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Wislawa Szymborska
維斯瓦娃·希姆博爾斯卡
Wislawa Szymborska, poet, died on February 1st, aged 88
維斯瓦娃·希姆博爾斯卡，詩人，2月1日去世，享年88歲
WHEN Wislawa Szymborska won the world's top literary prize in 1996, her friends called it the “Nobel disaster”. This was not just because she had spent an uncomfortable night before the award ceremony in the bath: the bathroom was the only part of her quarters in a grand Stockholm hotel in which she could manage to turn on the light. Nor was it the “torture” she felt in having to make a speech—one of only three she had given in her life. The real disaster was the trauma of fame and fortune. It was years before she could publish another poem. Her fans' delight in her Nobel prize was mixed with disappointment that it had rendered her mute.
1996年維斯瓦娃·希姆博爾斯卡榮獲世界最頂級的諾貝爾文學獎時，她的朋友們管這事兒叫做“諾貝爾災難”。在諾獎頒獎典禮前夜，她下榻在斯德哥爾摩大酒店，然而在這里她能打開的燈只有浴室的，結果她只好在浴室里度過了一個難捱的夜晚。災難的原因還不止于此，發表演講對她來說也是一種“折磨”，要知連帶這一次，她的一生中也只做過三次演講。然而真正的災難卻是名利的負累。獲獎數年之后，她才發表了另一首詩篇。她的粉絲既為她的獲獎而欣喜，又因她的獲獎而有些失望，因為這使她變得沉默。
Like many Poles who survived the war, Ms Szymborska readily accepted communism in early life, seeing it as a salvation for a ruined world. Early poems praised Lenin and young communists building a steel works. Later she blamed her own “foolishness, naivety and perhaps intellectual laziness”, but some found it hard to forgive her for signing a petition in 1953 backing a show trial of four priests.
與許多在二戰中活下來的波蘭人一樣，年輕的希姆博爾斯卡欣然接受了共產主義，相信共產主義將把世界從廢墟中拯救出來。她早年的詩篇歌頌了列寧和年輕的共產主義者們，描繪了他們建造鋼鐵廠的情景。雖說后來她責備了自己當時的“愚蠢、幼稚、也許還有一些思維上的惰性”，但有些人還是不能原諒她在1953年時的所作所為，當時她在一份支持公開審判四名牧師的請愿書上簽了名。
Her ironic and individualistic spirit was ill fitted to the grey conformity of “people's Poland”: the Nobel citation said she wrote with the ease of Mozart and the fury of Beethoven. Playful, subtle and haunting, her poetry could never be in harmony with the socialist realist style dictated by the country's cultural commissars. She mocked their intolerance of dissent in a poem on pornography:
她喜歡諷刺、崇尚個人主義的精神與“人民波蘭”的死氣沉沉和整齊劃一格格不入：諾貝爾評委會說，她的詩有著莫扎特的恬然與貝多芬的憤怒。富有趣味、難以捉摸又耐人尋味，她的詩永遠也無法與國家文化部政委指示要求的那種社會主義式的現實風格和平相處。她在一首關于色情文學的詩中嘲諷了波蘭當局的黨同伐異。
There's nothing more debauched than thinking.
沒有什么比思想更加放蕩
This sort of wantonness runs wild like a wind-borne weed on a plot laid out for daisies.
這樣的放縱猶如乘風的種子在即將雛菊盛開的野地之上肆無忌憚地奔狂
Communism she likened to the abominable snowman—horrid and unreal—though she stayed in the party until 1966, hoping “to try to fix it all from the inside”. That, she said later, had been another delusion.
她將共產主義比作喜馬拉雅雪人，一樣的可怕而不真實。雖然她直到1966年還仍然留在黨內，希望“從黨內修正”，但她后來說過，這又是一個不切實際的幻想。
Ms Szymborska was 16 when Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland between them. “Old age was the privilege of rocks and trees,” she wrote. Although not a mainstream dissident, her poems distilled the essence of individual stubbornness in the face of what the party bosses said was historical inevitability.
希姆博爾斯卡16歲時，希特勒和斯大林瓜分了波蘭。“長壽是石與樹的特權。”她寫道。面對瓜分，這被共黨領袖稱作的歷史必然，即使她并非主流的異見分子，她的詩還是表現出個體不屈頑抗的本質。
I believe in the refusal to take part.
我相信拒絕不參與的權利
I believe in the ruined career.
我相信那已經被毀的事業
I believe in the wasted years of work.
我相信白費掉的多年苦工
I believe in the secret taken to the grave.
我相信被帶入墳墓的秘密
These words soar for me beyond all rules without seeking support from actual examples.
這些告白為我展翅高飛，飛過一切的束縛，不必尋求實例的支持
My faith is strong, blind, and without foundation.
我的信仰堅強、盲目、沒有根據
Scepticism was her watchword. She eschewed political causes; her fight was “against the bad poet who is prone to using too many words”. Her favourite phrase was “I don't know”. She told the Nobel audience: “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.” Without it, she said, Isaac Newton would have gobbled apples rather than pondering the force that makes them drop. Her compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie would have “wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families.”
懷疑主義是她的口號。她遠避政治；她的斗爭是針對那些“會用詞太多的差勁詩人”。她最喜歡的詞組是“我不知道”。她在諾貝爾頒獎禮上對觀眾這樣說，“懷疑是渺小的，但有著堅強的翅膀。它擴大了我們的生活，包括我們生存的空間，和我們渺小的地球懸掛在的外太空。”她說，沒有它，艾薩克-牛頓當時也許只是狼吞虎咽地吃了那個蘋果，而非思索是什么力量讓蘋果掉落下來。她的同胞瑪麗-居里也許最后只是在某所私立女子貴族高中教化學。
An accretion of answers
答案的累加
It was the same for poets. Each poem was a kind of answer, but as soon as the last full stop hit the page the result seemed inadequate. “So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paper clip by literary historians and called their ‘oeuvre'.”
對詩人也一樣。每首詩都是一種答案，但落筆的最后一個句號也無法給出一個完滿的答案。“所以詩人們在不斷地嘗試，或早或晚，由于自我的不滿足而不斷給出的答案會被文學歷史學家用一個巨大的紙夾夾在一起，人們管這疊紙叫做他們的“畢生心血”。
Her own output was slender in quantity and lean in style. For all her erudition, she did not come across as intimidatingly brainy (unlike some other Polish post-war poets). Schoolchildren learn her poems by heart, like this one about a bereaved pet.
希姆博爾斯卡一生所寫的詩并不多，風格也較為單一。盡管她博學多識，她并為給人一種聰明到可怕的感覺（這與一些其他的波蘭戰后詩人不同）。小學生背誦她的詩篇，例如這首詩，是關于一只死掉的寵物貓。
Die—you can't do that to a cat.
死亡——你不能對一只貓這樣做
Since what can a cat do
你看，一只貓能做什么
in an empty apartment?
在一個空蕩蕩的公寓里
Climb the walls?
爬墻？
Rub up against the furniture?
跑到家具上？
Nothing seems different here
這兒似乎沒什么不同
but nothing is the same.
但又沒什么是相同的
Nothing's been moved
沒什么東西被搬走了
but there's more space.
但地方卻變大了
And at night-time no lamps are lit.
而且到了夜晚，再無燈亮
Invented words and syntactic tricks made some of her poems for Polish-speakers only. But her translators, chiefly Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, did a fine job, particularly in the New Yorker, which has published 16 of the best.
自造詞和句法變化的把戲讓她的一些詩只能被說波蘭語的人欣賞。但她詩的譯者，主要是Clare Cavanagh和Stanislaw Baranczak，卻做得很好，特別是在《紐約客》上，這本雜志已經刊登了她最優秀的詩歌中的16篇。
Her humour was mischievous: the lavatory seat in her Cracow flat was made of barbed wire encased in clear plastic. Asked why she had published so little—her entire canon was only some 400 poems—she replied gently that she had a waste-paper basket. Success left no dent in her reclusive modesty, and she would never claim that her external life was interesting. Imagine trying to make a film of a poet's “hopelessly unphotogenic” life, she said: “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 15 minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens Who…could stand to watch this kind of thing?”
她的幽默帶著惡作劇的性質：在她克拉科夫的公寓里，她抽水馬桶的座板是由透明塑料包住的棘鐵絲做成的。她發表的所有詩只有差不多400篇，當被問及為何如此之少時，她溫和地回答道，這是因為她有一個廢紙簍。成功并未對她隱士般的謙遜造成任何影響，而她也永遠不會將她的物質生活稱為有趣。當設想如果要拍攝一部影片，講述一位詩人“極端無美感”的生活時，她說，“就是一個人坐在桌子邊上，或者躺在沙發上，一動不動地盯著墻或是天花板。偶爾這個人寫了七行詩，15分鐘后就又劃掉了其中的一行，一個小時后又劃掉一行，在那之間其他什么事都沒發生。誰會愿意去看這樣的片子？”
Who, indeed? But plenty read and love the results of her self-imposed solitude.
究竟誰會愿意看呢？不過她把孤獨強加給自己后所作的作品，倒是不乏讀者和欣賞者。
