Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
The Poet and the World
Translators’ Note
CALLING OUT TO YETI
I’m Working on the World
Classifieds
Greeting the Supersonics
An Effort
Four A.M.
Still Life with a Balloon
To My Friends
Funeral (I)
Brueghel’s Two Monkeys
Still
Atlantis
Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition
Nothing Twice
Buffo
Commemoration
SALT
The Monkey
Lesson
Museum
A Moment in Troy
Shadow
The Rest
Clochard
Vocabulary
Travel Elegy
Without a Title
An Unexpected Meeting
Golden Anniversary
Starvation Camp Near Jaslo
Parable
Ballad
Over Wine
Rubens’ Women
Coloratura
Bodybuilders’ Contest
Poetry Reading
Epitaph
Prologue to a Comedy
Likeness
I am too close . . .
The Tower of Babel
Water
Synopsis
In Heraclitus’s River
Conversation with a Stone
NO END OF FUN
The Joy of Writing
Memory Finally
Landscape
Family Album
The Railroad Station
Alive
Born
Census
Soliloquy for Cassandra
A Byzantine Mosaic
Beheading
Pietà
Innocence
Vietnam
Written in a Hotel
A Film from the Sixties
Report from the Hospital
Returning Birds
Thomas Mann
Tarsier
To My Heart, on Sunday
The Acrobat
A Palaeolithic Fertility Fetish
Cave
Motion
No End of Fun
COULD HAVE
Could Have
Falling from the Sky
Wrong Number
Theatre Impressions
Voices
The Letters of the Dead
Old Folks’ Home
Advertisement
Lazarus Takes a Walk
Snapshot of a Crowd
Going Home
Discovery
Dinosaur Skeleton
A Speech at the Lost-and-Found
Astonishment
Birthday
Interview with a Child
Allegro ma Non Troppo
Autotomy
Frozen Motion
Certainty
The Classic
In Praise of Dreams
True Love
Under One Small Star
A LARGE NUMBER
A Large Number
Thank-You Note
Psalm
Lot’s Wife
Seen from Above
Experiment
Smiles
The Terrorist, He’s Watching
A Medieval Miniature
Aging Opera Singer
In Praise of My Sister
Hermitage
Portrait of a Woman
Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem
Warning
The Onion
The Suicide’s Room
In Praise of Feeling Bad about Yourself
Life While-You-Wait
On the Banks of the Styx
Utopia
Pi
THE PEOPLE ON THE BRIDGE
Stage Fright
Surplus
Archeology
View with a Grain of Sand
Clothes
On Death, without Exaggeration
The Great Man’s House
In Broad Daylight
Our Ancestors’ Short Lives
Hitler’s First Photograph
The Century’s Decline
Children of Our Age
Tortures
Plotting with the Dead
Writing a Résumé
Funeral (II)
An Opinion on the Question of Pornography
A Tale Begun
Into the Ark
Possibilities
Miracle Fair
The People on the Bridge
THE END AND THE BEGINNING
Sky
No Title Required
Some People Like Poetry
The End and the Beginning
Hatred
Reality Demands
The Real World
Elegiac Calculation
Cat in an Empty Apartment
Parting with a View
Séance
Love at First Sight
May 16, 1973
Maybe All This
Slapstick
Nothing’s a Gift
One Version of Events
We’re Extremely Fortunate
NEW POEMS
Some People
A Contribution to Statistics
Negative
Clouds
Among the Multitudes
The Silence of Plants
Index of First Lines
About the Author
Footnotes
English translation copyright © 1998 by Harcourt, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Text of the Nobel Lecture copyright © 1996 by The Nobel Foundation
www.hmhco.com
All poems from View with a Grain of Sand, Selected Poems appear in this volume.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Szymborska,Wisława.
[Poems, English]
Poems new and collected 1957–1977/Wisława Szymborska
translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-15-100353-X
ISBN 0-15-601146-8 (pbk.)
1. Szymborska, Wisława—Translations into English.
I. Barańczak, Stanislaw, 1946–. II. Cavanagh, Clare. III. Title.
PG7178.Z9A222 1998
891.8'517—dc21 97-32277
eISBN 978-0-547-54389-5
v1.0315
The Poet and the World
Nobel Lecture
1996
They say that the first sentence in any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one’s behind me. 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. Imperfection is easier to tolerate in small doses.
Contemporary poets are skeptical and suspici
ous 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 they fill out questionnaires or chat 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 discover that they’re dealing with a poet. I suppose philosophers meet with a similar reaction. Still, they are 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. That 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 the pleasure of meeting Brodsky. 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. This must have been, it seems to me, because he recalled the brutal humiliations that he 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, it was 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 finally this is 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 to 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. And 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 naïve 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 to someone else what you don’t understand yourself.
When I’m asked about this on occasion, I hedge, too. But my answer is this: Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists. There is, there has been, there 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—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 that 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—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 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 with a few loudly shouted slogans also enjoy their jobs, and they, too, perform their duties with inventive fervor. Well, yes; but 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 the force of their arguments. But 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 spaces within us as well as the 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 Skłodowska-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 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, absolutely inadequate. So 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 “oeuvres.”
I sometimes dream of situations that can’t possibly come true. I audaciously imagine, for example, that I get a chance to chat with Ecclesiastes, the author of that moving lament on the vanity of all human endeavors. I bow very deeply before him, because he is one of the greatest poets, for me at least. Then I 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 under which you’re sitting 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 thoughts that 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 that 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 we’re terrified by its vastness and our own impotence or when we’re 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 life span 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 to which we’ve grown accustomed. But the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se, and it isn’t based on a comparison with something else.
Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases such as “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 as though poets will always have their work cut out for them.
WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA
December 7, 1996