It’s the birthday of poet Czeslaw Milosz (books by this author), born in Szetejnie, Lithuania (1911). He grew up in a Polish-speaking family. His father was an engineer for czarist Russia during World War I. The family traveled all over the country as his father helped rebuild roads and bridges. Milosz was fascinated by all the different religions in that part of Russia, from Catholicism, Greek Orthodox, and Protestantism to Judaism and pagan mysticism. He loved listening to village folktales about the Lithuanian lakes, rivers, and forests, and these tales later influenced his poetry.

The family eventually settled in Poland. Milosz studied law rather than literature in college because, he said, “There were so many girls studying literature it was called the marriage department.” In 1931 he co-founded a literary group that was so pessimistic about the future it was nicknamed the “Catastrophists.” The group predicted a coming world war, but nobody believed them. He worked for Polish Radio for a while, but he got fired when he let Jews broadcast their opinions on the air. Another radio station sent him to cover the invasion of Poland by **** forces in 1939. After the invasion he found a job as a janitor at a university, secretly writing anti-**** poetry for underground publications. He witnessed the genocide of the Jews in Warsaw and was one of the first poets to write about it in his book of poems Rescue (1945).

After the war Milosz got a job working as a diplomat for communist Poland, though he wasn’t a party member. One night in the winter of 1949, on his way home from a government meeting, he saw several jeeps filled with political prisoners, surrounded by soldiers. He said, “It was then that I realized what I was part of.” He defected in 1951, and made it to Paris even though his passport had been confiscated.

Most intellectuals in Paris were pro-communist at the time and they thought of Milosz as either a traitor or a madman for leaving Poland. The poet Pablo Neruda attacked him in an article called “The Man Who Ran Away.” In 1953 Milosz published a book about communism called The Captive Mind in which he argued that people were too ready to accept totalitarian terror for the sake of an imaginary future. He moved to the United States and began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley in 1960. He had mixed feelings about the United States: he wrote, “What splendor! What poverty! What humanity! What inhumanity! What mutual good will! What individual isolation! What loyalty to the ideal! What hypocrisy! What a triumph of conscience! What perversity!”

He kept writing poetry in Polish even though almost no one was reading it. His books had been banned in Poland and his poems weren’t translated into English until 1973. Then, in 1980, he got a phone call at 3:00 in the morning telling him that he’d won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Czeslaw Milosz said, “I have read many books, but to place all those volumes on top of one another and stand on them would not add a cubit to my stature. Their learned terms are of little use when I attempt to seize naked experience, which eludes all accepted ideas,” and he said, “Language is the only homeland.”

..



You whom I could not save

Listen to me.  

Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.  

I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.  

I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.


What strengthened me, for you was lethal.  

You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning of a new one,  

Inspiration of hatred with lyrical beauty;  

Blind force with accomplished shape.


Here is a valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge  

Going into white fog. Here is a broken city;  

And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave  

When I am talking with you.


What is poetry which does not save  

Nations or people?  

A connivance with official lies,  

A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,  

Readings for sophomore girls.

That I wanted good poetry without knowing it,  

That I discovered, late, its salutary aim,  

In this and only this I find salvation.


They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds  

To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds.  

I put this book here for you, who once lived  

So that you should visit us no more.  




                                                                                         Warsaw, 1945

                                                                                        
- by Czeslaw Milosz






st, 13 dec 13

All colors come from the sun. And it does not have
Any particular color, for it contains them all.
And the whole Earth is like a poem
While the sun above represents the artist.

Whoever wants to paint the variegated world
Let him never look straight up at the sun
Or he will lose the memory of things he has seen.
Only burning tears will stay in his eyes.

Let him kneel down, lower his face to the grass,
And look at the light reflected by the ground.
There he will find everything we have lost:
The stars and the roses, the dusks and the dawns.

*Warsaw, 1943