Poets are Fortune's darlings according to Wislawa Szymborska. Despite the trials and tribulations, the frustration of not feeling comfortable calling oneself a poet and the real threat of claiming the title "poet" without official certification in some countries, poets are charged with answering the inner impulse of inspiration with "I don't know." The search for knowing leads poets inevitably to create a body of work, one that is never fully complete. They consider every word, weighing each one to reveal what most of us consider ordinary and normal as extra-ordinary and unique. Whether stone or cloud, day or night, a single existence or a person's existence, poets give their lives to describing a world and those in it as astonishing. What follows is the translated text of Symborska's Nobel acceptance speech.
