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Nobel Lecture English Polish 8 December 1980 I My
presence here, on this
tribune, should be an argument for all those who praise life's
God-given,
marvelously complex, unpredictability. In my school years I used to
read
volumes of a series then published in One of
the Nobel laureates
whom I read in childhood influenced to a large extent, I believe, my
notions of
poetry. That was Selma Lagerlöf. Her Wonderful Adventures of Nils, a
book I
loved, places the hero in a double role. He is the one who flies above
the
Earth and looks at it from above but at the same time sees it in every
detail.
This double vision may be a metaphor of the poet's vocation. I found a
similar
metaphor in a Latin ode of a Seventeenth-Century poet, Maciej
Sarbiewski, who
was once known all over Every
poet depends upon
generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and
forms
elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he
feels
that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own
experience. When
adapting himself, he hears an internal voice that warns him against
mask and
disguise. But when rebelling, he falls in turn into dependence upon his
contemporaries, various movements of the avant-garde. Alas, it is
enough for him
to publish his first volume of poems, to find himself entrapped. For
hardly has
the print dried, when that work, which seemed to him the most personal,
appears
to be enmeshed in the style of another. The only way to counter an
obscure
remorse is to continue searching and to publish a new book, but then
everything
repeats itself, so there is no end to that chase. And it may happen
that
leaving books behind as if they were dry snake skins, in a constant
escape
forward from what has been done in the past, he receives the Nobel
Prize. What is
this enigmatic
impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the
finished? I
think it is a quest for reality. I give to this word its naive and
solemn
meaning, a meaning having nothing to do with philosophical debates of
the last
few centuries. It is the Earth as seen by Nils from the back of the
gander and
by the author of the Latin ode from the back of Pegasus. Undoubtedly,
that
Earth is and her riches cannot be exhausted by any description. To make
such an
assertion means to reject in advance a question we often hear today:
"What
is reality?", for it is the same as the question of Pontius Pilate:
"What is truth?" If among pairs of opposites which we use every day,
the opposition of life and death has such an importance, no less
importance
should be ascribed to the oppositions of truth and falsehood, of
reality and
illusion. II Simone
Weil, to whose
writings I am profoundly indebted, says: "Distance is the soul of
beauty." Yet sometimes keeping distance is nearly impossible. I am A
Child
of Europe, as the title of one of the my poems admits, but that is a
bitter,
sarcastic admission. I am also the author of an autobiographical book
which in
the French translation bears the title Une autre It is
not easy to distinguish
reality from illusion, especially when one lives in a period of the
great
upheaval that begun a couple of centuries ago on a small western
peninsula of
the Euro-Asiatic continent, only to encompass the whole planet during
one man's
lifetime with the uniform worship of science and technology. And it was
particularly difficult to oppose multiple intellectual temptations in
those
areas of It is
good to be born in a
small country where Nature was on a human scale, where various
languages and
religions cohabited for centuries. I have in mind A poet
who grew up in such a
world should have been a seeker for reality through contemplation. A
patriarchal order should have been dear to him, a sound of bells, an
isolation
from pressures and the persistent demands of his fellow men, silence of
a
cloister cell. If books were to linger on a table, then they should be
those
which deal with the most incomprehensible quality of God-created
things, namely
being, the esse. But suddenly all this is negated by demoniac doings of
History
which acquires the traits of a bloodthirsty Deity. The Earth which the
poet
viewed in his flight calls with a cry, indeed, out of the abyss and
doesn't
allow itself to be viewed from above. An insoluble contradiction
appears, a
terribly real one, giving no peace of mind either day or night,
whatever we
call it, it is the contradiction between being and action, or, on
another
level, a contradiction between art and solidarity with one's fellow
men.
Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable and if it is
touched,
if it draws very close, the poet's mouth cannot even utter a complaint
of Job:
all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet, to embrace
reality in
such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and
evil, of
despair and hope, is possible only thanks to a distance, only by
soaring above
it - but this in turn seems then a moral treason. Such
was the contradiction at
the very core of conflicts engendered by the Twentieth Century and
discovered
by poets of an Earth polluted by the crime of genocide. What are the
thoughts
of one of them, who wrote a certain number of poems which remain as a
memorial,
as a testimony? He thinks that they were born out of a painful
contradiction
and that he would prefer to have been able to resolve it while leaving
them
unwritten. III A
patron saint of all poets
in exile, who visit their towns and provinces only in remembrance, is
always Dante.
But how has the number of Florences increased! The exile of a poet is
today a
simple function of a relatively recent discovery: that whoever wields
power is
also able to control language and not only with the prohibitions of
censorship,
but also by changing the meaning of words. A peculiar phenomenon makes
its
appearance: the language of a captive community acquires certain
durable
habits; whole zones of reality cease to exist simply because they have
no name.
There is, it seems, a hidden link between theories of literature as
Écriture,
of speech feeding on itself, and the growth of the totalitarian state.
In any
case, there is no reason why the state should not tolerate an activity
that
consists of creating «experimental» poems and prose, if these are
conceived as
autonomous systems of reference, enclosed within their own boundaries.
Only if
we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from
borrowed
styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people
unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds
like a
pistol shot. And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an
acute
itching, becomes an obsession which doesn't allow one to think of
anything
else. That is why a poet chooses internal or external exile. It is not
certain,
however, that he is motivated exclusively by his concern with
actuality. He may
also desire to free himself from it and elsewhere, in other countries,
on other
shores, to recover, at least for short moments, his true vocation -
which is to
contemplate Being. That
hope is illusory, for
those who come from the "other For the
poet of the
"other Europe" the events embraced by the name of the Holocaust are a
reality, so close in time that he cannot hope to liberate himself from
their
remembrance unless, perhaps, by translating the Psalms of David. He
feels
anxiety, though, when the meaning of the word Holocaust undergoes
gradual
modifications, so that the word begins to belong to the history of the
Jews
exclusively, as if among the victims there were not also millions of
Poles,
Russians, Ukrainians and prisoners of other nationalities. He feels
anxiety,
for he senses in this a foreboding of a not distant future when history
will be
reduced to what appears on television, while the truth, as it is too
complicated, will be buried in the archives, if not totally
annihilated. Other
facts as well, facts for him quite close but distant for the West, add
in his
mind to the credibility of H. G. Wells' vision in The Time Machine: the
Earth
inhabited by a tribe of children of the day, carefree, deprived of
memory and,
by the same token, of history, without defense when confronted with
dwellers of
subterranean caves, cannibalistic children of the night. Carried
forward, as we are,
by the movement of technological change, we realize that the
unification of our
planet is in the making and we attach importance to the notion of
international
community. The days when the Crimes
against human rights,
never confessed and never publicly denounced, are a poison which
destroys the
possibility of a friendship between nations. Anthologies of Polish
poetry
publish poems of my late friends - Wladyslaw Sebyla and Lech Piwowar,
and give
the date of their deaths: 1940. It is absurd not to be able to write
how they perished,
though everybody in The two
genocidal dictators
are no more and yet, who knows whether they did not gain a victory more
durable
than those of their armies. In spite of the Atlantic Charter, the
principle
that nations are objects of trade, if not chips in games of cards or
dice, has
been confirmed by the division of I hope you forgive my laying bare a memory like a wound. This subject is not unconnected with my meditation on the word "reality", so often misused but always deserving esteem. Complaints of peoples, pacts more treacherous than those we read about in Thucydides, the shape of a maple leaf, sunrises and sunsets over the ocean, the whole fabric of causes and effects, whether we call it Nature or History, points towards, I believe, another hidden reality, impenetrable, though exerting a powerful attraction that is the central driving force of all art and science. There are moments when it seems to me that I decipher the meaning of afflictions which befell the nations of the "other Europe" and that meaning is to make them the bearers of memory - at the time when Europe, without an adjective, and America possess it less and less with every generation. It is
possible that there is
no other memory than the memory of wounds. At least we are so taught by
the
Bible, a book of the tribulations of During
the thirty years I
have spent abroad I have felt I was more privileged than my Western
colleagues,
whether writers or teachers of literature, for events both recent and
long past
took in my mind a sharply delineated, precise form. Western audiences
confronted
with poems or novels written in A few minutes ago I expressed my longing for the end of a contradiction which opposes the poet's need of distance to his feeling of solidarity with his fellow men. And yet, if we take a flight above the Earth as a metaphor of the poet's vocation, it is not difficult to notice that a kind of contradiction is implied, even in those epochs when the poet is relatively free from the snares of History. For how to be above and simultaneously to see the Earth in every detail? And yet, in a precarious balance of opposites, a certain equilibrium can be achieved thanks to a distance introduced by the flow of time. "To see" means not only to have before one's eyes. It may mean also to preserve in memory. "To see and to describe" may also mean to reconstruct in imagination. A distance achieved, thanks to the mystery of time, must not change events, landscapes, human figures into a tangle of shadows growing paler and paler. On the contrary, it can show them in full light, so that every event, every date becomes expressive and persists as an eternal reminder of human depravity and human greatness. Those who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent forever. They can fulfill their duties only by trying to reconstruct precisely things as they were, and by wresting the past from fictions and legends. Thus
both - the Earth seen
from above in an eternal now and the Earth that endures in a recovered
time -
may serve as material for poetry. IV I would
not like to create
the impression that my mind is turned toward the past, for that would
not be
true. Like all my contemporaries I have felt the pull of despair, of
impending
doom, and reproached myself for succumbing to a nihilistic temptation.
Yet on a
deeper level, I believe, my poetry remained sane and, in a dark age,
expressed
a longing for the I
learned much from him. He
gave me a deeper insight into the religion of the Old and New Testament
and
inculcated a need for a strict, ascetic hierarchy in all matters of
mind,
including everything that pertains to art, where as a major sin he
considered
putting the second-rate on the same level with the first-rate.
Primarily,
though, I listened to him as a prophet who loved people, as he says,
"with
old love worn out by pity, loneliness and anger" and for that reason
tried
to address a warning to a crazy world rushing towards a catastrophe.
That a
catastrophe was imminent, I heard from him, but also I heard from him
that the
great conflagration he predicted would be merely a part of a larger
drama to be
played to the end. He saw
deeper causes in an
erroneous direction taken by science in the Eighteenth Century, a
direction
which provoked landslide effects. Not unlike William Blake before him,
he
announced a New Age, a second renaissance of imagination now polluted
by a
certain type of scientific knowledge, but, as he believed, not by all
scientific knowledge, least of all by science that would be discovered
by men
of the future. And it does not matter to what extent I took his
predictions
literally: a general orientation was enough. Oscar
Milosz, like William
Blake, drew inspirations from the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, a
scientist
who, earlier than anyone else, foresaw the defeat of man, hidden in the
Newtonian model of the Universe. When, thanks to my relative, I became
an
attentive reader of Swedenborg, interpreting him not, it is true, as
was common
in the Romantic era, I did not imagine I would visit his country for
the first
time on such an occasion as the present one. Our
century draws to its
close, and largely thanks to those influences I would not dare to curse
it, for
it has also been a century of faith and hope. A profound
transformation, of
which we are hardly aware, because we are a part of it, has been taking
place,
coming to the surface from time to time in phenomena that provoke
general
astonishment. That transformation has to do, and I use here words of
Oscar
Milosz, with "the deepest secret of toiling masses, more than ever
alive,
vibrant and tormented". Their secret, an unavowed need of true values,
finds no language to express itself and here not only the mass media
but also
intellectuals bear a heavy responsibility. But transformation has been
going
on, defying short term predictions, and it is probable that in spite of
all
horrors and perils, our time will be judged as a necessary phase of
travail
before mankind ascends to a new awareness. Then a new hierarchy of
merits will
emerge, and I am convinced that Simone Weil and Oscar Milosz, writers
in whose
school I obediently studied, will receive their due. I feel we should
publicly
confess our attachment to certain names because in that way we define
our
position more forcefully than by pronouncing the names of those to whom
we would
like to address a violent "no". My hope is that in this lecture, in
spite of my meandering thought, which is a professional bad habit of
poets, my
"yes" and "no" are clearly stated, at least as to the
choice of succession. For we all who are here, both the speaker and you
who
listen, are no more than links between the past and the future.
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