爱思英语编者按：辛波丝卡，生于波兰的小镇布宁的一个知识分子家庭里。当时，她的国家刚刚摆脱第一次世界大战的阴影。一九三一年全家迁往波兰南部的克拉科夫。在辛波丝卡的每一本诗集中，几乎都可以看到她追求新风格、尝试新技法的用心。 她擅长自日常生活汲取喜悦，以小隐喻开发深刻的思想，寓严肃于幽默、机智，是以 小搏大，举重若轻的语言大师。于1996年获得诺贝尔文学奖。2001年成为美国文学艺术学院名誉会员，这是美国授予杰出艺术家的最重要荣誉。2012年2月1日，在克拉科夫逝世，享年88岁。

Obituary

Wislawa Szymborska

维斯瓦娃·辛波丝卡

Wislawa Szymborska, poet, died on February 1st, aged 88.

诗人维斯瓦娃•辛波丝卡于2月1日辞世，终年88岁。

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.

1966年,维斯瓦娃•辛波丝卡荣膺文学最高荣誉，朋友却打诨为“诺贝尔灾难”。在颁奖的前一天，她还在浴室里挨过了一个难受的夜晚，因为在豪华的斯德哥尔摩酒店，浴室是其房间里唯一一处能找到灯光的地方。辛波丝卡一生中只做过三次演讲，每一次都身心“折磨”，这次也不例外。当然，真正的灾难要数名誉与财富带来的创伤，折桂诺贝尔奖后，粉丝高兴之余夹杂着些许失望，因为奖项也使这位桂冠诗人哑言，许多几年后才发表了一首诗。

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.

和许多战后余生的波兰人一样，辛波丝卡早年欣然接受共产主义洗礼，视之为对世界千疮百孔下的救赎。赞扬列宁，歌颂年轻的共产党建钢厂等题材常见于早期的诗中。随后，她自我嘲讽道“愚蠢，天真，还有一点思维惰性”。1953年，为支持4位神父的“审判秀”辛波丝卡在请愿书签字，许多人都无法接受她这一做法。

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:

辛波丝卡性情自讽而独特，难以融入波兰人民共和国那乏味的一致：诺贝尔奖褒奖她文如莫扎特一样舒缓，贝多芬一样愤怒。她的诗诙谐而精致，让人回味无穷，却与国家文化政委规定下的社会主义现实风格格不入。她以色情为题，借一首小诗嘲讽了这个狭隘的国度。

There’s nothing more debauched than thinking.

This sort of wantonness runs wild like a wind-borne weed on a plot laid out for daisies.

思想竟是如此堕落。

放纵滋蔓，犹如风媒后的野草，静候雏菊临幸。

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.

辛波丝卡将共产主义比作可憎的雪人，恐怖而虚幻。1966年还是党员的她希望从党内部“一一收拾掉”。随后她自嘲道这不过幻想一场罢。

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.

16岁那年小辛波丝卡经历希特勒与斯大林瓜分祖国。“年迈是岩石与树木的特权”她于是写道。尽管异议称不上主流，面对党派大佬鼓吹历史必然时，诗中却将那份骨子中的倔强娓娓道来。

I believe in the refusal to take part.

I believe in the ruined career.

I believe in the wasted years of work.

I believe in the secret taken to the grave.

These words soar for me beyond all rules without seeking support from actual examples.

My faith is strong, blind, and without foundation.

不去参与，

因已江郎才尽。

虚度光阴，

真理却永存于地下。

文字激荡，

跨越一切樊篱，不为现实所缚

我无依靠的灵魂啊，

竟是如此坚强，如此迷茫。

Scepticism was her watchword. She eschewed political causes; her fight was “against the bad poet who is prone to usingtoo 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.”

辛波丝卡常把“怀疑论”挂在嘴边。她有意避开政治运动，斗争对象常是那些“话多的诗人”。她最喜欢的短语是“不知道”。 诺贝尔奖授奖演说时，她如此说道：这两个词虽然小，却插上了有力的翅膀，扩大了我们内心中的生活范围，还有我们这小小地球悬于其中的天地。如果伊萨克•牛顿没有对自己说“我不知道”，便不会去想哪种力量使其落下，最多也只不过躬下身去拾起来，津津有味地吃下去；而同胞居里夫人则愿“在私立高中教导贵少妇化学而终此一生”。

An accretion of answers

答案徒增

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’.”

“不知道”同样适用于诗人。每首诗都含有一种解释，当最后一个句号跃于纸上，答案却显得并不充分。“这种不充分使个别诗人不满意自己的创作，于是诗人们不懈地努力着，总有一天，整个诗人群体连续写作的所有诗歌， 所有不充分不满意的加总文学史家于是给他的作品夹上一个大的夹子，美其名曰“诗作”

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.

作品较少的辛波丝卡以文风简洁见长。和其他战后波兰诗人不同，尽管她学识过人，却不被视为天才。学童个个熟记她的诗词，这首悼念死去的宠物就是一例。

Die—you can’t do that to a cat.

Since what can a cat do

in an empty apartment?

Climb the walls?

Rub up against the furniture?

Nothing seems different here

but nothing is the same.

Nothing’s been moved

but there’s more space.

And at night-time no lamps are lit.

害死一只猫——你不能这么干。

那么在一所空房子里

一只猫能够做什么？

爬墙？

抑或擦着家具走猫步？

看似这里并无二异，

却都变了位置。

什么也没移动过

可空间竟然大了。

夜里无灯点亮。

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.

在辛波丝卡一些诗中，巧妙的遣词造句只有波兰读者能看懂。但其著作译者卡莱尔•卡瓦纳与斯坦尼斯拉夫•巴兰恰克却能译笔生辉，在《纽约客》先后刊载了16首她的传世之作。

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?”

她的幽默常带有淘气色彩：譬如克拉科夫公寓中马桶座由铁丝围城，扣上一层透明塑料；又如问及何以作品如此之少，不过400余首，她从容地回到“废纸筐装不下了”。成功并没拭去她那份不食人间烟火的朴实，也从不张扬外在生活多么有趣。不妨想想，把这位诗人不上镜的生活搬上银幕结果会怎样。辛波丝卡自嘲道：“不就是坐在桌旁，要么靠在沙发上，盯着天花板或强看呗。一会儿码下7行字，一刻钟后划掉一行，然后又一钟头，啥也没发生……敢问这电影谁能受了？。

Who, indeed? But plenty read and love the results of her self-imposed solitude.

说真的，谁能？恐怕要数品咂辛老诗词之际又偏爱她那份自找的孤独之人吧。

译者后言

周国平说，人想出名一首小诗即可，何足以动辄费劲心思。而在辛老身上足见此言真谛。初识她的诗还在大学，那时因其一首自题“墓志铭”开始关注。诗歌大概是这样的

偏爱写诗的荒谬的巨蟹女走了。

这里躺着，像逗点般，一个

旧派的人。她写过几首诗，

大地赐她长眠，虽然她生前

不曾加入任何文学派系。

她墓上除了这首小诗，牛蒡

和猫头鹰外，别无其它珍物。

路人啊，拿出你提包里的计算机，

思索一下辛波丝卡的命运。

读罢一定会想这又是怎样一个天马行空而多愁善感的人？如果说，弗吉尼亚·沃尔夫会在英国海边精心准备好一副桌椅开始创作，而辛老则会肆意而为，随心而发，有时候会在菜市时来了灵感，席地创作，倔强而幽默的“东欧”女人表现的淋漓尽致。最后愿借默温一段诗歌，希望老人家一路走好。

Here surfacing through the long

backlight of my recollection

is this other world veiled

in its illusion of being known

at the moment of daybreak

when the dreams all at once are gone

into shadow leaving only

in their place the familiar

once-familiar landscape

————The First Days