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一九九六年諾貝爾文學獎得主、波蘭女詩人辛波絲卡（Wislawa Szymborska）一日在波蘭的克拉科夫市因肺癌辭世，享年八十八歲。
辛波絲卡是諾貝爾文學獎自一九○一年設立後的第五位波蘭籍或波蘭裔得主，畢生詩作不到四百首。她在波蘭深受歡迎，但在獲得諾貝爾文學獎之前，幾無國際知名度。
辛波絲卡多數詩作的英譯者、西北大學文學教授克蕾爾．凱瓦娜一日在接受紐約時報訪問時說，辛波絲卡長年深居簡出，諾貝爾獎讓她非常意外，得獎後所寫的第一首詩，是幾年之後的事。凱瓦娜還說：「辛波絲卡的朋友都說，那是『諾貝爾悲劇』。」
辛波絲卡生於一九二三年波蘭西部的波茲南，在德國佔領波蘭期間，她進入一所地下學校就讀，後來畢業於克拉科夫市著名的亞捷隆大學，研讀文學及社會學。
她大半生都居住在克拉科夫市，任職「文學生活」雜誌，每隔幾年就出版一冊薄薄的詩集。她的前夫也是詩人，兩人未生育子女。
辛波絲卡早期作品屬社會主義寫實風格，她的第一部詩集在一九五二年出版。她在多年後告訴美國詩人赫布：「我年輕時，有段時間相信共產主義，我想藉由共產主義拯救世界。但我很快就了解到，共產主義沒用，不過我從未假裝自己沒信過共產主義。」
她還說：「在我創作生涯的初期，我熱愛世人，我想為人類貢獻，但我很快就了解到，拯救全人類是不可能的。」
辛波絲卡在諾貝爾頒獎典禮上說，科學家及藝術家的生平可以拍成偉大的電影，但詩人能提供的，卻是無法入鏡的素材。她說：「有個人坐桌邊或躺沙發上，目不轉睛盯著牆或天花板，偶爾，這人寫下七行字，不過十五分鐘後劃掉其中一行。然後，又一個小時過去了，其間什麼事都沒有。誰受得了看這些？」
February 2, 2012 The path to international fame as a poet generally doesn't involve writing short poems about sea cucumbers. Yet for the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, who won the Nobel Prize in 1996 and died Wednesday, the little things — onions, cats, monkeys, and yes, sea cucumbers — turned out to be very big indeed.
A popular writer in Poland for many years, Szymborska became a reluctant international literary celebrity after her Nobel win.
Szymborska is an ironist. But in her work, irony becomes playful, almost whimsical. She thinks of the poet as an acrobat who moves, as she puts it, with "laborious ease, with patient agility, with calculated inspiration."
Szymborska's poems generally focus on everyday subjects or situations, and her tone stays firmly in the middle ground. She doesn't rant; she calmly assesses. She's a poet of dry-eyed, athletic precision: an acrobat, as she says, not a powerlifter. Here is how she begins a poem called "Under One Small Star" (all quotations are from translations by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh):
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
And the poem concludes:
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.
Yet if Szymborska's touch is gentle, it can still burn or freeze. Consider her sea cucumber (or "holothurian") poem, which is called "Autonomy." The poem begins:
In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees.
It violently divides into doom and salvation,
retribution and reward, what has been and what will be.
An abyss appears in the middle of its body
between what instantly becomes two foreign shores.
Life on one shore, death on the other.
The sea cucumber can become two parts, one living, one dead. Szymborska compares this to the way in which writers have long argued that when they died, their work would live on — granting them a kind of immortality. But Szymborska is skeptical. She doesn't think anyone exists outside of time, or that writing poetry is a matter of falling on the right side of an abyss. As she puts it in the poem's conclusion:
Here the heavy heart, there non omnis moriar —
Just three little words, like a flight's three feathers.
The abyss doesn't divide us.
The abyss surrounds us.
The ending of the poem could seem grim. After all, she's suggesting that there is, in the end, no way to cheat time. But if that's the case — if we can't continually evade death — then this is at least something we all share. It's no surprise that her poem is dedicated to the memory of one of her friends.
Szymborska has now fallen into the very abyss that she wrote about with such understated passion. And yet it's hard not to think that, with all her delicate power, she somehow still walks on air above us.
David Orr's most recent book is called Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry.
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