a small truth articulated as a sharp
ironic point, an emotion given a shape neither all too familiar nor all too
abstract.
No
one could possibly have chosen a worse time to arrive on the planet, or a
harder place to arrive. Born in 1923, and spending most of her life in the
Polish city of Krakow, she survived the Second World War as a railroad worker,
and then spent the long years of the Russian occupation as one of the more
discreet kinds of dissident.
Yet
her exposure to the pain of history did not turn her into a poet of history in
the usual sense. She lived through some horrible times, but rarely wrote about
them directly. Her experience, instead, deepened her commitment to the belief
that the poetic impulse, however small its objects, is always saner than the
polemical imperative, however passionate its certitudes.
Her
poems take small subjects and make much of them. In her poetry, a child about
to pull a tablecloth from a table becomes the type of every scientist beginning
an experiment; a visit to the doctors, with its stripping down and piling on of
clothes, a metaphor for all we go through in the company of the odd mechanisms
of our naked bodies; she ponders the onion's many layers, and the inner life of
Hitler's dog.
In
the poem that I used for the epigraph for my own latest book, she writes all
about the range of human difficulties, over time, that make the decision to
have a child impossible at any moment. We just can't do it, it's the wrong
time; and yet, we do. (Read
"A Tale Begun.")
And
I have always been moved and inspired by the text of her Nobel Prize acceptance
speech, in which she takes on the "astonishment" of normal life:
"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. 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."
That's
Szymborska's faith. I have a hard time knowing how I
would get through a single ordinary day without her poetry.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10721773
Adam Gopnik