CZESLAW MILOSZ (1911-2004)
By Nelson Ascher
http://www.europundits.blogspot.com/2004_08_01_europundits_archive.html#109251556615058932
The worlds most important living poet has died. Born, still under
the rule of the Czars, in what is now Lithuanias capital, Vilna
(Wilno, Vilnius), a city also known before WW1 as the
Jerusalem of the North because it was one of the main centers
of Jewish learning, Milosz became also the most important Polish
poet of the 20th century.
He spent the war years in Poland, took part in the resistance and
saw much of his country being devastated. For a time after WW2
he worked for his countrys communist government as a diplomat,
but by the end of the 40s he grew disappointed with communism
and, moving to Paris, he wrote what is a pioneering essay and
probably the best book there is about the reasons why leftist
totalitarianism has so powerfully attracted the best and brightest
among the Western intelligentsia: The Captive Mind. Later he
settled in California and, after 1989, he spent much of his time in
Krakow.
Milosz was a superb essayist who wrote brilliant and insightful
books on politics, literature and religion. He was a Christian, a
believer who learned Hebrew to translate into Polish parts of the
Bible. He was also a true humanist and a philo-Semite who wrote
movingly and sincerely about the fate of his countrys Jews.
Above all, however, he was a splendid poet and, though
unfortunately I know no Polish, his poems, translated into several
languages, have given me great pleasure for the last 25 years or
so. Thanks to his efforts, other first-rate Polish writers and poets
like Zbigniew Herbert and Aleksandr Watt became known and
appreciated in the West.
He was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. I interviewed
him twice during the 80s, once by phone and once personally in
Paris.
Here, in English translation, are some of his poems.
CAMPO DI FIORI
In Rome on the Campo di Fiori
baskets of olives and lemons,
cobbles spattered with wine
and the wreckage of flowers.
Vendors cover the trestles
with rose-pink fish;
armfuls of dark grapes
heaped on peach-down.
On this same square
they burned Giordano Bruno.
Henchmen kindled the pyre
close-pressed by the mob.
Before the flames had died
the taverns were full again,
baskets of olives and lemons
again on the vendors' shoulders.
I thought of the Campo di Fiori
in Warsaw by a carousel
one clear spring evening
to the strains of a carnival tune.
The bright melody drowned
the salvos from the ghetto wall,
and couples were flying
high in the cloudless sky.
At times wind from the burning
would drift dark kites along
and riders on the carousel
caught petals in mid-air.
That same hot wind
blew open the skirts of the girls
and the crowds were laughing
on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.
Someone will read as moral
that the people of Rome or Warsaw
haggle, laugh, make love
as they pass by martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
of the passing of things human,
of the oblivion
born before the flames have died.
But that day I thought only
of the loneliness of the dying,
of how, when Giordano
climbed to his burning
he could not find
in any human tongue
words for mankind,
mankind who live on.
Already they were back at their wine
or peddled their white starfish,
baskets of olives and lemons
they had shouldered to the fair,
and he already distanced
as if centuries had passed
while they paused just a moment
for his flying in the fire.
Those dying here, the lonely
forgotten by the world,
their tongue becomes for us
the language of an ancient planet.
Until, when all is legend
and many years have passed
on a new Campo di Fiori
rage will kindle at a poet's fire.
(Warsaw, 1943, Translated by David Brooks and Louis Iribarne)
FAREWELL
I speak to you, my son,
after years of silence. Verona is no more.
I crumbled its brickdust in my fingers. That is what remains
Of the great love of native cities.
I hear your laughter in the garden. And the mad spring's
scent comes toward me across the wet leaves.
Toward me, who, not believing in any saving power,
outlived the others and myself as well.
Do you know how it is when one wakes
at night suddenly and asks,
listening to the pounding heart: what more do you want,
insatiable? Spring, a nightingale is singing.
Children's laughter in the garden. A first clear star
above a foam of buds on the hills
and a light song returns to my lips
and I am young again, as before, in Verona.
To reject. To reject everything. That is not it.
It will neither resurrect the past nor return me to it.
Sleep, Romeo, Juliet, on your headrest of stone feathers.
I won't raise your bound hands from the ashes.
Let the cat visit the deserted cathedrals,
its pupil flashing on the altars. Let an owl
nest on the dead ogive.
In the white noon among the rubble, let the snake
warm itself on leaves of coltsfoot and in the silence
let him coil in lustrous circles around useless gold.
I won't return. I want to know what's left
after rejecting youth and spring,
after rejecting those red lips
from which heat seemed to flow
on sultry nights.
After songs and the scent of wine,
oaths and laments, diamond nights,
and the cry of gulls with the black sun
glaring behind them.
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