The Persona of Czeslaw Milosz 978-3-631-76205-9

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The Persona of Czesław Miłosz

Cross-Roads.

Polish Studies in Culture, Literary Theory, and History Edited by Ryszard Nycz

Volume 11

Mikołaj Golubiewski

The Persona of Czesław Miłosz Authorial Poetics, Critical Debates, Reception Games

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.   Zugl.: Berlin, Freie Univ., Diss., 2016   Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.  

Cover Design: © Olaf Gloeckler, Atelier Platen, Friedberg Cover Image: Courtesy of Benjamin Ben Chaim   Printed by CPI books GmbH, Leck   D 188 ISSN 2191-6179 ISBN 978-3-631-76204-2 (Print) E-ISBN 978-3-631-76205-9 (E-PDF E-ISBN 978-3-631-76206-6 (EPUB) E-ISBN 978-3-631-76207-3 (MOBI) DOI 10.3726/b14411 © Peter Lang GmbH Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften Berlin 2018 All rights reserved.   Peter Lang – Berlin · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed. www.peterlang.com

Preface Dear reader, this book was not intended for you; I indulged in a personal whim, dismissing in advance the idea of having any readers at all. This is, of course, not true. These words are my paraphrase of Czesław Miłosz’s introduction to the English translation of his book-long essay The Land of Ulro (1977). Recently, I attended the Miłosz Festival in Kraków, an event promoting international poetry, where I discussed with Polish poets whether they read him at all. Most of them showed reluctant aversion toward the overbearing influence of his works, and, among other things, described him as egocentric. This brought back memories of my own early response to Miłosz. I had thought then that his writing was about himself alone, about the primacy of his own view, adorned in some mystical splendor. Later, when I read the works in translation, especially the way Miłosz addressed his English-speaking readers in the introduction to The Land of Ulro, I began to understand the different reactions his works engendered in his Polish-speaking and his English-speaking readers. In Poland, such dismissal of readers upfront is regarded as grandstanding and unnecessary, while in the USA, for example, the assumption might be that such a cryptic foreigner bearing “exotic knowledge” wants to exclude the unprepared. It is the discrepancy between these two reactions that is the motivation for this book. At first, I had planned for my work to concentrate entirely on the American reception of Czesław Miłosz. I had thought that foreign writers suffer from the reductive gaze of their receiving cultures, which often simplify them according to reductionist expectations. In that way, one of the key American conjectures about poets, applied to Miłosz, was that they fulfill the goal of egocentric universalism through self-reliance. I was to discover, from deeper acquaintance with Miłosz’s writings and their Polish interpretation, that such conjecture did not differ greatly in Poland. Most Poles usually hope that the poets will bear communal traditions and even the most dutiful of scholars position Miłosz in this paradigm. The transatlantic generalizations are reinforced by the self-perception of Polish culture as an oppressed Catholic unity and America as a bastion of democratic and capitalist freedom. The tension between the two approaches—American universalism and Polish traditionalism—receives unexpected mediation in a nomadic quality of the works of Czesław Miłosz, by which I mean not only that his works changed with his journeys, but that mobility in many dimensions is what constitutes Miłosz’s writings.

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Preface

I believe Miłosz reveals the divide between the first generation of his readers, who mostly knew him personally and read him as a Polish patriot, and the second generation, who may only encounter his writings and, thus, concentrate on their intertextual relations, distinct voice, and poetics. As a representative of the second generation, I  have to first tackle the teleological excess that the first generation unavoidably displays toward Miłosz’s personae. That is, I have to begin by destabilizing Miłosz’s transatlantic image. That is why I have oriented my work to expose better why and how Miłosz’s thought diverges from the ready-made cultural matrices. Only by contrasting of the Polish and the American readings does the poetics of Miłosz emerge. Only from this double viewpoint does his poetics suddenly appear to operate both on the level of authorial reception and textual representation. My untypical approach is necessary to properly foreground a writer like Miłosz, and I am convinced that it will serve as a great example of how to learn from nomadic authors, whose numbers are steadily growing. Scholars argue that Miłosz opened the American poetic tradition to include more reflection on ideology and politics. In Poland, however, the works of Miłosz are considered from the viewpoint of religion and metaphysics. Poles construe Miłosz’s poetic self as a prophet, Americans as a witness to historical trauma. Markedly, Miłosz invited these discrepant assumptions himself. Nevertheless, there has been no comprehensive examination to date of the sources of the selfproclaimed contradictory nature of Czesław Miłosz in both his works and his self-presentation. As a result, with few exceptions, scholarship remains scattered in diverse areas of interest and this atomization removes Miłosz’s work to the margins of world literature. Without properly appreciating the poetics of contradiction, hinted at by Miłosz, and without a critical analysis of his self-situating, we undervalue his impact on literature, in the end allowing for a petrification of his innovative methods. However, Miłosz’s experiences and aesthetics prevent him from assuming a unified form. In fact, since he taught Slavic literature for more than 30 years at the University of California, Berkeley, Miłosz presented himself as a figure between the East and the West of European culture. This book juxtaposes the Polish and American literary expectations applied to Miłosz and reconsiders them by closely following his perseverance in formulating his own kind of perspectivism. That is, in search of lasting symbols common to all, Miłosz develops a method of oscillating between ideas, beginning unfailingly with his current situation. Furthermore, Miłosz persistently

Preface

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places himself outside of the consensus and maneuvers the subject matter of his works. In truth, Miłosz honed this method to such an extent that it eventually became his statement in poetry, poetology, politics, and philosophy. The following chapters recount Miłosz’s diverse images so as to track the broader gesture of his work—and his awareness of the transatlantic dialectic of his personae.

Acknowledgments I wish to express my deep gratitude to Ulla Haselstein, Georg Witte, Sabine Schülting, and Birte Wege of the Free University Berlin, as well as Irena Grudzińska Gross of Princeton University, who supported my work on this book from initial ideas to its publication. My sincere thanks go to many scholars and colleagues for scientific discussion, advice, and continuous support always so greatly appreciated, especially Clare Cavanagh of Northwestern University and Michał Paweł Markowski of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who advised me in crucial moments during the writing process. Specialists on Miłosz from Kraków, too, shared with me great ideas on the matters of his poetry and I owe my thanks above all to Aleksander Fiut, Joanna Zach, Ryszard Nycz of the Jagiellonian University, and the poets Adam Zagajewski and Tomasz Różycki. I also wish to thank scholars who have set me on the path of academic development, particularly Ewa Paczoska, Krzysztof Rutkowski, Małgorzata Grzegorzewska, Jan Zieliński, and Paweł Stępień of the University of Warsaw. I  would like to acknowledge my colleagues, whose benevolent spirits motivated me in times of doubt, above all Johannes Kleine, Aleksandra Kremer, Roman Kuhn, Eva Lieberich, Elodie Ripoll, Dennis Schep, and Agata Stasik. I owe a great debt to the team at the Borderland Foundation, especially Krzysztof and Małgorzata Czyżewski, caretakers of the Miłosz’s Krasnogruda manor, who inspired me to study his poetry. I express my gratitude to the most kind and perceptive readers of my work, John Foster Hoffmann of the Johns Hopkins University, Tamara Kamatović of the University of Chicago, and Professor Patricia McHugh. Last but not least, I thank Joanna Kulas.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will. “Ars Poetica?”

Contents Introduction .........................................................................................................  17 1 The Writer as Proteus and Silkworm ....................................................  21 The Plurality of Incarnations .............................................................................  21 Unity in Variety ...................................................................................................  24 The Silkworm and the Cocoon ..........................................................................  25 The Boiling Hot Star of Transformations .........................................................  28 Mowa  .....................................................................................................................  31 The Processual Performance ..............................................................................  32 The Lyrical Persona .............................................................................................  34 Authorial Personae ..............................................................................................  36 The Lens In-Between ..........................................................................................  38 The Meaning of Masks ........................................................................................  39

2 Modernist Hagiography .............................................................................  43 Gestures of Self-Situating ...................................................................................  44 The Intellectual Shape-Shifting ..........................................................................  46 Writers as the People of the Book .....................................................................  48 The Book as the Body .........................................................................................  49 The Book as the Sacred .......................................................................................  51 The Book as the World .......................................................................................  52 Epiphanic Poetry .................................................................................................  54 The Spatial Poetics of “A Notebook: Bon By Lake Leman” ............................  58 The Site In-Between ............................................................................................  60 To Reveal the Presence of Things ......................................................................  63

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Contents

3 Self-Definition ................................................................................................  67 The Idea of Witnessing .......................................................................................  67 Corporal Testimony ............................................................................................  68 Polish Romantic Martyrdom .............................................................................  69 American Puritan Witnessing with Life ...........................................................  72 Witnessing as Mnemonic Supersession ...........................................................  74 Witnessing of the Camps ....................................................................................  75 European Bystanders ..........................................................................................  76 “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” ...........................................................  78 The Ambivalence of Poorness ............................................................................  79 Guilt  ......................................................................................................................  80 The Fall of Humanist Anthropocentrism .........................................................  82 The Mole ...............................................................................................................  85 The Grotesque ......................................................................................................  89

4 The American Witness ................................................................................  91 Miłosz’s American Popularity ............................................................................  92 Lessons for American Poets ...............................................................................  92 A Distinct Author ................................................................................................  95 Moments That Judge All Poets ..........................................................................  96 The Poet of Witness .............................................................................................  98 The Immorality of Art ......................................................................................  101 Against Lionization ...........................................................................................  103 The Witness of Poetry .......................................................................................  107

5 The Polish Prophet .....................................................................................  111 What Is Polish Culture? ....................................................................................  112 Adam Mickiewicz’s Influence ..........................................................................  113

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Polish Romanticism ..........................................................................................  115 The Bardic Tradition .........................................................................................  116 The Prophetic Tradition ...................................................................................  118 Polish Expectations ...........................................................................................  119 Rescue; Ocalenie ................................................................................................  121 “In Warsaw” .......................................................................................................  123 National and Private Mourning ......................................................................  125 A Self-Conscious Elegy ....................................................................................  128

6 The Gnostic Bard .........................................................................................  133 Shared Responsibility for the Camps ..............................................................  134 The Evil of the Gnostic World .........................................................................  137 Manichean Duality ............................................................................................  139 The Reworking of the Gnostic Thought .........................................................  140 Polish “Metaphysical” Miłosz ..........................................................................  142 “Campo Dei Fiori” ............................................................................................  143 Pastime and Horror ...........................................................................................  146 Karuzela  ..............................................................................................................  149 Dramatis Personae ............................................................................................  151 Heresy, Faith, and Science ................................................................................  152 The Recurrence of Tragedy ..............................................................................  153 Interpretation and Time ...................................................................................  157

7 The Realist Perspectivist ..........................................................................  161 The Burials of Walt Whitman ..........................................................................  162 Double Vision of a Telescopic Eye ..................................................................  163 Presence as a Safe House ..................................................................................  165 The Peak Position and the Middle Ground ...................................................  166

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Contents

The Movement ...................................................................................................  168 William Blake’s Divine Imagination ...............................................................  169 Friedrich Nietzsche’s Perspectivism ................................................................  170 Against Nihilism ................................................................................................  173 The Utopian Hope .............................................................................................  176 “Heraclitus”  ........................................................................................................  178 The Same River ..................................................................................................  180 Love  .....................................................................................................................  183

Conclusion ..........................................................................................................  185 Situating and Movement ..................................................................................  185

Endnotes ...............................................................................................................  193 Index ......................................................................................................................  237

Introduction In the center of Miłosz’s poetry lies the experience or memory of a concrete event, whose situation in both time and space the poet explores in an endeavor to gain an understanding of himself. This stems not from introspection, but emerges from occurrences, mediated by the world. Through a movement of reflection, Miłosz situates the individual in the body, history, culture, and language—in a strictly personal yet structurally universal self-observation. Since Miłosz lived most of his life in exile and operated in three languages, his movement effects in a curious self-fashioning and the many allusions to other poets such as William Blake or Walt Whitman further reveal Miłosz’s self-awareness. To thoroughly analyze Miłosz’s methods means to read his works against the perceptions of most of his readers; that is, as experimental. Such experimental poetry by Miłosz conveys his shifting movement of thought and the use of different personae. The concept of persona, in its modern understanding, has been available since the nineteenth century. However, its scholarly reconnaissance has begun around 1957, with Robert Langbaum’s book The Poetry of Experience concentrating on the development of Robert Browning’s concept of dramatic monologue, later reshaped into literary personae by the modernist poets, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound. Four years after the Langbaum publication, Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction affirmed the idea that the author of fiction too may be a persuasive persona in its own right, and was described by Booth as the “second self ” and “the implied image of the artist.” At the same time, Lionel Trilling argued in his 1972 Norton lectures that English and American poets “have programmatically scuttled the sacred doctrine of the persona” and embraced the ideals of Sincerity and Authenticity, as inscribed in the title of Trilling’s book. To a certain extent against Trilling, Robert C. Elliott undertook to clarify the term as part of the critical discourse in his 1982 book The Literary Persona. The publication just two years of Stephen Greenblatt’s famous work on Renaissance Self-Fashioning, had motivated scholars even more to reflect on the authorial personae projected by writers not only through their style, tone, or technique in writing, but also through the codes they prescribed and by which they lived. This vein has been developed recently by Jérôme Meizoz, who works with the notion of Postures littéraires (2007, 2011), which set the stage for diachronic analysis of the writer as an actor in the literary field. Meizoz argues that the concept of “posture” comes from Jean Jacques Rousseau. It should be noted that the twentieth-century use of the term “persona” and the like points to two different

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Introduction

masks: the one held by an author to distance himself from the reader, and the other constructed inside the text as the speaker taking the position of the author.1 Thorough consideration of Miłosz’s theory and practice of writing leads us to postulate instead a persona-in-motion. On the one hand, Miłosz promotes multiperspectivist poetics that operate with a plethora of literary personae. On the other, Miłosz’s political engagement made him establish at least two different authorial personae, one in the USA and one in Poland. Operating between fictional and factual narratives so as to “situate” himself, Miłosz navigates amidst the modernist and the confessionalist traditions, between literature as an artificial construct and as an authentic voice. Thus, to get a better grasp of the self and the world, Miłosz remains in intellectual motion. The proliferation of personae comes from the kind of poetry Miłosz wants to create, his mentality, and the developments of his life. This specific blend of intellectual hopes and troublesome life may be unapproachable for Americans—but it is even more unapproachable for Poles who, if exiled, never concentrate on their migrant situation, but rather concentrate on their lost homeland, and often read Miłosz’s distance to Polishness as a rejection of his true self. However, Miłosz uses exile in his own way, not with nostalgia but with deep acceptance, because his home is within the Polish language. Nevertheless, Miłosz’s reception is obscured at his own doing, by his own manner of thinking in contradictions. In this regard, let us consider the most fundamental example from Miłosz’s wartime work in German-occupied Warsaw; the period in life that has completely changed him. Jerzy Andrzejewski (1909–1983), a notable Polish writer, mentions in his Notatki do autobiografii how he helped his good friend Czesław Miłosz publish the first book of poetry of wartime Warsaw. Andrzejewski, along with Miłosz, and Janina Dłuska (1909–1986) who later became Miłosz’s wife, brought out the book using a typewriter, a razor blade, a stitching awl, and twine. The 46 copies entitled simply Wiersze, Poems, came out in September 1940 under the pseudonym Jan Syruć. Subsequently, the similarly produced collections entitled The World (A Naive Poem) and Voices of Poor People were released in the 1943/1944 book Poems and formed the basis of Miłosz’s first postwar collection Rescue. However, those handmade artifacts of artistic resolve in times of war have been recovered and published only recently, for the centenary of Miłosz’s birthday, seven years after his death, in 2011. Among them were two previously unknown poems and three paragraphs of introduction to the cycle Voices of Poor People.2 The first two sentences captured my attention and read as follows:  “I have served two fears: the social fear and the metaphysical fear, expressing one in the language of another. Perhaps they are but one fear, growing when people are forbidden happiness.”3

Introduction

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This fragment perfectly encompasses the later divides of Miłosz’s worldview, poetics, reception, and style. “I have served two fears,” writes Miłosz, using the Polish word trwoga, which translates as “fear” but carries a broader set of meanings. Trwoga means “a state of alertness; from the phrase “bić na trwogę,” meaning “to ring the bells at the sight of an oncoming enemy.” In another instance, a proverb advises the one engulfed with “trwoga” to escape to God, “jak trwoga to do Boga.” In this way, the semantic field of the word “trwoga” already conveys the two fears Miłosz describes, namely, the social and the metaphysical. The two fears encompass Miłosz’s generational experience of social revolutions, like communism or fascism, and his private encounter with esoteric literature, personified by his distant French uncle, Oscar Vladislas Milosz (1877–1939).4 The opposition of the two fears is, however, a literary feint by Miłosz who, over time, developed an intricate system of spiraling paradoxes operating in sets of inconclusive references. For the most part, Miłosz’s declarations remain ungraspable, if not completely elusive. This unceasing movement of thought had been praised much earlier, and more clearly, by one of his favorite American poets, Walt Whitman (1819–1892), who asks in the poem “Walt Whitman,” “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”5 Miłosz was a humanist, so the antinomies he considers are not just his or Polish. There is a larger significance, a dimension that Miłosz generalizes from the local to the global perspective. An example of this is the Polish figure of the modern bard that Miłosz offered to the canon of world literature, simultaneously criticizing its origins and shifting the perspective toward gnosis; from the political to the religious. The issue of scientific materialism versus redemptive belief is, after all, clearly central to Miłosz’s work. Then again, for Miłosz, Polish religiosity is mostly political. Hence, even when politicians or historians articulate the tensions that Miłosz names, he retains the freedom to move between them, out of academic reasoning and back. As a poet, Miłosz can communicate with more than one language, he can choose from the narratives of science (biology, history, philosophy), power (politics, institutions, systems, the Church), religion (dogmas, rituals, esotericism), or the everyday (the private, the public). The capaciousness of his speech mixes them all in unending reconsiderations. However, Miłosz does not just concentrate on his present self; he equally encompasses his past and his possible pasts and possible futures. To that end, Miłosz repeatedly returns to the conditional mood and considers the many variants of events, using phrases such as “if only” or “what if.” Moreover, Miłosz moves beyond his self toward other people whom he knew personally to those he

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Introduction

heard or read about in history books to fictional personae to animals to things. Furthermore, Miłosz consequently surveys the possibility of truth through the eyes of the other and takes this approach to the extreme. That is, Miłosz cherishes the understanding stating, “I have my idea about things, but let us learn from the possibility of different viewpoints.” Hence, if Miłosz favors a specific poetic genre, it originates in prose and is called a soliloquy, a discussion with oneself famously represented by Augustine’s Confessions. But Miłosz’s soliloquy spreads to all the perspectives and lyrical personae he assumes. So as to gather knowledge about what it is to live as a human, Miłosz imagines different possibilities of life experience and embodiment, different viewpoints and moments of existence.6 Miłosz formulated a telling answer to the famous verse by Whitman, “(I am large, I  contain multitudes),” which I  use as the motto for this book. In the poem “Ars Poetica?” (1968), Miłosz’s speaker elaborates on the inability to find a stable position within one discourse. He compares himself to an open house with unlocked doors through which others may freely enter and exit. The speaker explains that the poet never has just a single source for his writing, but is inhabited by many external voices. The voices haunt the poet against his rational will and use him as if his body was their own. Just as the many authors of the Bible are supposed to derive from a single divine source of inspiration, so Miłosz suggests often a single invisible source of his literary work, detached from his person. When Miłosz talks of a “daimonion,” which provokes the rhythm and tone of the work at hand, he is utilizing a term first used by Socrates and meaning “divine touch.” This “daimonion” makes Miłosz feel as if he is only an instrument of greater powers.7 The poet acknowledges the instability of subjective perception, influenced by contrary ideologies, yet he strives to hold his own. Miłosz offers the image of a person as a haunted house, inspired by every person he encounters, motivated by speakers from the past and by the writings of others. This, the speaker argues, is the purpose of poetry: to constantly bring forth the knowledge that a poet’s identity—and possibly the human identity—is never stable, but always plural and referential. We learn from Miłosz’s manifold poems that the invisible guests may be demons or dead friends, imagined heroines or historical figures. The motto from “Ars Poetica?” reveals the constant shift of perspectives undergoing both in Miłosz’s poetry and in his situating himself as an author. The poet seems to be asking “Is the art of poetry even possible?” or “Is there anything permanent to poetry?” The question mark in the title of “Ars Poetica?” itself situates doubt as the mainspring of Miłosz’s writing and foregrounds his inclination to perspectivism, ambivalence, and oscillation of thought.

1 The Writer as Proteus and Silkworm In an interview first published in 1981, Czesław Miłosz reflects on his image as a poet: “Not many poets appear in such a variety of guises.” “Guise” means “a likeness, the external appearance, a shape, and an image.” Significantly, Miłosz uses a stronger noun in Polish, “skóry,” meaning simply “skins” that he consciously puts on and takes off. This phrasing projects a much closer relationship between the author and his writing. What is seemingly self-fashioning settles here into the etymology of “ ‘biography,” a word deriving from the Greek bios, “life,” and graphein, “to write.” The controlled changing of skins suggests complete metamorphosis, in which one abandons the old shell for a new one in a snake-like process of renovation, rejuvenation, and maturation. The writer abandons the old self, rejects the finished work for the sake of the new and unknown project ahead in order to move on, find new inspiration, and grow, in a constant interchange of biographical gains and losses. This shape-shifting paradoxically makes the artist retain experience but exchange the self and the form projected in literature; it makes him grow more adult and younger at the same time; simultaneously accruing wisdom and naïveté. To appear in a variety of skins is to revel in alternations without end, in a horizontal progression; or, it is to pursue some higher level of existence in a vertical understanding of being, ascending from the emanated forms. In an explicit recollection on the matter, Miłosz oscillates between the two images of life with the use of two metaphors: Proteus and the silkworm. Even when shifting between two dimensions of change, however, Miłosz undermines his own movement and revels in its ambiguities, pointing to the instability of images that are to capture the reality of his self and the reality of the perceived world. Already the process of dividing the subject and the object of perceptions goes against the many efforts Miłosz makes to reconcile modernity’s breach between the two and to re-enchant its rationalization with the use of ever-new poesy.1

The Plurality of Incarnations When Miłosz speaks with Aleksander Fiut—a renowned tireless reader of his poetry—he agrees that changing between masks is a constant in his work, inspired by unexplained intuitive sources, which “take over:” “Like Proteus, I appear to people in different incarnations.” Proteus was a Greek sea god who

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The Writer as Proteus and Silkworm

avoided capture by quickly changing appearances, resembling the qualities of water and the shifting shapes of the waves. When caught, his captors could make him prophesy their fate, as Menelaus does in Homer’s The Odyssey: “He began by turning into a bearded lion and then into a snake and after that a panther and a giant bear. He changed into running water too and a great tree in leaf.” Proteus was always changing only his external shape, but whenever he saw that his endeavors were of no avail, he moved back to his normal form and told the truth. All that had changed was only on the outside, obscuring the hidden inner truth about the future or the meaning of present infelicities. Menelaus learns from Proteus that he has to make an offering to the gods in order to erase his guilt: “It is not your fate to reach your own country and see your friends and fine house again until you have sailed the heaven-fed waters of the Nile once more and made ceremonial offerings to the everlasting gods who live in the broad sky. When that is done, the gods will let you start this voyage that you have set your heart on.”2 As with shedding skins, this Proteus-like changing of appearances suggests that the writer stays the same internally but blends in with his environment. In this way, Miłosz did his best to appear American to Americans and Polish to Poles; that is, he assimilated to the surrounding culture. Miłosz made himself fit in with the ways of the people around him. He linked himself to vital notions of Americanness while also remaining one with aspects crucial to his Polishness. As he often remarked, his true self was neither American nor Polish; rather, Miłosz remained rooted in his Lithuanian land of origin and his adopted Californian home, in a borderland between cultures, and, above all, in language. Miłosz is contained neither by the Polish nor American perspective; he can change at any moment; one cannot pinpoint his presence or nail down his identity. When describing the idea of constant transition and the figure of Proteus, he speaks of “different incarnations,” or “wcieleniach” in Polish, meaning “embodiments.” This word introduces a different logic to the otherwise horizontal perspective of protean transformation and the previous use of guises and skins. “Incarnations” suggests that the artist does not change the external form surrounding an unchangeable core but rather moves forcefully into different flesh and body altogether, as the noun comes from the Latin carne and in Polish ciało. Choosing from among a variety of incarnations, the writer embodies more than just abstract qualities. For Miłosz his life is inseparably bound up with his writing. “Incarnations” refers to the embodiment in the flesh of a deity or spirit, an extra-rational element coming from beyond to inhabit the living. In the context of Miłosz speaking of the “daimonions” taking him over, the word reveals the difference between the mythological Proteus and how the poet uses this

The Plurality of Incarnations

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figure. For Miłosz, the writer as Proteus does not only change on the outside: he changes completely, not just the skin but the whole being, and not by his own will but from unknown external motivation.3 In the context of Christian tradition, so important to Miłosz, the incarnation means the embodiment of God in the flesh as Jesus Christ. The Christological dimension introduces a religious perspective to the otherwise earthly figure of Proteus and recalls that not only personification or embodiment is at stake but a truly carnal transformation, a change of flesh. Thus, the artist assimilates to different cultures, escapes from one to another, and, surprisingly, subscribes to the development of a broader, messianic worldview. Christ, however, was God incarnated only to those who believed in him, which implies a two-way cultural assimilation. Everyone can recognize the writer, but at first one has to be able to recognize him. That is, Miłosz morphs his personae according to his surroundings, not only meeting certain expectations but also always introducing his personal and foreign element into the mix, thus changing the receiving culture. Readers must then struggle less to engage with his work, made available by a surface similarity, but the text seduces them to move on, abandon their cultural environment, and learn about the person hidden behind the superficial sameness. In this way, readers remove themselves from the site of transparent cultural obviousness and embark on a journey toward the other of the source culture; if such a source exists at all. In every such assimilation the artist retains a mission of his own, a proposal of unending change, and an offering of unceasing oscillation between worldviews.4 Proteus now appears chiefly as a figure of speech, although one referring not only to change but also to belief in prophecy. This element is important in the context of recurring motifs in Miłosz’s writing. His external inspiration by daimonions overlaps with a more traditional, Polish Romantic vein of foretelling the future of the nation and explaining its present misfortunes by prognosticating a coming rebirth. This suggestion lingers in the interview because the self-aware Miłosz gives it to the Polish public and only later secures its translation into English. Due to the Romantic roots of Miłosz’s poetic language, the figure of a prophet dominates Polish interpretations of his oeuvre. However, as noted in his interview, Miłosz points out that there is more to his biographein than one perspective or another, and his interlocutor is aware of that. Fiut remarks that Miłosz’s modus operandi is based on a paradox, that he always changes roles but wants to be perceived as singular, complete. The flesh of the poet becomes the poem thus changing and yearning for fixity; Miłosz struggles between relativism and conservatism of thought through reference to the bodily. Fiut then

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The Writer as Proteus and Silkworm

suggests that this approach may be termed “unity in variety,” Polish “jedność w różnorodności.”5

Unity in Variety The concept of unity in variety is old and debated by thinkers important to Miłosz. The Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus (c.500 BCE) based his cosmology on the premise of the universal rule of difference and sameness, later called in Latin concordia discors, the unity of opposites. The term also appears in poetics, used most prominently by Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595–1640) who explained in his treatise De acuto et arguto (1620) that the literary pointe or punch line is concordia discors or discordia concors, the latter meaning the disunity of similarities. According to Sarbiewski, poetry should create a microcosm organized by paralogical rules, where a contemporaneous occurrence of oppositions, coincidentia oppositorum, is available for the artist to grasp. In this way, the artistic work should aim at formulating images contrary to everyday experience that remains logical within itself. Another reference comes from the English-speaking world, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1772–1834) lecture “On Poesy or Art” (1818), which discusses the coexistence of different elements in the creative process of imitation. Coleridge calls it a “union of … disparates” and goes on to move his considerations from poetics into the field of aesthetics. Hence, Coleridge writes that beauty is “unity of the manifold,” “the coalescence of the diverse,” and “unity in multeity.” This last reference coincides with the philosophical-artistic considerations of Witkacy (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, 1885–1939), a Polish painter, writer, and philosopher that Miłosz depicted in several essays, frequently mentioning his notion of “unity in multiplicity,” jedność w wielości. As a multi-perspectivist, Miłosz refers to all of these approximations in parts of his work, but one must remember that they operate in different areas. Heraclitus spoke of cosmology, Sarbievius of poetics, Coleridge of aesthetics, and Witkacy of the ways of existence.6 The concept of “unity in variety” first refers to textual practice but for Miłosz, as suggests with his next metaphor, it applies both to life and writing. In writing, Miłosz operates with “thematic variation,” a term used in music to name the constant reworking of the same themes throughout a work. Miłosz abandons motifs and picks them up again from new perspectives at different points in time. When Miłosz himself embraces unity in variety in his life, it means dependency on external influences such as the culture, language, or local geography. For Miłosz this unity in variety also means dependence on the internal drive to develop personae, a form of art derived from life and in life coming to

The Silkworm and the Cocoon

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fruition: that is, he treated his life as the basis for and form of an aesthetic composition. One may notice this approach more easily in Miłosz’s essays, where he fully utilizes their main rhetorical devise, the syncrisis, which in Greek means “the comparison of opposites,” or “the observation of an issue from all possible perspectives, often oppositional.”7 Miłosz’s writing and personae as a nexus of biographein includes all the above versions of “unity in variety.” As a transatlantic poet, Miłosz masks in his allegories reflections on the cosmological, poetic, aesthetic, and existential discontents of the individual. Unity in variety as the principle of Miłosz’s work means that there is a plethora of personae available in his approach to both writing as well as to identity. However after his death, what comes first is the aesthetic-existential tension of Miłosz’s work, where art and life rely on each other and change concurrently. This disposition neatly overlaps with Miłosz’s considerations of writing in the Protean vein. His other comparison, of the writer to the silkworm, goes deeper and problematizes the functioning of the image of the poet.

The Silkworm and the Cocoon Miłosz tacitly agrees with Fiut that his work approximates a unity in variety and offers a telling comparison to this idea, that of a silkworm spinning its cocoon. Miłosz’s introduction makes it more than a comparison; he offers the image as an extended metaphor or an allegory recalling its historical contexts. Let us first consider the rich meanings of the silkworm. Silk as a material itself carries the signal of nobility, as it was used for centuries only by the highest ranking in Chinese society or, when acquired, by European aristocracy. As a rare resource, silk was a symbol of splendor, affluence, and power, while its production was kept secret for a long time. The most prominent use of the silkworm symbol and a reference vital to Miłosz’s work come from the tradition of Christian mysticism, represented by Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582). In her book The Interior Castle (1577), the Spanish mystic describes the development of a devoted Christian by comparing it to the metamorphosis of a silkworm into a butterfly. The second chapter of Teresa’s “The Fifth Mansions” directly states that, “the silkworm symbolizes the soul which begins to live when … it commences using the ordinary aids given by God to all.” Soon after, Teresa writes that the silkworm spins the house in which its body must die, even though for the future butterfly-soul, it is the house of life, or Jesus Christ. Just as the silkworm dies and lives again as the butterfly, so will the believer abandon earthly belongings, body, and individuality so as to set free the soul. The cocoon thus

26

The Writer as Proteus and Silkworm

signifies not only home, but a vessel transporting one from the shore of life to the shore of the afterlife, from the mundane to the celestial.8 The cocoon returns in Miłosz’s explanation as a different kind of house, one that depends on the perspective of its inhabitant, a silkworm or a butterfly. In the context of his work, one has to pay attention to the explanation that Teresa of Ávila provides for her allegory: “we can neither deprive God of anything nor add aught to Him, yet we can take away from and add to ourselves, like the silkworms.” That is, when alive, we are like silkworms who may only take away from ourselves to spin our houses leading to divinity. This relationship does not enable us however to “deprive God of anything nor add aught to Him.” If transposed to the relationship of the poet with the language, the end-effect will sound very much like the dilemma of the modern writer trying to grasp the subject of his or her description, or as Miłosz distinctly called it, “a quest for reality.”9 Teresa’s religious guidance remains the backdrop of Miłosz’s thought due to her elaboration of the silkworm allegory. Miłosz himself uses the silkworm as a comparison that develops into an extended metaphor with the qualities of an allegory. The exact exchange with Fiut proceeds as follows: FIUT But to some extent those various images are your own fault. It’s paradoxical that you project yourself in various roles, change personas, but at the same time you desire to be seen quite unequivocally. MILOSZ No doubt. Books like The Captive Mind or The Seizure of Power present a completely different image from let’s say, The Issa Valley or my poetry. The History of Polish Literature gives another image, the philosophical essays yet another. On the one hand, all of a sudden young American poets are asking me what it means to be politically committed and how to write political poetry; on the other, I recently wrote the introduction to a collection of works by Oskar Milosz in English in which I dealt with more or less the same subjects as I had in The Land of Ulro—Blake, Swedenborg, and so on. Where’s the unifying principle, I ask? FIUT Maybe this is unity in variety? MILOSZ If we look at the life of someone who writes, we see him constantly spinning a thread out of himself like a silk-worm:  he makes cocoons that lose their initial softness, becoming hard, almost crystalline structures in which he can no longer live, and so he has to move out. And again he makes a cocoon, and again it hardens and becomes alien to him. This is a paradox worth noting, a general one that may apply to other people as well. And another thing, going back to what I said earlier, I can’t call myself a Polish-speaking Lithuanian, because that beast is really extinct now. In an attempt to remain honest, I accentuate the specific features of my “dichotomy” in nationality, which makes no sense to the younger generations in Poland. They don’t even know it exists. The textbooks don’t say anything about Polish life and culture in Lithuania, how it arose, what it was, what those people felt, their sense of nationality. This can serve as a case in point that certain historical complications do not lend

The Silkworm and the Cocoon

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themselves to modern simplifications. Even to me a great many things still seem unclear. In any case, the desire to communicate a true image of myself is a constant. I have to say—and you’ll probably agree with me—that some of my books have that as their goal. If you take Native Realm, what else is it but an attempt to reveal myself as truthfully as possible? The Land of Ulro was another such attempt. If I  had set myself to it, I could have written a few other books like those, each of which would have caught a somewhat different side of me.10

Miłosz displaces the silkworm allegory from the interpretation offered by Teresa of Ávila:  the ground for his comparison is not life and afterlife but “someone who writes,” someone captured by the process of producing texts out of oneself. Miłosz develops his image of the poet not as the skin-changing Proteus but rather as a maker, in tune with the etymology of “poetry” coming from the Greek verb poiein, “to make.” Miłosz then carries over the image of the self-reliant writer to the figure of the self-sacrificing silkworm spinning the thread out of itself. He concentrates on the plasticity, tactility, and organicity of this metaphor. Miłosz thus describes writing as a biological activity, a form of life, and a process connected to the saliva that forms the thread of the cocoon and of writing. The meeting place of the silkworm’s house and the literary work resides in the corporal originator of saliva that is simultaneously the material, the tool, and the intermediary from and by which the work is accomplished. The silkworm makes its house out of it, with it, and through it. The biological metaphor suggests that the poet excretes writing. Following this connection, writing, or language, would be the poet’s material, tool, and intermediary that together formulate his dwelling. Saliva oils the speech organ and enables the production of language, utilized as writing. Thus writing is saliva transferred, secreted, and separated from its organic origin through speech. Speech makes language, which is the tool of and the material for writing. Without salivary mediation there could be no “house” made out of writing; that is, there would be no work of literature without lived experience. The forceful approximation of saliva and writing that Miłosz performs allows him to establish a metonymic relation between the body and the work, later developed by Fiut in the scholar’s monograph. Miłosz suggests that his very being and life reside in his poems. The reader receives his flesh in these texts. Miłosz’s work is thus no longer something external: it is a home made out of his own saliva; the expanding insides of a creative person. The sharing of flesh through work brings back the Christological associations, which Miłosz implies already in his image of the poet as the reincarnating Proteus. Initially, the allegory of the silkworm appears to have a lighter touch, explaining that the poet as maker never dies but only abandons the houses he has

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The Writer as Proteus and Silkworm

built in order to begin anew. Nevertheless, the practice of sericulture, the tradition of silk farming, and the meditations of Teresa of Ávila suggest a more brutal undertone. It no longer brings about reflections on the process of writing but on the asymmetrical relationship between the reception of the work and the poet’s own hopes of how it should be read and understood. Miłosz calls the image of the flesh-made cocoon-house hardening and becoming alien to the author “a paradox worth noting.” This paradox is the fact that innovative literature is, at first, an aberration to the readers, conveying “the immorality of art;” subsequently the ugly thing becomes known to the world but alien to its maker. It changes from house to artifact to the abject: the poet excretes writing. The horror of social ungodliness and personal abnormality call for a more drastic event, one from which Miłosz, however, withholds. Only the darker nuances of his allegory allow one to fully grasp its consequences.11 In sericulture, silkworms produce filament and gum from their saliva, which form a cocoon that hardens with time. The end product is then placed in hot water to remove the gum, preserving the silk but killing its maker. The practice prevents the transformation into a butterfly. Teresa of Ávila omits this part of the process to develop her allegory of the silkworm-body and the butterfly-soul. She compares the silkworm-butterfly transformation to the beautiful and promising secret of death. Hence, Teresa encourages her readers to let go of the mundane and “Die! die as the silkworm does when it has fulfilled the office of its creation, and you will see God and be immersed in His greatness, as the little silkworm is enveloped in its cocoon.” Her image of death and transformation refers to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.12 The Christian perspective of this extended metaphor is one of a vertical development of the spirit, in which the soul attains higher levels of existence, immortality, and connection with the Divine. Even when writing both about the reincarnating Proteus and the paradoxical silkworm, Miłosz always keeps a distance, engaged yet detached, immersed but eager to change completely. Miłosz touches upon the allusions of his allegories but never brings them to the fore, as if pointing to some entirely new understanding. The readers can follow his changes closely and change with him. Miłosz lures them in with transformational logic without ever allowing them to fulfill the solutions suggested by the images.

The Boiling Hot Star of Transformations The Christological tradition of the silkworm imagery developed simultaneously in the company of its poetological version. The most famous antecedent to

The Boiling Hot Star of Transformations

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Miłosz’s allegory comes from Rerum Familiarium Libri by Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), whose letter to Tommaso da Messina is called “On Inventiveness and Talent.” The Italian poet calls for moderation of ambitions when working with language because overzealousness may drive even a talented orator to complete silence. To keep from overextending our linguistic capabilities, we should follow the advice of the ancient Roman rhetorician, Seneca the Elder (c.55BC– c.39AD), and operate like the bees, who gather from different flowers to create wax and honey. That is, we should imitate “the bees, to produce in our own words thoughts borrowed from others” in an even better manner. The bees then symbolize the practice of imitation in art, so popular among the early modern writers, because it fights literary hubris, promotes humility, and secures a steady development of rhetorical talents. Petrarch reminds us that, when imitating ideas, one should seek a unique style, even if it be a collage of external influences. However, Petrarch opposes briefly this bee-like imitation with the figure of the genius, whom he compares to the silkworm. A literary genius can reflect on things rationally, bring in new arguments, and offer fresh perspectives in a style distinct and artful. However, Petrarch immediately retracts from this image, remarking that it is a natural gift and the grace of God possessed by few, and which should not be envied, because it will prove destructive. The majority of writers should, like the bees, gather from other authors in the summer of youth, “the flaming period of life,” and use the accumulated knowledge in the winter of old age. To repeat, let us write neither in the style of one or another writer, but in a style uniquely ours although gathered from a variety of sources. That writer is happier who is not, like the bees, collecting a number of scattered things, but instead, after the example of certain not much larger worms from whose bodies silk is produced, prefers to produce his own thoughts and speech—provided that the sense is serious and true and that his style is ornate. But in truth, this talent is given to none or to very few, so that we should patiently bear the lot of our personal talents, and not envy those above us, disdain those below us, or annoy our equals.13

Petrarch’s division of writers into the imitative and the ingenious is not a choice but rather a path that talented artists should follow, keeping in mind that hardly any of them is gifted enough to go on without collecting from others. Petrarch presents the ingenious poet as a nearly unattainable rarity, which reveals that he thinks of it more as an ideal than a model. Both the imitator and the genius should practice humility and be thankful for their natural gifts, even if their work proceeds in a different manner. Inspired by Petrarch, Romantic authors placed the ideal of the genius on monuments and knocked over the figure of the imitator. The allegory of the silkworm prevailed in the most peculiar of places. The early Romantic Friedrich

30

The Writer as Proteus and Silkworm

Schiller (1759–1805) wrote in 1782 a classicist fable “Die Spinne und der Seidenwurm,” in which the eponymous spider and silkworm may also be considered allegories of the competing images of a writer. The theme reappeared in one of the last poems of the most important Polish Romantic author, Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), with whom Miłosz never ceased to engage. Mickiewicz begins his short piece called “Snuć miłość…” from Liryki lozańskie with the verse “To spin love like the silkworm spins his thread with its insides,” and then continues “to pour it from the heart like a spring pours its waters from inside” (transl. MG). Even though Mickiewicz speaks about love, at this time of his development, he thought about it as the source value for writing and acting in life. His whole poem holds an emanationist yearning for existential development with the force of love. Miłosz used the image of the silkworm in his poetry on two occasions soon after the Second World War, when writing in Washington D.C. First in 1947, in a fragment from his untranslated long poem Traktat moralny (A Treatise on Morals). Like Petrarch, the speaker postulates the proper conduct of a great writer, acting in times of historical turmoil with unknown end (“misty days”), when he suggests meticulously taking away the style of writing in order to see the events themselves and touch upon the Real without intermediaries. The speaker compares the style to a “cocoon” wherein the yarns are lines of literary endeavors. In this allegory, the silkworm bears the name of the “chrysalis of events,” hiding underneath poetic approximations, but available only through unceasing work and an openness to change. Furthermore, the gist of reality is untouchable also because it is a “boiling-hot star,” meaning Sirius or the Canicula, the Dog Star, introducing the dog days, the warmest time of the year. This reminds us of the Petrarchan “flaming period of life,” considered by the ancient Romans the time of carnival and madness, a special moment of separation from the rhythm of everyday. By involving this imagery, Miłosz wants to engage both the Romantic aspiration to genius and Petrarchan ideal of imitation. Similarly, in our misty days, Enveloped in style as in a cocoon. Reach and take yarn after yarn Until the dry threads will untwist And on the bottom will appear The untouchable chrysalis of events. Then wind up the yarn. And, fully aware That only through the chrysalis eyes follow This boiling-hot star of transformations, Do, until you run out of days.14

Mowa

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What must one must keep in mind in the context of the silkworm allegory that Miłosz will apply to himself 34  years after writing the poem, is the same link between the silk thread and the flowing water that Mickiewicz offered in his text. Miłosz’s silkworm alludes to the struggling conceptions of the artist between Romantic maximalism and Petrarchan moderation.

Mowa The metaphor of the silkworm that abandons its environment, created out of itself, as soon as it hardens and becomes unlivable, also suggests the exilic motivations behind Miłosz’s literary work. The poet alters the original, unrepeatable process of sericulture and suggests that the writer is a nomadic larva. Tested by many years of exile—dissident from Poland, ill at ease in France, restless in America— Miłosz learned to create homes for himself within his poems. They allow him independence from the host culture as well as autonomy from historical change, from the influences that fix a person in one place and viewpoint. He may thus say about himself that the “Polish-speaking Lithuanian … beast is really extinct” and that now he can “accentuate the specific features of [the] “dichotomy” in [his] nationality” to achieve certain artistic ends. Exile thus builds up the distance needed to consciously operate the tension between belonging and separation. Miłosz inscribed this tension within his well-known poem “My Faithful Mother Tongue” (1968) from the book City Without A Name. Already the title motivates discussion on how to understand the Polish original, which speaks literally not of the mother tongue but of mowa, “speech.” That is, in Polish, Miłosz does not want to underline his national identity or, rather, he wants to blur the fact of its cultural belonging, which he allows in English. Mowa without any reference to a community may be this speech mentioned above, the speech oiled with saliva of the poet-silkworm. Mowa on this reading, then, would be part of the poet’s flesh that he tears away from himself to produce his dwelling. However, even with the greatest of care, such speech comes always with reference to the community that upholds it and from which it proliferates. Thus, belonging to and separated from the imagined community of the Polish nation remain an inseparable and basic tool of the poetic process, which Miłosz must then hold simultaneously in contempt and great admiration. As the speaker of his poem puts in a hymnic style, torn with doubt, and addresses mowa directly: This lasted many years. You were my native land; I lacked any other. I believed that you would also be a messenger between me and some good people

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The Writer as Proteus and Silkworm even if they were few, twenty, ten or not born, as yet.15

Out of mowa, then, resurface all Miłosz’s projections of home, this “native realm” that he produced over the years. The continuous process of exilic restriction and recuperation reveals not just Miłosz’s poetological reflection but also his passion for and reluctance toward the political and religious that converge around his rhetorical question to the mowa, speech, “But without you, who am I?” Exile is a blessing for a multi-perspectivist such as Miłosz, one who wants to appraise from a distance, but it is also a curse, separating the writer from the “good people” that could read his texts and respond. By withholding from laying down roots in any one place, then, Miłosz commits to none of the oppositions he describes.

The Processual Performance Miłosz hopes that his inner self is somehow unaffected by transformations and external influence. The allegory of the silkworm changing the cocoon-houses without transformation also suggests that Miłosz envisions an unchanging core to his personae. Indeed, the impossibility of pinpointing Miłosz’s poetics of personification is exemplified by his movement between the protean and the housechanging, his oscillation between perspectives, and his unending switch between the horizontal and vertical dimensions. In Christianity, transformation works in the vertical dimension, as the prescription for the earthly purification of morals and the reward of an afterlife in communion with divinity. The image of the poet as Proteus is horizontal, as the Greek god was only changing shapes. The noun “incarnations” however suggests a possibility of the vertical perspective. Similarly, the poet as silkworm refers to the vertical Christian mysticism, but Miłosz refrains from this interpretation by denying the moment of death or transformation of the silkworm and speaking only of the changing of the cocoon-houses. There is a meaningful ambivalence here. The poet as Proteus operates in the horizontal plane, to which Miłosz then adds the vertical suggestion. The poet as silkworm comes from the vertical imagery, which Miłosz reformulates into the vertical horizon, although with considerable restraint. In both cases, the Christian undercurrent in the wording of Miłosz’s poetological reflections never fully surfaces. The ambivalence, the withholding, and the oscillation between the horizontal and the vertical function not only within the images of the poet as Proteus and as the silkworm but also between them. The tension between and the mixing of the two metaphors suggests an uncanny, unsolvable aporia within the writer’s

The Processual Performance

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self-image. Miłosz bespeaks this irresolvable internal contradiction by saying that even to him, “a great many things still seem unclear,” yet he never ceases to attempt the proper description, motivated by “the desire to communicate a true image” of himself. Nevertheless, he understands that each attempt would simply grasp “a somewhat different side” of his inner self. Of course, this is a poetic ideal, not a psychological reality.16 Miłosz speaks in agreement with what Denis Diderot (1713–1784) says about acting in his famous dialogue The Paradox of Acting (French original: Paradoxe sur le comédien). The main argument of the text is that a great actress is more believable on stage if she detaches herself from sensibilité, which is a disconcerting emotion that undermines all rational efforts, actions, and ideas. Diderot discusses the qualities of a great actress in comparison with the ideal of a great poet. The main difference between the two is that the poet retains a moral sense. The motivations of the great actress come not from emotions or morals but from trained mimicry of others and an analytical approach to the full spectrum of moral choices. Diderot argues that the actress has to be in control and detached from emotions, able to mimic all and ready to assume every character or feeling on the run. What the actress knows and feels is often more than she gives away on the stage as if retaining an unchangeable core identity of herself; different inside from what the audience observes. Embodying the Enlightment ideals, the great actor of Diderot suggests the possibility of full control over emotions and analytical work as the mainspring of stage genius.17 Even though speaking in similar vein, Miłosz knows that the dictate of reason alone does not suffice. Sheer rationalism prevents the consideration of the spiritual proclivities of people. Many authors yearn for complete control over language and thoughts in order to put down in writing precisely what they intend but they all know it will never happen. More than discovering the unity behind the variety, Miłosz wants to engage readers in the search. He raises their interest, calls them to action, and simultaneously broadens their searching capabilities. These are important not only in the reading of poetry but also in reflections about existence and the possibility of a spiritual dimension in life. What one may do as a reader is watch the writer’s process of successive adaptation to his environments. What one perceives in art, then, is the processual performance, a constant change of positions of the housebuilding larvae. Miłosz thus wants the reader to observe the unity in variety, discover the common core of his thought and the logic that drives him. The silkworm spins itself by organic connection with the cocoon. Thus, in Miłosz’s allegory, the cocoon-house is the poem of the poet-silkworm working in language-thread. The poet lives in his or her poetry. However, the poetic

34

The Writer as Proteus and Silkworm

production then hardens and becomes casual, making “someone who writes” move out and create a new poem. Here, again one has to move away from Miłosz’s discourse on the eventfulness of writing to the way he transposes the creation of a single poem onto the founding rules of his whole work. When reading Miłosz, one must move frequently from the micro level of speech and writing to the macro level of his oeuvre as received by readers; shifting from singular poems to the broad reception of efforts under the metonymic signature of “Czesław Miłosz.”18

The Lyrical Persona The silkworm allegory of houses built from one’s own saliva reveals that Miłosz thinks:  “My poetry is me, and I  am my poetry.” To follow the effects of this assumption and reveal its scope, spectrum, and aporiae is the key stimulus of this interpretation. On the one hand, Miłosz obviously points to his identity alive in the diversity of poetic perspectives. On the other, realist perspectivism makes Miłosz value the changing, “protean” dimension of art. Miłosz is always on the move in the many fields he explores: the intellectual, the religious, the (geo)political, the existential, or the everyday. For the clarity of argument, we need to consider that both the critics and Miłosz himself use the term “persona” in two different ways, as the authorial and the lyrical persona. However, Miłosz mixes the two on purpose, aware that in real life it is impossible to separate that which seems from that which really is. The critics point to personae but almost never consider each of them analytically. Scholars sidestep this point, delving right into Miłosz’s writings and, thereby, omit a great range of subtlety that would help new readers to orient themselves in the crystalline complexity of his oeuvre. One cannot simply say that the authorial self is the lyrical self. The lyrical persona is a distinct speaker of a poem, the narrative voice of the text, used by the author as a mask to voice alien ideas and sound through events; to find words for the unnamed and name the known in a novel way. Writers revived the concept of the lyrical persona in its modern understanding in the wake of Romanticism and Modernism. Miłosz was especially influenced in this regard by the catalytic lectures of the American-born British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). Eliot’s works greatly contributed to the change in poetics that Miłosz experienced during his time in occupied Warsaw. Only through the distortions of form or slips of the tongue may the reader approximate the authorial reflection hidden behind the individual speaking in the poem. In his poetry, Miłosz frequently uses different lyrical personae, separate figures, named persons, or anonymous alter-egos. The

The Lyrical Persona

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authorial persona is a much different concept that has to be introduced to separate Miłosz’s frequent use of lyrical personae from his paradox-ridden efforts to present his “true” self in essays and interviews, debates and letters. Simplifying, the authorial persona appears at the crossroads between reader reception and authorial self-fashioning. The division between the authorial and lyrical personae reveals the impossible tension in Miłosz that many scholars struggle to pinpoint, and he himself never makes fully available. Miłosz oscillates between searching for and revealing his (authorial) self but then concealing and projecting the selves of the (lyrical) others. Movement is the key existential-poetic tool for and source of Miłosz’s writing. That is why oscillation is a returning trope in the following consideration of his poetry. It presents a fluctuation between perspectives and ideologies. In the interview with Fiut, Miłosz uses the term “image” with this understanding. In the two instances in which Miłosz mentions a “persona” to Fiut, he first means the authorial and, second, the lyrical one. He mentions both in a single utterance, divided by just two paragraphs. Miłosz first explains how dominant in his thought is “the desire not to appear other than I am,” accompanied by the awareness that “each of us realizes that his own image of himself is one thing, and his image as reflected in the eyes of others is something else again. The two never entirely coincide, because we know more about ourselves than others do.” Miłosz knows that perfect self-presentation is impossible and that “we are not completely sincere” in our desire to express ourselves clearly: “To do it directly is impossible, simply because there’s always some process of selection involved and we create an image consistent with our persona. Still, it’s striking that we’re so disturbed each time we’re taken for something other than we are.” In this instance, Miłosz means the authorial persona; that is, an image of himself, as close as possible to the way he understands his true self, which is the one he intends to project in writing and transmit to readers.19 However, just two paragraphs later, when speaking about the Polish reception of his work, he means the lyrical persona: “historical circumstances have often wrung literary works out of me in which either I or some persona, usually a persona, spoke as the medium for certain collective feelings.” It is worth noting that Miłosz assumes situations in which he himself speaks in a poem. Miłosz’s literary practice and other statements leave little place for such assumption. He says otherwise in the Polish interview, probably due to working in the Polish Romantic expectations of a sincere voice. Moreover, Miłosz appears not to separate the authorial persona from the lyrical persona as firmly as would be convenient for a scholarly reading. He retains the connection to his lyrical personae through his personal knowledge of the intention behind them all.

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Authorial Personae In the same interview with Fiut, Miłosz recounts five authorial personae, strongly aware that the American public reads him through different works and images than his Polish audience. Miłosz names four without applying them to specific national perspectives. Nevertheless, certain proclivities dominate in American and Polish readings that align them with one perspective or other. The two personae that Miłosz himself links to the American readings are those of a politician and a witness of history, whereas he suggests that Polish expectations more closely seek a patriot and a moral authority. His ideal self-presentation is that of a thinker. Still, an exclusively analytical mind would easily find more than just five different versions of his personae and the poet himself, which may even suggest that they are but distinct versions of his self. When self-portraying his image as the politician, Miłosz remarks that in the USA he had to reject being “tagged as a specialist in communist affairs” or called a “politically committed” author of “political poetry.” At the same time, Miłosz has to decline the other American reading of him as the witness for its (emotional) power to distort the variety of his roles: “I don’t like it very much when critics seize on the most historical poems, particularly those written during the war, and create an image of me as a survivor of the Holocaust. That’s false.” Miłosz was neither Jewish nor detained in an extermination camp, but rather a rare Pole conscious enough to write about and mourn the fall of the Warsaw Ghetto as it happened, not just in retrospect. In these expectations, Miłosz suggests that American readers follow their cultural proclivity to seek an authentic individual and closely listen to one’s confessions.20 The more Polish vision of Miłosz is that of the patriot, an incarnation he deems naïve. This part of his works receives the qualities of a “patriot-poet, a bard … an engagé poet … [one having] the aura of a poet who fights for something,” “a heroic figure,” or a “poet of action … actively involved in history.” They all stem from the dominant tendency in Polish Romantic culture “to identify literature with life,” which Miłosz knows, avoids, plays with, and, at times, abuses for his own reasons. The other Polish reading, that of the moral authority, Miłosz declares “a little humorous.” He consciously explains that this approach unjustly casts him in the role of “a symbol of integrity, a moral authority … a moralist.” This “moral persona” appears to Miłosz “a little suspect” as he downplays his individual choices for the sake of “collective pressure” or “the temperature of the [Polish] civilization” in which he grew up. Instead of morality, Miłosz assumes that fortune or fate guide him through history. Instead of integrity, he sees change in accordance with “a certain ideal” to which he, however, does

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not measure up. Miłosz rejects conveying in his writing “any especially moral principles.” On the contrary, he argues that he is “neither noble nor simple.” Miłosz’s reluctance suggests that his main worry is that the mask of a moralist would make his literary reflections black and white, whereas he aims at complicating the represented realities. When reading these explanations, one recalls the Polish “tendency to identify literature with life” that Miłosz criticizes. Whenever he speaks of the moral persona, he mixes subjective expectations, the content of his work, and the response of his readers. The lack of clarity about this image reveals Miłosz’s struggle with the issue but, even more, his constant effort of selfsituating. To this extent, Miłosz suggests that Polish readers appear to seek an honest Romantic poetic voice. Finally, Miłosz explicitly names the authorial persona that he would like to project as the thinker. Miłosz explains that his true self-aware goal of writing is to be “a rather hermetic,” “philosophical,” “meditative poet,” or a “poet-scholar,” dissatisfied with “any image that was for mass consumption” and wanting but “a small number of ideal readers.” With these proclamations, Miłosz once again inscribes himself within the Renaissance ideals of a learned man, promoted by Petrarch in his letter to Tommaso da Messina:  “It is not noise that makes the learned man, but contemplation.” Nevertheless, Miłosz’s playful, humbling rejections bring to mind the involuted games of the Ketman, introduced by the Polish writer in The Captive Mind, and encourage the reader to further subversive interpretations.21 The intricacy of Miłosz’s reflection on the image of the poet raises the following four questions: Why are there so many contradicting viewpoints on his writing? How self-conscious of his presentation is Miłosz really? Is this interview not just another play with his reception? Is he not himself responsible for the proliferation of perspectives? The personae that Miłosz calls distant to his own are all related to politics. If not for the above division into four categories, they might be presented as just one extreme of interpretation, one which Miłosz wants to counter with a more religious, meditative understanding. Then again, the interview was originally prepared for Polish readers. Miłosz’s enumeration of inadequate authorial personae does not give the right account of their actual diversity or division but rather of his projection, as well as of his will to withstand the dominantly political interpretation of his work at the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Readings of his poetry in light of later scholarship suggest that his personae diverged between political and religious readings, with Americans more inclined to the former and Poles to the latter.22

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The Lens In-Between In the essay “A Poet Between East And West”—presented first as a lecture at the University of Michigan in 1977, and later translated into Polish as “Niemoralność sztuki,” “The Immorality of Art”—Miłosz writes that a poet “becomes double, a man who, while being led to his own execution, still remains, with one part of himself, a detached, ironic observer.” On many levels, Miłosz contains just such doubleness or in-betweenness. The difficulty of finding a proper place for his writing stems from Miłosz’s knowledge of diverse cultures, moving homes, experience of exile, and awareness of imperialism.23 The English subtitle of Miłosz’s Native Realm:  A Search for Self-Definition offers his literary program in a phrase: writing means searching for one’s identity and understanding. Such positioning entails an understanding other than self-presentation and self-fashioning, typically noted in the context of an author offering diverse perspectives. A search for self-definition suggests an unceasing endeavor to not only capture the ungraspable “essence” of identity but also reveals the task of the writer as constant revaluator of the given, stable, and finite assumptions about one’s own consciousness and perspectives on the world. The process of gathering perspectives led Miłosz to establish the different personae, complementing each other on the search for self-situating in the dynamics of existence. Hence, setting Miłosz’s diverse masks side by side foments new oppositions and ways to read his work. There is no best perspective or most authentic persona as the masks are all imperfect, and only gathered together do they allow myopic restraints, at times imposed on Miłosz’s work by his learned readers, to be abandoned.24 Scholars argue that Miłosz’s complex poetic strategy is internally dialogical: that his poetry is stretched between premodern trust in direct communion with the real world and the (post)modern conviction that this contact is always mediatized by innumerable and opaque layers of meaning. Others say that Miłosz forms his biography into a personal myth because it appears to him the last bastion of truth: it is open to the world and incorporates it at the same time. Indeed, Miłosz frequently writes using himself as a lens; he shares Walt Whitman’s (1819–1892) conviction that this is the only truth available to someone caught up in his existence. Scholarly approximations, however, take us only so far. They attune to Miłosz’s proclamations from the interviews, but no structured thought will ever be able to penetrate sufficiently his literary attempts.25 Miłosz’s perspectivism comes from his need for a detached, broad, and encompassing perspective to appraise events abstracted from time and space; to sound through the insides of every being and event. Miłosz’s paradoxes and

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transformations do not reveal a secretly singular authorial persona through many changes, but a diverse set of personae proposed by one writer who seeks self-awareness although he knows that it is ungraspable. He ponders many questions, weighs them, considers, puts them aside, takes new ones up, and so on. Meanwhile, differences arise and his identity mutates with time, movement, and context. The high regard for Miłosz comes, then, not from his giving answers but from asking even more troubling questions. Miłosz’s perspectivism is that of the silkworm. It holds a productive tangentiality, a cocoon of references that incorporates each described view to the achievable end, and then abandons it by changing places in order to concentrate fully on a new one. What remains are the published writings. Once appropriated, a viewpoint remains with the text but not with the author. Put differently, even if the writer discards the ideas, the text is left for everyone to read as proof of one’s previous position, one’s former self. This ambiguity is the source of misappropriations of Miłosz’s authorial personae made by American and Polish readers interpreting the texts through culturally specific conceptual frameworks. However, there is no stability behind the illusion. The authorial personae grow more obscure with attempts to uncover Miłosz’s true standpoint, especially because, later in his career, he managed to switch between different perspectives several times in a single text.

The Meaning of Masks The critics reconstructed Miłosz’s use of personae in only a few texts, which leaves plenty of space for the analysis of his own poetic fabrications of his images, apart from what he has said in interviews. Miłosz produced one direct literary entry about persona, an untranslated prose poem from Road-side Dog. The speaker in the piece does not deny that lyrical personae originate in his experience, but they are enlarged and transformed into another person like a libretto for an opera. By comparison, when composing La Traviata Giuseppe Verdi may have equally well said that he is all the characters. For Miłosz himself it is also true that he takes from experience, thus forming the voice of another who is still of the self. Then again, it may only be “a literary device:” Persona. An important discovery; that when we say ‘I’ and speak for ourselves, it may be just a literary device. When this poet acknowledged that he was not the speaker in his poem, but a persona created by him, he became bolder and overcame the scruples preventing him from making things up. He called on the fragments of his experiences but then connected them so as to write an aria, sung by a figure only remotely like him.26

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Since the beginning of the twentieth century the term “persona” means an aspect of personality presented to others and hiding the rest, from which comes the term “public persona,” or a role assumed by an actor. Miłosz, however reluctant of psychoanalysis, was aware that the term “persona” is relevant to the theories of the psychiatrist and psychotherapist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). In Jung’s works, the “persona” finds its counterpart in the concept of “anima.” “Anima” means the diverse (feminine) inside behind the façade, the mask, the “persona.” The Jungian anima, according to Latin etymology, means “mind” and “soul” as well as “wind” and “breath.” The Greek word for soul is psukhē, described by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) as the source of movement, a “life force” that gives origin to the personal perspective and its metamorphoses. The modern understanding of the “persona” comes from the Latin noun meaning the mask used by an actor in classical theater. Such understanding entails the associations of “(public) face,” “character,” “identity,” “image,” “front,” “façade,” “guise,” “exterior,” “role,” and “part.” In Miłosz’s untranslated poem “Ze szkodą” (“To The Detriment”), the speaker argues that when writing, he followed the Hippocratic rule “primum non nocere”—“first, do no harm”—that physicians should always keep in mind when working with a patient. Miłosz transposes the bioethical rule of nonmaleficence onto the ideology-building powers of poetry. Miłosz worried about the power of Polish nationalism to influence or misinterpret its poetical heritage. In Poland, poetry is considered to host the core of Polishness, so its interpretation and proliferation are a matter of the communal “to be or not to be.” Miłosz’s speaker believes that he partly managed to avoid doing harm to the national selfperception via the usage of masks: And I have harmed, maybe less than others. In disguises, masks, unrecognizable, Ambivalent. Already this secures From being read at annual celebrations.27

In his early writings, when introducing his person to the world of science, Descartes uses the famous Latin phrase “larvatus prodeo,” usually read as “I advance masked.” The utterance is said to originate from Roman actors wearing theatrical masks who stated this when entering the stage. Although today used for “the immature phase of an animal,” a meaning introduced first by Carl Linneaus (1707–1778), the questionable systematizer of species, the noun “larva” originally meant an “evil ghost, specter, mask, skeleton” and was associated with epilepsy. The etymology thus implies a hidden malignant source of movement working against our will. The verb “larvare” meant “to bewitch, enchant,” or

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even “to be possessed by a ghost.” Hence, Cartesian “larvatus” as a form of the verb, suggests an ambivalence of the phrase. It means both masking as well as bewitched movement, a studied gesture and an uncontrolled inspiration, an overt pose and a covert intent, external stabilization and internal energy. The second reading gives place for “divine inspiration” or “inhuman thing;” powers external to common knowledge. Actors on stage enact different personae and perspectives by assuming their masks or—as the roots of theater coincide with sacred rituals—by allowing the spirits of the dead to possess them. Actors give voice to the words of fictional or dead characters from behind the mask, just as the deceased communicate from behind the veil of death. Miłosz uses the term in Polish once only, when speaking of “Śmierć-larwa,” “the puppet [mask] Death” in the long poem “With Trumpets and Zithers.”28 Cartesian “prodeo,” then, means not only “to advance or enter” but also “to do this in a public space.” “Larvatus prodeo” thus signifies also to “enter public space, ready to present madness, the masking of reason, what lies beyond the reach of senses” or “to introduce the sacred within the public.” Hence, Miłosz’s mention of daimonions inspiring his writing against his will.29 Furthermore, the rhetorical device used in literature to assume the person of an object, animal, or another person and give another perspective to the action described is called prosopopeia, which in Greek means “to make a face or a mask.” The Latin word “persona” finds its roots in the verb “personare,” which means “to sound through.” It suggests that a “persona” and a “person” are not static nouns but come from a movement, from the action of putting something in and listening to what comes back, from the “to and fro” of argument, a dialogue, an intro- as well as an extrospection. To assume masks and to take positions is a process of sounding through. In this context, a persona loses its stability and becomes subject to change and interaction, as an instrument resounding to a stroke. Maybe a “persona” is even more than a device, and is something that derives from the sheer process of being played. The sounding-through implies a resonance, a wave-like rhythm moving forward and back again, examining, trying out positions, and worldviews so as to remove itself back again to the origin of movement. Again, such an understanding of a “persona” works hand in hand with Miłosz’s repeated claim of daimonions using him as an instrument for voicing art. The voice sounding through the poet is also the poet’s own timbre, tone, tempo, and manner of speech, all of which contribute to the process of sounding through others and through ideas, as well as to the final reception of a persona. A person appears then as an element of a growing whole with the qualities of a subject, both general and concrete, communal and individual. A “persona”

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is, thus, not just “a mask” but rather somebody else entirely. The etymology suggests the complete opposite of superficial exteriority represented by a simple “mask.” The origins of the word convey that a persona is a means to understand fully, to attain a complete perspective, to sound out its depths and shallows, to assume it and appropriate it only like a mask and then change the object of the sounding process for another. The change is visible in the fact that even the lyrical “I” employed by Miłosz, supposedly sincerely, is to an extent a persona. The perspectivism of “personare” aims to see something through and talk through the voice of another. The dynamics of such etymology also suggest that the author himself—although sounding through different positions and persons— remains sounding-proof and any attempt at revealing the stable core “hidden” in one or other of his authorial personae will prove futile.30 Miłosz works through the changing of unstable masks to fulfill his “quest for reality,” but it proves to be a never-ending labor. His literary exertion holds, thus, an unsolvable tension: the writer is fully conscious of inauthenticity yet, despite this awareness, he desires to personare, to push a, hopefully, “authentic” voice through these masks and reach whoever might listen. Within the poet, then, resides the permanent desire to find a real peace of mind, which may only be mapped from a distance, touched upon in fleeting approximations, or glimpsed by negation.

2 Modernist Hagiography Most Poles fashion Miłosz as a religious visionary withstanding modern secularization. Most Americans perceive him as a first-hand political witness to the cruelties of the twentieth century. However, on both sides, the majority of readers seeks stable, overarching, panoptic consequence in Miłosz’s diverse works. The problem is that Miłosz’s thought does not accept generalizations. Whenever possible, Miłosz declares himself not belonging to literary groups, diverges from established styles, and decenters every possible assumption readers or critics may have coined about him. When called a “witness” in The New York Review of Books, he objects in a letter. When awarded a doctorate honoris causa by a leading Polish Catholic university in Lublin, he denies being a Christian writer. As Miłosz wittily observes in his Nobel Lecture, “meandering thought” is a “professional bad habit of poets.” The problem with Miłosz’s readiness to say “yes, but” to available ideologies translates into the issue of transatlantic scholarship’s misguided search for his stable but non-existent authorial persona.1 When Miłosz writes about the social and the metaphysical fears in 1943, he unconsciously foreshadows the heightened awareness, with which he would work to present himself in Poland and America throughout the years. Miłosz’s literary development and self-situating reveal him not as stable and coherent but as changing and diverse. Moreover, the movements of his thought show how the two fears align with different cultural receptions:  the religious Polish and the political American one. The political situation after the Second World War certainly complicated his reception despite the high quality of his works. The places and cultures experienced by Miłosz to a great extent resurface in the ways he fashions himself as a writer. Over the years, geographical circumstances make Miłosz choose one style or genre over another. For instance, France offers fame to a migrant from the Soviet Bloc, if he writes political prose, whereas American readers impatiently await more of his first-hand experiences of wartime Warsaw. Aleksander Fiut even proposes “Miłosz the poet” who is cryptic and Eastern, whereas “Miłosz the essayist” is to be enlightened and Western. This division fits into the divide between Polish “religious” and American “political” scholarship of Miłosz and aligns with their interest in, accordingly, poetry and prose. In fact, Fiut is the main source and promoter of the monolithizing tradition of reading Miłosz both in Poland and in the USA. Fiut’s efforts are symptomatic of the transatlantic scholarship and display their need for a petrified persona of a writer.2

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Gestures of Self-Situating Miłosz fashions himself, for American readers, most decisively and coherently in Postwar Polish Poetry (1966) and in The History of Polish Literature (1969). In the former Miłosz writes of himself: “Some critics see in him a symbolist in reverse: in symbolism a poet proceeds from external reality toward the ineffable veiled by it, while Miłosz circumvents with his symbols the essential being of things, which seems to be his main concern.” In the latter, Miłosz presents himself in the context of Polish literature in general; for instance, by speaking about his book The Valley of Issa (1955) in this manner: “It has been called “pagan” because of its childish amazement with the world; but this story of childhood in Lithuania, with its simple images of nature, is somewhat deceptive, as underneath lurks a Manichean vision.” Miłosz’s self-presentation in both Postwar Polish Poetry and The History of Polish Literature underscores dichotomies in his authorial persona and poetry:  paganism and pantheism aside Christianity and Manicheism, philosophy aside naiveté, politics aside spirituality. The image Miłosz offers is complex and kaleidoscopic, with elements of secrecy and plasticity. Michał Paweł Markowski—a professor of Polish Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago—in his important and highly theoretical article on Miłosz reminds us that every book of Miłosz’s essays conveys “gestures of self-presentation.” However apt a statement, this way of describing Miłosz’s work is at odds with his own declarations, which capture this process under the name of “situating.” Situating, or, rather, self-situating is less about existential awareness and more about positioning in both thought and space; a process reliant on the changing circumstances and the geopolitics of life. Thus, situating remains in touch with Miłosz’s need to perform biographein, the writing down of life and living through writing.3 When one considers the changes in themes and genres in Miłosz’s work, there emerges a patchwork, not a monolith. One can group his efforts into five themes that prevail in Miłosz’s writing from the outset, with changing intensity: politics, religion, locality, modernity, and the salutary. Until the end of the war, in Poland, Miłosz concentrates on poetry. Right after, whilst engaged in diplomatic service for the Polish government in New York and Washington, D.C., Miłosz notices with amazement the low esteem in which poetry is held in the USA and the idea of “bestsellers.” In 1950, Miłosz was granted political asylum in Paris, where he critically describes his experiences and political reflections. He spent a decade in Paris, publishing a collection of essays and four books of prose, though only two books of poetry. This period, slanted toward political and semi-autobiographical

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prose, further develops Miłosz’s interests in the five themes with the addition of increasing self-reflectivity.4 Aware of how narrow the poetical field is in the Anglo-American community is, Miłosz worked his way first in genres securing broader readership: books of essays, semi-autobiographies, political fact, and fiction. Even though he denigrates the political side of his work in later interviews and promotes his poetry, it was Miłosz’s prose that gained him steadfast supporters of his ideas that allowed him to continue to work after his defection. Moreover, Miłosz regarded political reflections to be part of the responsibilities of a “poet-intellectual.” A broad understanding of these obligations paved his path to popularity among Western readers. By the end of the fifties, Miłosz had gained enough renown in the West to receive an invitation to teach in the USA. Thus in 1960 he moved further west, fearing that the Soviet Union, with what he perceived as its ideological foothold among the French intellectuals, would completely envelop Western Europe. Nota bene, Miłosz was on good terms with Marxist philosophy but was nevertheless terrified by the totalitarian power behind it. Since the start of his professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, Miłosz emphatically distanced himself from political prose. In a letter to The New York Review of Books dated June 21, 1988, Miłosz calls this process liberating his “neck from those dead albatrosses.” He then began to concentrate more on philosophy and religiosity. He spent the last ten years of his life in Kraków, Poland, which, alongside his old age, dominated his imagination with metaphysical questions.5 As soon as he began his work at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature in UC Berkeley, Miłosz popularized Polish culture, Russian literature, and Central Eastern European history for over twenty years. Partly preparing his own readership, he fostered translators among his students, inspired interest in Polish literature, and translated the poems of his Polish contemporaries. The latter sometimes gained more popularity than Miłosz himself, especially noticeable in the case of his friend, the poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998). The sequence of publications, Postwar Polish Poetry (1966), The History of Polish Literature (1969), Selected Poems (1973), and Emperor of the Earth (1977), unveils Miłosz’s strategy of self-situating in the American literary field as a thoroughly prepared, ambitious plan. Miłosz first puts contemporary Polish poetry on the map of the Anglo-American readership, and follows it up with a subjective overview of Polish literary history. Only then does he introduce a selection of his own poetry and another book, with his essays. Miłosz’s book on Polish literature gave him ample opportunity to describe his poetic development as a participant of literary groups, trends, and events, which he utilizes on four separate occasions.

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In the book’s self-introduction, Miłosz remarks about his current situation in his home country: “In Poland he was a strictly forbidden author from 1951 to 1956, extolled during the years 1956–1958, and again forbidden in the period 1958–1966; despite these fluctuations, his intimate ties with the Polish writers’ community have not been destroyed.”6 The situation changed partly with the first publication of his poetry in English in 1973, which, untypically, Miłosz ordered thematically. With the title “Shore,” the last section clearly marks the finale of a “learning curve” and gathers poems produced in America. Miłosz constructed the book for Western readers, without a decisive chronology but rather with the suggestion of an evolution; leaving out many poems otherwise important in the Polish cultural context. Selected Poems strengthens Miłosz’s authorial persona as the one upholding communal traditions and observing the changing thread of historical events. For many American readers the book was the first to introduce Miłosz as an American poet, although in his life he wrote just one poem in English, a short letter in verse addressed “To Raja Rao,” an Indian writer of novels in English (1908–2006). The growing prestige of new Polish poetry, mediated through Miłosz’s anthology of verse and the separately published translations of Zbigniew Herbert (1968) and Aleksander Wat (1977), added to his recognition.7 In all this, one needs to keep in mind the delays of translation and reception occurring throughout Miłosz’s literary career in the field of world literature, at least until his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1980. In the year of the award, the only literary works by Miłosz available to Anglo-American readers were The Captive Mind (1953), The Issa Valley (1955), The Native Realm (1958), The Emperor of the Earth (1976), and Selected Poems: four prose texts and one collection of poetry. The following years balance the image of Miłosz, more according to his liking and actual literary output, with such important publications as The Witness of Poetry (1982), The Separate Notebooks (1984), and Collected Poems (1987). In the eighties, Miłosz re-established his authorial persona in the American field nearly in a single stroke, with the telling flavor of his currently dominant, religious interests. The three publications introduced Miłosz to the American poetry scene with considerable force and quickly positioned him as an important participant and recognizable voice.8

The Intellectual Shape-Shifting For a long time, Miłosz avoided mass media and any direct way of presenting his opinion, such as interviews or letters to newspapers, in fear of unavoidable distortions of his perspective. Instead, he favored the form of the essay, in which

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he retains control over style and rhetoric but may also assume masks and uphold an oscillation between ideas, while never taking them for granted. One of the reasons for Miłosz’s self-inflicted non-belonging is his distrust of the ability of Western luminaries to understand an important source of his writing. That is, his unorthodox religious disposition mixed with keen political awareness. In the voice of a distrustful speaker, in an untranslated poem from 1970, “Kiedy mówiłem,” “When I  Said,” Miłosz declares his detachment from the tempo of journalism. The speaker suggests with considerable sarcasm that reporters have no grasp of what is real.9 However, Miłosz’s attitude changed with the award of the Nobel Prize. It encouraged him to give interviews and even agree to the translation of the cryptic work The Land of Ulro (1984), which he had explicitly not intended for his English-speaking readers. The position of The Land of Ulro reveals the twopronged approach Miłosz undertook:  addressing at times American, at times Polish readers. This time the separating approach is explicitly named and, due to the translation, distorted. Some consider The Land of Ulro a master key to all of Miłosz’s work. However, Miłosz himself refers to it rather as an exception: “I said to myself that a writer can afford to produce in his lifetime one maverick work.”10 The diversity of aims alongside separate lines of self-situating, Polish and American, form the first destabilizing element in Miłosz scholarship. The hope of stabilizing Miłosz as a monolithic “classic,” entertained by his interpreters, fails in the face of the poet’s own changing interests, divided attention, and conscious work of mobile self-situating. Miłosz’s voicing of some ideas to Americans and other to Poles reveals his cultural flexibility aimed at producing a diversity of perspectives and personae, available only to those, who will consider both sides of the argument. This intellectual shapeshifting shows the poet’s acute awareness of the cultural differences and predispositions of the two primary communities of readers. However, the defining characteristics of the first generation of Miłosz’s scholarship—namely, semantic overdetermination and forceful cohesion—further prevent a properly detached valuation of his poetics. This work of ideological appropriation best exemplifies the work of Miłosz’s famous interlocutor and tireless interpreter, Aleksander Fiut, who began writing about the poet already in the 1970s. With his ambitious take on Miłosz’s poetry, Fiut is the first scholar to bridge the gap between interpretations of his works in Poland and the USA. Fiut’s monograph, The Eternal Moment, sets up a grand acclamation of Miłosz’s oeuvre as a singular stroke of an exuberant genius, and influenced the first generation to assume his monolithic image. One of only five books about Miłosz available both in Polish (1987) and English (1990), Fiut’s is undoubtedly the

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most important work in the field. By firmly positioning Miłosz in the Christian worldview, Fiut formed a modernist hagiography of sorts, while simultaneously petrifying Miłosz’s persona and excluding expectation of poetic experimentation, also available in his works.11 Most understandably, then, to survey the main arguments of Fiut’s The Eternal Moment allows for understanding the key aporiae of Miłosz’s works and their reception.

Writers as the People of the Book Aleksander Fiut suggests that the most appropriate symbol for the whole of Miłosz’s work is that of “the Book,” a concept popular in the study of his poetry and one promoting its overarching panoptic consequence. In an interview from 1983, Miłosz himself introduced the importance of the mixed symbolism of “the Book” as biographein, existence, and reality. He first speaks of “the People of the Book,” a term traditionally used for the Jewish people, the Torah being their point of reference. But Miłosz has the phrase encompass everyone yearning for capturing the world or life in writing, so he mentions the French literati, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) and Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880). Miłosz calls the hope of representing reality in art “man’s ultimate dream” in the struggle against the chaos of meaninglessness. “The Book” also denotes the Bible, which establishes three uses of the metaphor as coherent encompassing of the world, life, or divinity. For Miłosz, the three are not necessarily separate. The separation appears only in scholarly analysis, which Miłosz’s work continuously aims to blur and mix.12 Fiut develops upon Miłosz’s statement and introduces simultaneously three different understandings of “the Book.” First, Miłosz is to write only one work throughout his life, under new titles—a modernist notion. Then, he is also to imitate in his work the authenticity of biblical language—a Christian concept (in Fiut’s interpretation). Finally, Miłosz is to treat reality as “the Book” presented to man by God—a medieval idea. In order to prepare ground for the implementation of the symbol, in all three readings, Fiut ascribes three qualities to Miłosz’s work: wholeness, uniqueness, and deeper meaning. The assumption of underlying cohesion in Miłosz’s work does not mean that Fiut turns a blind eye to the poet’s need always to defer from final answers. Instead, Fiut incorporates Miłosz’s “yes, but” into his interpretion as a “polydirectionality of associations,” however trumped by the “inner logic” of his works. Fiut’s understanding of Miłosz’s intellectual decentering introduces the image of his “poetic corpus” as a “huge palimpsest,” a diverse but singular and coherent body of work. A “palimpsest” is an ancient scroll, scraped and reused

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several times for the scarcity of writing surfaces, often with traces of previous texts still visible under newer inscriptions. Gerard Genette, a renowned French literary theorist, conceptualized the notion for theoretical use in his famous Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (1982). Genette describes “palimpsest” as the relationship each work builds with prior texts, at times expecting the readers to recognize allusions to earlier works by the same or a different author.13 The metaphor of a palimpsestic corpus gives away how important for Fiut is the expectation for a consistent authorial persona underlying all literary deliberations. The body of work suggests a one-to-one relationship of the poet to his poems. The primary source of Fiut’s comparison of Miłosz’s diverse works to “the Book” is the biological instance of Miłosz-the-writer himself. Thus, Fiut appears overburdened by the biographical referentiality of Miłosz’s writings, however derived from his own declarations in the matter.14 Miłosz introduces the image of “the Book” to his writing in 1958. In an untranslated poem written in Montgeron, “Jak można zapomnieć,” “How Could One Forget,” the speaker compares the memory of his life to “the Book” as if every lived experience had an external treasury, abstracted in a traditional prop. Sensorial Erlebniss returns forcefully as an alien thought, externalized by the passing time as just a shadow of the original event, “but a tone.” The returning of images stirs hope for a more lasting presence, in which all will be remembered and re-lived; which is why the speaker imbues nature with a constant cry of penance. It is the first word from Ps 51:1, frequently used in liturgical practice and often assigned in Catholic tradition after confession of sins, it begins with “Miserere mei, Deus” and in English reads “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy loving kindness:  according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.” The popularity of the phrase in Christianity derives from one of the core assumptions of this faith that all believers will be saved, if they systematically renounce their sins and beg for forgiveness. But Miłosz uses “miserere” here mainly as an image of a resurfacing yet ungraspable connection with reality. The epiphanic moment of contact with the world is the experience of divinity, hence the words from the Psalm.15

The Book as the Body The understanding of a life’s work as a single book is a modernist idea propagated most directly by Stéphane Mallarmé, a major French symbolist poet and literary critic who influenced the artistic schools of the early twentieth century. Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003), an eminent French writer and philosopher, considered the symbol of “the Book” as a “totality or Work.” Blanchot

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tracks the idea of “the Book” from the Bible through German poet Novalis and philosophers Hegel and Marx to Mallarmé. The way Blanchot writes about the concept overlaps with Fiut’s biological sanctioning. According to Blanchot, “The Book” achieves higher levels of abstraction while capturing time. Literary output described by this stabilizing notion gains coherence yet loses influence. Blanchot links writing with reading by their work of presence and presentation. That is, he suggests that reception of one’s work comes to life by the assumption of one’s life behind the work. “The Book,” continues Blanchot, appears through an erasing of time in writing, which makes it “unique, irreplaceable,” and “almost a person.” But the biographical foundation of any timeless work exposes it to the threat of essentialism.16 In contrast to Blanchot’s separation of “the Book” from the author as a selfsustainable abstraction—an issue relevant to the second generation of Miłosz scholars—Fiut underlines how the author becomes one with the body of work. The latter declares that “the outline of the Book shines through” the poetic corpus and becomes “a lost archetype of the unity of existence, the human subject, and language.” Thus, “the Book” for Fiut merges completely with the person of the author, solidifying and capturing Miłosz’s authorial persona.17 The difference between Blanchot’s and Fiut’s take on “the Book” allows to better understand Miłosz’s distance to symbolist poetics. In many of his essays, above all in The Witness of Poetry, Miłosz describes the ideas of Mallarmé et alia in negative terms, as sources of a trend destructive to the anthropocentrism of Western poetry. “Symbolists discovered,” writes Miłosz, “the idea of a poem as an autonomous, self-sufficient unit, no longer describing the world but existing instead of the world.” Thus, for Miłosz, the self-sufficient poetry of the symbolists is designed to shelter them from the frailty of all civilization. As an escapist illusion, such poetry stems from the idea that what “surrounds us, here and now, is not guaranteed.” A poem existing instead of the world is for Miłosz a notion that turns away from what is human and denies the openness to encounter the other. A revered French philosopher, Alain Badiou, has a chapter “A French Philosopher Answers A Polish Poet” in his Handbook of Inaesthetics, in which he persuasively disagrees with Miłosz’s views on Mallarmé’s poetics and concisely summarizes the former’s critique of the matter. Badiou’s summary swiftly explains how Miłosz juxtaposes the European West and East, where the former’s poetry is to drown in “hopeless hermeticism” whereas the latter’s historical suffering helps the “living word” survive.18 Especially in The Witness of Poetry Miłosz accuses the promoters of pure art, such as Mallarmé, of gradually isolating themselves from the world and its

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objects, above all from religion. For Miłosz, they form the foundation of human experience and are, thus, the only things worthy of poetry: “In the very midst of a universal weakening of values deprived of their metaphysical foundations,” writes Miłosz, “there arises the idea of a poem outside that crisis. Such a poem should be perfectly self-sufficient, submitted to its own laws, and organized as a peculiar anti-world.” Miłosz stresses the need for the poet to take part in whatever happens, instead of escaping from the everyday events. Participation in the world means for Miłosz at least partial disagreement with the privatization and subjectivization of the poetic word, a process threatening to break communication between the poet and the readers.19 Fiut reads Miłosz’s trouble with Symbolist inscribing of the sacred within art as clear disagreement for such inscription. However, Miłosz did form his works partly with post-symbolist poetics, especially the book that brought him initial fame, The Three Winters (1936). Miłosz may have been critical of Mallarmé’s solution but this does not mean he is not relentlessly describing modernity. However frequently Miłosz may mourn the destruction of religious symbolism, he still puts his hopes in science to mend the self-inflicted crisis of modernity with its own means.20

The Book as the Sacred Biographical sanction for “the Book” as a corpus of texts is only the first use of the notion by Fiut. The scholar furthermore sets biological sanction for Miłosz’s work aside an eschatological one, where Miłosz is to intuit an afterlife in which “the full truth” will be attainable. In this regard, Fiut comes closer to Blanchot’s perspective: When there will be no Miłosz, his body of work will “promote itself into a masterpiece.” To that extent, Fiut declares that, with the passing time, texts from the past gain authenticity and sanctity, “a true and holy” knowledge. Sacred knowledge means the Bible, one of the oldest and most important texts in European culture, although Fiut characterizes the Bible differently, as “the origins of hermeneutics” and “source of true language.” This part corresponds to Fiut’s introductory statement that Miłosz’s poetry is a “hermeneutics of the Christian imagination.” The overall suggestion is that, when Miłosz’s life ends, his translating of the Bible would be the perfect conclusion to his life’s work. However Miłosz lived for seventeen more years and engaged more often in extra-biblical thought, making Fiut prepare an addendum for the Polish version of his publication. The Bible is the second designate of “the Book” in The Eternal Moment. In Koine Greek, tà biblía means “the books,” because it is a collection of texts.

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However, theologians argued that the authors of “the books” were inspired by the Holy Spirit of God, who must therefore be considered the real author. In this way, “the books” form a single text, just as readers perceive Miłosz’s works as one entity due to the singularity of authorship. In a single paragraph, Fiut draws a strong comparison between Miłosz’s “Book” and “the Holy Book.” Miłosz translated parts of the Old Testament and by doing so, reasons Fiut, he engaged with the “true language.” Fiut appears to argue that translation and representation come close to each other and declares that Miłosz’s poetic “universe” is to find beginning and end in the opening and closing biblical stories of the Tree of Knowledge and the End Times. Since Miłosz represents the Bible through his manner of speech and appropriates its “true” words, implies Fiut, his own work assumes this inspired language, thus gaining biblical qualities of authenticity, sanctity, and longevity. In this way, the biological and the eschatological sanctions both stimulate the production of the singular “Book.”21

The Book as the World Fiut wants Miłosz’s work to gather “the unity of existence, the human subject, and language.” Such unity goes hand in hand with Fiut’s tripartite use of the symbol of “the Book” in its modernist, Christian, and medieval understanding. The modernist interpretation tasks the writer with composing writing around the singularity of “the human subject” as the body of work. The Christian apprehension of the Bible as “the Book” allows Fiut to suggest the influence of its “true language” on Miłosz’s work by proxy of his translation efforts. What follows is the third, medieval perception of “existence” represented within nature as the divine “Book,” as Fiut declares: The Book that the poet tirelessly attempts to decipher is a representation, a repetition in word of the entire universe. It is a text that discloses the method for its own reading only to the initiated. It is a prefiguration of the world that like a parchment scroll God will roll up at the end of human history.22

Here, Fiut first states that Miłosz’s work is like “the Book;” then, that he translates it; finally, that he deciphers “the Book” of the world. This quote begins a new paragraph and Fiut uses the word “Book” with a capital letter only for the second time in his text. From the preceding paragraph, one may have learned about the body of work as “the Book” and as the Bible. The new paragraph beginning with “the Book” explicitly means the Bible because Fiut speaks of deciphering as “translating.” However, the new paragraph excludes a clear subject of the comparison and blurs the lines dividing the Bible from Miłosz’s work; it erases the

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comparison and approximates the two even more strongly. To decipher the Book may mean to translate the Bible, although, it may also mean to translate reality into language. In the second reading of the same fragment by Fiut, the Book denotes the finite and time-bound universe “written” by God. That the perceived world is a book prepared by God is a medieval notion. According to this version, signs of “the Book” may be read, translated, and interpreted so that the presence of the divine author can be approximated. At the end of times, writes Fiut, God “will roll up” the “parchment scroll,” that is “the Book.” Thus, the divine “Book” of the world describes not only materiality but also temporality, nature as well as history: two important tropes in Miłosz’s writing. The world as “the Book” also suggests the finality of signs promoted by Aristotle:  that there is a beginning, middle, and end to the endeavors of the inquiring and describing mind. It suggests there is an end to the effort of representation and that lies with the divine source. Miłosz himself alludes to the topos of the world as “the Book” in his wartime cycle The World (A Naive Poem) inspired, as he declared, chiefly by the writings of the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), who attempted to fuse Aristotelian thought with Christian theology.23 What Fiut does to Miłosz’s work is, however, more complex than any of these three understandings of “the Book” alone. Following the poet’s lead, Fiut applies all three to Miłosz’s work and, thus, engages it in all of the three traditions of reading its symbolism. That is, Fiut suggests that Miłosz’s work as “the Book” should be perceived in a threefold manner:  like the Bible—hermeneutically, cyclically (re)read and translated in search always for new answers; like the image of the world—representing the fullest perspective on the possible experience of man; and like a single text—a complete, closed, and final reiteration of the writer’s experiences. By linking the three readings of “the Book,” Fiut argues that Miłosz’s work forms a complete representation of experience, finite yet open-ended, decisive yet unresolved. Fiut, thus, formulates a fusion between medieval, biblical, and modernist uses of the symbol, which in a way aptly encompasses Miłosz’s paradoxical thought and his own declarations. However, this fusion undermines Fiut’s unending efforts to establish a monolithic authorial persona of Miłosz as a classical author. The fusion also does not lend itself to extrapolation and development into Miłosz’s poetics. Of course, Fiut’s aim was not to discern Miłosz’s poetics, but to firmly place him in the firmament of world literature. Still, to delineate Miłosz’s poetics, one has to follow not only his instructive voice but also take a route parallel to Fiut’s considerations.

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Fiut’s effort to apply “the Book” to Miłosz as his body, language, and world, is in itself a modern attempt: one that seeks wholeness and uniqueness in a stable authorial persona of a writer. Fiut’s narrative of “the Book” is based on similar efforts by esteemed predecessors, who used the term “classic” to formulate a view of a single author as stable, monolithic, unique, and wholesome. Most notably, the French literary scholar Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869) described the development of the meaning of the word in the essay What Is A Classic? (1850). Sainte-Beuve remarked that ancient Romans used the Latin word classicus, meaning “the most admired and authoritative social class,” for writers who stand out from the crowd. For Sainte-Beuve himself, a classic is an author who enlightens the mind, shares moral truth or eternal passion, and has a style of his own, at once new and known. Sainte-Beuve’s definition has been debated by many, most notably by the American-born British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), but in the context of world literature, an important reference for Miłosz and Fiut is the Latvian-born British philosopher Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997). In 1951, Berlin authored The Hedgehog and the Fox, a popular essay on one of the greatest Russian novelists, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). In his presentation of Tolstoy as a religious but socially active figure, Berlin stands against simplistic narratives presenting Russia as an Eastern evil that would mimic the West only to destroy it.24 Similarly, in his work to solidify the image of Miłosz as a classical author, Fiut aims to complicate the image of what was perceived in the West as a Slavic Communist void under Russian domination. Fiut foregrounds the exceptionality of Miłosz further by differentiating Poland and Central European culture from the Soviet oppressor. However, the geopolitical imagination is but one of many concerns that Fiut tackles using the notion of “the Book.” His own book, The Eternal Moment, is just as syncretic as that notion he applies to Miłosz’s work; sparkling with medieval, Christian, and modernist references. That is, Fiut forms his monograph into a modernist hagiography of an exceptional author. A goal foreshadowed and motivated in many ways by Miłosz himself. By doing so, Fiut continues Miłosz’s endeavors and caters to the expectations of both the modernizing Americans and the traditionalist Poles.25

Epiphanic Poetry The title of Fiut’s book, The Eternal Moment, itself conveys the idea that the gist of Miłosz’s work revolves around the link between the modern and the premodern, be it Christian, medieval, or ancient. The title suggests that Miłosz is to find the most significant element of personal experience and capture it forever in

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his poetry. This way Miłosz’s work is to preserve and secure the precious minutiae of life. The concept of “eternal moment” comes from a very special poem by Miłosz. Although, it first stems from his great fondness for the French writer Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) and his popular essay, The Painter of Modern Life (1863), a cornerstone for all reflection on modernity and art. In 1998, Miłosz wrote an introduction to the Polish translation of Baudelaire’s text: “Since I read Baudelaire’s essay in the thirties it has been for me, and is to this day, one of the most important texts about civilization…. I liked it so much as to translate it into Polish, though the manuscript got lost in the ruins of my Warsaw apartment.”26 In his essay, Baudelaire describes Constantin Guys, a painter, but his thoughts are applicable to any artistic craftsman. Baudelaire defines the object of art similarly to the “eternal moment;” it is to join two halves, “the ephemeral, the fugitive, and the contingent” with “the eternal and the immutable.” He explains that there is beauty in representations of the minor and the particular within the present. The invariable and the circumstantial denote the “eternal” and the “momentary.” Baudelaire declares that modern times screen off general ideas with the plenitude of minute encounters.27 For Baudelaire, someone passionate about lasting beauty in the fleeting seeks to grasp the “moral mechanism of the world.” In his famous article “Nie,” “No” from 1951, in which Miłosz officially cuts ties with the Communist government, the poet sets out conditions for an authentic work of art. It should be excellent craft combined with moral content, conveying elements of truth, vision, and artistic integrity. “Perceptiveness,” however, is necessary for the poet’s ability to extract the “eternal moment” from the passing moments.28 Miłosz’s “eternal moment” and Baudelaire’s double source of art, in the mutable and the immutable, has an older name, used previously in religious practices for moments of revelation, when the individual glimpses the divine. This older notion is called “epiphany.” Epipháneia is Greek for “showing forth,” “an apparition,” “a manifestation,” or “a striking appearance” and signifies an experience of sudden and striking realization. It shares its root verb phaínein, “to appear,” with the word phenomenon, which means “something that appears.” Epiphany may also mean “a manifestation of a deity” that in Christian theology denotes “the manifestation of Christ’s divinity to his disciples.” The idea of epiphany surfaces also in the illuminationism of an author highly relevant to Miłosz, the legislator of many Christian ideas, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), who speaks in his famous Confessions of “luce securitatis.” This “light of assurance” is interpreted frequently as the gift of God allowing him to gain insight about himself, the world, and the way he should follow.29

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Baudelaire was one of the first to transpose the function of epiphany from religion to art. He wanted art to become a secular religion, separate from dogmas yet offering insight into the invisible. In modern times, the sacred is decreasingly available within the means of organized religiosity, which makes artists seek divinity with their own tools and abilities. The artists reasoned that, if one cannot glimpse eternity through the elevated rites of the Christian faith, we should apotheosize the casual through art; elevate the everyday to the rank of god with literature or painting. In contrast to Baudelaire, however, Miłosz works hard in the opposite direction, to draw art closer to religiosity, to link the epiphanies of the painter of modern life with the epiphanies of the ancient philosophers and medieval theologians. The author whose work popularized the idea of “epiphany” in English culture was the Irish novelist, James Joyce (1882–1941), who offered a very mundane kind of revelation. Joyce writes about moments that give insight into the “whatness” of things and do not exceed beyond the dimension of the empirical world; rather, they allow for the full appreciation of its presence.30 Polish readers of Miłosz offered several interpretations of his idea of epiphany, all of which venture away from the Joycean secular and aesthetic understanding of epiphany as non-divine revelation. Critics imply that Miłosz’s epiphany—a term he never uses in his poetry—assumes either a rejection or a broadening of subjectivity alongside an apprehension of moral values. They write that his idea is an act of instantaneous insight into a deeper reality, a momentary perception of the Real, axiological intuition, imperfect ekstasis, mystical-religious sublimation, or divinity unveiling itself in things. It appears that some Polish readers want Miłosz’s epiphanies to be a completely internal and perspectival affair, while others want them to be a religious experience. This reveals how ungraspable is the concept of epiphany and that Miłosz never cares for its proper definition, probably perceiving its strength in its separation from meaning and concentration on the presence.31 Aleksander Fiut’s The Eternal Moment takes its title from a telling passage from Miłosz’s poem “A Notebook:  Bon By Lake Leman” (1953). While Fiut establishes the symbol of “the Book” as the mark of Miłosz’s formal coherence and the “eternal moment” as gathering his thematic dichotomies, the scholar never provides a close reading of the text, from which the latter concept comes. Nevertheless, Fiut’s whole book is a long meditation on the themes conveyed within the single poem by Miłosz.32 Overall, the notion of “eternal moment” conveys, for Fiut, the “continual interpenetration” of time and eternity, thus suggesting an “eschatological epiphany,” again, adding to the religious reading of Miłosz’s poetry. Unfortunately, in the

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course of his book, Fiut concentrates on the concept of “eternal moment” to such an extent that it becomes blurred. When considering all its possible applications, the idea becomes so general as to lose any grasp of Miłosz’s poetics, but for the fact that his thought inclines toward dichotomies. Rather than explaining Miłosz’s poetics and inclination for describing presence, the diverse sets of oppositions that Fiut projects reveal the scholar’s longing for the finality of signs.33 In general, however, one should understand the concept of “eternal moment” as Miłosz’s inclination to take the momentary out of the passing time and preserve it in art. That is, “eternal moment” is Miłosz’s way of rephrasing the workings of modernist epiphany, as phrased by Baudelaire. Still, when considering the poem in which the concept appears, it seems to convey much more. The poem “A Notebook: Bon By Lake Leman” is classical in form, dominated in the Polish version by eleven-syllable strophes of iambic pentameter. Both elements are left out in English for the sake of the general flow of the phrase, quite mellifluous in Polish. The rhythm is not typical for the Polish language, usually attached to the trochee, due to the domination of two-syllable words and double rhyme patterns. The text does not rhyme but for the words “co jest,” “what is,” repeated twice in each of the three stanzas and “wieczny,” “eternal,” twice at the end of the final one. The poem consists of three stanzas, each presenting a landscape in front of the speaker and his reflection on his perceptions. The speaker, similar to Miłosz, declares that he will disregard the passing of time and the fading of material reality in order to concentrate on the presence at hand, “an eternal moment in what is.” This motif is crucial to the poem and remains in strong relation to the understanding of epiphany. The main issue of this poem is, thus, the striving to understand the presence of things, “what is;” how could we be able to grasp it and communicate the event of their appearance, “the eternal moment.” This same issue is offered in three stanzas of “A Notebook: Bon By Lake Leman,” each attempting the same task of voicing the process of mapping the presence of things through cultural references. The title remarks that those considerations are romantic in style and genre, because they are supposedly fragmentary or a fragment, an entry in a notebook, as Miłosz titles many of his poems; this poem does not reveal the whole gamut of his perspectives. The translation of the poem used by Fiut on the first pages of his book appears to be made by Miłosz himself, because no other information is available. However, this poem is absent from all of the available collections of Miłosz’s poetry in English. Is it possible that Miłosz disagreed with his most esteemed reader and popularizer? Or, maybe Fiut’s book The Eternal Moment established too strong an interpretation and Miłosz wanted to counteract it with the absence

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of this, however we look at it, very important text? Or, maybe he considered this book to promote his rather Polish, national and prophetic persona?

The Spatial Poetics of “A Notebook: Bon By Lake Leman” “A Notebook: Bon By Lake Leman” is a masterful poem because each of its parts conveys the whole. The first stanza begins with a description of a landscape. We read about pastoral landscape, calming to the eyes of an émigré from wardevastated Poland. The seemingly irrelevant trees introduce more than just the mood of the poem. They present the setting, in which the speaker recollects his thoughts, and convey additional symbolism, retained throughout the rest of the text. The beech is a reminder of the pastoral genre and the whole poem conveys a seemingly bucolic surface, well-ordered and rhythmic, revealing a beautiful vista. The poplar symbolizes the underworld river Acheron, the afterlife, death, the end of time, and holds the main question of the poem:  is there anything aside life and death? The spruce signifies immortality and is the hope that lingers within the questions the speaker poses—as well as his epiphanic revelation. The spruce is the only tree of the poem that never sheds its leaves. Considering that it is October and winter is coming, the other two trees will soon stand lifeless and naked.34 The landscape is covered with autumnal fog, so everything is white, the contours are unclear, and visibility is bad. But the sentence following the initial distich reveals that there is more to see, because the speaker stands at a good vantage point, on a mountainside, overlooking a valley with a lake that produces “smoke,” as if boiling from some hidden fire. This is, again, reminiscent of Hades, which Odysseus reached in “the furthest parts of the deep-flowing river of Ocean where the Cimmerians live, wrapped in mist and fog.”35 The third sentence introduces the first sign of the coming winter: snow on the opposite hillside. Again, the simple phrase reveals that there is “the other shore.” That was to be expected, since the title of the poem clearly indicates that the scene happens over Lake Leman—or, Lake Geneva—but only the Polish title speaks of “the shores of Lake Leman,” “Brzegi Lemanu.” Both sides are thus considered by the onlooker. He divides the image into planes of perception: there is up and down, and there is also a meaningful “this side” and “the other side.” The speaker may be on top of a hillside, but the imagery suggests he may already be underground, overlooking the river of woe, Acheron, that in Greek mythology all souls have to cross to reach the world of the dead. Together with the speaker, then, we are simultaneously high above the ground—and underneath it—comfortable on the pastoral surface yet undercut by the stygian element underneath.36

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Red beeches, shining poplars And steep spruce behind the October fog. In the valley the lake smokes. Already snow Lies on the hillsides of the other shore.37

The stanza continues to develop the uncertainty of this location with the speaker asking, “Of life, what remains?” The question is placed right after the ambivalent introduction. A reader who noticed the symbolism of the paysage does not see this question as sudden. From the onset, the speaker reflects on life and death. If the poem ended here, one would come up with answers, such as memory, art, or offspring. However, the question asked by the speaker has no doubt in it: it is a rhetorical affirmation of everything that exceeds life and death. Nevertheless, the lyrical “I” gives an unexpected and, again, symbolic answer; he says that “only light” remains of life. On the one hand, this is a very rational and practical answer. Memories fade, art loses its seductive power, and offspring die. To say that only light prevails over the entropy of the universe requires a disposition of mind that wants only to abstract; possibly that of a physicist, who, like theologians and philosophers, seeks the underlying rules of being. However, on the other hand, this light symbolizes an even more abstract and non-physical element, which transcends existence and is devoid of meaning:  presence. This kind of luce securitatis, as used by Miłosz in this poem, operates on the edges of the Catholic imagination; it gives no certainty, only a hope for a divine presence. The moment when we perceive our own life as light and presence, the speaker compares to a special time, an instant of self-cognition. All of a sudden one is transfixed and transported out of the usual being and just is; one perceives the existence itself. And this kind of lasting presence is the most elementary thing available to a person. The full phrase speaks of more than just light and continues painting the seemingly pastoral image of the famous Swiss valley. The light comes from the sun at its highest point, above the speaker, making him move his eyes from the lowest part of the vista, the lake, to its peak feature, the shining star. An enjambment dividing the words “sunny” and “noon” underlines the importance of this element. “Noon” would suggest that the sun is at its zenith, directly above the speaker; but it is nearly wintertime and the sun is very much to the south, meaning that the speaker must be standing on the northern hillside overlooking Lake Geneva to see it; possibly in Lausanne or Vevey. The Polish version does not denote the time of day and only speaks of “słoneczny czas” instead, a “sunny time.” The English “noon” marks the turning point of the day, the moment of all-encompassing perspective, the most elevated and highlighted time and place of life, when there is no past or future, no memories or plans,

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just the present. Although impossible to capture in words and seemingly complex even in Miłosz’s iteration, the full moment of presence is actually the simplest of experiences. The line after the enjambment makes us concentrate on the fact that the day described by the speaker is also the peak moment of this “season,” autumn. The direction of the poem, the peak moment of autumn, means the transformation from the time of life to the time of death; supposedly, from the linear time into timeless eternity. This is “such” a season, hence it is of great importance to the poetic meditation at hand. In other words, the speaker reflects on the changing of times, on transformation and movement. This stanza reminds us that Miłosz’s poem is not only about seeing but also about what looms on the edge of perception. The valley is clouded with fog, the clouds have abandoned their heavenly seat and descended to the ground, while the light above makes the onlooker “blink” or “squint;” “mrużą się” in Polish. Both the valley from a gothic novel and the heavenly firmament distort vision. Time stops in the peak moment of transformation, life is on the brink of ceasing, perception fails, and space escapes the senses. The “eyes blink” in the light as if losing sight by staring straight into the sun. The English text thus underlines the momentariness of the situation while the Polish has the viewer remain with his head turned toward the light, striving to observe what is unobservable: the light reveals objects but by itself is without form. What better opportunity for an epiphanic revelation? But the erasing of time and space is insufficient preparation. The speaker says that pure existence, “this is,” relinquishes not only time, space, and perception, but also individual identity by way of memory. This is possibly the reason why he suddenly addresses himself in the third person, “you say,” which in Polish is even more separate from any personality, put in the plural third put in passive voice, “mówi się,” “it is said.” Memory is useless from the perspective of eternity where even art fails. When the mechanisms of thinking no longer operate, suggests the speaker, there remains a presence.38 Of life, what remains? Only light, So that the eyes blink in the sunny Noon of such a season. You say: this is, And no capacity, no artfulness Can reach beyond what is. And memory, useless, loses power.

The Site In-Between Each part of the poem conveys the same pastoral surface, tenebrous undercurrent, and a faint hope for immortality. The second stanza begins with what the

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speaker perceives in his vicinity. He starts once more with a sensual picture: beer brewing, everyday work at the parish, schoolchildren gathering fruits. However, the stygian tone lingers. Cider is made in the process of fermentation; that is, the apples must first decay so that one may produce the brew. Slaked lime mixed by the vicar is good for building purposes but, traditionally, was used to cover corpses, especially in mass graves, so as to hasten the process of decomposition. The chestnut tree is of the same genus as the beech tree, Fagaceae, so it supplants the pastoral imaginary. The fruits of the chestnut, furthermore, remind that cider and lime show the aim of decay and death, as a necessary part of the process allowing the fruits to proliferate. The fruits of life are children and, since they grow and develop along the path of life, hope remains with them. But the necessity of death as a catalyst and path to authentic life extends beyond offspring to religion. After resurrecting Lazarus, Jesus told the apostles that life must undergo a drastic transformation before it brings true effects; he explains to them in John 12:24, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” This reference reveals the hope hidden between the lines of this melancholic poem; that there is life after death, revelation within decay, and illumination in the past. As if attempting to find wisdom in the fearful beauty of the view, the melancholic speaker incessantly returns to the shore of the river of woe, Acheron. Kegs smell of cider. The vicar with a spade Mixes lime in front of the school. My son runs there on a path. Boys carry Sacks of chestnuts gathered on the slope.

Resurrection and the moment of transition between life and death remind of something else entirely. The peak moment of autumn from the first stanza may well be the 31st October to the 2nd November; that is, the triduum of All Hallows set by the Catholic Church to remember the faithful dead. One of the most classical positions in Polish literature, Adam Mickiewicz’s romantic drama Forefather’s Eve, revolves around the 2nd of November and the pagan tradition of communicating with the dead. Part Four of Mickiewicz’s drama (1822) describes the visit of young Gustaw to the abode of a local priest and his children. Gustaw may be a ghost, because he explains how he attempted suicide, depressed by unrequited love like Mickiewicz himself, when writing this work. The second stanza of “A Notebook: Bon By Lake Leman” repeats this configuration of characters; we have the vicar, the children, and the speaker may assume the role of the disconsolate Gustaw. Again, the tone of the poem is about an unnamed sorrow. This feeling subtly pervades most of the verses, so it raises

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questions: Sorrow for what? What has been lost or caused the trauma? Is it love, as with Gustaw? Is it the melancholy of contemplating death? Or is it perhaps the nostalgia for homeland, the regret of an exile?39 The sentence in verses 15–16 has the central place in the whole poem, counting 33 verses in total, and keep the formal position of the “sunny noon of such a season;” the middle place; the in-between site of the observer. These verses suggest that the sadness is that of an exile and of a crestfallen artist. Just as in the first part, the speaker’s thoughts turn inward halfway through the stanza; he recalls Ps 137:5. This Psalm, an invocation for the liberation of the Hebrews enslaved by the Babylonians, is one of the best-known psalms. It begins with the passage that, again, brings forth the image of rivers, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” Ascribed to the prophet Jeremiah, Psalm 137 speaks of the misery of longing for the lost capital city of Jerusalem and the difficulty of praising a homeland when it is absent. The Jews, asked by their captors to sing them their songs, ask: How could we praise Jerusalem properly, if it is not present? And they quickly move on to promise, quoted by Miłosz here, that if they forget their home city, they should lose their ability to play on harps. In the context of Miłosz’s poem, it means that remembering one’s origins is the prerequisite for art. Without tradition, especially in exile, one could not create. In his commentary to Psalm 137, Augustine of Hippo interprets Jerusalem as the “everlasting” city of God: the source of illumination. Christians are citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem; however, right now, they are enslaved in the symbolic Babylon of the material world and linear time. Their yearning for homeland is thus the hope for salvation through faith.40 Immediately following the quotation from Psalm 137, the earth starts trembling, a biblical sign of an epiphany: a divine revelation that “shake[s]‌what is.” The speaker suddenly comes to the understanding that the sorrow of his perceptions comes from the longing for the Hebrew Jerusalem or the Christian salvation; or to put it simply, the modern poet’s hope for everlasting presence. This realization completely overturns his perception, which is marked in the poem by the crumbling of the paysage: the mountains and the forests distort completely.41 The penultimate verse is a literary allusion to the Communist Manifesto, published during the European Revolutions of 1848 by the German philosophers Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). They wrote about their time that “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” which means that, due to the rapid shifts in social fabric, we will have to live in a world without traditions and hierarchies. Meaningless presence is the blessing and the curse of modernity; this fact worries the speaker otherwise engulfed by the hope

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for a kind of salvation. In Polish, a meaningful enjambment underlines the verb “touched,” as if repositioned by the tremors of the landscape. This verb is ambivalent. It reminds the reader of Midas’s curse, whose touch changed everything into gold, thus making it priceless yet immobile like a painter’s still life. The past and the future converge in the present moment of perception which, nevertheless, remains ungraspable and reveals the futility of the artist’s work (“crumbles into dust”). In spite of the crumbling of values and signs, memory and art continue to produce meaning in the hope to bring back the Holy Jerusalem of presence.42 If I forget thee, Jerusalem, Says the prophet, let my right hand wither. Underground tremors shake what is, Mountains crack and forests break. Touched by what was and what will be All that is crumbles into dust. And neither memory nor striving ceases.

To Reveal the Presence of Things The last stanza of “A Notebook: Bon By Lake Leman” begins again with a landscape. This time, however, the speaker looks at the broader and distant elements of the view:  the skies and the landscape in general. It suggests an opposition of the heavenly and the mundane. Moreover, the speaker directly addresses them, accusing them as personified deities or tricksters of misguiding human perceptions. The skies remind him both of the quickly passing years and, with their immutable form, of the immobile eternal perspective. It seems as if the skies occluded the perception of reality, which is why the speaker declares he will cease to look at them. In Polish, the third verse disturbs the rhythm of the poem with the word “stare” going across the stable caesura of five plus six syllables per line. The English version works this out with the enjambment between verses with “I won’t / Stare at you.”43 Just as autumnal skies bind the individual to the image of the passing of time, the landscapes bind him to his corporal nature. The speaker wants to turn away from all four dimensions of time and matter because they always change; and he wants to find the immutable order of things and their presence without meaning. He compares the visual beauty of landscapes to poison that induces sleep or even paralysis. The landscape becomes here, therefore, like the fruits from the Lotus trees that Odysseus found to cause pleasant drowsiness, however making the individual lose any desire to return home. And since returning to the mystical Jerusalem of presence is the main theme of the poem, the ambivalently bucolic

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landscape acquires an explicitly negative connotation. The speaker wants to avert the eyes from transient earthly beauties towards lasting forms. Even more, the speaker negates both the landscapes for their “poison” that turns people into their animal, corporal selves, and the skies for their rational light that occludes the true presence of things. That is, he seeks a presence both extra-rational and extra-corporal. Autumnal skies, the same in childhood, In adulthood and in old age, I won’t Stare at you. And you, landscapes Feeding our hearts with mild warmth What poison dwells in you that seals our lips, Makes us sit with folded arms and the look Of sleepy animals?

Initially, the speaker appears to praise this kind of presence abstracted from “what is.” He speaks that there one may find order and peace. Within the presence of these pastoral qualities lies the epiphanic “eternal moment.” However, the speaker delineates two different kinds of eternal moment. The first one, extracted from the bucolic appearance of the surroundings, makes the individual dissolve in being, disappear in the flow of things. The wording is soothing and appears to appreciate the “eternal moment” originating in “what is” and erasing individuality. However, complicating his thought, the speaker unexpectedly marks this presencing eternal moment negatively, because he agrees to “abolish what is”—the founding marker of this “epiphany from stasis” or “epiphany from perception.” The speaker decides not to merge with the presence at hand, but to extract the other kind of eternal moment “from movement;” that is, from the changing of things, from events. But the speaker does not mean just any events, because he compares this eternal moment to light reflected from the incessantly changing waters of a “black river.” The “gleam” aligns with the light from the first stanza and the heavenly Jerusalem from the second. Whereas the black river is the space between life and death, the one alluded to in the first stanza, the woeful river of Acheron. In ancient Greek mythology, another black river of Hades is Styx, symbolizing hate. Miłosz’s “black river” thus points to other streams of Hades, such as Lethe, the underworld water of oblivion. The “gleam” the speaker would like to gather from the shifting currents of events is, by all accounts, memory. Aptly enough, Miłosz makes his speaker end each stanza with words about memory except for this last one. The black river entails then not only the woeful oblivion of events but also marks the need to preserve even the most fleeting of them with

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artful memory. The psalmic verse returns with new meaning here, reminding us that the light of the symbolic Jerusalem is never to be forgotten by the psalmist, the prototype poet. Forgetting, thus, becomes the surprising precondition for the eternal moment, which motivates the work of the modern poet.44 What is, then, this other, proper “eternal moment” that the speaker wants to take from movement? He elaborates it in each of the stanzas and, in the end one has to gather together all the pieces so as to better understand the “eternal moment.” At first, this evasive idea appears to be a miniature life extracted from the flow of events, i.e., an event retaining its relationship with the flow of time, yet timeless. As light taken from darkness, it is a different kind of presence to that offered by the observable world, which is peaceful only on the surface. It is art always conscious of the unstable threshold between life and death, of the illusions spun by time and spatial imagery, and of the restrictions that rational thinking and corporal sensuality throw upon the perceiver. Whoever finds order, Peace, and an eternal moment in what is Passes without trace. Do you agree then To abolish what is, and take from movement The eternal moment as a gleam On the current of a black river? Yes.

To understand himself and reality, Miłosz’s speaker seeks a final point of reference. To achieve one, he may only imagine striving for the vantage point of God often, as in “A Notebook: Bon By Lake Leman,” by way of rejection. This task for the poet was prescribed by many authors from the early nineteenth century. The title of the poem signals that Miłosz directly dialogues with the last collection by Adam Mickiewicz, the Lausanne Lyrics (1839–1840). Especially with his poem “Nad wodą wielką i czystą…,” “Over the water great and clear…,” Mickiewicz assumes a meditative stance, similar to Miłosz’s. However, while Miłosz’s speaker seeks an almost transcendental position as an observer detached from all things, Mickiewicz’s lyrical “I” agrees to become one with the flow of events. Although Mickiewicz lived for fifteen more years, he markedly did not write any more poetry after this work, which made his declarations from the last poems to often be considered sincere. Afterward, Mickiewicz decided instead to partake in the current of events and engaged in social and political activities. His last poems were very concise: “Rocks are to stand and threaten, / Clouds are to carry rains, / Lightning is to thunder and die, / I am to flow, flow, and flow.”45 An equally important point of reference for this poem by Miłosz is the thought of the American thinker, poet, and leader of the transcendentalist movement,

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Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). His essay “The Over-Soul” (1841) offers yet another perspective on Miłosz’s gleam “on the current of the black river.” Emerson describes his reflections on the nature of the human soul and a possibility of the eponymous supreme overarching unity. Among other things, he lists the different names used throughout time for epiphanic illumination, which he understands as the connection of the soul with the Over-Soul. For him, the soul is “not a faculty, but a light.” Emerson declares that an undercurrent of external origin runs through all people, “[m]‌an is a stream whose source is hidden,” and goes on to develop the metaphor of a “flowing river” that makes one into an observer of its “ethereal water” that brings “alien energy” and visions. The Emersonian river is, thus, a transcendent source of inspiration. Through its connection with underlying Unity, the soul may only contemplate itself and, writes Emerson, “the web of events” that surrounds it. Markedly, like for Miłosz, events are more important than objects for Emerson, who explicitly diminishes their importance on the example of landscapes, which are to be “facts as fugitive as … any whiff of mist.”46 The appreciation of events over things and moments over lasting presence is the main point of Emerson’s essay. He begins by saying that “[o]‌ur faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual” and ends with “the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time.” That is, his overall ambitions motivate Emerson to miniaturize the field of contemplation to the smallest quantities of time and space. What opposes this task is “the habitual,” meaning “customs” or “actions that we are used to,” a word rooted in the Latin habere, which signifies “to have.” Hence, the way to connect the soul with the overarching principle is to reject that what is perceivable and attainable for the sake of the unattainable and invisible. This does not mean an ascetic dismissal of the earthly beauties but, rather, a way to concentrate on “what happens” instead of “what is;” on the current instead of the river itself; on events instead of perceptions; on movement instead of things. In comparison to Emerson, however, there is more reluctance in Miłosz’s poem. That is because great poetry never gives a straight answer and the greatest of poets know that their art speaks only if reluctantly praising both the “landscapes” and the “movement,” the chiasmus between the stygian and the pastoral. Moreover, as further readings reveal, Miłosz transposes what he declares in this poem onto his actions as the official transatlantic poet; intellectual movement pervades his artistic and public declarations. We have yet to learn why rivers were important to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus and what he has to do with Miłosz’s idea of movement. We still need to consider why Miłosz’s image as an artist differs so much between America and Poland and why is it the effect of his conscious actions.

3 Self-Definition The most vivid location in which different interpretations of Miłosz’s work are positioned is also the most painful one, concentrated as it is in one of the most tragic times of the Second World War and in what is certainly the most calamitous event in the history of the occupation of Warsaw, the Polish capital city. This was the first Warsaw Uprising (19.04.1943–16.05.1943) and the complete devastation of the area where it occurred, the Warsaw Ghetto, and above all the murder of 13,000 Jews still living in that location. However, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Miłosz’s work is a symbol of something he himself did not see, namely, the fate of the nearly 300,000 Jewish inhabitants of the Ghetto, who were transported and systematically killed in the death camp in Treblinka. What Miłosz saw or as most of his readers say, “witnessed,” were the events of the Uprising as they happened—although from the outside only. Furthermore, as an exception among nearly all of the writers on the Christian side of the Ghetto, he immediately transcribed the way the events impacted him into two of his most powerful poems, “A Poor Christian Looks At the Ghetto” and “Campo dei Fiori.” These two very popular and very artful texts have gathered so many commentaries on both sides of the Atlantic as to reveal the gross misconceptions about Miłosz’s wartime attitude, his poetry, and poetics. The misconceptions’ diversity and range often occlude the main thought of his influential poems. So, before even beginning to consider the reception of Miłosz’s poetry, we have to properly understand the cultural differences between Polish and American understanding of witnessing.

The Idea of Witnessing There are many sides to the concept of “witnessing” and it has a long tradition in European culture. On a general level, “witnessing” comes from the perception of an event and the memory of the same event regarded as truth. This truth is then either publicly pronounced in the court of law or openly professed, against all odds, in a sacrifice for the faith. It is either an act of speech or a corporeal action. The idea of “witnessing” is situated at the crossroads of religion and law. Religion and law derive from the need to regulate the space of encounter between God and the worshipper as well as between society and the individual. Often religion and law have worked simultaneously for both religious and political means, such as the divine sanction of monarchs established “by the Grace

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of God.” Religion implies a regulatory system of commandments and rituals. Divine authority grounds religious regulations, whereas the basis for juridical regulation is derived from the idea of the common good. The regulatory necessity has the individual answer to others for his or her beliefs and perceptions. To answer is to bear witness. In religion, the individual gives witness to his or her faith and life in accordance with divine sanctions. Private relations with God become public by action or affirmation. One gives visual testimony to the invisible experience of God by way of deeds or words. The meaning of “to witness” is “to perceive an event taking place and to be able to repeat it,” while “to be a witness” means to evidence an event and “give testimony.” Then, “to bear witness” means “to evidence the authenticity of an event by one’s memory of perceptions and presence.”1 From among the many understandings of testimony—such as those recounting the Holocaust, the Hiroshima bombing, or the Latin American tradition of testimonio—only three versions are relevant in the context of Miłosz’s writings, those of Polish national messianism, American communal testimony, and post-camp witnessing. The difference in Polish and American understanding of “witness” stems from the ancient divisions among Christians and later the separation of Protestants from Catholics. The American notion of “witnessing” comes from Protestant customs; it effects in the need for an authenticity of individual experience. The Polish understanding of “witnessing” comes from a Catholic practice attached to the need to memorize the communal bond of the Church and sustain traditions. The third instance of “witnessing” originates from the trauma of the extermination of Jewish people during the Second World War and pictures the state of exception within the juridical systems of modern societies. Miłosz’s writings generalize the experience of psychic and physical suffering as the sources of witnessing.2

Corporal Testimony In the context of modern-day Polish and American cultures, both predominantly Christian, the key figure giving witness to his beliefs is Jesus. During prosecution, Jesus tells Pontius Pilate in John 18:37, “To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.” Witnessing thus links truth and death: the individual is either witnessing with her own death or witnessing the death of another. In the former case, witnessing is related to religion and metaphysics. In the latter, witnessing is an important element of jurisdiction and refers to a physical reality. The human law relies on the witness to make a case against the accused: the witness testifies to the actions

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of others, in speech or writing. This function of the witness exists unchanged to this day. The ancient Greek word for courtroom witness, the person, was “martys.” Christians changed the use of “martys” to its current understanding of bearing witness to faith, martyrdom, with the sacrifice of life. Greco-Roman cultural influence over the whole Mediterranean area inspired reflections on the definition of a “noble death” and referred to sacrificial rituals and heroic epics. Aside from European development surrounding the word “martyr,” the concept has been available in many religions, which connected it with “doctrinal correctness” and “divine authentication.” In various ways, bodily suffering was strongly considered to give “moral and doctrinal superiority.”3 According to Daniel Boyarin, a historian of religion from the University of California, Berkeley, it was the desire of the early Christians for martyrdom, imitating the death of Jesus, which distinguished them from non-Christians. When Jesus answers Pilate in Jn 18:36 that his “Kingdom is not of this world,” he formulates the paradigm of martyrdom. Such martyrdom, argues Boyarin, is a “witness to the greater jurisdiction of God’s power and justice, which supersedes that of mere temporal authority.” Religious witnessing is thus not only captured by language. Just as frequently, the individual has been inspired to bear witness to her faith with corporeal action. In ancient times, the language of witness meant sacrificing the body to physical suffering or even death.4 Boyarin refers to a sequence from the apocryphal Acts of Peter, the leader of the Church after Christ. The apostle retreats from Rome to escape persecution, but outside the walls, sees Jesus entering the city. Peter asks him “Quo vadis?”, “Where are you going?”, and learns that Jesus is heading to Rome to be crucified again. The vision persuades Peter to go back and submit to execution and martyrdom on the inverted symbol of his Lord, the cross. In early Christianity, the leader of the community of the faithful has to live his life and die like Jesus; that is, he has to become a martyr.

Polish Romantic Martyrdom The apocryphal story of Peter is important in the Polish context because the “Quo vadis?” sequence is also the title of the worldwide bestseller Quo Vadis, written in 1895 by the prolific writer and promoter of Polish nationalism, Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916). The popularity of his novel and its treatment of “an elevated subject in an elevated manner,” as the Nobel committee called it, strongly influenced the award of the prize to Sienkiewicz ten years later. In his Award Ceremony Speech, the secretary to the Swedish Academia, C.  D.  af

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Wirsén, reminds the audience that, “The English translation sold 800.000 copies in England and America in one year. Professor Brückner, the historian of Polish literature in Berlin, estimated in 1901 that about two million copies had been sold in these two countries alone.” Regardless of international success (and one of the earliest Hollywood blockbusters in 1951), the book has always been read differently by Poles, mainly due to the time of publication and the role of the author. The publication was issued in the period of Polish dependence on the Russian, Austrian, and Prussian empires. Sienkiewicz was popular for historical novels fashioned as national epics, which praised the Polish Golden Age in the seventeenth century. Sienkiewicz himself points out in his acceptance Banquet Speech that this “homage has been rendered not to me … but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius.” He was proud that his artistic work had reminded Europe of the presence of Polish culture despite the country’s geopolitical absence. Sienkiewicz declared that, “it has been said that Poland is dead, exhausted, enslaved, but here is the proof of her life and triumph.”5 In line with Sienkewicz’s thought, Poles read as parables the images of the burning Rome and the slaughter of Christians in the amphitheater, which Wirsén considered “without equal.” The martyrdom of the first Christians was to be the martyrdom of the Catholic Polish nation under the oppression of the Protestant Prussian and Orthodox Russian administrations. The idea that the Polish nation is a martyr to the Christian cause—killed by the hands of foreign rulers—comes from a peculiar work by Adam Mickiewicz, his popular political pamphlet The Books and the Pilgrimage of the Polish Nation (1832). The text says not only that Poland as a nation is a martyr but also that it is Jesus, messiah of the European peoples, which will rise from the dead: And the Polish nation was crucified, and brought into its tomb. And the kings shouted: “We have killed freedom—we have buried it.” And their shouting was but folly; because, by committing this last crime, they filled up the measure of their iniquities to the brim; and their power was crumbling to pieces the most, when they were most rejoicing. For the Polish nation is not dead! Its body, indeed, is in the tomb, but its SOUL has ascended from the surface of the earth; that is, from public life to the abyss, or domestic life—to the homes and hearths of those who endure distress and oppression in their country, and far from their country, in order to be the witness there of their suffering, and of their misery. And on the third day, the soul shall return to its body; and the nation shall rise from the dead; and shall free all the nations of Europe from slavery.6

Mickiewicz inscribes Polish history into the European sacred by making it the epitome of freedom and suffering of the subaltern. Mickiewicz’s text along Sienkiewicz’s novels, which consecrate Polish history, shaped Polish identity so

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much that every writer from the following generations had to confront them in one way or another. Miłosz’s untranslated article from 1968 tells plenty about his view of Sienkiewicz and Polish martyrish messianism. In “Sienkiewicz, Homer i Gnębon Puczymorda” Miłosz points out that there is nothing wrong with Sienkiewicz’s writing unless one forgets that it is only popular literature. However, problems arise when Sienkiewicz’s books are recommended to Polish schoolchildren as the “spiritual bread of generations” and high literature. That is why Miłosz asks rhetorically: if “a nation picks a rather childish story for its Iliad … does it not turn into a Peter Pan?”7 In his book Daylight, Miłosz titles a poem written just after the war, “A Nation,” in which he indulges in meditating on similar issues about Poland. The indefinite article in the title points to what Miłosz declared at times explicitly:  that Poland both is and is not his homeland; that the Polish language both is and is not his language. In fact, Miłosz often presented himself as raised in a region of Lithuania, where he learned a peripheral version of Polish; although it may be just his pose. To agree that the peripheral language Miłosz used had a peripheral position in Polish culture would be to ignore a very important truth: the most important modern Polish writers, including Sienkiewicz and Mickiewicz, come from that same area in Lithuania, so their supposedly “peripheral” linguistic imagination shaped the mainstream Polish culture for many decades. Miłosz, however, was probably the only one to suggest that his true origins are with the Lithuanians and to underline that his true culture was colonized centuries ago by the Polish newcomers.8 The poem holds a universal reading, where “A Nation” may be any imagined community or all poets as one group. The text reveals its connection with Polish culture in verses resonant with its sacrificial capability and pilgrimatic vocation prescribed by Mickiewicz. However, Miłosz’s speaker rehearses the martyrological idiom with bitter irony, in self-contradicting distichs. “The purest of nations on earth when it’s judged by a flash of lightning, / But thoughtless and sly in everyday toil.”9 When reading these lines, though, one has to keep in mind the situation Miłosz was in when he prepared them. As the note reveals, he wrote the poem in Kraków, the medieval capital of Poland, right after the war, in 1945; before his first visit to the USA. The date means Miłosz migrated there after the second failed Warsaw Uprising of the 1944 and resultant utter destruction of the capital. The initial two verses convey a trope prevalent throughout Polish literature, that of Poles eager for short outbursts of bravery but reckless when it comes to the systematic fortification of social structures. Crestfallen, the speaker reverberates

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Miłosz’s regret for his colleagues-intellectuals, who entered the uprising driven by the hope of instantaneous glory: “The best of its sons remain unknown, / They appear once only, to die on the barricades.” Although the elites, the speaker continues, are oblivious to the tragic fate of the people, who have to seek asylum from terror, carrying no culture or tradition of Polishness, except for what is transferred in language: “A nation in crumpled caps, carrying all they own, / They go west and south searching for a place to live. // It has no cities, no monuments, no painting or sculpture, / Only the word passed from mouth to mouth and prophecy of poets.”

American Puritan Witnessing with Life While the Polish culture of witnessing originates in nationalist Romantic writings, that of America stems from the Puritan ideas of its pilgrim forefathers. The difference in perception of the concept between Polish and American cultures informs their different perceptions of Miłosz’s writing. Where the Polish culture of witness emphasizes communal martyrdom in extreme adversities, the American one underscores the path of a long-lasting individual demonstration of faith. We may even attempt to transpose the Polish-American difference into their cultural traits. The Polish revolutionary spirit, described by Miłosz in “A Nation,” contrasts with the Puritan development-oriented communality. The Christians of late antiquity had already debated whether to bear witness to their faith with a good life or a noble death. To some, martyrdom appeared as death that was meaningless in God’s eyes and therefore undesirable. The Christians debated whether to suffer through time by rejecting a life of passion or to take the more public route of exquisite sacrifice. The Greek theologian Clement of Alexandria (c.150–215) calls for “Gnostic martyrdom,” that is, witnessing with gnōsis, the knowledge of life. Gnostic martyrdom means surviving and retaining the ability to bear witness to faith “both by life and word” and shedding not corporeal blood but rather, figuratively, “faith as blood along its whole life till its departure.”10 For the Gnostics, the Christian could never achieve perfection through death but rather through slow development in life. Protestants prefer the meaning of acts over the meaning of things. This is why one of the originators of Protestantism, Jean Calvin (1509–1564), criticized Catholic admiration of corporeal saintly relics as intelligible. Protestant martyrologies dismiss the adoration of the dead body of a martyr in favor of written reflections considering the significance of the martyr’s death (a view to which the Catholic Miłosz would nevertheless subscribe). The best witness to the faith for Protestants is the survivor of physical

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or spiritual adversities. The same reasons lie behind the Puritan choice of communal display and defense of the faith.11 The Puritans made a significant change to the processes of witnessing faith among Christians. Protestant martyrdom as lifelong witnessing takes note of the Greek verb, from which the noun “martys” derives, and which means “to remember.” Though bloodless, the Puritan concept of public witnessing involves a trajectory similar to martyrdom: witnessing that must be seen, conversion in public spaces.12 To establish who is chosen by God to participate in his invisible church and, thus, to approximate the visible church as its imitation, the Puritans established specific rules of eligibility. Church membership required a confession of faith that was not a recitation of a given text, such as the Catholic Credo, but rather a public demonstration of knowledge and understanding of the Christian doctrine: an individual and subjective paraphrase of meaning. The internal qualities of religiosity were to be matched by external bearing in life. The distinctive element was to bear witness to the incessant work of grace as it upholds faith through one’s life. To retain this wisdom the individual had to undergo constant self-evaluation and self-witnessing. Thus, the early versions of autobiographies were Puritan didactic and auto-didactic confessional diaries.13 Self-witnessing, or self-definition, aims to establish an authentic narration of the self as the representation of faith. Thus, from the outset, American culture has thus imbued witnessing with the authenticity of experience and its expression, the didactic and auto-didactic process of defining individual identity and the identity of the community. This is one of the reasons Miłosz adds the subtitle Search for Self-Definition to the English version of Native Realm. With this title Miłosz explains to American readers that he based his book on authentic premises. From the Puritan demonstration of faith, self-witnessing moved on to other genres in American literature, exemplified by canonical books written by their authors about themselves, such as, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1790), and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). While Franklin operates in the vein of confessional diaries, Rowlandson and Douglass are motivated by the memory of suffering they experienced at the hands of Native Americans or Southern white landowners. Enlightenment autobiography shares a pattern for the good life according to the laws of reason. Puritan autobiography, in the form of the captivity narrative, connotes self-empowerment and morality through witnessing the good life in authentic examples. Black autobiography, in the form of the slave narrative, uses the formula of Puritan exemplification to

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testify against white society. In this context, “to bear witness,” connotes a knowledge derived from suffering, because one may also “bear the pain.”14

Witnessing as Mnemonic Supersession Miłosz was aware of the difference between the Catholic and the Protestant approach to witnessing. In “The Legend of an Island” from Legends of Modernity, written before his first visit to the USA, Miłosz argues that Robinson Crusoe is a thoroughly Christian book. Spun around the story of the prophet Jonah, where Robinson’s island acts as Jonah’s whale, it is the place of “penance and renewal.” The book, continues Miłosz, displays how the Protestant thinkers strived to find in man an innate basis for the good life, which led them to create a divide between civilized society and the noble individual. However, the ending of the fragment points to a crack in the image of the self-made man and the brutal cost of his development: violence, colonization, imperialism.15 In a much later piece entitled “Disappearance,” Miłosz, developing his reflection on the difference between Catholics and Protestants, writes that the Catholics are closer in their spirituality to animist religions. For the Catholics, the speaker argues, the dead are good spirits divided from the living by only a permeable wall, while there is no place for such belief among the Protestants. No Protestant “turns to the dead with a plea for intervention.”16 “Disappearance” ends Miłosz’s ABC, one of his last and most fragmentary books. It is a set of recollections ordered seemingly only by the titles following the letters of the alphabet. The ABC genre is popular in Poland, due to its open character: it blends biography, aesthetic judgment, with descriptions of friends or famous characters, real and fictional, as well as quarrels with the living and the dead. The genre allows for the obfuscation of visible textual hierarchies and stresses the experience of the author and his self-fashioning.17 The speaker of the piece remarks that, “[p]‌erhaps my ABC’s are instead of: instead of a novel, instead of an essay on the twentieth century, instead of a memoir” but may still give a better sense of how each person evoked on its pages puts into motion “a network of mutual allusions,” which propel the changing century. The statement led the Warsaw literary scholar Marek Zaleski to argue that literature for Miłosz is always “instead of ” reality, instead of someone’s presence, and instead of how something truly happened. Certainly, the need for mnemonic supersession drives many if not all of the poet’s work but, on the contrary, Miłosz does not turn his back to the here and now of events. Working to supplant memories with representation in word comes from the conviction that “there is no longer anyone to bear witness.” As Miłosz’s poems about the Ghetto

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Uprising clearly prove, he means that with all possible immediacy. Because the present moment may convey some otherwise unattainable epiphany that will never again be available.18

Witnessing of the Camps Miłosz wrote lyrical poetry nearly simultaneously with the cruel events, and with full knowledge of the atrocities of the camps, the inhumanity of life in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the obliteration of the city. In this context, it is perplexing to remember the famous phrase by the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), who said that it is barbaric to write a poem after Auschwitz. Miłosz seems to have exceeded Adorno’s statement in the instant when the basis for the statement had occurred. Miłosz wrote “A Poor Poet Looks at the Ghetto” during the days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, incited by the inhabitant’s recently acquired knowledge about the death camps. Miłosz continued writing in this period because he believed firmly in the redemptive quality of poetry, which is why he called his wartime book Rescue: a virtue viable only to someone aware of the three different traditions of witnessing that are discussed here. Both Polish and American cultures of witnessing struggle to narrate the organized extermination of peoples during the Second World War. On the one hand, the camps touched to the greatest extent the Jewish people, a group previously excluded from Polish and American understanding of a witness. On the other hand, as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben explains, the methodical cruelties of the camps were never related to religious but rather to juridical witnessing. To problematize the issue even further, Agamben undermines the notion of the “Holocaust.” With its sacerdotal meaning of “burning whole (on an altar),” the “Holocaust” inscribes the camps in a set of relations, in which the furnaces are altars, the German Nazi guards are priests, and the Jews and others are sacrificial offerings to God. The post-camp witness exceeds and supersedes the Christian debates about the (Catholic) body as a legible sign of metaphysical dimension or the (Protestant) body as ostensive pointer beyond the material world.19 Agamben underlines that although the victims of the extermination camps have little to do with martyrs, they fundamentally change our understanding of witnessing. The change comes with the Latin, instead of the Greek etymology of the word, which helps to discern the juridical from the ethical understanding of witnessing. “Testis” is the Latin source of “testimony” and means a third party in a lawsuit. “Superstes” means a person who experienced an event to its fullest and may bear witness to it.

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For Agamben, after Auschwitz, testimony lacks correspondence between two different and impossible possibilities of witnessing. He calls one testimony “imperfect” because the survivors enjoy the privilege of life, unavailable to those who died in the camps; even though the survivors secure and preserve an approximation of the experience. Agamben calls the other testimony “perfect” and mute, nonlinguistic, because it withdraws from the grasp of language along with the disappearance of the victims and a lacuna in communal memory.20

European Bystanders Writing in the early 1950s about an event from the war, Miłosz intuits the division between the imperfect and the perfect witness already in The Captive Mind. The narrator, close to Miłosz, introduces the scene with the world of the living and healthy inhabitants of central Paris, where life proceeds unimpeded by the events of the Warsaw Ghetto. He does not write about feelings of guilt but rather incites it in the reader through the contrast between the situations. The speaker juxtaposes the passersby of the Paris streets to the Jewish girl running away on the streets of Warsaw. The tempo differs: the Parisians are savoring their free time as flâneurs, while the Jewish girl runs in distress. The first women awake “delight and desire” and the Jew, too, is physically “full, splendid, exultant.” The corporal element of the fragment also serves a symbolic function:  the female bodies are subtly equalled to the two cities. The Jewish girl runs with “her chest thrust forward,” which in Polish is a step more sexual, with “pierś” meaning “breast.” The bullets, though, “reached her” not in her chest but “in her city.” However, to complicate matters even further, the Polish version records here that the bullets reached the girl in the “the scream of protest.”21 Often, as I am sitting on the terrace of Paris café or walking through the streets of a large city, I succumb to a certain obsession. I look at the women who pass, at their luxuriant hair, their proudly lifted chins, their slender throats whose lines awaken delight and desire—and then I see before my eyes always the same young Jewish girl. She was probably about twenty years old. Her body was full, splendid, exultant. She was running down the street, her hands raised, her chest thrust forward. She cried piercingly, “No! No! No!” The necessity to die was beyond her comprehension—a necessity that came from outside, having nothing in common with her unprepared body. The bullets of the SS guards’ automatic pistols reached her in her city.22

Miłosz’s juxtaposition of the cities reinserts the area of the Ghetto, separated by the Nazis, back into Warsaw, the European cityscapes, and bourgeois culture. His inclusive literary gesture says:  the wartime atrocities happened in a city

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just like Paris, there is no division; we are unable to separate them from our everyday lives. Then again, the contrast between Paris and Warsaw tests the limits of the reader’s empathy and displays the available limits of the empathy of the witness. The narrator identifies and disidentifies with the girl. The image of her tarnished vitality prevents him from ever fully enjoying the beauty of everyday life. Like all descriptions of wartime atrocities, this too is an accusation of the survivors, that they may lead their lives while others have died by brutal force. The reader first witnesses here the narrative and its poetics, then the guilt of the survivor, and only at the end the idea that writing has a specific humane and humanistic core. The message of Miłosz’s work is that we share in all the human predicaments of witness, victim, and perpetrator; there is no possibility of being a “neutral” bystander. Poetry has to present these things without teaching us a lesson. Miłosz introduces the event as an “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Although, in opposition to the Romantics, Miłosz’s narrator does not recollect a tranquil emotion of lasting beauty but of inherent brutality paired with relentless memory. The speaker mourns the fact that atrocity hides under everyday Parisian beauty, that the “delight and desire” of our bodies, too, hides brutal death. Desire motivates both to action and destruction. The comparison of attractiveness between the women assumes carnal qualities in the light of the girl’s murder. The narrator sets female beauty and brutal death side by side, probably in order to underline the weakness of the wall separating aesthetics from animal instinct. As a second-degree witness to the tragedy of the Jewish people, Miłosz wants to warn those unaware of the close proximity of barbarism and animality, hidden within the civilized. The speaker from another passage in The Captive Mind realizes his position of the imperfect witness and writes, “A real ‘wasteland’ is much more terrible than any imaginary one.” Miłosz personally experienced that the witness as active non-participant does not want to be in this position, even though his subsequent shame and need to narrate the events sheds light on the wrongdoings of humanity, thus serving an important social function. The narrator of The Captive Mind continues, “Whoever has not dwelt in the midst of horror and dread cannot know how strongly a witness and participant protests against himself, against his own neglect and egotism.”23 Miłosz knows that “perfect” witnessing is unspeakable. In turn, the “imperfect,” poetic witnessing is impossible if overshadowed by cruelty. Poetic witnessing requires both imagination and the consciousness of horror to approximate the presence of the lost.24

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“A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” A great part of Miłosz’s transatlantic reception can be organized around the reading of his accusatory poem “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto.” This poem gives us the best opportunity to overview the dynamics of Miłosz’s transatlantic reception with regard to different traditions of witnessing—and to reveal how consciously he used them in his poetic reflection. Thus, this poem not only applies blame but also a complete reconsideration of those cultural frameworks of witnessing. Miłosz subtly examines the traditions by mixing in “A Poor Christian” the perspective of the animal body, the moral mind, and the religious imagination; that is, the poem blends the somatic with the ethical and the eschatological.25 Most Poles deflect and misunderstand the aim of the poem, because it is so distant to the martyrologic tradition of self-sacrifice. Polish readers act as if they do not want the accusations to enter the Polish culture. After years of selfvicitimization and intellectual games with the Communist censorship, many prefer to downplay the issues of guilt or responsibility and concentrate on the less relevant subtleties. For instance, the very thoughtful analysis by Stefan Chwin, renowned Polish writer and literary scholar, discusses this poem in the context of Christian religiosity and the evolutionist worldview. However, what Chwin does is avoid the main matter of the poem and, instead, abstract the notion of biological suffering away from the moral consequences of the genocide.26 Conversely, most Americans oversimplify their interpretations by including Miłosz’s reflections into their own ideological framework. In this instance, they frequently employ the text to work for their understanding of witnessing as that of the early Christian “Gnostic martyrdom,” testifying by living. For example, the very insightful reading by the writer Marisha Chamberlain derives from the poem the idea that Miłosz is an “orphan.” That is, Chamberlain applies to Miłosz the American marks of an individualist and survivor to suggest that he is motivated by grief, blame, and responsibility, but coming from a childlike emotional reasoning. The forcefulness of her reading and subsequent overgeneralizations made Miłosz never read this text in public.27 Miłosz, however, has written “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” neither to contemplate history, nature, or religion in the face of destruction nor to ponder on his individual emotions but, instead, to pinpoint the more abstract, moral guilt shared by all Christians as brothers and persecutors of the Jews. Such understanding of the poem, though touched upon by Chamberlain and Fiut, has been properly given prominence only recently by Bożena Shallcross, a bridging scholar of Polish upbringing and American education, from the University of Chicago, in her book The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture.

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Shallcross takes great care to highlight the issues of silence and muteness of both the victims and the witnesses of the Second World War genocide of the Jewish people as conveyed in Miłosz’s poem “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto.”28 This most exhaustive reading of the poem by Shallcross offers the opportunity to consider instead the different ways of witnessing that Miłosz already evaluated when the tragedy of the Ghetto was happening. His instant of confused and dramatic searching, striving for words, effected in a poem that stands out not only from his wartime collection Rescue but also from all the other poetry he had ever written. In just five stanzas, Miłosz moves from expressionist enumerations and baroque intertexts to surrealist symbolism and a grotesque mystique. In fact, this is probably the only surrealist poem Miłosz has ever created. This matter, though very important, has not been given sufficient focus, since Miłosz himself called this poem surreal. The questions that we need to answer in the context of witnessing and this poem include: Why did Miłosz use this particular style here? And, what does this rare surrealism and grotesque entail?29 Not only its mixed reception but Miłosz’s poem itself reveals how the poet struggled to find proper a cultural framework to express the genocide that transpired in front of his eyes. Freshly stimulated by the Anglo-American poetic tradition, Miłosz sought the best imagery to convey the conviction that the guilt and the blame incited by the catastrophe shake the very foundations of Western civilization. Like the symbolic chthonic creature from the poem—the mole— Miłosz seems to dig into and weigh the available ways of witnessing, the Polish martyrdom and the American self-definition, so as to, single-handedly, come upon the poetics of the mute witnessing of the camps. Although, his readers in Poland analyzed the religious or biological implications of this poem, and his readers in the USA reflected on the personal experience of the calamity, we should instead consider that Miłosz himself has written rather about how the disaster of the Jewish people distributes an otherworldly, “metaphysical” blame among all the Westerners. The responsibility for their demise falls upon all the eponymous “poor Christians;” not just Germans or Poles.

The Ambivalence of Poorness In “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” Miłosz masterfully utilizes the semantic uncertainty all adjectives offer to great poets. That is, especially modernist writers, use adjectives in an ambivalent way by remarking on their history, referencing certain cultural relations, or simply employing the full scope of their meanings. The importance of the adjective “poor” as it is used by Miłosz in this one poem, testifies to his thoughtfulness and to his ironic disposition. Full

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understanding of the adjective “poor” is necessary to better appreciate the poem and the collection Rescue. The poem “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” comes from the cycle “Voices of Poor People” within the book Rescue. Since the publishing of the volume, Miłosz uses it in a very precise manner, at times with ambivalent and ironic undertones. The adjective biedny, “poor,” has three meanings in Polish: (1) “of limited means, impecunious, penniless, poor;” (2)  “needy, inspiring sympathy, worthy of compassion, suffering, unhappy;” and (3)  “of objects:  basic, modest, unattractive, worn-out, shoddy, shabby, pitiful, worthless.” In Polish, the second meaning is always audible behind any other use of this word and always lends it not only a touch of affectionate sensibility, even pietism, but also irony.30 Historically, the term “poor Christian” is first used in the preachings of Augustine of Hippo, where the character complains about the wealth of the pagans. Augustine encourages the believers to contemplate the grave as the place where the bones of the rich and the poor, of Christians and pagans, mix. In Rescue, the “poor” includes everyone because of their rational modern consciousness. In “W malignie 1939,” “In fever 1939,” the thieves are “poor” and “tired” from the effort of breaking into the heavens that turn out to be empty. The thieves are the people who seek to name the mysteries of existence and simultaneously stripe it of its life-giving myths. The thieves see falling stars, which recollect the famous phrase by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who explained the interests of the inquiring mind to be “the starry sky above me and the moral law within me.” The phrase captures the way in which Kant’s reasoning positioned moral laws within the subject and metaphysics outside of the human grasp. As it encompasses the subsequent divide of the subject from the object, the sentence functions as the catchphrase not only for Kant’s philosophy but also for the modernist project per se. The phrase is recalled again in “Song of a Citizen,” where the “poor man” is the member of civilization, the creation of the counting and measuring reason. The distance offered by rational thought impoverishes man and makes one think of others only as disposable objects and numbers. Similar poems oppose and contrast the animality of existence and the rationality of civilized social relations, the animality of war and the rationality of organized warfare, in which neither side is obviously good.31

Guilt The poem “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” consists of just five stanzas with no apparent ordering principle: the first three have seven verses, the fourth

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four, and the fifth five. The text builds an opposition between what happens on the ground, in the destroyed Ghetto, and underground, in the imaginary world of the dead. The title and the image clearly points to the last days of the Ghetto in 1943. As the action moves from above ground to underneath, the style changes from the naturalist-expressionist document to the grotesque vision of apocalypse. The central question of the poem is “What is the poor Christian afraid of?” The non-explicit answer claims that the speaker is unable to give name to the guilt for what has happened: the destruction of the Jewish people of Warsaw. In a way, thus, this text is, shockingly, not so much about the Jews—whose experience is forever silent and unapproachable—as much as it is about the poor Christian’s guilt; that is, about the abstracted moral sin of a Christian Everyman. The speaker is not really mourning the dead; the text is neither an elegy nor a prayer; it is but a worrisome consideration of one’s future after death, bearing in mind the shameful wartime inaction. Miłosz draws a strong connection between the Jews and the Christians in the equalizing perspective of death and the afterlife. The death of the Hebrew people accuses and condemns all Christians to eternal damnation. The poem holds a kind of “eschatological anxiety.” On the one hand, this text suggests that the apocalypse—understood as final destruction of the world—is already here, preceded and conveyed in the massacre of a whole people. On the other hand, however, the speaker motivates readers to ask rather: Why, in the face of such atrocities, does the apocalypse not strike upon us? Should it not have begun already? Does the Revelation of Saint John not tell us that after a cataclysm comes the judgment of men and, possibly, salvation?32 Miłosz wrote this dark self-accusation of a Christian by describing the scandalous and paradoxical guilt of the passive observers whose own death will not reconcile them with their Jewish victims. The “Poor Christian” in the title means that every Westerner of his generation bears the mark of the killer.33 But, instead of directly applying blame, the poem begins with a tone called by some “documentary” or “scientific.” However, in truth, the poet suspends any kind of realism almost immediately and moves into the surreal qualities of the afterworld. In the first two stanzas, Miłosz applies a nightmarish image to develop the event of the genocide to its frightful end on the crossroads of terrifying imagination and inescapable moral guilt, in which the logic of language no longer operates. The speaker witnesses the devastation of the Ghetto after the transportation of most of its inhabitants to death camps and right after the subsequent First Warsaw Uprising of 1943. The place is nearly empty. The distich depicting ants and bees devouring human organs is highlighted in the Polish version with cursive script, as if uttered by a different voice, some objective observer, separated

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from the speaker. The distich begins the poem and then returns in two other stanzas like a medieval memento mori, “remember that you have to die,” or a baroque vanitas vanitatum, “everything is futile [in the face of death].”34 Giovanna Tomassucci, Italian specialist in Polish literature from the University of Pisa, rightly suggests that the images of bees and ants working around body remnants come from ancient concepts of spontaneous generation. Having received a classical schooling, Miłosz was well aware that the ants and bees are the proverbial “master builders.” But here they are paradoxically the “daughters of death,” building the void as miniature destroyers and constructors. In the Old Testament bees appear in the story of Samson, who in Judges 14:8 “turned aside to see the carcase of the lion: and, behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion.” In Virgil’s Georgics bees appear at the end of Book Four, verses 528-30: “through the oxen’s flesh, / Waxed soft in dissolution, hark! there hum / Bees from the belly.”35 Markedly, the insects work on the foundation made of human organs. Although, eventually, there is nothing more left for the bugs to work on but a trace of the speaker’s body, the place in which it dissolved and left for the underworld. That is, the poem begins unexpectedly with the speaker’s own projection of life after his disappearance. On the one hand, we may conclude after Chwin that nature dominates the stygian vista yet, on the other hand, we should rather question the reliability of the speaker himself. What most readers omit in regard to his trustworthiness is how Miłosz applies to him the adjective “poor.” Typically, Miłosz used this term with an undertone of ambivalence and irony. This is a separate matter, but clearly visible in the recently discovered introduction to the cycle Voices of Poor People, which conveys the poem under consideration. There, Miłosz declares that he “had derived the voices of poor people” from himself and he does not identify with “being a poor man” or with their words; rather “some spiteful distance separates the speaking me from myself the human.” Thus, Miłosz ascertains that the speakers of the cycle are but lyrical personae. But then he ends with a different phrase, explaining with a tone of utter self-awareness that his own voice as author is different from his true and rational self, “I am then yet another voice, over which stands the checking mind.” That is, Miłosz’s intricate thought on lyrical and authorial personae began right at that moment, in wartime Warsaw, when the world he knew was crumbling to pieces.36

The Fall of Humanist Anthropocentrism After the insectile distich, the “Poor Christian” stubbornly repeats “it has begun.” These words seem biblical, when considered in the context of complete

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destruction surrounding the speaker. What he describes seems more like the end than a beginning. He enumerates the materials and manmade objects undergoing destruction. This “beginning” then may be the onset of the apocalypse, an interpretation supported by the images from below the ground, where a kind of the Last Judgment seems to proceed. If not, then the speaker may mean that, in the face of such destruction and the death of so many, the apocalypse should certainly be already upon us. Or, at least, upon the speaker himself, who becomes increasingly scared as the poem develops. This “end of the world,” thus, seems to be available both from the general and the individual perspective.37 There is another possibility, however, for the original Polish “Rozpoczyna się” means not so much “It has begun” but rather “And so it begins,” which conveys the suggestion “as we all expected it to happen.” That is, the inevitability remains in place, though it becomes much more mundane. In fact, a specialist in Polish literature, Irena Grudzińska Gross of Princeton University, argues that subsequent image suggests on the surface the acts of looting of what is left of the Ghetto. This looting would have been done by the Polish community; a matter very delicate for the Polish socio-historical psyche even today, which explains the ambiguous phrasing by Miłosz. But Grudzińska’s reading, however much in line with many historical documents and with Miłosz’s own opinions in the matter, is an over-interpretation of this poem.38 Let us notice the verbs used by the poet here: the manmade objects are undergoing “tearing” and “breaking” as if there were no agents of these actions present. Certainly, the destruction is not effected by the exterminated inhabitants. Fire devours whatever is left. Historically, the Ghetto Uprising ended with the German troops systematically burning and blowing up blocks of buildings. The eponymous Christian looks at the Ghetto but there is nothing there anymore. Thus, however true to the facts, Grudzińska’s interpretation appears to add more to the poem than it conveys itself. The guilt and fear conveyed by the speaker refer not to his own misdeeds or the misdeeds of his fellow Poles, but to their passivity. Who knows, maybe this poem by Miłosz considers the Germans to be no alien enemies but purveyors of the same Western culture that have led to the killings? After all, he did not suggest in the title that the speaker is a “Poor German” or a “Poor Pole” but rather a “Poor Christian.” Furthermore, the selfaccusation at the end of the poem counts all Westerners among “the helpers of the dead.” Hence, it does not matter whether Poles were actually looting the place afterward. The blame that the speaker fears so much is already upon them.39 The two introductory stanzas describing the surface end with the image of what is left: “Now there is only the earth, sandy, trodden down, / With one leafless tree.” The English version ends with a tree, an image of infertility and

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destruction, yet with a glimpse of hope. Miłosz translated this poem himself, so the change is a meaningful turn to the positive from the Polish original, which seems to offer no hope at all. The wartime version ends with the same words, but a different element after the enjambment—“the earth”: “Jest już tylko piaszczysta, zdeptana, z jednym drzewem bez liści / Ziemia.” The reference to the earth reminds us of Miłosz’s most important wartime lecture, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, from which the former took a poetic method completely different to the traditional Polish one: the changing of voices and styles, mixing between pathos and grotesque.40 Miłosz translated The Waste Land around that time and Eliot’s image of an apocalyptic landscape left its mark within Miłosz’s poem. Eliot’s work was highly regarded for his use of lyrical personae and unreliable voices blending with each other. So, with each stanza of “A Poor Christian Looks At the Ghetto,” we need to consider the role of the speaker; that is, what his words tell us about him. Only now may we simply declare that there is something wrong and cruelly authentic in the speaker, if in the face of the tragic genocide he first worries about his own death and future absence. This explanation may not seem so astounding, when we know the poetry of T. S. Eliot, but it was quite revolutionary in Polish poetry of the time, dominated by the romantic codes of sincerity. And, as rightly notices a specialist in Polish literature, Clare Cavanagh of the Northwestern University, Miłosz’s distance and perspectivism were a novelty in American culture at the time of his teaching in Berkeley, because poets have moved away from Auden or Eliot toward the poetics of “confession” and “sincerity.” In a way, then, Miłosz did not bring anything new to America but only returned the poetics that came from that continent, with, of course, the additional forcefulness of Polish tradition. But the differences in reading of this poem in the USA and Poland occlude yet another suggestion about the space described by the speaker, available only if we consider the silent witnessing of those killed in the Ghetto. That is, that the devastated surface may already be that of an imagined afterworld and that the genocide of the Jewish people marks the fall of Western civilization. The fact of the genocide means the destruction of Christian morality. The ruination of this heritage turns humans into sheer insects without moral value. So, it is not about some Darwinist naturalism but about the fall of humanist anthropocentrism. What remains of civilization in this poem is the quasi-scientific detachment of its descriptions.41 Bees build around red liver, Ants build around black bone. It has begun: the tearing, the trampling on silks, It has begun: the breaking of glass, wood, copper, nickel, silver, foam

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Of gypsum, iron sheets, violin strings, trumpets, leaves, balls, crystals. Poof! Phosphorescent fire from yellow walls Engulfs animal and human hair. Bees build around the honeycomb of lungs, Ants build around white bone. Torn is paper, rubber, linen, leather, flax, Fiber, fabrics, cellulose, snakeskin, wire. The roof and the wall collapse in flame and heat seizes the foundations. Now there is only the earth, sandy, trodden down, With one leafless tree.

The Mole The ambivalent narrator describes the destruction of the Ghetto in abstract images of ruination as if in a macabre theater. From the apocalyptic scenery, the perspective shifts underground and the imagery becomes grotesque. In an interview, Miłosz explained that the surface in the poem is “full of ashes,” whereas underground are different ashes, which are, surprisingly, “not entirely dead matter.” Why is underground more alive than the insect-ridden surface? It is for him a mixture of many mythical afterworlds, “heaven, hell, Hades, the Old Testament Sheol,” which means that life underneath stems directly from religious imagination. That is, the speaker calls upon all the core traditions of European culture: Jewish, Christian, and the Greco-Roman.42 Into this surreal space enters a living creature that “must be a mole,” says Miłosz. The poet denies any knowledge of “w h o” the guardian mole is. This conveys that the mole was for him quite possibly not a “who,” such as the spirit of all the Hebrews, but a “what:” the figure of guilt. But it is not enough to say simply that the mole is some projection of the speaker’s guilt. The animal gathers all attention; he is ugly, black, and grotesque; his attributes make him into a nearly eschatological symbol. His eyelids are enormous and disfigured, he has a red lamp on his forehead, and he counts the dead, mirroring the enumerations from above ground. In comparison with the brutal destruction on the surface, the main difference is that the mole counts with great attention, dignity, and care in his movements, and with great respect for the dead—something so basic yet unavailable to the Hebrew of wartime Warsaw. The mole is a guardian working in catacomb-like tunnels and, following the Catholic imaginary, he may be a substitute for the guardian angel, whom each individual is supposed to have as protector from invisible evils. Maybe the animal is the angel guarding the gates to paradise with a red lamp instead of a fiery sword? Or maybe he is the Archangel Michael, weighing the souls during

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the Last Judgment? The mole appears to be not only the guardian but also the host of the underworld, assuming the role of mythological chthonic deities as the caretaker of the dead.43 The guard and the guardian form an uncanny, dangerous territory, mixing metaphysical safety with surveillance, eternal promise with damnation. A guardian guards a safe or sacred place, a threshold, a point of change and hidden knowledge. Maybe his red lamp is the eternal light that flickers in all the Catholic Churches as the signal of Jesus’ presence with the community of Christians. The light symbolizes the everlasting defense, offered by the institution of the Church and the walls of a particular temple, against the sin-darkened world. This light also reminds us of the redemptive passion of Christ; though in Miłosz’s poem there is little hope for redemption for the passive onlookers. The sanctuary lamp, also called the eternal flame, is present in many denominations of Christianity and even in the Jewish tradition, where it is known as ner tamid, also symbolizing God’s eternal presence. That is, the red lamp reminds of the unceasing moral sanction of all human actions. The duality of light in the darkness recalls the simplest origins of all religions as a gathering of community against death and the unknown. The presence of the red lamp may signal the poor Christian’s anxiety about the possibility of the resurrection. Each reader of this peculiar poem by Miłosz seeks literary antecedence for the symbolic mole, which testifies to its richness. No one has yet considered that the figure of the mole resembles the narrator from the unfinished story “Der Bau,” by the Czech novelist of Jewish descent who wrote in German, Franz Kafka (1883– 1924). Probably a mole as well, the creature in the story describes the effort of having created its home—the burrow, as Mira and Edwin Muir translate the title—meaning also a den or a construction, suggesting intellectual abstraction. Kafka’s mole deliberates on his prowess and the power of the mind to create such a safe house, or “Castle Keep,” as he calls it. However, the labyrinthine underground tunnels rarely give him the feeling of safety. Kafka’s creature reveals that Miłosz’s mole also represents the human mind struggling with the facts of death and material deterioration of the body. Such an understanding explains why the eschatological imagery mixes elements from different mythical afterworlds, disclosing the mind’s effort to secure itself from the fear of death and the struggle of imagination to defy death itself. “Der Bau” displays the irony buried deep within the proclivities of the powerful mind. This is, after all, the same mind that actively fights against death, delays its works by way of art or religion, but, simultaneously, overcome with fear, motivates biological enhancement and faith in evolution, followed by eugenics, racism, the

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segregation of peoples, which end in genocide. The labyrinth of the human mind holds redemptive activism and injurious passivity, the acceptance of death and the ideology of superhuman immortality, the hope for an afterworld and the inhumane need to experiment on life itself. The mole reveals the anxiety of the beholder, a visionary quality of his perceptions, and his paradoxical position. The speaker is neither dead nor alive, neither in Heaven nor Hell, but he is with the absurd mole. The animal’s features remind him of an Old Testament Patriarch from the Judaic tradition, in whose lamp some see a tefillin, a box with verses from the Torah worn by the praying. On the one hand, his qualities point to the primary interest of the Patriarch—the reading of the Bible. The mole is blind but perceives, thus reaching with his senses beyond the visible and material world. On the other hand, the “swollen eyelids” of the chthonic creature suggest a disfiguration, a caricature, connoting the physiognomic arguments offered by the anti-Semites of the time as proof of the supposed “mischievousness” of the Jewish people. Aside from physiognomy—the knowledge “hidden” in one’s facial features— the Jews were also frequently humiliated by comparisons to animals spreading illnesses and moving close to the ground, such as cockroaches or rats. This way, the Nazi propaganda made them seem inhuman, homeless among the European nations, and scapegoated them into animality, which enabled future killings.44 But the term “Patriarch” recalls the shared origins of Christian and Jewish faiths. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are called the patriarchs of the people of Israel while the Christians apply the name to the highest-ranking officials of the Church such as archbishops and, occasionally, the Pope as the “Patriarch of the West.” In a more general understanding, coming from the Greek etymology of the word, a patriarch is the archein, the senior male capable of ruling a community, understood as extended family, patria. In religious communities, the leader teaches how to read the Book, that is, what interpretation of the Bible is orthodox, righteous. The mole as the “Patriarch” suggests a leader that conveys all those traditions; an eschatological sanction exceeding the power of earthly institutions and intellectual divisions. However, the speaker is so shocked with what he perceives that he doubts all of it. The “Poor Christian” asks himself, “Is this really true? Is this how the afterlife looks? Or, is it a place in-between, the moment of judgment?” Thus, Miłosz’s grotesque mole symbolizes not only a judge, a bureaucrat, and a guardian (angel), but also a prophet crying on the ruins of his people’s dwelling grounds like Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem and his people, stricken with unspeakable grief.45

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Self-Definition Slowly, boring a tunnel, a guardian mole makes his way, With a small red lamp fastened to his forehead. He touches buried bodies, counts them, pushes on, He distinguishes human ashes by their luminous vapor, The ashes of each man by a different part of the spectrum. Bees build around a red trace. Ants build around the place left by my body

The patriarch-mole in Miłosz’s poem symbolizes retribution after death, the Last Judgment, in which the victims sentence to damnation those who did not lift a finger to aid them or who, actually, reproduce the ideology that killed them, together with all the other Westerners. The depiction of the afterworld combines images from the Judaic and Christian traditions. The mole represents the Jewish tradition while acting as Archangel Michael during the Last Judgment. The situation describes a Christian in Sheol, the Jewish afterworld from the Torah. However, there is no Judgment in Sheol, and both the righteous and the unrighteous remain equally disconnected from existence and from God. Here, the mole acts in retribution for the faults of the Christians; however, in Judaism, retribution is only possible in life. The figure of the mole as the Patriarch is immediately ambivalent and further questions the position and objectivity of the speaker. Why does he observe the destruction with such detail? What is his aim? What does he look for? Why is he afraid of the mole? Is he guilty of participating in the atrocities? Maybe he wanted to plunder whatever is left of the destroyed Ghetto and its inhabitants? The terrorized speaker, a Christian Pole, assumes the language of the Old Testament; he possibly asks himself: “If I were alive then what retributive fate would await me after I  die? Why is there such unequal destruction? Why am I  alive while they are dead because of reading the wrong part of the Bible? If I passively observe the erasure of the Ghetto, maybe I—guilty yet horrified—take pleasure from it? For such voyeuristic sin, surely I will be punished by the blind mole, the divine voyeur, in a post-historical logic of the afterlife.”46 In the fourth stanza the mole grows to be the epitome of both the natural and sacred laws of the universe, in which the Hebrew Book of Genesis and the “book of biological existence” come together. This is Miłosz’s strong poetic gesture; through poetic imagination, he aims to oppose the hopelessness of biological finality. But he also reveals how the destruction of the Warsaw Hebrews transgressed against both divine and natural laws.47 I am afraid, so afraid of the guardian mole. He has swollen eyelids, like a Patriarch Who has sat much in the light of candles Reading the great book of the species.

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The Grotesque Just as the sign of circumcision identified Jewish men, so the lack of it will help the patriarch-mole to find “the helpers of death”—those co-responsible for the genocide. By making the lack of circumcision the sign of sin and death, the speaker makes the foreskin seem unnatural. He applies the mark of sanctity to the embodied rite of the Jewish religion, the circumcised penis, so ridiculed in racist narratives. Indeed, Miłosz inscribes all non-Jewish Westerners with the blame of their brothers. However, the statement of the speaker, “I, a Jew of the New Testament,” may form extenuating circumstance for Miłosz’s “sin of survival.” As both Chamberlain and Shallcross remark, to call oneself a Jew during the times of greatest anti-Semitic persecution—even by way of symbolic identification— poses a significant risk and is an act of ethical bravery. Miłosz saved this poem from his apartment on the brink of the Warsaw Uprising and wandered around with it hidden in his suitcase, which displays how aware he was of its power and importance as well as of the ethical responsibility that this work entailed. To carry such a text in the midst of ongoing persecution was like protecting your own death sentence.48 Only through a second reading, then, can the reader begin to seek the frail signals of division between the victims, the oppressors, and the bystanders, separated by faith and ethnicity. The initial enumerations of destroyed objects tell much less without this context. Now, the materials present themselves as the remains of the dead neighbors from the razed Ghetto. This biological directness of annihilation allows for a much more sexualized reading of some of the elements, initiated by the mention of circumcision. The “swollen eyelids” of the mole, especially in the context of the Polish “obrzmiała” close to nabrzmiała, meaning “filled with blood,” “engorged,” points more to the foreskin cut in the ritual of circumcision. The sexualized reading changes, thus, the divine and meditative eye of the Patriarch into a property of sacral and sacrilegious voyeurism, where the “broken body” of the “Poor Christian” is raped by the otherworldly eschatological imagery he perceives. The tactile erotics of faith come about already when the mole not only “counts” the bodies but also “touches” them. In such somatic religious experience, neither sound nor smell will “deliver” the presence of the speaker to the mole but his “broken body” itself. What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament, Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus? My broken body will deliver me to his sight

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Self-Definition And he will count me among the helpers of death: The uncircumcised.49

A guardian of the dead should be close to God and leading the souls. This role is filled instead by a grotesque earthly creature, seemingly unimportant, searching for corpses. The grotesque means something strange and ugly, unpleasant and unexpected, incongruous and pitiful; it develops the qualities so important not only to Miłosz but also to many modernist writers, such as hybridity and doubleness. At least since Romanticism, the grotesque was used by artists to capture radical emotions, such as pain or grief, or, more generally, to depict a character as a sympathetic outsider and alienated victim to the society. The most telling example may be the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s short story “The Metamorphosis” from 1915, Gregor Samsa, who turned into a tragicomic cockroach. However, the origins of the grotesque date back to ancient Rome and also to sixteenth-century Italian art; they point to a different understanding of what is truly grotesque. Originally, these were images depicting monstrous, unnatural, and impossible beings that defied God’s order on earth through the powers of human imagination. But they also reminded us that what is divine may well be very different from anthropomorphic. And so, teratology, the science of monsters, offered insight into what it means to be human and what it means to be inhuman. Similarly, in “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” the physical takes precedence over the spiritual, nature over eschatology. But, furthermore, the image empowers the ugly and dissociates it from evil. Instead, the self-perceived “Poor” Christian is the one who is hideous because of the immorality of his actions. The Jews may have been portrayed by the German propaganda as monsters, but here they gain paradoxical artistic retribution by way of the grotesque. The poor poet Miłosz transgresses his wartime circumstances to reveal that the victims are sacred for more reasons than just the guilt, blame, and responsibility that their tragedy distributes among those who survived. The victims are sacred because they are mute witnesses to unspeakable horrors which completely exceed previous ideas of what witnessing should ever capture.

4 The American Witness One of the effects of Miłosz’s post-Nobel recognition in the USA has been a controversial article in the field of world poetry. Probably the most famous poetry critic in contemporary America, Helen Vendler, argued that, contrary to the majority of American poetry, “the work of Milosz reminds us of the great power that poetry gains from bearing within itself an unforced, natural, and long-ranging memory of past customs; a sense of the strata of ancient and modern history; wide visual experience; and a knowledge of many languages and literatures.”1 The debate surrounding Vendler’s text from 1984 informs Miłosz’s position within the American literary field even today. In her often-cited essay, Vendler combines the recognition of Miłosz’s poetical witnessing of history with both critical and self-congratulatory declaration of American innocence; as an explanation for the lack of historical sense in American poetry. Others have since argued along similar lines, which provoked the poet’s ire because he saw his work externalized and exoticized. The issue clearly is a complicated one, for it is Miłosz’s humanism which is at stake. Vendler’s praise greatly helped popularize the idea that Miłosz’s poetry “bears” memory and knowledge, in other words, that it is the bearer of “natural” traditions of civilization. In the context of the American perception of Miłosz’s writings, “to bear” connotes “to bear witness.” Apart from her supporters, critical voices were raised against Vendler’s perception of American literature and—by association—Miłosz’s poetry in general underwent considerable denigration. Most of the voices, however, were apt in their anti-reductionist drive and, should they have the opportunity to read Miłosz in Polish, they would easily find their own accusations already incorporated into his works. Finally, there was but one voice of constructive criticism, formulating a new perspective on Miłosz and incorporating Vendler’s views judiciously.2 As one might expect, even though American attention turned slowly toward his poetry, just as Miłosz would have liked, most critical discussions still began with analyses of his prose. The complex debates grow even more elaborate when we remember that, for a long time after his post-Nobel recognition, Miłosz was one of their active participants. And so, there are instances, in which Miłosz plays along and actively supports the idea of him being the witness of history, but, as a further complication, there are also other instances, in which he rejects the expectation of producing such a singular coherent persona outright. Miłosz’s most theoretical and explicit take on these issues appear in his Norton Lectures, subversively entitled The Witness of Poetry.

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Miłosz’s American Popularity In general, Americans present Miłosz as an author concentrated on political and social change, first-hand experience (“witness of history”), uprootedness (“laureate of exiles”), or inhuman endurance (“poetry of survival”). The problem is that American scholarship predominantly presents Miłosz one-dimensionally, as the last representative and scholar of the dying people from a forgotten wartorn corner of Eastern Europe. When American readers foreground instances in which Miłosz gathers witnessed events, they suggest that this chronicling is the key issue of his writing, and so they stabilize his otherwise polytropic authorial persona.3 Furthermore, American critics seem to expect that the works of an exceptional newcomer will rekindle the exceptionalism of poetry stateside. To prove that, they stabilize Miłosz’s authorial persona as a “political” construct: a dissident or an exile, a communist or an anti-communist, Lithuanian or Pole. They not only cast Miłosz in the role of the “witness” but inevitably reposition him as an American author, for instance by counting him among the American Nobel Prize winners. Thus, American expectations often tend to reduce the scope of Miłosz’s work to a single issue. However, this reduction is also the result of Miłosz’s own efforts to establish a singular image for himself as a writer in the USA. The reception of Miłosz’s writings in America begins in the 1950s, but it blossoms only in the eighties and nineties. During the two decades, Miłosz’s road to popularity was paved by The New York Review of Books, and critics such as Helen Vendler. These popularizing readings underline the few elements of Miłosz’s poetry in concert with American culture, such as testifying by living, self-reliance, and the influence of history. More specialized readings of his work appeared in diverse magazines and in a few issues devoted entirely to Miłosz by World Literature Today (1978, 1999)  and Ironwood (1980). The magazines indulge in in-depth analyzes; however, they do not venture far from the most popular concept of “the poet as witness.” In short, the issue debated was whether American culture is exceptional or if it needs an exceptional outsider to bring change. The questions raised underline the lack of experience of American poets while others defend the historical awareness of their literati.4

Lessons for American Poets Before the Nobel Prize, Miłosz was recognized in the USA only as an author of political prose, as Helen Vendler reminds us in her first article about him. After the award in 1980, she writes, “the consequent wave of publicity made almost everything about Milosz—everything except for his poems—become

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better known.” Like most American readers of Miłosz, Vendler admits that she is unable to read the original flow of Polish. Thus, she can only declare that what in Miłosz’s poetry does “seem to be translatable; it is a poetry that even in English both disturbs and satisfies, with a mordant irony and a classical grandeur vying in it for dominance.” In the absence of Miłosz’s “native euphonies,” “immensely touching effects,” and the alignment of the Polish past with the present, Vendler asks what is available to the reader of English versions. She argues that the most accessible matter in the translations is Miłosz’s “truncated” and “reticent” autobiography, elaborated with the use of his “disinterestedly personal” yet universalizing voice. This subtlety gains her attention. Vendler finds the matrix of Miłosz’s poetry situated in “the interchange between external events and the individual life”, as if, “he has suffered the twentieth century all alone … living in catastrophe as a hermit” and making “humanity … visible … through circumstance.” “It is in this peculiar balance between a juridical, frowning severity,” Vendler continues, “and a lyrical, melting attachment that Milosz’s power to unsettle us lies.” For the critic, the power to unsettle that she ascribes to Miłosz’s poetry derives from his disturbing biography. It is to stem from his position of witness to historical scourge, which she reads from his wartime poetry.5 Vendler imagines that Miłosz’s “anguished personal memory” is that “of an incinerated culture;” a metaphor suggesting complete disaster of Polish tradition. It is certainly a powerful image but thankfully, also, false. Miłosz may constitute for “himself the abstract chronicle of a dead Europe” but neither Europe nor Poland is really gone. It appears that Vendler wants to exoticize the whole Old Continent to establish a specific arc of Miłosz’s development; she suggests that from the ashes of a “fallen empire” he could have risen to new greatness only in America. Vendler’s assumption that Miłosz witnessed most of the historical disasters of the twentieth century while retaining a poetic disposition comes from his own declaration in Native Realm. There, Miłosz writes that when he was three years old, in 1914, when the First World War began, he may have undergone his first conscious experience: “My first awareness came with war.” The speaker organizes the events around the crucial points in European history. The phrase that follows, “Peeping from under my grandmother’s cloak, I discovered horror,” builds a symbolic image of the poet as coming to the atrocious present already guarded from it by the past traditions of the forefathers. However, contrary to Vendler’s reading, Miłosz’s work is not inspired predominantly by drastic wartime change but by the weakness of memory and the passing of time. As Miłosz mentions in a previous paragraph of the same fragment, his motivation comes from disagreement with “the thought that [in  1959] two great world conflicts

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were already as unreal as the Punic Wars.” That is, those ashes of European culture that Vendler wants to exoticize remain the dearest to Miłosz and there is nothing that will change his love for the past, not even the splendid American continent.6 At the end of her article, Vendler utilizes the imagery she built to argue that only the journey from the ruined European culture to the youthful American one makes a truly great poet such as Miłosz. This remark inspires pride among the Polish critics who repeat it frequently; even though this is not something Miłosz could ever agree with. Vendler states that Americans are not suited to convey in poetry the changes in political power and metaphysical order as Miłosz does. She argues that as a “historical poet” Miłosz is better equipped to create great poetry because he personally experienced war in his homeland and the “dissolution” of the religious foundations of European culture. Vendler also argues that American poets cannot learn from Miłosz because he is writing about things American culture has never experienced. Thus, American poets cannot adopt Miłosz as their teacher or role model. He is unique and solitary, exceptional but alone. Simultaneously, though, by comparing Miłosz with the famous American writer Ezra Pound (1885–1972), Vendler seeks to establish the former as a poetic counterfigure to the American literary field. There are no direct lessons that American poets can learn from Miłosz. Those who have never seen modern war on their own soil cannot adopt his tone; the sights that scarred his eyes cannot be seen by the children of a young provincial empire. A thousand years of history do not exist in American bones and a culture secular from birth cannot feel the dissolution of the European religious synthesis … Not, as in Pound, the self-conscious allusiveness of the autodidact returning obsessively to the books of his formative years, but, rather, the living and tormented revoicing of the past makes Milosz a historical poet of bleak illumination.7

Although Vendler compares Miłosz and Pound on the basis of poetry, like many of his readers before her, she means politics. Vendler’s suggestion is that the expat Pound—who embraced Mussolini’s fascism and openly supported Hitler—receives an apt answer in the person of the newcomer, the exiled Miłosz, who endured and survived the Nazi occupation. The comparison between the two poets, who both mastered their trade by abandoning their homelands, points not so much to some ahistorical American inclination as to the American lack of engagement with the history that unavoidably surrounds it. Pound is characterized as living in the world of abstraction, “returning obsessively to the books,” while Miłosz is characterized as focusing on the “authentic” life and the “tormented” history. In an interesting turn, Vendler’s argument against the autodidact Pound receives support from the Puritan understanding of witnessing. The

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Puritans perceived witnessing as self-definition by means of truthful narration of the faithful self. The authenticity of experience predestined the speaker to its honest expression. In Vendler’s argument, the validity of experience lies on the side of Miłosz. As much as it is ennobling, Vendler’s statement to a great extent entails a shared “political” misreading of many of Miłosz’s works in the USA. Such assumptions are foreseen and projected by Miłosz in his texts, in which he argues that the difference between having experienced Nazi occupation and Stalinist rule and the lack of such experience completely separates Polish poetry from all Western writing.8

A Distinct Author Vendler’s idea that Miłosz brought history back to American poetry gained many supporters, from diverse perspectives. Her scholarly followers searched for reasons in American culture and Miłosz’s experience that made them harmonize with each other. Bożena Karwowska of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver is most punctilious in her review of Miłosz’s American reception. She argues that the growing popularity of the criterion of “experience” for the evaluation of Anglo-American poetry helped introduce Miłosz as a “poet of witness.” “Experience” entered literary discourse in the sixties through Al Alvarez’s anthology The New Poetry (1962) and a book of essays Beyond All This Fiddle (1968). Alvarez, an esteemed British literary critic and writer, claims that poetry “that matters” comes from a direct experience of dire events, in contrast to poetry extracted exclusively from the imagination or the everyday. In fact, another supporter of Vendler, Polish literature specialist Bogdana Carpenter of the University of Michigan, aptly remarks that American critics often stress Miłosz’s “distinctness” and “specialness” by saying that his work differs from everything in English literature. Carpenter remarks that the “unique” positioning is a result of Miłosz’s “radically different historical experience.” American critics do not consider a mixture of different socio-historical background, Polish literary traditions, and the influence of their own culture, but only the brutality of the times Miłosz experienced. Vendler herself enumerates the moments most interesting to her, which clarifies how little of Miłosz’s broad work interested the well-read American readers—and how the geographical distance inevitably played its role in his reception. Vendler writes precisely that still only politics are interesting in his work, “the war, occupation of Warsaw, the subsequent Russian occupation, and Communist rule in Poland.” One might add to the list Miłosz’s first-hand

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observation of the Berkeley riots in the 1960s, but they happened in California, so that “documentalist” quality, for which his works have been praised, suddenly proved less interesting. However, contrary to Vendler and others, ninety per cent of Miłosz’s poetry revolves around issues much broader than subjective experience and authenticity; even when assuming the most personal perspective, he still reflected more on memory, tradition, and imagination.9

Moments That Judge All Poets Miłosz’s initial popularity in America came from his politically engaged texts from the 1950s. Two books proved especially influential, as reflecting on the cultural impact of sociopolitical changes in history little known in the West. In The Captive Mind (1953), Miłosz considers the adaptation of intellectuals to totalitarian regimes on the basis of his Polish experience. He analyzes the reactions of various writers to communism and its manifestation in the Stalinist regime as well as in the state-sanctioned aesthetic of Socialist Realism. In The Witness of Poetry (1982), Miłosz draws a more general perspective in relation to the presentation of his poetics. In six chapters, he describes his influences, worldview, and aesthetics, and draws a more general view of Western civilization in the twentieth century. In both books, Miłosz underlines the importance of unmediated first-hand experience for literature, even though Miłosz himself uses different narrative ploys to separate his own memories from the observations of the speaker. Due to Miłosz’s anti-Communist deliberations in The Captive Mind, his first readers were mostly prone to right-wing politics. Some critics say Miłosz’s poetry is utilized exclusively within the conservative framework of the American literary field. However, an attentive reading of his works finds that Miłosz sided neither with left nor right, as, for instance, his friendship with Susan Sontag testifies. Or the fact that the first thing he did after arriving at Berkeley, Miłosz was to search for Marx’s writings, interested in questions of the common ground between theology and Marxism.10 Native Realm is the only book that comes close to Miłosz’s autobiography. The text is exemplary for his approach to sincerity, which Miłosz declares to be an observation of “oneself as a sociological phenomenon.” On the one hand, Miłosz’s aim is to “bring Europe closer to the Europeans” by showing “what a man who comes from the East of Europe is like” with the use of best example at hand: himself. On the other hand, Miłosz wants to “discourage lovers of sincerity.” “Obviously complete candor is impossible,” Miłosz continues, “and the more its semblances are preserved, the greater the role contrivance plays. In pretending

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to unattainable truth, we perpetrate a lie, since we exclude those things that show us in an unfavorable light.” Due to this awareness of the ambivalence of selfpresentation, Miłosz orders Native Realm thematically and, rather, aims to present a detached intellectual biography, something quite different from a factual report on the events of his private life. Hence, Native Realm is a great example of perspectivism, criticized by the Poles for self-promotion, by the Americans for secretive elitism, or on both continents for a kind of snobbism.11 In contrast to an intellectual biography, when describing real-life experiences, Miłosz prefers to elevate them to the rank of exemplars. In his literary descriptions of individual trauma, Miłosz removes himself from the narrative, as in the following passage from The Captive Mind, whose narrator may be likened to the author. The passage reports in a peculiar way. Miłosz writes a third person narrative probably derived from his own experience. He withdraws himself from the scene by objectifying the event with phrases like “a man,” “a certain poet,” “such moments,” or “let us suppose.” The situation is eternalized by the present tense and third-person point of view, which becomes immediately subject to analysis. The objectification of the personal suggests a splitting of personae— typical for people under stress—into the one describing and the one described. The “moments” themselves operate within the distressed consciousness and prove worthless in the face of direct threat to life.12 A man is lying under machine-gun fire on the street of an embattled city. He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight: the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine. The bullets hitting against their edges displace and tilt them. Such moments in the consciousness of a man judge all poets and philosophers. Let us suppose, too, that a certain poet was the hero of the literary cafés, and wherever he went was regarded with curiosity and awe. Yet his poems, recalled in such a moment, suddenly seem diseased and highbrow. The vision of the cobblestones is unquestionably real, and poetry based on an equally naked experience could survive triumphantly that judgment day of man’s illusions. In the intellectuals who lived through the atrocities of war in Eastern Europe there took place what one might call the elimination of emotional luxuries. They consider the literature of erotic complications, still popular in the West, as trash. Imitation abstract painting bores them. They are hungry—but they want bread, not hors d’oeuvres.”13

Miłosz writes most of The Captive Mind in the third person voice of an objective historian, although with one exception: he presents his current views or the people he knew in Communist Poland in the first person. He begins the preface with “Like many of my generation” but in the first chapter keeps his distance: “It was only toward the end of the twentieth century.” The second chapter conveys the quotation above, despite being written almost completely in the third person.

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The scene above is special, for it most probably describes his personal memory but with a voice full of distance, offered as an enduring event rendered in the present tense. Thus, Miłosz uses here the device of the historical present. That is, he wants his past to last in each instance of reading.14

The Poet of Witness The American popularity of The Captive Mind begins with a review by Dwight Macdonald, a social critic, philosopher, and friend of Miłosz. As early as on the 7th of November 1953, in The New Yorker, Macdonald proposed the same argument that Vendler would make more than forty years later: “to Europeans, we Americans are an innocent, almost virginal people … The difference is not so much in morality as in experience.” Most probably, categorizing Miłosz’s works as political- and experience-based was the best way to grasp its complexity and simplify the difference of Miłosz’s East Central European heritage. But Miłosz was not interested in remaining within the boundaries set by his American readers. Twenty years after introducing “experience” as the founding factor of good poetry and seven years after the publishing of Miłosz’s The Witness of Poetry, Al Alvarez reviewed Miłosz’s Collected Poems for The New  York Review of Books. Independently from Vendler, Alvarez developed a reading of Miłosz that was, however, not so distant from hers. Markedly, Alvarez entitled the piece about Miłosz “Witness” (June 2, 1988) and searched for the origins of his writing in “a very Polish situation,” although, Alvarez imagined this “situation” with a tone both exoticizing and patronizing. He wrote that Polishness in Miłosz’s writing combines “bullets and modernism, the polyglot in the potato field.” Miłosz answered with genuine passion to what he perceived as a reductive evaluation: those events occurred many decades ago and facts, through direct testimonies, statistical data, innumerable books are available to whoever wishes to acquaint himself with the history of our century…. You may guess my uneasiness when I saw the long evolution of my poetic craft encapsulated by Mr. Alvarez in the word “witness,” which for him is perhaps a praise, but for me is not. / Am I really so exotic an animal that I deserve to be exposed in a separate cage bearing a label: “Far Away”? … My objection to Mr. Alvarez’s method of literary criticism is that he seems to be impervious to the dynamics at the very core of any art: after all, a poet repeatedly says farewell to his old selves and makes himself ready for renewals.

Another promoter of Vendler’s thought on Miłosz, a public intellectual Michael Ignatieff of Harvard University, describes a talk he had with Miłosz in 1991, in

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an article for The New York Review of Books. Miłosz’s eyes were “lit up once” only, when Ignatieff remarked on the witness issue that had so enraged the author. The light in Miłosz’s eyes though does not mean enthusiasm. On the contrary, it is Ignatieff ’s “naiveté” that Miłosz found “amusing;” which is why the poet warned him, “Now you are reaching dangerous levels.” Indeed, Ignatieff himself referred to his awkward exchange with Miłosz in an article entitled “Art of Witness” (1995), as if it were written by Al Alvarez himself.15 The tone and aim of Vendler’s and Alvarez’s articles prevail among the authors gathered around The New York Review of Books, who have championed Miłosz, since his receipt of the Nobel Prize as a masterful writer yet a peculiar survivor of traumatic history; maybe even a rare bird from the outskirts of civilization. The critics gathered in this community imply that Miłosz concentrates on describing a world forever lost. In fact, Vendler entitles her other essays “Tireless Messenger” (1992) and “Lament in Three Voices” (2001). In the former, she describes Miłosz’s long poem A Treatise on Poetry, as a work that is to establish him as “a citizen not of nature but of history.” There is, however, very little if any nostalgia for the past in Miłosz’s works. As he mentioned frequently, his home was his language and he could always take it with him. Further advocates of Vendler include of the Serbian-American US Poet Laureate Charles Simic, British author and translator of Slavic literature Michael Scammel, and British writer and critic, D. J. Enright. In yet another essay suggesting Miłosz’s nostalgia for the past, “A World Gone Up in Smoke” (2001), Simic develops on Vendler’s ideas and again contrasts Miłosz’s historical feel with that of American poets:  “They wrote as if History had little to do with them”—that’s how I  imagine some future study of American poetry describing the work of our poets in the waning years of the twentieth century.” In turn, Scammel explains the title of his review, “Loyal Toward Reality” (1998), that it means Miłosz’s unfailing receptivity to witness reality and describe it throughout his career, “Milosz has brought to his work a sense of urgency about people in difficult times and places.” Finally, Miłosz is to be the “Child of Europe” (1974), which is to say that Enright used the title of one of his poems for the title of his review. However, Americans understand Miłosz’s title chiefly as conveying Miłosz’s unending experience of historical traumas; or, as Scammel declares, the “experience of living through one tragic period after another.”16 Even Seamus Heaney, the Irish Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1995 and self-proclaimed student of Miłosz, perceives his artistic “Master” to be the epitome of a “poet tested by dangerous times.” In the essay “The Impact of Translation” from 1986, Heaney argues that Miłosz writes poetry which

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“witnesses the poet’s refusal to lose” his cultural memory. That is, Heaney refrains from indulging in exoticizing Miłosz with some nostalgia for a defeated country. Although Heaney still utilizes the fertile notion of witnessing, even in an occasional article for The Guardian, he describes Miłosz to be “poised … between lyricism and witness.”17 In turn, the American academic and translator of Slavic literature, Louis Iribarne, displays an approach to Miłosz common among the authors publishing about the poet in World Literature Today (1978). Iribarne does not explicitly use the term “poet of witness” but still concentrates on the extraordinariness of Miłosz’s life and experiences. “There are few writers in the West today whose work can rival the sheer mass of human experience distilled in Milosz’s work”, writes Iribarne, “or whose work has so engaged the self in defining that experience. Its acquisition has not been a matter of choice nor does it have a purely metaphorical reality.” Iribarne suggests that in his poetry Miłosz distills or condenses experience and, to a great extent, uses his individual experience. Simultaneously, Miłosz is to rationalize and explain his wartime passivity by chronicling the thoughts of a survivor. However, Miłosz’s passion for perspectivism made him consider all viewpoints, not simply his own. After all, he often contrasted Catholic Polish martyrdom against Puritan American witnessing with life, Christian anthropocentrism against secularist inhumanism, experience against imagination, science against religion. Finally, the American literary critic Sven Birkerts is another vocal endorser of East Central European authors as first-hand “witnesses.” Birkerts takes Vendler’s interpretation of Miłosz to its extreme; he explains that American poetry should strive to witness reality like Miłosz but American culture will never allow its poets to reach this goal. In two essays referring to Miłosz, “The Rage of Caliban” (1986) and “Poetry” and “Politics” (1987), Birkerts declares that the media disfigured American poetry, in the first one, and, in the other, considers why it is not political enough. Birkerts writes that a grave fear, unavailable to the Americans, makes all other troubles meaningless and brings “poetic authenticity” to the fore. Thus, “crisis” becomes the catalyst necessary to renew poetry, as exemplified by the “poetry of the oppressed” championed by Miłosz. Birkerts does not mean by that an absence in the tradition of political poetry in the USA but its cultural marginalization, by contrast to its Eastern European relative. Thus, paradoxically, terror appears to be for Birkerts the prerequisite of (political) authenticity in literature and the growth of its popularity. Unfortunately, this way of reasoning makes Miłosz, again, into a token in abstract literary quarrels, which disregard both the actual troubles of societies under totalitarian regimes and their cultural traditions.18

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The Immorality of Art Instead of fulfilling the expectations of “witnessing” or “experiencing,” Miłosz envisages history rarely from his individual perspective. Rather, he returns to the traumatic moments with diverse means, so that he pictures them from the position of a group of civilians or a figure of an ambitious writer like himself. That is, Miłosz wants to imagine the experiences of others in the most universal way possible. The best examples of this approach come, again, from Miłosz’s Native Realm. In this book, he makes attempts at personalizing the train of thought of the majority of the inhabitants of Warsaw during the German occupation, before the destruction of the Ghetto:  “There would be no point today in trying to convince myself or others that I had any sort of talent for heroism. I admit it openly: I turned cold with fear even at home if I happened to meet our apartment manager’s eyes with their veiled threat, knowing that he suspected one of our guests was a Jew.” This brief quotation reveals a whole set of troubles of wartime Warsaw. Most Poles lived under a prolonged state of fear, with no heroism left in their minds, even though many may have been sheltering Jewish survivors. And so, the ambivalence of war-life continues, where some observe passively, some shelter the victimized, while many tremble in terror distributed unintentionally by the eyes of another. In such situations especially, literature is able to rework the narration of the everyday, especially if the everyday is a prolonged state of exception, and to give a glimpse of hope, which was always the calling that has led Miłosz’s pen.19 Both in his literary strategies as well as in real-life situations, Miłosz does assume the position of a reluctant observer; or, of an eyewitness. Another term—that of the bystander—is unsuitable because it suggests passive nonparticipation, whereas Miłosz was an active non-participant, witnessing with the tools he had: literature, language; an unnerving yet important position, for the word gives means to best capture the experiences of people. This is how Miłosz influenced Polish culture with his poems. As he stated in The Captive Mind, “To write of the tragedy of the Warsaw ghetto, to which I was an eyewitness, is hard for me.” The translator, Jane Zielonko, omits a significant phrase after this one, which reads in Polish, “Pisałem o niej wtedy kiedy się odbywała.” The fragment translates into “I wrote about it when it happened.” So, Miłosz means that he already acted as the chronicler and it is nearly impossible to write about a tragic event after time has passed. This is a very important point, because it means that—despite his many objections—Miłosz wanted to be a witness; at least to the events that transpired in front of his very eyes.20

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Nevertheless, Miłosz continues, “The vision of the burning ghetto is too welded into all I lived through in my adult years for me to speak of it quietly.” This hesitation is meaningful. Despite his words, Miłosz seeks the distance of narration and the distance of time to separate him from the experiences, but for the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. The narrator speaks here as if of a completely different person, someone similar to Czesław Miłosz, who has already “expired” with the war and is no longer present but for the bits and pieces in the writer’s memory. In fact, the narrator does not really analyze the experience of war but considers the morality of artful reflection on an example from his faded wartime recollections. That is, Miłosz describes an ambitious work about destruction with a view on the burning Ghetto; namely, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922)—Miłosz’s most important lecture from this horrific period.21 The event might not have occurred to Miłosz at all. However, his juxtaposition of the Ghetto fires with Eliot’s text is a statement requiring further elaboration. Eliot’s The Waste Land is regarded as one of the most important poems of the twentieth century for its reconsideration of the post-Great War Western culture, the ambitious application of modernist style, and its control over speakers, locations, and times of narration. In the context of Miłosz’s considerations of wartime Warsaw, we have to bear in mind that Eliot’s obscure text imagines the death of tradition and the need for its rebirth through memory. Eliot’s pessimism and the dominant feeling of futility of all man’s struggles pervade the horrific situation described in The Waste Land. The previously indispensable symbols, suggest the poem’s voices, have become unusable. Although, in dialogue with Eliot, Miłosz’s voice seems to be saying, “Look at all this destruction! How is it possible that we are still alive? Maybe there is still some hope left?” I dug through to deeper layers, greatly aided by my meditations on English poetry. This does not mean imitating, for the disparity in experience was too great. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for example, made somewhat weird reading as the glow from the burning ghetto illuminated the city skyline.22

The phrase testifies to the incongruence of poetry and atrocity. The narrator saw the glow of the Ghetto and continued with the reading. The speaker does not express disdain for his own inaction but rather the moderate curiosity of a scientist or, rather, a detached artist. Even though The Waste Land is about destruction and emptiness, Eliot’s text describes the end in a highly aesthetic way, which brings Miłosz to his comparison. After all, poetry as meticulously constructed words, rhymes, and rhythms is a thing of beauty. Reading in the glow of a dying district is “somewhat weird” because of the blatant disparity between the Jews and the narrator, “A Poor Christian” who is passively meditating over a poem

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about an aesthetic end of traditions. The blunt statement is simultaneously a self-accusation of inaction and a masterful description of the general division between the always “immoral art,” as Miłosz called it, and the brutality of modern life.23 Miłosz, therefore, suggests at least two things. That Eliot’s wasteland of values is the reason behind the genocidal actions Miłosz witnessed. And that the real wasteland of Western civilization, brought about at the hands of German forces, is incomparably more threatening than the visions in Eliot’s work or, by association, any other literary work coming from the West. The German conquest of Eastern Europe was based on stereotypes denigrating its inhabitants. If the conquered peoples had different customs, social organization, or technological advancement, the conquerors thought that they retained the moral ground even when employing brutal force. Miłosz deplores this train of thought as derived from eugenics and Darwinian theory extended to sociology, in which the strong have the moral ground to punish the weak just by the fact of their domination. However, Miłosz suggests in his writings that, by exercising methodical genocide in the camps, Western civilization armed its Eastern European counterparts with the moral higher ground. That is why Miłosz points out the lack of such experience among American literati, and not to boast of his own rare prowess or their lower artistic standing. Most certainly, Miłosz introduced a new element into the discourse of American literary criticism: that only the experience of mortal danger can give sophisticated poetry a political sting. However, this happened not only because Miłosz’s wartime Warsaw equipped him with the experience of unimaginable brutality. But rather, what forged Miłosz’s changed artistic resolve was the prolonged state of oppression and subjugation that prevented an interpretive community from voicing necessary and repressed narratives. Miłosz lived under the slow incessant grasp of the totalitarian machine while living in German-occupied Warsaw. Later, he struggled with this oppressive system when serving as cultural attaché to the Polish Communist diplomatic mission in New York and Washington, D.C. The prolonged state of official newspeak, subalternity, and counter-narratives is what creates different poetry. However, Miłosz’s poetry itself comes from the need to work with a set of ambivalent worldviews; developed regardless of political circumstances.24

Against Lionization Now we may see that Vendler criticizes the developments in American poetry with the use of a reductive reading of Miłosz’s works. Even though she does not

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misinterpret the fact that Miłosz had an unusual sense of the historical, Vendler utilizes the fragments where he deliberates on past experience to scold the American poets. It would appear, then, that any opposition to their views will triumphantly reinstate a more problematized view on Miłosz’s oeuvre. However, the most vocal opponents of the idea of American historical naïveté criticize the poet as well. Against Vendler’s cultural chastising rose writer Bruce Bawer, scholar Bruce F. Murphy, and, most recently, The New York Times’s poetry critic David Orr. Already in the Hudson Review of 1989, Bawer inveighs against Vendler for her disregard of American poetry for the sake of the Old Continent. Bawer aptly points out that Vendler’s statement that American culture is “secular from birth” omits the very religious, Puritan beginnings at the official core of American culture. Americans do not need Miłosz to teach them a lesson, Bawer argues, because it has a long tradition of its own, initiated by authors such as the poet Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672). Coming from the British metropolis, Bradstreet’s works uphold a long religious and literary tradition from the Old Continent.25 Soon after Bawer, in the 1990 edition of Critical Inquiry, Bruce F.  Murphy thoroughly criticized not Vendler’s but Birkerts’s position. Although Murphy concentrates on American poetry, the title of his piece, “The Exile of Literature,” targets mostly Miłosz’s poetics, as they were presented by his promoters from The New York Review of Books. Due to the reductiveness of the NYRB readings, Murphy only seemingly attacks Miłosz’s views on literature. But, in truth, by operating exclusively within American critical discourse, Murphy is only able to oppose the fragmented American interpretations of Miłosz’s works. Nevertheless, some of his arguments could well be used by Miłosz himself. In general, Murphy distances himself from the idea that American poetry is not in vogue because the American state holds no mechanisms of oppression like the Communist regimes of East Central Europe have. He argues that censorship on one side of the Iron Curtain has led to a self-serving fetishization of totalitarianism on the other. The American mythology of “unbounded and unmediated” freedom, as Murphy calls it, supports the thought that the imagery of totalitarianism and freedom rely on each other. The opposition communism versus capitalism creates a situation, argues Murphy, in which poetry of the “free” USA becomes ephemeral, whereas writers from politically oppressed countries achieve high authority and their words may lead peoples to the barricades.26 Miłosz was quite aware of this dichotomy and his perspectivist poetics allowed him to refrain from choosing sides. As pieces like “Hollywood” testify, Miłosz was as eager to criticize the capitalist West as he was quick to accuse the Soviet Bloc. The question from this fragment, “What penalty would be adequate?” may

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easily apply to both ideological systems. In Miłosz’s view, neither allowed for the perception of a world in its multiplicity, but engaged in forming a destructive, dualist imaginary of the good and the bad—societies, histories, and cultures.27 The most recent and most brazen critique of Vendler’s interpretation of Miłosz’s works, comes with the article for The New  York Times in 2009, “The Great(ness) Game” by poetry critic David Orr; which stirred quite some controversy among the readers of Miłosz. Orr’s understanding of Miłosz testifies to the troubling effects of monolithic interpretations. Such readings highlight only part of a writer’s worldview and engage him in quarrels that to a great extent disregard the general direction of his oeuvre. The controversy around Orr’s article testifies also to how much Miłosz’s writing differs from the American literary field. Orr rightly criticizes the nostalgia for greatness pervasive among the critics who praise Miłosz. As Orr argues, this nostalgia leads to a “lionization” of poets from oppressed countries, which should testify to American cosmopolitanism. However, he writes, there are situations contradicting the assumption. Orr’s example is Robert Pinsky interpreting Miłosz’s laughter as, in itself, a symbolic triumph of intelligence over totalitarian oppression. Orr adequately pinpoints the moment of myth-building the “poet as witness” and jibes that Pinsky “can’t hear a Polish poet snortle without having fantasies about barricades and firing squads.” Unfortunately, Orr continues, many Americans incline to promote and simplify foreign writers for their own gains: “non-American writers are the perfect surface upon which to project our desire for the style and persona we associate with old-fashioned greatness.” Orr finds a proper term for the absurd situation in American literature, in which foreigners dominate, calling it, very aptly, a state of “reverse condescension.” In the end, however, Orr picks a quotation from Miłosz to undermine those fascinated with his writing. He uses Miłosz’s famous poem “Dedication” and calls it “pompous nonsense.” Like Bawer and Murphy, Orr does not strive to understand Miłosz better and then criticize the reductiveness of “reverse condescension.” Instead, Orr subscribes to the same cliché of “poet as witness” to detach Miłosz from the American literature. Unfortunately, this misstep blunts the edge of Orr’s critique of American readers of Miłosz. In the very important “Dedication” Miłosz presents his need to save the events witnessed through writing. There are two problems with Orr’s use of this quotation for his ends. First, he disregards the issue crucial in all of Miłosz’s poetry, namely that of literature’s “saving” or “rescuing” power. Second, what Orr uses for his main example is Miłosz’s phrase “sophomore girls.” This is clearly a case where American disregard of translation comes to the fore, because, in this instance, the translation does not bring the scope of meaning of Miłosz’s

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“panieńskiego.” The Polish word comes from the French “pensionnaire,” a female student from a bourgeois family receiving education at a “pensionnat,” an expensive boarding school separated from the outside world. Miłosz uses this word in its common understanding in times of usage as referring to a person without any knowledge of the hardships of life apart from that acquired from books in a guarded institution. The “pensionnaire” knows only the safe environment of the boarding school and expects a safe future at home, because her family’s wealth separates her from the everyday struggle of earning money. The fragment analyzed by Orr reads as follows: 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.28

A much more thorough and subtle reading of the same poem is proposed by Clare Cavanagh in a chapter about Miłosz from her book Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics, published in the year 2009. She unerringly describes the important connection of “Dedication” with Polish literature and reveals how it acts as a kind of caesura in Polish culture. Moreover, Cavanagh critically examines the debate surrounding Vendler and adds another counterargument. Furthermore, as a reader of both Polish and American criticism participating in the debate, Cavanagh’s approach is the only well-informed piece of constructive criticism in the matter. Cavanagh states that American poetry does remain private and egocentric in comparison to Miłosz; but it is a kind of “egocentric universalism” shared with many other poets around the world. Cavanagh rightly remarks that Americans are indeed shielded from the European course of history by way of geographical separation, but their antihistorical regenerative inclination does not mean there is something unique in the Polish witnessing or memorizing tradition. Miłosz hints at a more complex image than the simple opposition of extremities of the egocentric and the historical. He describes his unceasing interest in Anglo-American literature. Cavanagh’s remarkable insight is, in fact, that what Americans like in Miłosz’s poetics often stems from the methods of their own writers, who Miłosz returns to them in a mediated form. Let it suffice to be reminded of Whitman tending the wounded during the Civil War; meaning that Whitman directly “witnessed” this part of the tumultuous American history.29 Moreover, Cavanagh further claims that not only did Miłosz bring Polish poetry to the United States, but also changed the interest of Polish readers from

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French to English literature. Rightly, Cavanagh warns of the reductive gaze of Anglo-American readers who would like to perceive East Central European writers in but one “function and tonality.” Instead, she aptly calls Miłosz the “master of indirection.” We need to remember that Miłosz always perceives himself in a “double bind between politics and transcendence;” the two fears about the social and the metaphysical dimensions of life. In fact, it is Cavanagh’s idea that I develop here: while American readers concentrate on the side of politics, morality, and suffering, Polish interpreters stress transcendence, mysticism, and lyricism.30 However, this does not mean that Cavanagh has sufficient opportunity to do Miłosz justice in the forty pages of her chapter. Rather, she has just enough to debunk the superficiality of Vendler’s vein of reading. And she does so even without considering Miłosz’s own full voice in the matter; including, how he reacted to American criticism and what he developed in the playfully entitled gathering of his poetological essays, The Witness of Poetry. This book will always remain a fundamental reference for everyone interested in understanding Miłosz’s idea of writing poetry.

The Witness of Poetry Miłosz was more acknowledged for what he always wanted—his poetry—only after the Neustadt and Nobel Prizes. He used the success to further complicate his American authorial persona, by playing with the “poet-witness” cliché in The Witness of Poetry. The book is the outcome of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University (1981–1982), which Miłosz utilized to describe his poetics and his view on the task of poetry. Let us critically follow here only the main premises of this book, leaving aside the exact poetics proposed by Miłosz for another excursion. His poetics are inextricably tied to his reception, but we need to consider them one after another. With The Witness of Poetry Miłosz gives his own additions to the formula of the “poet-witness,” which, in a way, answer the controversies surrounding the cliché. The major themes of this book are the poetic form and the role of the poet after World War II. Miłosz criticizes formal experimentation while preserving the importance of linguistic precision in poetic language by faithful descriptions of reality. In his own words, he is “reflecting upon what sort of testimony about our century is being established by poetry.” The book’s overall argument is, thus, that poetry witnesses “us” in countless situations and from many perspectives, giving voice to human aspirations and human pitfalls and allowing for the observation of historical and cultural forces that shape the conditions of life.31

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By titling the book The Witness of Poetry, Miłosz avoids the cliché of witnessing, although he plays with the expectations surrounding his works and leaves space for misreadings. He prepared the text in Polish and translated it before the lecture with Robert Hass. The Polish title is Świadectwo poezji, which translates exactly as The Testimony of Poetry. While the noun “witness” conveys the meaning of testimony in the phrase “to bear witness,” the English title implies a different meaning. This particular meaning has been constantly overlooked in the study of Miłosz’s work. The title actually implies a personification of poetry— as an active force of perception, speech, and reflection of whom the poet is only the vessel. The first reading may certainly be that poetry gives testimony to the events experienced by the poet. This would picture poetry as a textual effect of personal distress. However, the English title allows a reading in which it is poetry in general that actively witnesses the events of history. Such interpretation complicates the matter and suggests that the distress happens within the fabric of culture. Miłosz could have used the title The Witnessing of Poetry but he did not. “I have felt that the problem of my time should be defined as Poetry and History,” he said in another lecture, five years earlier, at the University of Michigan. Poetry as witness is, thus, personified by Miłosz, who makes it into a voice, a vision. American critics would like to see Miłosz as the witness, but he evades this label and points to poetry itself.32 Miłosz writes that poetry “witnesses us,” which raises the question of its sources and points toward some external force inspiring his writing. In this way, he denigrates the role of the poet as participant in the historical events and places agency within poetry. If poetry is a person, then the poet becomes only a passive medium, who witnesses what the poetry itself is witnessing. That is, all perceptions described by the poet are made involuntarily because they occur within the realm of poetry—its language, genres, and traditions.33 Poetry as witness implies a specific function of language, not as a means for everyday communication but for preserving tradition and history, referencing the communal past and present. Thus, Miłosz opens the profession of writing poetry to all, even those who only learn history from books. This opening is possible because poetry, for Miłosz, appears to have an origin external to the poet, a “daimonion” connected to truth. Its inhuman origin allows poetry to grasp the “direct experience” of “historical dimension” available even “in a detail of architecture,” but in this case especially in the peculiar events taking place in Miłosz’s “corner of Europe.” By placing the act of “witnessing” within personified poetry, Miłosz allows poets to draw not only from private experience of anguish but also from tradition, the experiences of others, imagination, and the unconscious.

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Miłosz tackles the issue of witnessing straightaway in the first pages of his book, though he immediately subverts readerly expectations. He begins by describing the strength he gathers from the attachment to his region: As a result, all of us who come from those parts appraise poetry slightly differently from the majority of my audience, for we tend to view it as a witness and participant in one of mankind’s major transformations. I have titled this book The Witness of Poetry not because we witness it, but because it witnesses us.34

From the outset, Miłosz supports the stereotype promoted by Vendler that he conceives of poetry differently from Americans due to his experience of wartime and totalitarian oppression. For Miłosz, the difference between him and American poets hides in the function of poetry. For Miłosz, poetry takes over the role of a chronicler; it is “witness and participant.” That is, he compares poetry to a person transcribing events at the moment they appear. Even if its workings are invisibly slow, poetry for Miłosz is not an object to be made, a thing to be crafted, not even a work of art for amusement or awe—but a subject endowed with agency. Personified poetry is distant from means of propaganda, control of population, mnemonic enhancement, or market advertisement. Poetry that “witnesses us” exceeds its occupation of chronicling and becomes an active partaker in events of great importance, says Miłosz and calls those events “History, with capital H.” When describing this “History,” Miłosz divides Western civilization into the “free” capitalist and the “oppressed” communist, suggesting that they continue the traditions of, respectively, Rome and Byzantium. Although, Miłosz remains skeptical of both, finding flaws in their extremes and polarization. That is why he believes that the Polish tradition of taking from both offers the best insight on how to mediate between the modern Rome and Byzantium. A prolonged borderland position has given Poland, Miłosz continues, the ability to reveal, by way of juxtaposition, the good and the bad of each ideological system. “On the borderline of Rome and Byzantium, Polish poetry became a home for incorrigible hope, immune to historical disasters.”35 But when Miłosz speaks of “History,” he does not mean the surface of the fleeting events that would interest journalists. He argues that poetry is able to witness what is underneath those facts and bind them to the more lasting process of time, invisible in just one lifetime. For Miłosz, then, the only way to approximate an “authentic” event is to verify it with poetry. This is a way for Miłosz to avoid being fixed by American critics in the firmament of the witnessing poets, who would document only the fleeting events. He argues instead that what he really wants to document are the durable patterns in the lives of communities, the quality of their struggles, and the spirit of their revolutions.

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[Poetry] is a more reliable witness than journalism. If something cannot be verified on a deeper level, that of poetry, it is not, we may suspect, authentic …. Yet to realize that the poetry of the twentieth century testifies to serious disturbances in our perception of the world may already become the first step in self-therapy.36

Paradoxically, Miłosz has the symbolic figure of History to be one of the “new dimensions accessible only to direct experience” that people “are constantly discovering.” It is, of course, only possible through the use of reality-oriented poetry. In this way, Miłosz’s proposal for a “witness of poetry” becomes a double enchanter. On the one hand, the man witnesses poetry while, on the other, poetry witnesses the man. Poetry, thus, becomes for Miłosz both the subject and the object, both active and passive. A good example may be the situation, already considered, that of his reception by the Americans. Miłosz learned from the French and American literary tradition, experienced the war, witnessed genocide, created his own poetic way—and influenced or argued with his recipients to write about him precisely the way he wanted. The same goes for his reception by the Poles. If not so, how else would Aleksander Fiut so neatly formulate the kind of modernist hagiography of Czesław Miłosz? This hermeneutic circle of self-situating, established by Miłosz, is a feat to behold! But, nevertheless, it is a feat so subtle that it easily evades notice. The Witness of Poetry is, thus, Miłosz’s most transparent elaboration of his poetology; that is, his poetic disposition to artful presentation of reality and real-life submission to necessities of art. Once we understand this fact better, the issues of authorial and literary personae become much clearer. However, we need first to consider fully the subtleties of his transatlantic reception. Because, striving for a global perspective, Miłosz rarely takes sides and prefers to juxtapose contrasting viewpoints, even if they should contradict his Catholic upbringing and the Polish tradition.

5 The Polish Prophet On the 16th of December 1980, Miłosz’s Polish authorial persona was forcefully included into the nationalist-messianic rites of Polish culture. Citizens of Gdańsk cast his poem “You Who Wronged” in bronze at the base of the three 42-meter steel crosses that made up the Monument of the Fallen Shipyard Workers of 1970. Miłosz did not want any of his poems to be under the monument because the verses like “Do not feel safe” resonated with threat, especially accompanied by martyrologic bas-reliefs of widows and wailing mothers. The poet visited the site exactly six months after the presentation of the monument, invited by the Solidarity committee that originated in the shipyard. The situation arose from “insurrectional” Polish Romanticism, and people celebrated Miłosz as the national bard. During that visit Miłosz was “a poet without,” because, rather than his works, his person was the sole subject of the meeting, and the gathered masses wanted to learn from him what to do in the future. Although crowds attended the celebration, the authorial persona honored was not the one Miłosz intended for himself. The meeting took place in the “historical” room where Lech Wałęsa, the leader of Solidarity’s peaceful “insurrection,” signed the deal between labor workers and the government. Those in attendance learned that Miłosz is the son of a beaten nation, where the Polish adjective umęczonego, “beaten,” refers to the flagellation of Christ. Before the visit, when asked which poem he would propose for the engraving, Miłosz offered only his translation of Ps 29:11. The verse also appeared on the plate: “The Lord will give strength unto his people; the Lord will bless his people with peace.” In the shipyard room, where Miłosz met the workers, they prepared a huge sign behind the panel table, written in the same famous blood-like font as the logo of Solidarity. The sign rephrased the Psalm in a socialist-Romantic manner: “The people will give strength unto his poet.” Miłosz did his best to avoid his assumption as a religious national bard and clarified, for instance, that he translated parts of the Old Testament on purpose from Hebrew instead of traditionally used Latin. Lech Wałęsa explicitly requested that Miłosz fulfills the role of the Polish bard and explain the future of the nation. Wałęsa wanted Miłosz to become the spiritual leader alongside his own political authority. Miłosz was terrified by the atmosphere, and it reminded him of the pre-uprising spirit of the 1944 Warsaw. He worried that Solidarity would end the same way as the devastated city. As an apt comparison for the Gdańsk 1981 meeting, it

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suffices to present Miłosz’s letter to his wartime mentor, the Marxist philosopher Tadeusz Kroński, from 1947: “I hope God will save me from becoming a so-called herald of the opposition and … [act] as the new Mickiewicz …. I am too cunning for that and I do not give a shit about the poor Poles able to think only politically.”1 To properly situate himself in the Polish traditions of witnessing, Miłosz had to tackle the figure of the strong Romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, and rewrite the ideas about bardism and prophetism. That is, he had to open the predominantly political Polish Romanticism to the subtleties of Western Romantic traditions which allow for a diversity of perspectives, especially through nondogmatic religiosity. In fact, just as Miłosz brought perspectivist modernism back to the USA, so did he bring religious Romanticism back to Poland.

What Is Polish Culture? In an interview from the 1980s, Miłosz said that in Poland “[t]‌he past is Mickiewicz, culture is Mickiewicz, but the reality is” provincial. He stressed the overwhelming presence of Mickiewicz as a point of reference for all thought. For the most part, Miłosz concentrated on Mickiewicz’s classicist love for order and balance, a side close to the rationalist satire mindful of reality, although Miłosz still retained great reverence for the mystical undercurrents of Mickiewicz’s work.2 Miłosz had the opportunity to describe Mickiewicz formally in The History of Polish Literature, where he highlights and appraises his most important works but also inadvertently displays his own take on Mickiewicz as the legislator of Polish national culture and romanticism in general. Critics agree that Miłosz’s constant consideration of Mickiewicz is part of his self-fashioning strategy. As the first strongest reference to Mickiewicz, Polish readers point to Miłosz’s prewar emulation of the prophetic and visionary qualities foretelling a catastrophe of European culture. During the war, threatened by the historical events, Miłosz takes more pastoral elements from Mickiewicz’s national epic Pan Tadeusz. Miłosz took great care to subvert the one-sided perspective on Mickiewicz, knowing that undermining his nationalist reading would also expand the number of identities available within the concept of Polishness. To that extent, during a conference at Columbia University in 1948, Miłosz said that “the word ‘romantic’ does not encompass all of the elements of Mickiewicz’s poetry … and his work has roots in the literature of the eighteenth century and the philosophy of the Enlightenment.” Only after that point in time does Miłosz bring to the fore his biographic and geographic similarity to Mickiewicz, and the figure of the pilgrim seeking a way back to what Miłosz called his “native realm.”3

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Troubled by the overwhelming national romantic narrative, Miłosz pictures himself as a person separate from and unable to conform to the power of any collective. As critics point out, Miłosz rejects the norms of Polishness and believes that the idea of the nation enforces oppression. He inclines toward the everyman and fights against everything even remotely based on the excluding rhetoric of Polish nationalist romanticism. Miłosz writes that the ideas of a messianic poetic mission and the national duties of literature are “provincial” and “embarrassing:” “Mickiewicz’s messianism is like many compensatory ideas, sought after by oppressed communities when they formulate their new mythologies.” Nevertheless, Miłosz never abandons Mickiewicz’s works altogether. On many occasions, Miłosz himself remarked how easy it is to compare his biography with that of Mickiewicz. Both grew up near Vilnius, studied at the same university, were exiled from peripheral Poland to central Paris, rebelled against Western culture, retained interest in Russia, produced voluminous influential work, lectured about Poland to the West, and their words ended up on monuments across Poland.4

Adam Mickiewicz’s Influence Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) was born in the same region as Miłosz and also studied at the same Stefan Batory University in Wilno. Intellectually, Mickiewicz was a descendant of eighteenth century Enlightenment. As Miłosz writes, he is “for Poles what Goethe is for Germans and Pushkin for Russians…. [but also a] pilgrim, leader, and fighter … [who] through his life of service to the Polish cause grew into the embodiment of a “national bard” and a spiritual commander of the generations to come.” Mickiewicz’s early works were classicist, but he avidly read Schiller, Goethe, and Byron, so that he was the first to introduce the Romantic style into Polish culture with his book Ballady i romanse (1822). Alongside the drama Grażyna (1823) about a fictional Lithuanian version of Joan of Arc, and the work-inprogress drama Forefather’s Eve (Dziady; 1823–1832), set around the pagan ritual of evoking the dead, the collection of poetry Ballady i romanse positioned Mickiewicz as the promoter and protector of regional folk traditions. In this case, these were Lithuanian and Belarusian lore in the Polish language mixed with Romantic worldview. With his work, Mickiewicz relocated the literary center of Polishness from Jan Kochanowski’s (1530–1584) Masovian Czarnolas—120 kilometers southeast of Warsaw—to the Wilno region in Lithuania, considered by his contemporaries to be linguistically inferior.

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Mickiewicz was forced to spend the next few years in Saint Petersburg, celebrated by Pushkin and others, where he wrote his revered oriental Crimean Sonnets (1826) and the long poem Konrad Wallenrod (1828), which Miłosz calls “Byronic.” The eponymous Wallenrod hides his Lithuanian origins to become the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights and defeat them from within. The last work modulated the growing discontent of the Polish gentry of the subjugation to the Russian Empire and served as a blueprint for educated young Polish army officers to rebel against the administration. Hence the November Uprising of 1830–1831, that diminished the importance of the folklorist and orientalist Romanticism in Poland and gave rise to its nationalist and messianic version.5 After the failed insurrection, Mickiewicz moved to Dresden, where he produced his most important revolutionary work, Part Three of the Forefather’s Eve (1832), which was, within Polish culture, to remain for a long time as the centerpiece of relentless resistance to imperialism. Even in 1968, the drama spurred student protests after the famous Łódź staging by Kazimierz Dejmek. The poetic afterword of the drama called Digression—a “summation of Polish attitudes toward Russia in the nineteenth century”—prompted Pushkin’s reply in form of his masterpiece The Bronze Horseman and dictated many verses of Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. Also during the two years spent in Dresden, Mickiewicz wrote the famous nationalist religious parable of the fate of Poland as the crucified messiah of nations, The Books of the Polish Nation and of the Polish Pilgrims (1832), in which he employed biblical and simple language, so that everyone could understand it.6 The dark vein of Mickiewicz’s writing found its counter in the prolific national epic Pan Tadeusz (Sir Thaddeus, 1834), first planned as “a modest idyll somewhat in the genre of Goethe’s Hermann und Dorothea.” The pastoral tone of the text mythologizes the Polish past and sets its traditions within the realm of the sacred through discreet religious allusions. The softness of the latter spurred even such eccentric interpretations of the title as a supposedly hybrid GreekLatin secret etymology panta deus, understood as “everything comes from and belongs to God.” Afterward, Mickiewicz wrote only a few short meditative poems in verse, gathered under the name Lausanne Lyrics, which nevertheless proved very influential and found their way to Miłosz’s earliest pieces from The Three Winters (1936). Mickiewicz also wrote a prophetic meditation on the future of Poland in a proto-science fiction manner in Polish and French, that he mostly destroyed, L’histoire d’avenir (The History of the Future), a treatise about the works of the German mystic Jakob Böhme (1575–1624). Finally, Mickiewicz prepared a book of aphorisms, Zdania i uwagi, based on the thoughts of Böhme, another German

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mystic Angelus Silesius (1624–1677), and the French philosopher Louis-Claude de Saint Martin (1743–1803). Later on, Mickiewicz only lectured at Collége de France on Slavic literatures, but they were still written down and published by the participants. Miłosz declares that from that point Mickiewicz was a “teacher, a prophet, a publicist, an organizer, he chose the life of action as if to confirm what he had once said, paraphrasing German mystics: that it is more difficult to live honestly through one day than to write a book.” Throughout his life Mickiewicz was both celebrated and criticized, but with the passing of time, increasingly lionized, which resulted in his second burial in the crypts of the Polish kings, on the hill of the Wawel Castle in Cracow.7

Polish Romanticism Miłosz’s subversive play with the “metaphysical” expectations of his Polish readers is the most visible in his ambivalent relationship with Polish Romanticism. As Miłosz points out in The History of Polish Literature, Romanticism in Poland took on organized “revolutionary” forms often pointing to the Holy Alliance as “a diabolical conspiracy against the peoples of Europe.” The broad understanding of the term Romanticism does not apply to its Polish version: “Contrary to the brand of Romanticism which in many countries was identified with a withdrawal of the individual into his own interior world,” argues Miłosz, “Romanticism in Poland acquired an extremely activist character and was clearly a consequence of many ideas of the Enlightenment.” In general, the movement fused politics and religion so as to mythologize a new position of the individual in society. Miłosz quotes a telling passage from Metternich’s memorandum to Czar Alexander I, where he analyzes the Romantic inspirations of contemporary intelligentsia: “The real aim of the idealists of the party is religious and political fusion, and this being analyzed is nothing else but creating in favor of each individual an existence entirely independent of all authority, or any other will than his own.” This rebellious spark resulted in the promotion of an introvert vector among independent societies, whereas, in subdued communities like the Polish one, it fostered political activism. Such interpretation called for the writer to take on the role of “a charismatic leader, the incarnation of collective strivings of the peoples,” who set paths for others to follow with both his writing and life.8 Polish literary leaders observed Lord Byron’s activism and the subdued community hailed them as “national bards.” A Polish bard both incarnates and sets the discourse of a community. To do this, the Polish Romantic “bards” used the force of imagination. Imagination moves people more than reason and logical

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arguments, and they described it as a natural force: as a part of us. Everybody has imagination, so it links all people, giving everyone the potential to become a national bard, a leader of society, just as Napoleon’s soldiers had all the possibility of becoming generals through valor in combat. Imagination is thus a communal force into which everyone could tap. Part of the poet’s work was to find forms in which every imagination could recognize itself. Excellent examples of works of imagination are premodern mythologies and folklore as pre-rational points of reference in poetry; just consider Homer, Virgil, Ossyan, or even the tales collected by the Grimm brothers. Part of the Romantic Movement included the effort to search and rescue oral traditions in order to deliver them from the changing powers of modernity. Thus, the Romantics are oppositional: a bard not only looks to the past but also confronts the present division of society into classes. A national bard does more: he supports not only ethnic cohesion and imagines communities but also formulates a new religion and a new mythology in the place emptied by reason. In the former version, the poet confronts a universe ruled by interest and money. In the latter, the poet as bard comes close to the prophet, a bard of the Hebrew tradition. Since the Poles have such a strong Catholic tradition, the notion of a national bard easily finds a cultural point of reference in the role of the biblical bard. Miłosz was aware of this, and mentions it in the introduction to his translation of the Book of Job: “Nobody raised on Polish literature can erase the image of the poet as a prophet or a bard.”9 Hence, the bardic calling derives from a communal need for a leader in a stateless culture, and from a reliance on imagination and the literary word as carriers of authentic truths. A Polish bard should tackle political issues with the language of religion and spread homeland culture to foreign countries. Exile is an unavoidable part of Polish bardism, although it should happen within the diaspora. Critics find in Miłosz proof for the Romantic belief in the power of the word, a fascination resisted by the poet with the memory of its ill-fated and radical applications in Polish history. They argue that the Romantic tradition appears to be the point of departure for both Miłosz’s literary and existential identity. Romanticism for him is homely yet provincial. Throughout his work, Miłosz always appraises Romanticism negatively, even though there are many examples of his appropriation of some of its myths and, above all, its literary techniques.10

The Bardic Tradition Miłosz uses three words to name what in English is translated as “bard.” Although, the prevalence of this English word in Polish makes him also frequently employ it

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in the same spelling. The English word “bard” comes from the sixteenth-century derogatory Scottish term for itinerant musicians, a term that was later romanticized by Sir Walter Scott as the conveyor of folklore and traditions as well as the author of epics. In the Polish tradition, the meanings associated with the word “bard” are highly positive and relevant to the national psyche, although the term rarely appears in Miłosz’s poetry and when it does, the poet usually uses it to criticize someone. For instance, in a footnote to A Treatise on Poetry, Miłosz calls his fellow poet Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński (1905–1953) the “bard” of the “extreme right,” which links the term to the nationalistic and xenophobic vein of Polish culture. However, in the long poem From the Rising of the Sun, Miłosz calls another colleague, the Lithuanian poet Teodor Bujnicki (1907–1944): “The last poor bard of the Grand Duchy [of Lithuania].” Bujnicki was, in turn, a supporter of international communism. The two contrasting uses suggest that Miłosz linked bardism not only with nationalism and xenophobia but, broader, with the irrational creation of imagined communities as the means of inclusion, exclusion, or division.11 Another Polish word translated as “bard” is wajdelota or, as Miłosz uses it, “wajdalota.” The word means a priest of Lithuanian pagan rites, who was transferring communal tradition with songs, especially about the dead. The name comes from the German Waidler and Old Prussian verb waidlemai, “to foresee.” Miłosz uses the word only in the function of the “bard Mickiewicz” and for other writers coming from the same region which includes Miłosz himself: “No one among the bards returned to the [Lithuanian] speech of his ancestors.” In this instance, then, the word suggests provincialism and strong ties not only to regional tradition but also the tragedy of exile.12 The last word translated from Polish as “bard,” wieszcz, is the term most commonly used in relation to Romanticism. It means an “inspired, ingenious, outstanding poet” and typically denotes the three greatest writers of the period: Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849), and Zygmunt Krasiński (1812–1859). Miłosz uses the term on many occasions to recall the messianic vein of Polish Romanticism. Like all other poets in Polish literature, Miłosz always has to measure himself especially against Mickiewicz, who mythologized the function of the wieszcz. The wieszcz preserves an idealized version of national values and remains detached from the small-mindedness and everyday business of his community, thereby assuming a distanced perspective on home events. In this way, every wieszcz is created to a great extent outside of the Polish community, due to an externalization of culture.13 The word wieszcz comes, however, from the older wieszczbiarz, “seer,” who is the one that foresees the future. Thus, wieszcz as bard and seer gathers all eras

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of the community. He is the man who transfers the traditions of the past, gives proper words to present events, and delineates the contours of the coming times. Miłosz uses the title wieszcz in this way when speaking about the English poet and mystic William Blake (1757–1827). “There is no good term for Blake in Polish, if we reject “bard” and the reckless “visionary”,” ponders Miłosz, “Blake’s poet is a vatic figure, a seer [wieszcz].” These considerations lead Miłosz to propose an understanding of wieszcz in a manner typically saved for the prophet: “In Blake religion and poetry merge, art becomes prophesy, just as religion, before it became debased, was once prophesy.”14 Grudzińska Gross argues that “Miłosz saw himself as a bard,” by which she most probably suggests for Miłosz this particular kind of bardism that he considered when speaking about Blake as the prophesying seer. In this context we should consider the words of Cyprian Kamil Norwid (1821–1883), another Romantic poet relevant to Miłosz. Sometimes called the fourth Polish bard, Norwid wrote an impactful but untranslated long poem Promethidion (1851), where he argues that wieszcz is only interested in aesthetics whereas the prophet concerns himself with an ethical understanding of truth. That is, the prophet is a bard with a specific agenda that exceeds literature.15 The figure of the prophet is certainly more appealing to Miłosz than that of the bard, although, it does not encompass the whole of his work, rather its dominant Polish reception. Miłosz uses the term “prophet” not only in relation to the truth but also in relation to its biblical meaning as the bard of the Jewish people. The prophet points to a crisis in the traditions of the community, a morally evil custom, a trespassing against God’s will, and calls for change, religious or political reform, even revolution. Miłosz shaped his authorial persona between aesthetic bardism and ethical prophetism, always shifting between the two. However, most Polish critics developed his ethical or, rather, “metaphysical” self-situating.

The Prophetic Tradition Polish readers follow Miłosz’s lead and several compare him to a prophet. Some argue that Miłosz’s ideal poet is a nonconformist defender of truth, who should both see and fore-see. That is, this protector should describe both the reality at hand and the future. Some argue that these obligations overlap with the pedagogical and prophetic obligations of the artist that Miłosz is to advance in his anti-aesthetic and dialogical approach. Others compare Miłosz to Mickiewicz to remind us that it was not literary craft that gained him fame but personality, vision, and the life of a paradigmatic poet-revolutionary and poet-wanderer. And, they say, Miłosz should be evaluated accordingly.16

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As a further complication, we need to remember that Miłosz himself uses in his poetry the notion of a prophet twice as frequently as all other terms for the, generally understood, bard. Apart from denoting the biblical prophets, Miłosz uses the term “prophet” positively in other instances, when writing about nondogmatic thinkers, who impact reality with their thought. Miłosz names in this way: William Blake and Jakob Böhme as well as the so-called “masters of suspicion,” Karl Marx and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844– 1900). The last two offered self-fulfilling prophecies, Miłosz’s speaker argues, influencing history before any events have taken place.17 At times, even Miłosz’s own speaker would consider himself for the position of prophet. This speaker-like Miłosz would want to act as a revelator, who uncovers a crisis in the general worldview and the need for a change in perception. This change would then allow us to describe current events from the perspective of the past and the future; and to moreover describe the political events from a metaphysical viewpoint. But Miłosz is well aware how strongly these considerations impact his authorial persona, so he develops other instances, where his speaker undermines the grandeur of prophet altogether. For instance, in the poem “Confession” from the book Kroniki (1987), where the speaker considers himself dominated by opposing urges—carnal and spiritual—which makes him ask with doubt, “So what kind of prophet am I?”18 These doubts make Miłosz use the term “prophet” frequently with sarcasm when recalling his predecessors in Polish literature, the Romantic bards. In this way, Miłosz criticizes the Romantic nationalist demons lingering in Polish culture that he believes have always led Poles astray. In a self-reflective untranslated poem “Ze szkodą,” “To the Detriment,” Miłosz remarks on the danger accompanying the poetic craft in Polish culture. In Poland, every word of a celebrated author, suggests the speaker, may be abused for political gain or national frenzy, as has happened to the works of Mickiewicz, Miłosz’s role model:  “And later the banners, / screams, prophecies, defense of the barricades. / My great poetic patron saint has done great evil.” One may argue, unfortunately, that a similar fate has already befallen the poetry of Czesław Miłosz.19

Polish Expectations The poet as a bard had to be the memory of a nation, and as a prophet, its conscience. Miłosz was aware that a Romantic framing of the authorial persona of an exceptional poet is unavoidable in non-independent Poland. Unwillingly, Mickiewicz canonized the responsibilities of a “great poet” in the vein of messianic nationalism and bardic servitude. In the Polish tradition, the bard does

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not just envision the times of political freedom, rather he envisions political freedom through religious salvation. Under oppression, the poetic text is read as a prophecy of future liberation. The situation has given unusual stature and resonance to him not only as an author, vide the 1981 Gdańsk meeting, but it also burdened him with outdated and restrictive cultural duties he never wanted. That is why the speaker of Treatise on Theology finds Polish Catholicism ritualized and politicized, while Mickiewicz “accommodated to everyday use” as “a can of preserves.”20 The same was frequently attempted with Miłosz—to accommodate him to Polish culture. The most vivid example comes with his widely debated 2011 biography by the Kraków scholar Andrzej Franaszek. In the introduction, Franaszek declares Miłosz the last great representative of the Romantic school outright. Franaszek does it by using American arguments of “witnessing” to position Miłosz within a literary tradition originating in the nationalist vein of Polish Romanticism.21 The Polish messianic narration implies a particular role for the poet. He, not she, is to be a bard praising the culture. Moreover, he is to be a prophet announcing the day of the nation’s rebirth. He should speak about all the issues of his community: from the political and social to the religious problems of his time. After almost two centuries of subjugation and resistance, Polish culture suffers from a partially colonial mentality and an escapist discourse of (post) dependency, which seek “hidden” or “prophetic” content in Miłosz’s work even after achieving independence. The search for the “metaphysical” turns the Polish community away from current troubles toward the invisible world, supported by poetic and religious rituals.22 Miłosz is to a great extent reluctant to take up the inherited role of the wieszcz: he does not want to be seduced by national myths, and worries that his public image would end up the same way as Mickiewicz. However, Miłosz was not always completely resistant to the ambiguous charms of the Polish Romantic tradition. That tradition ensured poets not only with the perspective of longlasting fame but, if one decided to stay and praise the communist state, also secured their everyday needs. The promise of fame and stability sheds light on Miłosz’s initial cooperation with the regime, the courage of defecting to France, and his later return to Poland in glory.23 Nevertheless, Miłosz did not bask in his prestige but put his fame to good use and inspired controversy over neglected issues. Miłosz publicly rejected his widely esteemed status as national bard by reminding Poles about his and Mickiewicz’s Lithuanian origins and criticizing the superficiality of Polish religious customs. Scholars remark nonetheless that Miłosz’s stubborn resistance to

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the cult of Polishness is paradoxical, considering the amount of work he put into establishing the concept of the “Polish school of poetry” in the USA.24 Despite his categorical separation from the nationalist tradition, Miłosz did not avoid his Polish, Romantic destiny. The Polish-Catholic connection is visible even when Aleksander Fiut describes Miłosz’s work as “the Book” and equates it with the Bible. Finally, Miłosz’s Romantic placement received symbolical reinforcement at his funeral, attended by thousands. The event turned out unexpectedly to be Catholic and national, even in spite of many voices accusing Miłosz of ethnic, sexual, religious, and political deviations.25

Rescue; Ocalenie Miłosz’s struggles with the obligations of Polishness, his attachment to the JudeoChristian tradition, and insights into American individualism are purveyed to the greatest extent in his wartime book Rescue. It is not only the chronicling of wartime atrocities but the sheer change of perspectives that has repeatedly drawn critics toward this volume. That is, the events described there are of utmost importance but, abstracted by the passing of time, the poems witness rather the slow cultural flows, which eventually change the perspective on those dire happenings. In the context of prophetism, Rescue displays equally the doubt of a dissenter—critical of the metamorphoses of Polishness during the war—and the remembrance of a lost collective heritage. This brings us to the kaleidoscopic meanings that the title of the book holds. In Rescue, Miłosz’s speakers frequently speak to the dead, for them, or in place of them, often by utilizing prosopopoeia, a rhetorical device serving the writer to speak as another person or object. The Polish title of the book, Ocalenie, is a noun that points toward poetry’s mnemonic “salvation” and metaphysical “redemption.” The verb form ocalić figures in five important poems and in all cycles in Rescue. In English, the word appears in alternations as “salvage,” “rescue,” “saving,” “salutary,” and “redemption.” The word gathers the extremities from the spectrum of Miłosz’s writing: from concrete “politics” to abstract “metaphysics.” Awareness of this dichotomy is crucial to understanding Miłosz’s position as the writer not in exile, but in permanent motion. The source of Miłosz’s perspectivist poetics stems precisely from the idea that poetry can save tradition and people by way of remembering and religious reflection; a formula Miłosz introduced in great clarity in his wartime collection Rescue.26 The concept of “rescue” is very important for both Miłosz and his readers. It appears in the first stanza of the book, in the poem “Dedication,” and in the book’s last stanza, in the poem “In Warsaw.” The English version actually pairs

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the two poems directly, by ending with “Dedication” coming right after “In Warsaw.” Clare Cavanagh’s illuminating interpretation of the former calls for a supplement in the form of an interpretation of the latter. While “Dedication” introduces Miłosz’s troubles with the Polish culture, “In Warsaw” considers the possible ways out of the cluster of prophetic obligations without abandoning the tradition altogether. To achieve that, “In Warsaw” dialogues with traditions offering different perspectives on suffering and witnessing.27 Miłosz’s considerations of different cultural possibilities of artistically presenting a catastrophe are absolutely earnest. After all, in a 1982 interview, Miłosz declared that “In Warsaw” is the effect of “a moral reaction” and compared its importance to the two most significant witnessing poems: “The Poor Christian” and “Campo dei Fiori.” However, Miłosz stressed that “In Warsaw” differs from the other two because it “was jotted down on a scrap of paper in half a minute” and he considers it to be “just a note” or “a private note.” Why should such text, seemingly indispensable to the overall composition of Rescue, “not [be] destined for print?” This “moral reaction” and “an itch” that Miłosz had at times are his subversive ways to describe what the Romantics have called “inspiration” or “the stroke of genius.” Miłosz compares “In Warsaw” to his other poems, outright political and Romantic by way of Polish obstinacy. Such writings, Miłosz argues, distort the authorial persona he wishes to project—that of a philosophical poet rather than a bard—and shed more light on matters too close to his “heart” to be described in his poetry; that is, on the state of Poland. “In Warsaw” … was jotted down on a scrap of paper in half a minute. And-as is often the case with my poems—I don’t consider it a poem, just a note. That poem also arose as a moral reaction, like “The Poor Christian” or “Campo dei Fiori.” … The point here is that every so often I get an itch and I write something, a poem not destined for print, a private note. The poem “In Warsaw,” written in ’45, is an example. I certainly didn’t intend that for print; it was a note I made under the influence of emotion. The same is true for “To a Politician” or “He Who Wrongs a Simple Man” or my recent poem “To Lech Wałęsa.” I continually write that sort of thing, then afterward worry that it’ll ruin my image as a philosophical poet.28

“In Warsaw” is a seemingly innocuous title, although it encapsulates all the poems in Rescue, further positions the speaker, and underlines the cultural background behind his words as written from the perspective of the devastated city of Warsaw. The poem consists of six unrhymed, tonic stanzas, a method developed in Polish poetry after the First World War. The order of the tonic verse is to have the same number of stressed positions in each line; in this case, three. The modern form of the poem is itself an argument in the debate that the speaker holds with himself: whether to inscribe oneself in the Polish narrative

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of suffering or, rather, seek different ways of describing the atrocious events at hand. In fact, the subject considered by the speaker in “In Warsaw” is the main issue of the whole of Rescue: how to simultaneously guard tradition and represent suffering without any compromise? The issue is, unfortunately, quite vital for Poles even today. On the one hand, tradition offers an unwieldy staffage that takes away the realness of tragedy. On the other hand, to simply describe in a journalistic manner distorts the language, with which the inhabitants of Warsaw would have named the events themselves—had they only survived the disaster.29

“In Warsaw” “In Warsaw” describes the capital of Poland after the Second Warsaw Uprising that began in August of 1944 and lasted 63 days until the area’s total destruction. The wrecking was so complete that many thought it unreasonable to even think of rebuilding the city. The speaker-poet stands on the ruins of St. John’s Cathedral, one of the many structures bombed at the end of the Uprising. The cathedral had been the site of Warsaw archbishopric since the fourteenth century. Three centenaries later it was the site of an assassination attempt on the King Sigismund III and, on the third of May, 1791, the formulation of the first European constitution. That is, the symbolic building encapsulates both the Christian and the Enlightenment development of Polish civilization; to Poles, it is the site of divine and earthly power. Saint John’s Gospel bears the symbol of a man because it lays more stress on the human suffering of Christ than on his divine origin. Thus, the speaker’s question may hold a hint of lost faith in the divine element of human nature. But Saint John was also the author of the Apocalypse, the vision of the final judgment and the end of days, seemingly incarnated in wartime Warsaw. However, Miłosz omits the fact that the Cathedral is dedicated not to Saint John the Evangelist but to Saint John the Baptist instead. The latter betokens the ritual of christening and conversion, the changing of soul. The person of John the Baptist also prefigures the passion of Jesus Christ. It points to death yet means hope of rebirth. The reference to Christ, in turn, engages Miłosz’s poem within the Polish Romantic paradigm about the nation-martyr that will come back to life in glory. This interpretive vein is hidden, although it allows us to suppose that it was the main source of Miłosz’s dislike for “In Warsaw.” The situation is set in the spring of 1945, which is several months after the Uprising, when most of the inhabitants have left and only a few buildings still stand. Someone addresses the speaker-poet, close to Miłosz, the protagonist of the book Rescue and the apologist of poetry in the face of historical cruelties.

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The identity of the figure questioning the poet is uncertain. Most probably, it is the poet rhetorically questioning himself in a soliloquy; or, these are the dead questioning the one who is responsible to give voice to their suffering. Although, considering that no one else would be around in the ruined city and Miłosz is writing the poem in Kraków, the poet engaged in self-dialogue may quite well be a ghost, a memory of the dead still in the charred remains of the city. Maybe this is just a vision in the mind of the recollecting author, reminiscing on the destruction of his people. Furthermore, the voice speaks from a position of social or religious authority. It sounds like a policeman who has found the poet among the ruins; or, a Russian soldier suggesting that the city has been liberated or asking what would anyone do in the ruins. He may be a priest or a bishop from the parish of the destroyed cathedral. The voice may come from above, indicating God or even a personified history. It may also be the poet’s daimonion dictating verses or the Devil speaking from among the ruins. Maybe the initial question scolds the poet like a child? Maybe the speaker is shocked that the poet survived? Then, the poet would act as the personification of Polish Romantic poetry in crumbles.30 What are you doing here, poet, on the ruins Of St. John’s Cathedral this sunny Day in spring?

The poet questions himself again in a similar stanza: first, he queries actions and now he questions thoughts. While the first verses introduced a specific place, the Cathedral, the second mention a whole area by referencing Wisła, the Vistula River. Wisła has always been central to Poland, another symbol of the national imagination, flowing through both its medieval and modern capitals, Cracow and Warsaw. With the anaphoric construction, the first two stanzas liken the soliloquy to a litany, a church prayer in a recurring formula based on the biblical psalms, where the clergy and the people repeat a call for salvation to God. The psalmic repetition and rewording of full sentences appear four times in the poem. Although the ritual repetition itself performs mourning, in this case, the litanic structure is a sign of devotion not to the Catholic God or the abstract powers of history but to the idea of the Polish nation. Here, Miłosz understands the nation as a gathering of listeners and upholders of tradition from which his poems stem and in which they blossom.31 The speaker’s witnessing of the destruction of his country fills him with helplessness. The wind from the river moving the dust of the Cathedral is the haunting of history; its great machinery leaves symbols of national pride and

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authority leveled to the ground. The small life of one poet, reliant on the existence of those symbols—even if by negation—now bears witness only to loss. “The red dust of the rubble” is the only thing left from the red brick cathedral that had been rebuilt in English Gothic Revival style after a nineteenth century fire. The color of the dust suggests the blood of the dead and the failure of Christianity as the guardian of the humane, that is, the horror makes the poet question himself and his aesthetic choices. He describes these crumbling national symbols self-consciously, mourning not only their loss but also the loss of the ahistorical poetics that are no longer available to him—the witness to the fall of Warsaw. Still, the speaker does not want to sacrifice himself to the inevitable haunting of history: something that he will not be able to forget, images forever burned into his brain. But the “red dust” had appeared already in Miłosz’s 1933 poem “O książce,” “About a book,” where he uses it as a metaphor for rapid historical change. Thus the wind in “In Warsaw” is, thus, also the wind of change, the need for modernization and abandonment of old narratives, incapacitating the poet who seeks new ways to voice the suffering of his people. In other words, Wisła, the traditionally Polish river—Miłosz’s favorite symbol of change—brings energy to scatter the remains of the old and build anew. In this way, the two initial stanzas position the poem firmly within the Polish imagination, question this old perspective, and signal the possibility of renewal.32 What are you thinking here, where the wind Blowing from the Vistula scatters The red dust of the rubble?

National and Private Mourning The speaker-poet reminds himself that he swore never to be “a ritual mourner.” Is this reminder not just rhetorical, when it appears at the end of a collection of many elegiac poems? It is still possible. The verses that follow explain the mourning as relating not to individuals but to the imaginary community of the “Polish nation.” The ritual of mourning a nation is quite different from that of typical funeral rites. First, it is very hard to assess whether the abstract object of mourning is truly deceased, especially when the lamenting poet would have to use the very language of the culture that is supposedly gone. Second, grieving for a nation may well be the tenacious custom of prophets—beginning with the Old Testament, where Jeremiah laments the fall of Jerusalem—but it does not give a true account of what has happened to the people. Third, in the case of

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Polish culture, ritually mourning a nation inscribes the poet within the inescapable narrative, which dominates over the critical mind and disallows any kind of divergence. The poet appears to refuse to glorify national wounds and reiterate the story of Poland’s victimhood, but he is still torn between the attachment to his upbringing, the literary tradition, and the ruins in front of him. When he struggles to mourn the community he imagines, the mourning becomes even more vivid. The messianic metaphors, against which he swore, quickly spring to his mind, taking the place of aesthetic reflection. He easily moves back to nationalist Romantic language. “The deep wounds” bring back Mickiewicz’s comparison of Poland to Christ. In this image, the reluctant poet is to be the doubting Thomas who first needed to touch Christ’s wounds to believe in his resurrection; that is, Poland has been killed and is still alive, a fact reinforcing the Romantic paradigm. The “wounds” are right in front of the poet’s eyes, and the only language available in the tradition is that of Christ’s crucifixion and rising from the dead. But then again, the poet is aware of this vein of thinking and defends himself. In Polish, an irony relieves the speaker with the inversion in “ran wielkich,” “wounds so great,” which hints that the visible traumas have no real name, no narration yet. One should go further and search beyond the traditional possibilities to name the destruction. Otherwise, the “wounds” will gain “accursed holiness” that has troubled the mentality of his community through history. After all, this “accursed holiness” influenced the young Warsaw intelligentsia to organize the uprising that resulted in the destruction of the city in the first place and led to the death of many possible future leaders of the community. The involuntary witnesses of atrocities now bear an apostolic mission to spread the word of divine suffering of the nation. Although, as history will show, it is not the destruction or defeat that will haunt the future generations of Poles, but the “accursed holiness” itself; that is, the inescapable messianic phantasm, the undying Romantic paradigm, Mickiewicz’s imagination clawing at his people.33 You swore never to be A ritual mourner. You swore never to touch The deep wounds of your nation So you would not make them holy With the accursed holiness that pursues Descendants for many centuries.

Lamenting the nation is a tragedy for a poet who wants to narrate a different community, one distant from Mickiewicz’s martyrology. The work of mourning

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presents itself to the speaker as that of Antigone, a character from Greek mythology. Antigone attempts a burial of her brother Polynices against the interdict of her uncle Creon, the ruler of the city-state of Thebes. The character of Antigone was popular among the ancient playwrights for its tragic potential: the heroine is torn between the divine law to give her brother proper burial and the manmade law, introduced by Creon, not to mourn after Polynices. The speaker makes twofold use of the comparison with Antigone. First, he puts himself in the position of Creon and the manmade laws, which oblige one to seek what is best for the living. But Antigone’s cry is too much to bear, says the poet, which makes him falter, incline toward the divine laws, and want to look after the dead. The speaker, torn between the wartime reality of change and the national paradigm of mourning, searches for a way out of the tragic knot and for a distanced perspective. Nevertheless, the situation appears so overwhelming as to deny any other way of narration but for the Romantic one. However, Miłosz’s subversion shines through this point, because his comparison of the poet to Antigone ejects the writing subject outside of the nationalist obligations. This is the second and intertextual use of the ancient trope to insert external tradition in the seemingly unavoidable paradigm. And, even though it serves to reveal the struggle toward the divine laws, it simultaneously opens the Polish tradition to different possibilities of commemorating the dead. That is, it opens the Polish tradition to the idea of Gnostic witnessing—embraced by the Puritans—testifying with life.34 The second part of the stanza rephrases the above in an image favored by Miłosz and one that returns in many of his poems: still life, captured movement, a moment eternalized. An amber stone is both beautiful and preserves the past, that is, it binds the aesthetic with the historical—in a way, the two forces that tear apart the speaker of “In Warsaw.” Since the poet compares his heart to the amber stone, it becomes the allegory of his tragic circumstance which he calls the “dark love:” the choice between the living and the dead. Loving the Polish tradition does not bring him any joy but, instead, obligation, and deprives him of the interest in life and the movement of ideas; after all, his heart is now petrified.35 In fact, Miłosz envisions his private version of apokatástasis, which would preserve all the moments of life in their diversity and multi-perspectivism; which imbues the amber stone with a broad symbolism. Apokatástasis is a Greek word for full bodily resurrection after the end of the world and, in Miłosz’s rendering, the eternal presence of all moments, events, and things in a purified form. The early Christian theologian Origen (185–254) first introduced the idea in the third century, and Miłosz understands it as a return of all things back to God.36

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Tragic love for a nation opposes the verdicts of history. It makes one stop in his ways, gather all the fleeting details, and reminisce about them for the rest of one’s life. Such sacrifice would require Antigone-like devotion to the people. The poet feels the need to contest Antigone’s fate and actively work against the flow of events: to abolish them through literature. However, there appears here again a subtle breach, hidden in the fact that this “dark love” is not “for” the “unhappy land” but “of ” it. That is, this love comes not from the speaker but to him, it is the Poles’ love of the nationalist Romantic paradigm: unavoidable yet terrifying, close yet cruel, homely yet insane. But the lament of Antigone Searching for her brother Is indeed beyond the power Of endurance. And the heart Is a stone in which is enclosed, Like an insect, the dark love Of a most unhappy land.

A Self-Conscious Elegy When formulating this self-conscious elegy, the speaker mourns not only the destruction and death, but also the calamitous force of the flawed Romantic nationalist ideology that contributed to the Second Warsaw Uprising in the first place. In a way, the poet laments the sheer influence of poetry on group imagination. That is why he begins the next stanza with a repeated negation: he would prefer not to feel the attachment to this culture of sorrow, which comes out as love and pity. Love and pity, this self-supplementing pair of emotions, exceed the speaker’s plans and reasoning. However hard a Pole would try to deny the overwhelming Romantic narrative of failure, the first four verses of this stanza could easily end with the words “but I do love so,” “but I do pity so.” Instead, the poet adds another psalmic repetition, declaring that he is unfit to take the obligation and be the witness; in Polish, he is not strong enough. His pen is light and similar to that of a hummingbird; a comparison emphasized by the homography of the Polish “pen” and “feather,” which appear as pióro. This pióro is ready to fly away and escape the constraints of the cumbersome cultural matrix. Such pióro reminds us that Miłosz’s own goal in poetry is to capture the eternal from transient events. In this instance, the speaker approximates the mechanical tool of his trade to the intended object of his poems. This is the tipping point of the text and the speaker begins to withdraw from the urge to straightforwardly follow Antigone. The country appears to him

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overburdened with attachment to the dead. The poet senses tragedy on every corner. The dead surround him and take away the possibility to speak his own mind. This is an issue highly visible even in contemporary Warsaw, where nearly every corner bears a plaque explaining who died there during wartime struggles. The dead haunt the Polish poetic memory and make writers bear witness to the lives of others. The dead expect writers to “chronicle” their lives; or, in Polish, to write down their “dzieje.” That is, the dead turn the speaker of “In Warsaw” toward history, while his own predilection would make him concentrate on the aesthetic qualities of the here and now. Therefore, the speaker attempts to reject the dead. He challenges his calling of a poet, if it means only to represent the deaths of his friends instead of their lives. By posing a rhetorical question, he rejects the task of the “ritual mourner” and defends poetry that describes the joys of existence. The speaker’s argument is that poets uphold the life of communities by writing about diverse themes, not only the witnessing of death and suffering. He introduces the idea of joyous writing with the term “moments of happiness,” again pointing to the transience of things, and stresses their importance. Without poetic imagination describing the fleeting beauties but only burdened with sorrow, the speaker explains, the world we know will “perish” as in “suffer the apocalypse.” As we know from another text from Rescue, “A Song on the End of the World,” the end is a complete overturning of viewpoints. In “In Warsaw” the poet argues that exclusive concentration on witnessing brings such an end to a world once known. This reductiveness, not incidentally, is the same reason why Miłosz objected to Al Alvarez in the 1980s, after the latter called him the “poet of witness.” It means that in the book of his witness-poems, which so inspired American critics, Rescue, Miłosz already criticizes witnessing, calls for more space in literary endeavors, and makes a case for the diversification of poetic tasks. The speaker of “In Warsaw” gives a very telling yet ambivalent example for joyous poetry—Shakespeare. In 1942, Miłosz acquainted himself with Shakespeare and translated his As You Like It, a pastoral comedy situated in the “greenwood” of Arden. Miłosz includes the strong figure of Shakespeare here, and the allusion to this particular play, for at least three reasons: the melancholic jester Jaques, the theatricality of events, and the pastoral tradition. At the end of As You Like It, when everyone rejoices, Jaques secludes himself in a monastery. The poet from “In Warsaw” denies the call to be the only one in sorrow in an otherwise happy play. His figure refers to a set of historical Polish personalities and events. Jaques is the fool to the Duke’s court so his figure reminds us of Stańczyk, jester to three sixteenth-century Polish kings. Jan Matejko famously depicted this fool in 1862, casting him as a sad and wise man.

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In the picture, Stańczyk is the only one troubled by the news of the Russians capturing Smoleńsk in 1514; a royal ball continues undisturbed in the background. A year before Matejko painted this picture, the Russian governor brutally pacified a national gathering in St. John’s Cathedral in Warsaw. The situation described opposes the joyful ending of Shakespeare’s play and reminds us of the ambivalent role of the poet, who needs to admonish the powerful, cheer up the people, and capture fleeting beauty, while being driven by the melancholic consciousness of the frailty of all human efforts. The second reason for the mentioning of Shakespeare is to remind us of the theatricality of the poem itself. The ruins in which the speaker conducts his soliloquy become a theater, where the ritual of contacting the dead commences. The situation aligns with Shakespeare’s famous scene from Hamlet, in which the eponymous character dialogues with the skull of the jester Yorick. This way the speaker—and the author—reveals the self-awareness of the Polish Romantic paradigm, which enforces the use of tropes such as St. John’s Cathedral and Wisła. This way, the subversive allusion erodes the nationalist narrative from the inside and allows for the entrance of elements of Gnostic witnessing. This is the third reason for the poet to refer to Shakespeare in the poem about the Polish capital. The English language literary tradition is what Miłosz wants to introduce to Polish culture and, especially, the pastoral disposition such as in As You Like It. Just as with Antigone and the Greek tragedy, we learn from this passage of the other pole of poetic possibilities, comedy, attached to a foreign culture, which offers a way out of the Polish narrative of failure and sorrow. I did not want to love so. That was not my design. I did not want to pity so. That was not my design. My pen is lighter Than a hummingbird’s feather. This burden Is too much for it to bear. How can I live in this country Where the foot knocks against The unburied bones of kin? I hear voices, see smiles. I cannot Write anything: five hands Seize my pen and order me to write The story of their lives and deaths. Was I born to become a ritual mourner? I want to sing festivities,

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The greenwood into which Shakespeare Often took me. Leave To poets a moment of happiness, Otherwise your world will perish.

In the final stanza, the speaker comes to an uneasy resolution that leaves the reader with even more questions. He explains that it is irrational to lead a joyless life and only focus on retelling to the dead the same words, “truth and justice.” Instead of concentrating on the grim fact of their passing, it is better to consider the fruitful lives the dead have led. The speaker rejects the established way of transferring tradition, in which mourning has to be the key note. He denies the sorrowful disposition of Polish Romanticism and reminds us that those now dead have lived in “gladness / Of action.” That is, the speaker reveals the tragic yet important truth about life, which motivates Miłosz’s poetry. Action “in thought and in the flesh” is the only thing worth remembering— not passive melancholy—and that entails the work of capturing the fleeting moments of life. In fact, the two dramatic works that Miłosz references in the poem, the tragic Antigone and the comic As You Like It, already contain the two options in the figures of Antigone and Jaques. The juxtaposition of the madness of mourning and the “gladness of action,” tragedy and comedy as the two sides to the same event, displays the full spectrum of witnessing through literature. The poet further juxtaposes fleeting joys and lasting sorrows with the use of the tonic verse. Only two verses stray away from the three-stressed rhythm in Polish; one in the beginning, “Płaczką żałobną,” “A ritual mourner,” and the other at the end, in Polish separated from other lines, “Pieśni, uczt,” “singing, feasts.” It’s madness to live without joy And to repeat to the dead Whose part was to be gladness Of action in thought and in the flesh, singing, feasts, Only the two salvaged words: Truth and justice.

This kind of poetic reluctance in the face of atrocity is foundational to Miłosz’s poetry. Poetic reluctance, says Miłosz in the essay “A Poet Between East and West,” is immoral but necessary in order to aesthetically engage the reader in the process of witnessing fleeting life, not the lasting death. So as to transfer the gist of the events, the poet must compromise between atrocity and beauty, participation and reflection, truth and justice. By elaborating the ambivalent situation of

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the witnessing poet, Miłosz removes himself from the nationalist Polish matrix, as well as from the future expectations of American critics. Instead, Miłosz formulates a prophecy worthy of the poet-philosopher that he wanted to be: that new Polish culture will concentrate on the joyous transience painted on the grey background of wars and killings.37

6 The Gnostic Bard Miłosz’s understanding of Polish Romanticism and his trouble with the nationalist matrix would not be complete without considering the influence of Catholicism. Miłosz always considered himself a Catholic writer; although, a non-dogmatic or even heretical one, who frequently takes from Manicheic ideas and Gnostic tradition (different from Gnostic witnessing of the Puritans). The Catholic Church provides a link for Poles internally and externally (migrants), but it is also related to power structures and politics as part of the state. Thus, if a poet thinks about himself as a bard and a prophet, he almost naturally has to deal with the Catholic Church. Within the territory of organized religion, held by the church, a bard-prophet needs to come up with a secularized version of what the church offers. This was why, for instance, William Blake was considered an enemy by the Church of England. In an effort to disperse faith outside of the church, the prophet looks for old traditions claiming a spirituality discarded by systematic religions, such as Gnosticism. Because it was unsuccessful and declared heretical, Gnosticism is of great interest to the poet as prophet, who wants to address the field dominated by the church using a language of his own. The poets use the spiritual material to address the field taken by the church, but do not immerse themselves completely in the discarded undercurrents. Blake’s praise of the Devil highlights the need for a deeper understanding of life’s oppositional and spiritual qualities, and does not necessarily immediately place him among the followers of Satan. In the same vein, Miłosz maneuvered between the mainstream dogmas of the Catholic Church, and what he saw as the commonsense of the Enlightenment, and the esotericism of New Age movements. Miłosz used the content of all three to steer away from the ready-made ideas of Western societies as organized in both political and religious terms. He recognized the amazing force of the Polish tradition and forged it into a tool for subversive thinking. The choice of Gnosticism comes from Miłosz’s rejection of nationalist bardism and his development of a modern prophetic role. He needed Gnosticism to undermine the obvious and say: we are all victims and perpetrators; we are neither animals nor angels; the oppositions within us remain forever.

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Shared Responsibility for the Camps All this does not mean that Polish readers agreed with Miłosz’s perspectivist understanding of religion or the way he applied it to reveal that we all share in the responsibility for the genocide of the Jewish people. In the 1980s, “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” possibly due to the individuality of vision or the somatic qualities of its perspective, became the center of Polish debate about the shared responsibility for the camps. This poem exerted influence on Polish culture and society incomparable to any other of Miłosz’s poems. The dispute began with a Catholic reflection offered by Jan Błoński (1931–2009), a professor of Polish literature from Kraków, on the possibility of redemption for the sin of neglect and passivity during the war. Debated right after the Nobel Prize, Błoński’s text helped Miłosz reach his broadest audience ever and resulted in discussions spanning the globe:  they appeared in newspapers, in essays, and in academic articles. Moreover, in contrast with “You Who Wronged” engraved under the Three Crosses in Gdańsk, “A Poor Poet Looks at the Ghetto” underlines Miłosz’s political-religious sensibility of a modern prophet. The poem presents a disaster, which made the interpreters call for a change of perspective and a revaluation of communal ideas. By engaging and eventually changing the local Polish community, Miłosz achieved a global resonance with his prophetic ambitions, spreading his ideas farther than ever. By way of political debate, the prophetic element of the text is revealed to originate in the bardic needs of a community and, thus, was presented as the good carried from local Polish culture to the level of world literature and global culture. The Błoński controversy introduced a moment in time, in which the political and the religious dimensions came together. The global resonance of Miłosz’s poem reveals his enduring goal of raising controversy over affairs silenced by a broad consensus. In this case, the matter was who is the oppressor, who the bystander, who the perpetrator, and why the roles interchange. At present, we know that those notions are very much blurred, but the debate in the 1980s was one of the reasons we have acquired this understanding. Miłosz himself always wanted more controversy than agreement, was always willing to be unpopular, to put his finger into the wound and to see what happens, to bring the wrongdoings of a community into the open, and to point out the nakedness of the emperor. He wanted to be present in the literary field at home and popular among readers. The controversy begins with Błoński’s broadly debated article published in the Cracow-based weekly Tygodnik Powszechny on the 11th of January 1987, “Biedni Polacy patrzą na getto” (“The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto”), in which the

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author meditates on the last three stanzas of the poem “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto.” Błoński’s article first enraged and ultimately thoroughly changed the social self-perception of Poles. The text appears to be a literary analysis, but it is not. Instead, it is a social critique stemming from Miłosz’s writing. However, the poems analyzed are not just decorative. In his controversial article, Błoński seeks a way out of the historians’ detailed and repetitive discussions on the extermination of the Jewish people. Błoński recounts that, for a long time, Polish scholars disagreed with the idea of Polish anti-semitic violence during the Second World War, by saying that Poles were also victims. Błoński undermines the issue by analyzing Miłosz’s poetry and appealing to emotions founded on Christianity rather than the reason of the historians. Błoński argues that the patriarch-mole symbolizes the unconscious moral guilt of shared responsibility: This mole burrows underground but also underneath our consciousness. This is the feeling of guilt which we do not want to admit. Buried under the rubble, among the bodies of the Jews, the “uncircumcised” fears that he may be counted among the murderers…. [The poem] makes tangible something which is not fully comprehended, something that was, and perhaps still is, in other people’s as much as in the poet’s own psyche, but in an obscure, blurred, muffled shape. When we read such a poem, we understand ourselves better, since that which had been evading us until now is made palpable.1

The neighbors who live many hundred years side by side with us are being slaughtered, and we do nothing; the conclusion is visible in Miłosz’s text as early as 1943. It is amazing that this issue waited forty years to fully come to light. Błoński’s central point was very revolutionary in his time, although he introduced his thought subtly, to reach the greatest of doubters, by calling the matter współodpowiedzialność, “shared responsibility.” Błoński explained that Poles may not be responsible for the murder, but they do share the responsibility of moral sluggishness in the midst of crisis. That is why the speaker in the poem will be counted “among the helpers of the dead.” Eventually, when we lost our home, and when, within that home, the invaders set to murdering Jews, did we show solidarity towards them? How many of us decided that it was none of our business? There were also those (and I leave out of account common criminals) who were secretly pleased that Hitler had solved for us “the Jewish problem.”2

Miłosz himself said a few years earlier in an interview that “[t]‌here was the ghetto, for God’s sake, and the liquidation of three million Polish Jews, a sin that cries out—on the earth, in all of Poland—to be absolved.” Despite great tactfulness, Błoński’s article was very controversial at the time of publication. Jerzy

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Turowicz (1912–1999), the chief editor of Tygodnik Powszechny, said that the reaction exceeded expectations. It was the biggest in the 42 years of his leading the paper. Many readers wrote letters protesting and arguing that, during the German occupation, Poles had been subjects of equally terrible oppression as the Jews, so they first had to save themselves. For some, the text was revelatory, while for others it was a scandal diminishing Poland in the Western eyes.3 Błoński rejects extremes of self-accusation or self-apologia so as to reflect on the issues and work out a way of thinking about them. Although he consistently uses the language of morality, Błoński is no moralizer. Still, his choice of images, and the proximity of “shared responsibility” to the sin of omission, testifies to the profoundly Christian motivation of his text and the interpretation of Miłosz’s poem. Błoński’s article employs religious language and symbolism; for instance, he talks about “spilled blood [that] demands reflection and penance” or the need for the cleansing of “Cain’s field” by remembering Abel, that is, the Jewish people.4 Błoński’s conciliatory conclusion points out that before the war Poles frequently revealed anti-Semitic attitudes but rarely engaged in physical persecution. Błoński argues it was so because God prevented them and that they “were still a little Christian.” Thanks to the popularity of Błoński’s article and the resulting discussion in the USA, his statement was undermined a decade later by new research in the matter. The essay prepared the ground for such important historical inquiries as Jan Gross’s widely debated elaborations, such as, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (2001), in which the author refers to documents revealing not subtle współodpowiedzialność for the wartime genocide but active participation of the Polish people in some of the mass murders of the Jewish community. Most recently, Irena Grudzińska Gross reassessed the controversy of Polish shared responsibility by underlining that the generations born years after the events of the camps should not feel guilty but rather concentrate on the responsibility for history and on atonement.5 Błoński created the controversy more than Miłosz himself and, by doing so he established part of Miłosz’s authorial persona as that of a man busied with sociocultural history under metaphysical perspective. Still, Miłosz’s reflection appears mature already in the moment of the event. Nevertheless, many Polish readers have interpreted “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” and its counterpart “Campo dei Fiori” exclusively as testimony and challenge, rarely as simple accusation. However, Miłosz’s take on the extermination of the getto warszawskie in many of his works presents the idea that the atrocious acts behind the Ghetto’s wall happen not just on Polish territory but rather on the European continent; that is, they accuse all the bystanders, all men and women of the Western world.

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Through inaction, they allowed murderous xenophobic impulses to proliferate and come to fruition.6

The Evil of the Gnostic World Many Polish readers of Miłosz often omitted the issues of responsibility and guilt to seek in his works, instead, a “hidden” knowledge. This inclination comes from Miłosz’s unsystematic returns to premodern Gnostic inspirations. They stem from Miłosz’s early pursuits of hermetic inspiration under the patronage of his uncle, Oscar Vladislas Milosz. Oscar Vladislas Milosz (1877–1939) was a distant relative to Czesław Miłosz and a Parisian post-symbolist poet. OVM, as Czesław Miłosz calls him, emerges with full force in Miłosz’s writings at the end of the seventies, even though OVM was important to the Polish writer from the beginning. When presenting his uncle, Miłosz compares his influence to a treasure buried in a field, with which the lucky discoverer could make little practical use. Miłosz declares having read his uncle’s poetry for the first time at the age of thirteen. OVM’s books Ars Magna and Les Arcanes were especially important to the twenty years old Miłosz, as the poet states that “without exaggeration, [they] decided my intellectual career.” Miłosz visited OVM personally in Paris 1931 and 1934, and later translated some of his works to English and Polish. Still, even though OVM figures as patron to the most interesting theses of The Witness of Poetry, Miłosz denies ever thinking of him as his poetic master or role model; a feint typical for Miłosz’s oscillating thought.7 However, OVM’s inspiration is the reason behind Miłosz’s recurring returns to the idea of “the passionate pursuit of the Real” in poetry; in which “the Real” means the invisible and the non-scientific. In an interview, Miłosz explicitly declares that he equates “the Real” with divinity. Miłosz claimed to follow “the Real” in his Nobel Lecture and The Witness of Poetry. He mentions the idea clearly also in his personal anthology of world poetry, A Book of Luminous Things (1996), the title of which stems from the Gnostic tradition. This mixing of reality and gnosis as “the Real,” that is, the visible and the invisible, comes from his interest in the non-dogmatic religiosity.8 Miłosz encountered the concept of gnosis early on, during high school, where he had to read the handbook to the history of the Catholic Church, Historia Kościoła Katolickiego w zarysie, by the priest Roman Archutowski (1882–1943). The way that religious minorities were presented as evil or impure in mainstream discourse raised Miłosz’s interest. The introduction given to Christian heresies in Archutowski’s handbook presents them as irrational and evil working against

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the purity of Church beliefs. Archutowski separates what he considers good gnosis from false gnosis, where the latter is a hybrid of different ideas, linking the Eastern and Greek thought with Christianity without due consideration. Furthermore, Archutowski presents Manicheism as coming from this same vein and encompassing only the radicals, “strict ascetics or licentious debauchers.”9 Gnostic ideas attracted Miłosz not only because of his resistance to Catholic education but also because of his reflections on Darwinism. As he himself put it, “as a boy I was initiated into Nature’s recklessness,” which he learned from a book by the Polish zoologist Józef Nusbaum-Hilarowicz (1859–1917). “Nor was my early fascination with the Manichean heresy merely incidental,” Miłosz added. His individual experience of existence found adequate articulation in Gnostic categories, shaping his thoughts and sensibility to form what Miłosz called his “Manichean temperament.”10 Miłosz developed his interest in the non-doctrinal Christianity through the lecture of magisterial work of a German philosopher Hans Jonas (1903– 1993)—The Gnostic Religion. Jonas explains that Gnosticism comes from gnosis understood as knowledge of God as “the means for the attainment of salvation.” There were Jewish, Hellenic, Iranian, and Babylonian versions of Gnosticism. In the Gnostic context, “knowledge” is extra-rational and non-visual; it differs greatly from the rational ways of philosophy. Gnostic knowledge differs considerably from the Greek tradition of theoria, science, and the scientific method. Nevertheless, higher forms of Gnosticism introduced rationalizing speculation that remained in all religious thought. Revelation as the “reception of the truth” is the most significant way of attaining gnosis, either through learning “the secret and sacred lore” or through “illumination.” The ultimate object of gnosis is God, which allows the “knower” to take part in divine existence.11 In Gnosticism, the evil material world is opposed to the good and transmundane God, while man is a prisoner in the evil cosmos created by the demiurge, a weaker planetary god. The cosmic powers are thus perceived by Gnostics with revulsion along with their own bodies and souls, also created by the demiurge. Only the spirit, pneuma or “spark,” holds a fragment of the true God, fallen to the world. The “knowledge” in gnosis conveys this story and its subtleties; only through this knowledge can liberation from the cosmic forces be achieved. As a consequence, Gnosticism develops a distinct morality, in which those “in the know” are hostile to the world and condemn all mundane relations. From this point, gnostics derived two contrary conclusions that find their archetypes in the figures of the ascetic and the libertine. The ascetic avoids more corruption by the worldly things, whereas the libertine interprets the situation as a guarantee of absolute freedom of action, for this also works against the evil

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cosmic forces. In this way, the latter reveals the “nihilistic element contained in gnostic acosmism.” For Jonas, Gnosticism is myth-centered and operates with the imagery and personification, which, of course, lend themselves perfectly to the work of a writer. Indeed, Miłosz positions his speaker frequently in the situation of choice between the corporal and the intellectual.12

Manichean Duality In an interview, Miłosz said that his interests in gnosis even led him to teach a course about Manicheism at Berkeley, based on the book by Jonas. Most of Miłosz’s readers wonder why such dualist thought would be interesting to a writer always stressing perspectivism and the subtlety of things. However, his interest in dualist systems reveals rather his understanding that many issues may not be contemplated in separation. Most importantly, throughout his poems, Miłosz relies on linking religious meditation with sociopolitical events. To better understand the poems in which Miłosz presents two struggling sides, one has to be aware of the paradoxes of the Manichean faith. Manicheism was a religious system amalgamated from early Christian gnosis and pagan elements in the third century by Iranian thinker, Mani (c.216– 274). Jonas emphasizes that Mani’s system gained considerable strength and, although it crumbled, should be counted among the most important of religions. Moreover, for some time, Manicheism competed with the Christian Church. Mani established the religion with a syncretistic method, fusing Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and Christian elements with the Gnostic core, which Jonas calls “the most important product of Gnosticism.” This system reappeared in several sects of medieval Christianity, which was of great interest to Miłosz.13 The Manicheic system itself was dualist and described the world as the scene of struggle between the forces of darkness and light; led by two equally powerful divinities. In contrast to the Gnostic mythology that presents the world as a creation of beings lower than the one God, Mani’s system presents the world as the site of struggle between two equally powerful, coeternal divinities, good and evil, the “King of Light” and the “King of Darkness.” The latter rules the material world; Mani refers to him with the Greek term hyle, the personification of “matter,” but in other translated texts it appears also as the Devil, surrounded by the five Aeons: Smoke, Fire, Wind, Water, Darkness. The good principle, called the “Father of Greatness,” signifies the qualities of reason; his five extensions are called “Intelligence, Knowledge, Thought, Deliberation, Resolution.” Most strikingly, in contrast to the Christian imaginary, Light is self-sufficient and fulfills its nature without the need to enlighten Darkness,

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satisfied with the separation. However, Darkness is driven by hate, greed, and envy, incited by the perception of Light, which motivates it to aggression not due to inherent malice but out of “desire for the better.” The attack makes Light create the world and people, binding them as subjects to the eternal struggle between the two divinities.14

The Reworking of the Gnostic Thought Whenever reflecting on Gnosticism or Manicheism, Miłosz retained his distance. Nota bene, a distance, which Miłosz felt was often misinterpreted by the critics. To counter such misreadings, Miłosz supplied the 1999 Polish edition of The Land of Ulro with a telling introduction that conveys the clear explanation of his perspectivist style: “I identified with the thought I currently described.”15 On a more general level, Czesław Miłosz critically addressed the matter before in the Native Realm, where he explained that Oscar Milosz has already given a general prediction based on the thought of William Blake. Oscar Milosz prophesied the coming of “a second renaissance of imagination” which will move science in a direction closer to poetry.16 When reflecting on the sources of modern maladies, Czesław Miłosz frequently turns to Blake, who thought the dominance of systematic thinking is evil. William Blake (1757–1827) was an English poet, thinker, and illustrator, who engaged in esoteric speculation. Because he was critical of reason as the metaphysical principle of modernity, Blake argued instead for a universe made up of forces of light and darkness. Blake concerned himself with the productive clash of different forces, which allowed for a multitude of perspectives and heterogeneity of symbols. He used Gnostic and esoteric elements not because he was a Gnostic, but to create a choice of worldviews. In Miłosz’s interpretation, Blake wrote “[a]‌gainst Nature” and was in fact “a person of pronounced Manichean tendencies.”17 Miłosz is particularly fascinated with Blake’s idea of imagination as a force that connects different traditions. Blake proposed the “four-fold vision,” which meant equal appreciation of the perspectives created not only by science and religion but also by imagination and the corporal. As the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (1912–1991) formulates it in his authoritative book Fearful Symmetry, Blake reinterprets the biblical myth of the Fall by declaring that “all reality is mental” and the decline of the mind spoils the physical world; that is, “the fall of man involved a fall in part of the divine nature.” To properly understand his symbolism, one should remember that, for Blake, the Fall of man and the forming of the material world are one event.18

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In a monotype from 1795, entitled Newton, Blake depicted his disdain for the one-dimensionality of scientific materialism, in opposition to his spiritual vision that offered a diversity of perspectives of the “four-fold vision” (reason, imagination, spirit, body). The picture presents a naked man sitting on a rock covered with sea flora, suggesting that the scene takes place underwater. He bends unnaturally and reaches down to a scroll on the ground, on which he draws a triangle and half-circle with a pair of compasses held in his left hand. His right hand presses the sheet and points the positioning of lines. The character seems to be part of the stone while the parchment appears to flow out of his head. The compasses are the symbolic measuring tools and, together with the drawings, they point to the ordering inclinations of scientific inquiry. Blake opposed the Enlightenment and considered the thought of, among others, the English physicist Isaac Newton (1642–1727) as the key source of its sterility. Blake thought Newton’s theory of optics speaks only of mundane vision related to the “Mental Gift.” But Blake rejected the deistic image of God as a watchmaker and foregrounded his personal religious experience of everyday encounters with the divine. Miłosz’s important The Land of Ulro takes its title from Blake’s long poem The Four Zoas (1797–1807). There, Ulro is the lowest of the four states of existence, “Where the Dead wail Night & Day”. Ulro is the material world bound to egoism and ruled by Urizen, the “prince of Light,” who favors rationalism, the suppression of desire, and the petrification of “all the Human Imagination.” Miłosz describes Ulro as the “realm of spiritual pain” where a man “is reduced to a supererogatory number.” Ulro is a sad country inhabited by the spiritually lame, which is how Blake perceived scientists, the followers of the British physicist Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and most philosophers and artists. Miłosz makes Blake’s land of Ulro into an emblem of modernity’s existential crisis, in which one is “enslaved” to the ego. Such “demon ego” promotes the subjective and makes existence into a lethargy, a hallucination, or a nightmare, which then prevents the individual noticing the eternal perspective from within the order of nature. For Miłosz, Blake is the guardian of the last strongholds of religious imagination.19 After Blake, Miłosz promotes things contrasting but not negating each other, especially in The Land of Ulro. Critics underline Miłosz’s use of the Blakean idea of retaining contradictions without the elimination of either side, which is, in truth, an ethical approach which allows the independence of all worldviews. Furthermore, Miłosz developed Blake’s understanding of imagination as a nonconfessional act of faith and defense against modernity. This modernity is the perception of reality as externally controlled by an oppressively instigated system of laws and obligations, which Miłosz calls the “age of decline.”20

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Partly by way of Blakean inspiration, eschatological reflection and somatic imaging are widely present in Miłosz’s thought. Accordingly, Miłosz suggests in an interview that The Issa Valley has a secret Manichean key available to the initiated and calls the novel “a theological treatise in disguise.” In turn, The Land of Ulro may be Miłosz’s most religious reflection on his place in the world, frequently deciphered by his critics within an esoteric code, but the persona of a Gnostic bard that they would likely apply to Miłosz is but a fragment of his ambitions. In his literary journal from the 1980s, A Year of the Hunter, Miłosz remarks with considerable irony that The Land of Ulro has been misread: “oratio obliqua was received as oratio recta…. My goal was to make a diagnosis, not to deliver a sermon, but people wanted to take literally the leapings of my dialectical mind. One order of beefsteak, please.”21

Polish “Metaphysical” Miłosz Miłosz does not expect anyone to need his “ideas on esoterica.” In fact, in the introduction to the English translation of The Land of Ulro, Miłosz directly states that “out of personal whim” he planned the book for only a few Polish readers. Both in Poland and in America, Miłosz wants to draw a compact circle of “initiated” readers. Despite, or, because of the restrictions, The Land of Ulro became the core text for Miłosz’s Polish readers and led the majority of scholars to concentrate on the issues of theology, theodicy, and epiphany. The Polish need to describe Miłosz’s work in the “metaphysical” vein overshadows other ideas.22 “Metaphysical” reflections in Miłosz’s writings gain prominence over political themes in his late works. However, with time, Miłosz began to be more explicit about Gnostic inspirations. The most complex poetic elaboration of his interest in “metaphysics” is displayed in his long poem Treatise on Theology, published as part of the volume Second Space in 2002. Apocryphal readings, Gnostic imagery, and Catholic dogmas combine and proliferate in this treatise, and the speaker projects the persona of a Gnostic bard. By way of localizing his experience in particular language (Polish) and in childhood region (Lithuania), Miłosz seeks the best position to prophesy globally about the condition of the modern man. Following Miłosz’s thought through all twenty-three parts of Treatise on Theology reveals not only a religious ambivalence but also his elementary understanding of “theology” and his distance from doctrinal Catholicism. In short, the text is an expression of disappointment with theological systemizations.23 Miłosz’s predilection for Manicheic thought entails the question about the sources of evil. Reflection on the sources of evil, especially in the context of the Christian God, is called “theodicy.” Theodicy is the vindication of the Creator

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for the existence of evil. For instance, the ubiquity of pain may question God’s omnipotence. In the recently translated study Miłosz and the Problem of Evil (2015), Cracow-based scholar Łukasz Tischner tackles the issues of theodicy in Miłosz’s oeuvre. Although there was no such book in American scholarship before, its contents testify to the perspective on Miłosz prevalent among many Polish scholars. Tischner explains that Miłosz typically presents evil either as acts or as experiences. The former, called “moral evil,” comes from free individual action, where the active party bears the responsibility. Moral evil, in Miłosz’s religious elaborations, means sin. The latter, called “natural evil,” is physical pain suffered by people often without fault and only as part of their humanity, although, natural evil is the one that informs Miłosz’s doubt about God’s benevolent disposition. Miłosz considers natural evil as stemming from the discrepancy between the Christian and the scientific view of the natural order. The former has nature to be controlled by a benevolent God while the latter has nature to be ruled by the strongest species. Thoughts on the sources of both natural and moral evil lead Miłosz to mention its Christian personification, the devil, construed in Manicheism as God’s equal enemy.24

“Campo Dei Fiori” A perfect example of Miłosz’s ambivalent approach to his persona of a Gnostic bard is the poem which deals with the same historical event as “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” namely, “Campo dei Fiori.” Certain elements particular to the Polish version heighten the latter’s religious and also, as a consequence, its political meaning. “Campo dei Fiori” aptly demonstrates how “metaphysics” and politics intersect in Miłosz’s poetry, and how American and Polish perspectives supplement each other. “Campo dei Fiori” is formally more organized than its companion piece, “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto.” While the latter builds opposition between the destroyed Ghetto and the underground, in the former there is a triad victimoppressor-bystanders (without the explicit presence of oppressors in the Warsaw scene) mirrored in the past and present events. “Campo dei Fiori” comes from the same volume Rescue, but not the cycle “Voices of Poor People.” In the poem, Miłosz compares the destruction of the getto warszawskie to the burning of the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno in the Roman square in the year 1600. The burning of Bruno at the stake is usually regarded as the event marking the end of the Middle Ages, as a period characterized by the domination of the Roman Catholic Church. Bruno, himself a Dominican friar, was sentenced

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in a seven-year trial by the Dominican brothers in charge of the Inquisition for the propagation of heretical views. Contrary to the Ptolemaic geocentric system, still espoused by both the Catholic and Reformatory Churches of the time, and in opposition to the fairly new heliocentric theory (1543), by the Polish astronomer Mikołaj Kopernik (1473–1543), Bruno proposed that the universe is infinite and the worlds multiple.25 “Campo dei Fiori” comprises eight stanzas, eight verses each, in the Polish original with a regular length of eight syllables. The poem rarely diverges to seven or nine syllables, which, however, does not signify a breach of form. The rhythm appears syllabic at first, but it is actually a tonic verse with three stressed positions per line. The poem is melodic while its consequent interchange of intonation adds to the interpretation. Those elements suggest an almost classical balance by means of structural symmetry, clear comparisons, grand style, and the explicit consideration of a possible moral. The translation retains the poem’s changing but peaceful rhythm, with but one enjambment, and the speaker’s steady voice presents the situation in a detached manner. The rich imagery and restricted diction clash with the atrocities described. The balance and detachment suggest that the speaker comes from a radically humanist position. That is why the central theme of the poem is the question of dignity in the loneliness of a dying individual, separated from the community.26 “Campo dei Fiori” is also a statement about history, continuing uninterrupted by tragic events. In the history of Western literature, it is one of the few texts to register the First Warsaw Uprising written from outside of the Ghetto, as it happened (19.04.–16.05.1943). The poem testifies to the fact that the Uprising was also a Polish experience. Miłosz himself calls the poem “an act of moral witness.” Most of the testimonies about the Uprising come from the inhabitants of the Ghetto. Therefore, instead of excluding the event as something extraordinary, Miłosz’s poem inscribes the Uprising and the extermination of the Jewish community within the history of Poland, Europe, and the world. In fact, in an effort to universalize the matter, Miłosz devotes only three out of eight stanzas to the Ghetto.27 The first two stanzas allow for the reading of two lines per breath, in a rise and fall intonation, offering a soothing rhythm, suggesting the orderly everyday. So as to introduce the surroundings, in which Giordano Bruno was burned, the speaker first presents the imagined everyday of the famous Roman piazza four hundred years ago. The market is blooming with commerce, and the stalls are heavy with copious foods as if in a still life painting by the Dutch painters of the time; a moment captured out of fleeting time.

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Bruno’s death occurred during the flourishing Renaissance and the inception of humanism. Only in a second reading does the reader become aware that the opening verses already indicate the oncoming events. The ambivalent adjectives “splattered” and “wreckage” foreshadow the shedding of the “rose-pink” blood, while the “dark” fruits “heaped” on the white “peach-down” introduce the contrasting of events in an ominous aura. The abundance of life contrasts with the singleness of Bruno’s individuality, just as his philosophy contrasted with the dominant medieval worldview.28 In Rome on the Campo dei 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.29

The intonation in the second stanza remains peaceful. Bruno’s execution is inscribed within the intonation, within the everyday, as if it was just one of many typical events. Bruno’s execution is presented as swift and ritualistic. The piazza quickly recovers its everyday shape after the disruption. The shoulders of vendors are heavy with “olives and lemons” instead of being “heavy with guilt,” marking their indifference to the tragic events nearby and their unawareness of the loss of a great mind. Miłosz seems to remark that disruptive changes in the history of civilization often appear insignificant so that they can only be registered in hindsight. But, above all, the speaker suggests that—for the brief moment of the execution—the “vendors” turn into “the mob.” While the vendors briefly change into the mob and then step back to the genre of painting as it were, questions remain: Who or what turns them into the mob? Why and how do they change so easily? What makes these nice everyday market people into a single mass of onlookers, watching the execution? Is the capacity to be the mob always there or is it motivated by outside influence? Is it curiosity, enjoyment, sheer cruelty, or a mixture of all three? Driven by their curiosity, the onlookers are “close-pressed” and packed into a single entity. Everyone present on the square observes the killing and through their concentration on the spectacle, they become one. Bruno’s individuality contrasts with the crowd and symbolizes the fates of singular ideas in the hands of the resistant majority. The ritual is brutal and reveals the aggression and animality always latent within the community. The public finds and recognizes itself united and in the right through the exclusion and abandonment of Bruno—now

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the outsider. The simile suggests that the Jews of Warsaw die due to analogously ritualistic exclusion and separation from the Polish community, although, for many years they were part of it and its culture. The Jews are not allowed to belong, assumedly for the safety of the majority. Miłosz never mentions anything about the crowd apart from the suggestion of its “close-pressed” unity. The verse in Polish has another meaning. “W kole ciekawej gawiedzi” means that the pyre was lit “in a circle of the curious mob,” which also suggests an image of unity and completion, of closing the ranks of the onlookers. There is, however, no notion of the lack of space in Polish, and the line explicitly underscores curiosity. Still, in both versions the speaker focuses on other elements. The taverns were full even before the pyre stopped burning, probably already when Bruno’s screams ended; or, maybe when the stench of his burned flesh filled the air and the disgust dispersed them. Miłosz concentrates on the visual and aural reception of the violence. He imagines Bruno’s execution and likens it to his own experiences. 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.

Pastime and Horror The third and fourth stanzas of “Campo dei Fiori” compare the Renaissance events to the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto as witnessed by Miłosz. The intonation changes, rising for three lines as if gathering tension only to release in the falling fourth. The speaker holds his breath and suspends the rhythm of the everyday. The images of play, pastime, and happiness, or even love and sexuality, starkly contrast with those of death and destruction, only suggested here. The lovers fly “high” just as the remnants of the Ghetto “drift” in the air in the form of “dark kites”: children’s toys with an ominous twist; ambivalent symbols of freedom and tragedy. They appear harmless at first glance but testify to brutal deaths and pinpoint the unawareness of the playful crowd. The remnants of burnt bodies flying in the wind are mistaken by the riders for “petals,” as if coming from some black flowers, which reference the mythical asphodels, flowers blooming on the fields of the Greek afterworld Hades. This allusion is an

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enriching addition to the original, where the “petals” are but “skrawki,” “scraps.” The hot wind produced by the destruction of the Ghetto blows open “the skirts of the girls” in an image, which appears lustful—only at first—before its horror dawns upon the reader. The crowd outside the Ghetto is indifferent to whatever happens inside the excluded district. The “carnival tune” drowns the sounds of gunfire from the district and the enjambment of the phrase “drowned the salvos” brings forth the brutality of the verb “to drown (someone)” lacking in the original “głuszyła,” “to overwhelm as to render inaudible.” The speaker compares the cheerful crowd outside getto warszawskie to the curious mob observing Bruno’s execution. The opposition of the suffering individuals and the cheerful crowd in the Warsaw of 1943 mirrors that of the Rome of 1600. The historical context and the structure of the poem together equate the death of Bruno with the deaths of the Jews. Miłosz meditates on the inaction, the lack of responsibility and compassion among the crowds. He concentrates on making the reader see and become aware of situations, in which passive onlookers share in the responsibility and guilt for atrocities enacted by the perpetrators.30 I thought of the Campo dei Fiori in Warsaw by the sky-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 midair. That same hot wind blew open the skirts of the girls and the crowds were laughing on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

The “sky-carousel” is not a metaphor but an actual object. It stood in reality before the Ghetto wall on that day and is the most vivid element that Miłosz brings into his poem as a testimony to the events. Miłosz personally saw the situation described on the 25th of April 1943. Six days earlier, the remaining Jews in the Ghetto began an uprising in opposition to the transportation of the population to the Treblinka camp. The 25th of April was Easter Sunday.

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Miłosz adds a note to each of his poems with the year and place of the writing. “Warsaw, 1943” says the English version while the Polish is more precise “Warszawa - Wielkanoc. 1943;” which reads, “Warsaw–Easter Sunday. 1943.” Clearly, there is a religious meaning involved here that Miłosz reserved for his Polish Catholic readers and hid from the predominantly Protestant English speakers. Easter is the oldest feast in Christianity and is a commemoration of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The Romans publicly crucified Jesus on Mount Golgotha in Jerusalem and he was to come back to life three days later, giving promise of the coming Judgment of all people and the salvation of the faithful. Christians believe that Jesus gave his life to redeem all people from Original Sin, so that in the afterlife they may live in Heaven. For Catholics, the resurrection of Christ is the most important of the Easter celebrations, as the act giving hope for individual resurrection, while for most Protestants the more important is the day of his sacrifice on the cross, Good Friday. The Puritans distance themselves from celebrating Easter because the tradition is not documented in the Bible but a later development. This fact sheds some light on Miłosz’s choice not to include the full note in the translation. Aside from the note in the original, Miłosz does not reflect on the religious significance of the date. The day was meaningful for the Christian inhabitants of Warsaw, who were out celebrating despite the German occupation and the Ghetto fights, but the poem itself leaves out the issue of religion. Miłosz refers to it only in the frame because he does not want to concentrate on the resurrection or eternal life—but on the “rituality” of the killing of an outsider. Moreover, mentioning the time in the main text would focus readers’ attention on the Christian perpetrators instead of the Jewish victims. Even though Miłosz does not highlight the fact in the poem, it is important to remember that the crucifixion of Christ was a historical mainspring of antiSemitism. The Christians accused the Jews of killing their God, overlooking the facts that Jesus himself was Jewish, and that the Romans killed him. Miłosz admitted in a later interview that the poem touches on the problem of antiSemitism, however only slightly, “z ukosa.” Much rather, the text praises the dignity of a lonely death. The story of Jesus would fit the role perfectly:  He was cast out by his community, persecuted for his beliefs, and died alone. Instead of Christ, Miłosz chooses Bruno for the simile because the figure of Jesus would bring about a whole set of symbols occluding the poem. Bruno stands out from the Christian majority just as the Jewish community does, by way of divergent beliefs, whereas Christ symbolizes the point of origin for all Christians, even if, in his time, Jesus was an isolated figure.31

Karuzela

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Karuzela Ever since the poem’s publication until today, the “sky-carousel” has been the object of much controversy in Poland, because it implies the insensitivity and inaction of most Poles at the destruction of the Ghetto. Miłosz did not read the poem in the USA because the American public interpreted it as accusing the Poles, which may have been one more reason for him to drop the information about Easter from the frame. However, just a few years later, in 1952, Miłosz described the situation in a very similar way in his novel prepared for French readers, The Seizure of Power. In the novel, the old Polish women voice the only worry they have: “They’re burning the Jews now. It will be our turn next.”32 The subject was always debated, and Miłosz returned to it even a year before his death, to answer voices of contradiction in an article “Karuzela,” published in 2003 in the weekly Tygodnik Powszechny. Miłosz wrote the article against a piece from the daily Rzeczpospolita, by the renowned poet and scholar Ryszard Matuszewski. Matuszewski, while praising Miłosz’s poetry, remembered visiting the site frequently during the war and the machine standing in the same place, but never functioning. In his article, Miłosz shares details about the existence of the playful gathering during Easter Sunday and the sky-carousel active on Plac Krasińskich. The specifics include comments coming from the crowd about what is taking place on the other side of the wall, such as the blunt remark, “Oh, he fell.” To support his argument, Miłosz quotes Natan Gross’s testimony for an Israeli newspaper, in which the latter mentions that the Ghetto Uprising served as additional entertainment for the crowd playing around and on the machine. Only after the presentation of this information does Miłosz, unlike Gross, deny his interest in laying blame on the crowds. However, the positioning of this declaration after the compromising details, again, proves ambivalent. In the article, Miłosz attempts to move the debate away from the sky-carousel to the fact of the playful crowd and the exceptional situation of Easter games on and around the machine: The poem is an example of how dangerous faithfulness is to facts because the fact itself sometimes looks like an invention of imagination and thanks to that gains great impact. I had no intention aimed against the playing crowd…. I wanted to juxtapose the community with individual tragedy, to present the loneliness of the dying…. Is this event not important for lawyers, who frequently grapple with differentiating between the probable and the exceptional; and is it not good material for historical reflection on the particular event and its complicated relations with that, what is typical?33

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By pointing to the exception, though, Miłosz once again pinpoints the great problem conveyed in his poem, which is: the brutality of a community reassuring its righteousness through the sacrifice of the outsider. Apart from Matuszewski’s doubt about the usage of the machine, there were voices doubting the sheer existence of the sky-carousel, as if the issue was a “liminal fact” in Polish culture, deciding about its innocence or guilt.34 The space in which Miłosz saw the “sky-carousel” was Plac Krasińskich. This square was the site of Polish judiciary institutions during the interwar period: the Supreme Court and lower branches of jurisdiction, with the Ministry of Justice in the vicinity. If the speaker would mention the neighborhood of those institutions, issues such as the law, verdicts, innocence, guilt, and the identity of the judges would have been introduced into the poem. Wisely, Miłosz omits them completely. He does not mention the identities or group affiliation of the judges; he refers to them only by the presence of the “henchmen.” By omitting the judiciary space and the sacral time, Miłosz concentrates his text on the opposition of the spectators and the dying. There is no mention of a process leading to execution or of laws being broken, as if what is happening was an exception to the rule of law. Maybe this suggests a separation or a trespassing inscribed within the nature of human societies? While Bruno’s execution proceeded alongside Church laws, the Jews were killed outside of any law. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) argues in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Jews were first stripped of their dignity and innocence, then of ownership, citizenship, identity, and individuality. In due course, through vast propagandist efforts, no one perceived the Jewish community as part of the social group but as outsiders, not worthy to participate in their judicial system—German or Polish. By comparing the destruction of the getto warszawskie to Bruno’s execution, without any presence of the judiciary, Miłosz declares that the attack on the Ghetto was a genocidal execution outside of the law.35 The “sky-carousel,” thus, means a circle without a center, an execution without judgment, an accident without victims, a misdeed without perpetrators, and perception without witnessing. The circular shape of the machine responds to the circle of the “curious mob” gathering around Bruno’s pyre in the Polish version of the second stanza, though this time the “bystanders” are not even looking at the executed, even though the circle is still there. Thus, the circle denotes the passivity of the “bystanders,” the lack of confrontation with what is happening to their neighbors, the everyday turn of events, and even the jocular other of every tragedy. The circle of the modern community removes the executed not only from their group but also from participation in the collective rights and the

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annals of history. Finally, the circle reminds us about the repeatability of history; that humanity, apparently, learns very little from its past misdeeds.

Dramatis Personae Even though “Campo dei Fiori” intentionally omits issues of religion and law, its choice of actors builds a comparison based on belief and witnessing; it entails a whole set of parallels. The Jews in the Ghetto are each like Bruno at the stake, the happy couples on the machine are the vendors turned into a mob, the omitted Germans are the Dominican henchmen. In the case of Bruno, all the participants may be recognized as Italians: the victim, the observers, the executors, the invisible judges. Whereas, in the case of the Warsaw Jews, the victims belong to Polish culture, language, and state, as well as to Jewish culture, religion, and, mostly, the Yiddish language. Furthermore, the observers are their neighbors, the Polish Christians. (Interestingly enough, these issues are too rarely considered in terms of Jewish and Christian Poles). The real but unmentioned perpetrators are the German occupants. Their telling absence from the poem complicates the sky-carousel controversy and appears to point the finger at the playful Poles. The Poles are like the Roman mob. They either actively deny noticing the atrocities nearby or passively agree with the situation, the separation from their Jewish neighbors introduced by the Ghetto wall. Miłosz stresses that Polish passivity and physical separation do not exclude them from the simile. That is, although the Easter games underline insensitivity and neglect of neighbors, the Polish rejection of observation— through active ignorance and passive acceptance—is doubly shameful. The inability, or even refusal, to observe the killing does not absolve one from the guilt of inaction. This fact undermines the division between perpetrators, bystanders, and victims. Hence, “Campo dei Fiori” asks not who is good and who evil, but where in this world is good and where evil? If we are unaware of many situations when we perpetrate a crime against others or pass by unaware of a murder, how are we to remain blameless? The questions allude to the Manicheic disagreement with the order of nature and the world as the battlefield of opposing forces of rational light and materialist darkness. Miłosz usually seeks answers in Christian anthropocentrism, understood as the antidote to the dehumanizing power of reason and a connection between the animal and the mind. However, the lyrical effects of Miłosz’s reflections go far beyond his philosophical disposition. That is, because of its internal complications, Miłosz’s poetry inspires debates exceeding its aesthetic or “metaphysical” scope and stirs controversy within the political and social dimensions.

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This way, the persona of a Gnostic bard, so eagerly applied to him by the Polish readers, is to a considerable extent a side-effect of his moral-aesthetic inclinations.

Heresy, Faith, and Science The widespread understanding of Bruno’s death is that it was a murder of, in the words of Bożena Shallcross, a “philosopher and astronomer who believed in the infinity of the universe and the multiplicity of worlds.” Bruno was to refuse rejecting his cosmological ideas which contradicted the Church teachings. His death is typically posed as the martyrdom of liberal thought by the hands of medieval irrationality. However, in truth, Miłosz is not very much concerned in “Campo dei Fiori” with the “ideological struggle between rationalism and religious faith.”36 If Bruno and the henchmen signify the rational mind and irrational faith, would the Jews and the Germans then mean reason and unreason? This does not seem likely. Miłosz frequently underlined that the Nazis were anti-Christian purveyors of the power of reason and the rules of nature. Thus, if the Jews were, instead, to denote excluded beliefs, then Bruno, as the other side of the simile, signals not anti-religious belief, but those excluded from the Christian center. That is, the figures of Bruno and the Jews point, more generally, to the nondogmatic other of theological thought. Miłosz seems to suggest that to appreciate the difference of beliefs requires one to abandon the divisive approach to the rational and the irrational. In fact, dividing the rational and the irrational only reproduces the discriminatory propaganda thrown at Bruno and the Jews. Bruno was excluded on the grounds of differences of faith; his views were considered heretical. Bruno’s proposals fit nicely into some of the today’s astronomic findings and theories: the multiplicity of worlds and the infiniteness of the universe. However, the dominant points of reference in his time were the teachings of the Church and the Bible. Those offered no defense of Bruno’s ideas and upheld an image of the visible cosmos as a reflection of the invisible hierarchy of beings; an idea that worked well with geocentric theory. By comparison, Copernicus’s heliocentric ideas do not erase the expectation of the center but only take the esteemed position from the earth and give it to the sun. That is, the cosmological consequences of the Copernican revolution were much less striking to the prevalent worldview. Instead, Bruno argued that each star may be a sun—a notion calamitous to the minds of his colleagues—which suggested that God’s power and attention may be divided among places other than our solar system.

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Copernicus was also a priest but, unlike Bruno, he always remained within the Christian worldview. Bruno’s ideas countered not only the widely accepted geo- and the novel heliocentrism, but he—a respected Dominican friar—argued with the use of pagan and heretical notions. In fact, Bruno’s astronomical theories gave him posthumous fame among both the promoters of the sciences and the seekers of hermetic ideas. Most notably, the English historian Frances Yates (1899–1981) argues in her debated work Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1961) that, “Bruno pushes Copernicus’ scientific work back into a prescientific stage, back into Hermetism, interpreting the Copernican diagram as a hieroglyph of divine mysteries.” Miłosz was aware of the ambivalence of Giordano Bruno as simultaneously a martyr for science and symbol of Renaissance Neoplatonism. In the poem, Miłosz leaves a mark pointing to Bruno’s metaphysical rather than scientific predilection. The speaker says that, on his death, Bruno is “flying in the fire.” The Polish original reads, “jego odlot w pożarze,” which means “departure” or “flying off ” in a blaze. Already the English “flying” disturbs the image of a man burned at the stake and suggests an ekstasis or even ascension. By comparison with Bruno, thus, the speaker hints that, in the end, the Jewish people hold the moral higher ground over their persecutors. This fact, which is clear at present, would have been very hard to utter at the time of the events during German occupation, but that is exactly why Miłosz’s poetry is so important; it testifies to his intellectual bravery.37 Just as Bruno’s thought divided divine interest among many stars, so did the presence of the Jewish minority—in the eyes of their persecutors—divide the religious space of the society among many possible divinities. That is, both the Italian mob and the Polish neighbors are afraid of diversity of viewpoints. To that extent, Miłosz’s poem is a perfect introduction to the purpose of his poetry: to rescue the variety of perspectives. Furthermore, like Bruno, the Jews were alienated from the community of the rational. The Jewish way of life and religion were similar to Polish and German through everyday customs and traditions; but they were made dissimilar by propagandist efforts and xenophobic fears. Their exclusion from rationality points to a bigger issue, that the space of rationalism is produced socially and culturally, which opens it to misinterpretation and misuse. Yet another reason for Miłosz to engage with non-dogmatic thought.

The Recurrence of Tragedy The fact of the “sky-carousel” finds its way into the rhythmic structure of “Campo dei Fiori.” The image must have burned deep into Miłosz’s consciousness, for it

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influenced the form itself, the ups and downs of the intonation, the feeling of suspension and distance to the dreadful events, as if hanging midair by a centrifugal force. The speaker is very self-conscious, considers the lessons of the events and the comparison of Rome and Warsaw, so that he offers his own moral to the presented situation. The speaker implies that Bruno and the Jews are “martyrs.” The martyrs are also witnesses to the faith, which, in this case, should be understood more generally, as the metaphysical principle of truth. Miłosz meditates also on the martyrdom of the executed in his comparison of Warsaw to Rome. But he never explicitly develops this interpretation as it would, like with the information about Easter, bind the events within Christian discourse. The executed retain their beliefs and give final statement to the truth with their sacrifice, as if trying to persuade others that what they say is also right and good for the passive onlookers. By calling the executed “martyrs,” the speaker inscribes Bruno and each and every Jew killed in the Ghetto with individuality and significance. They are dignified by way of prophesying faith in the principle of truth against all odds. After all, Christians believe that those who die an unjust death become saints. As the speaker explains, another reading might stress the transience of all events and lives and the subsequent oblivion. This perspective suggests a radical humanist worldview, the foundation of modernity, present in the whole poem, which is the lack of metaphysical perspective, the terror of discontinuity. This worldview assumes that historical, time-bound life is the only thing available. Thus, this stanza proposes two future readings of the poem: a Christian interpretation and a humanist one. The former may belong to the onlooking Poles, the latter to modernizing Germans. Or, the former displays the Catholic Polish martyrdom, while the latter the Gnostic Puritan witnessing with life.38 Someone will read as moral that the people of Rome or Warsaw haggle, laugh, make love as they pass by the martyrs’ pyres. Someone else will read of the passing of things human, of the oblivion born before the flames have died.

However, the speaker emphasizes that he brings forth the images because they remind him of the “loneliness of the dying” and the silence of death. He remarks that the Bruno simile that came to him, had implications that he was not aware of, at first. Initially, he had not yet fully realized the consequences of

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the metaphor and, now, the speaker asks: “Is it right to think about loneliness in these circumstances? Do I not think about my own imminent death when I look at the burning Ghetto?” The loneliness of the dying implies the loss of possibility for linguistic communication and communion with others. “Campo dei Fiori” breaks the isolation of both Bruno’s death and the Jews’ death, though not their loneliness. Because death is above all an individual experience, the speaker declines describing the demise of thousands inside the Ghetto as the experience of a group. That is why he underlines the singularity of Bruno’s execution and never explicitly describes the events inside the Ghetto (which Miłosz never witnessed directly). Furthermore, the speaker points out not that Bruno wanted to speak about the situation but that he could not, as if silenced by something. The speaker says that Bruno “could not find … words” for others who live on, without doing anything to help. There are no words to describe the passive millions doing nothing against the death of a single person. But what could they do? Are we all to blame in the face of each death? This way of reasoning makes every death inhumane and inhuman. But death itself is unavoidable and one cannot do anything to prevent it. In Polish, Bruno wants to “bid farewell” to mankind, “ludzkość pożegnać,” which is a different thing; it suggests an unceasing connection between the outsider and the community, the executed and the judges, the afflicted and the onlookers. The execution of one human being among others is an image of inhumanity so terrible and traumatic that it is inconceivable “in any human tongue.” And yet “humanity” prevails in the brutal unending rhythm of the everyday, which reveals itself to be mechanistic and cruel.39 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.

In “Campo dei Fiori,” the “white starfish” sold by the merchants refers to Bruno’s belief in multiple stars of equal importance. The lack of center in the physical world was what scared all thinkers of Bruno’s time the most. In fact, the lack of any point of reference in life, be it physical or metaphysical, is what scares even modern intellectuals, who call it modernity. There are many famous works of art that one could name “elegies” for the discontents of a decentered

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modernity. One of them is Eliot’s The Waste Land, but in “Campo dei Fiori” Miłosz explicitly returns to the image of a circle, which recalls a different text by the Irish modernist poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1938). Yeats’ important poem “The Second Coming” (1919) was written right after the First World War and mourns the ending of values. Yeats’s famous verse about losing any point of reference—“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”—supplants Miłosz’s mention of a circle. It reveals Miłosz’s early awareness that modernity’s “immoral” perspectivism is the foundation that allowed the destruction of the Jewish people. 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.

When the speaker remarks the “new Campo dei Fiori,” he does not mean the Ghetto, but yet another situation that will appear due to the incessant repetition of historical events. Thus, Miłosz constructs Giordano Bruno and his death—for excluded beliefs—so that it will be the prefiguration of all exclusionary killings. Such prefiguration brings about Augustine of Hippo’s tradition of reading the Bible by way of finding the logic of typological prediction (like Jonah’s story foreshadows Christ’s passion). In Miłosz’s poem, Bruno on Campo dei Fiori is the type and the Jews in the Ghetto the superseding antitype. The framing of the events by the speaker suddenly appears to question the possibility of divine justice, redemption, salvation, and the concern about the benevolent nature of God. Will such atrocity and silence ever be healed? Is poetic remembrance the only way? Is there another method to conceive of these historical events? Can we say more than just that? Will everything just “go back to normal” after such terror? Miłosz’s poem is powerful because it does not give answers. The subtle strokes of the pen share just enough information to raise doubt, not form opinions: What do these killings signify? Where is God if such things happen? If there is one, it must be cruel because only a cruel God would let them happen. Why are we brutal and insensitive to our own kind, the mirror images of ourselves? Why do these events recur without notice? Those dying here, the lonely forgotten by the world,

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our tongue becomes for them the language of an ancient planet. Until, when all is legend and many years have passed, on a new Campo dei Fiori rage will kindle at a poet’s word.40

Interpretation and Time So as to break the rhythm of the everyday, the speaker inserts his own interpretation of the events. This insertion reveals a complicated temporal structure of the poem. The speaker presents the first stanza in an (a)historical present tense, an image of unceasing repetition, a spectrum of habits. Against this background, all other events are posed as if the everyday of the Roman square took something from its city, called la città eterna. In fact, the following partitioning of tenses among Miłosz’s stanzas is necessary to grasp his poetic mastery: Stanza

Time

I II III, IV V VI VII VIII

(A)historical Present (Bruno) Past 1 (Bruno) Past 2 (the Jews) Future (Readers) Past 2 (the Jews) Past 1 (Bruno) (A)historical Present (Bruno & the Jews) / Future (Poet)

The second stanza, about Bruno’s burning, refers to the events in simple past tense and the same goes for the next two, which present what the speaker saw from the other side of the Ghetto wall. Although, what happened to Bruno and the Ghetto inhabitants are events of two separate pasts. The fifth stanza offers the speaker’s assumptions about what people will read from his verses in the future. The future tense conveys a projection and an enchantment of the possible readings. The sixth stanza moves back to the other, second past of the burning Ghetto and how the speaker simultaneously perceived and interpreted it (“that day I thought only”), to which the inscription about Easter temporally belongs. Therefore, all interpretation begins in the past—the image of Bruno’s burning originating there—and moves to the future considerations of the readers. The seventh stanza moves further back in time, to the Roman piazza, now with Bruno absent, so as to present the everyday as somewhat disturbed and no

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longer functioning in the (a)historical present, but rather in the past tense. The final eight verses initially speak of a—added in English—“here” of the (a)historical present encompassing both Bruno and the Jews, making the suggestion that the events of their deaths will last forever; even though, in Polish, they are “już zapomnieni,” “[already] forgotten.” But the last four lines move to the future as if in a prophecy, resembling the duty of poets inscribed also in Miłosz’s other famous poem “You Who Have Wronged:” “The poet remembers.” In the last four lines, Miłosz includes the past reaction of the mob (“legend”) and envisions the responses of the future readers of his work. Simultaneously, he anticipates the events from the position of the past Campo dei Fiori and, from that past, envisions the work that a poet will do to commemorate them; in this instance—Miłosz himself. Thus, Miłosz folds both his understanding of historical events and his own role in describing it in the poem, and, therefore, he folds himself into the historicity of the situation itself. The poem, thus, predicts and contains its reading, a gesture called by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) “the fold.” “The fold” is an idea that all our interpretation is always already here, folded into the scenes perceived and the words describing the events.41 In summary, there are four temporal moments from which Miłosz composes his poem: (1) the (a)historical present; (2) the past of Bruno; (3) the past of the Jews; and (4) the future of the readers and the poet. But there is also a fifth temporal position, and it belongs to (5) the silent and eternal now of the speaker impersonating the future word of the poet; the perspective from which he speaks. The external now of the poet’s word allows for the movement backward and forward between the past, the present, and the future: the “[u]‌ntil” when “all is legend.” The speaker witnessed the events and reflected upon their similarity to the happenings of Campo dei Fiori so as, later, in the now of writing, to give testimony to what he witnessed. There is a tension within the momentary now of the poetic word divided between the time of writing, the time of (re)reading, and the multi-temporal situation of the described event. This tension removes witnessing from history and introduces a distanced, metaphysical perspective. Furthermore, the witness reveals, both to himself and the readers, that he did not know all this at the moment of the event. Only later did he discover more layers of the situation through reflection, distance, writing, and then again through (re)reading of his own text. That is, in the moment of the event itself, the speaker did not have the knowledge he has now and “here,” before his mind’s eye. Thus, speaking and knowing are to become one, and to gain presence in the unknown future, as the outcome of the shifting temporalities. This is why the

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speaker’s “I” appears only twice, in relation to memory and reflection: when he remembers “Campo dei Fiori / in Warsaw by the sky-carousel” and when he remembers how he reflected upon it as being “only / of the loneliness of the dying.” From this point on, the poet strives to find a transcendent perspective and to be everywhere, by perceiving from the outside of time and space or by assuming the perspective of God (“language of an ancient planet”). As the upholder of a tradition founded in language, the poet has the power to tell the event anew and give voice to the silenced. Their silence may have been the way to retain their own convictions, but the speaker now braids it into a bigger picture, “when all is legend, / and many years have passed,” in praise for their humanity. However, for Miłosz, the inability of language to grasp the atrocities reveals a limit to representation. By considering the events at the most universal level, Miłosz suggests the situation is part of a larger struggle between opposing, invisible forces. In only a few brief images the speaker denies human agency in the destruction, as if no coordinated military work was utilized to demolish the getto warszawskie. Some pure force of history or Manichean evil seems to shape the events in a way that no work of journalism could grasp it. Thought—Miłosz seems to suggest—shapes both the religious imagination and the political outcome; which requires from a careful observer that he investigates them simultaneously, just like Jan Błoński did when he incited the shared responsibility controversy.42 “Campo dei Fiori” is where the metaphysical perspective emerges from reallife witnessing and where the American interpretations join the Polish scholarship. It is the best argument for reading Miłosz’s transatlantic scholarship together and for blurring the divisions in order to achieve new viewpoints. Miłosz himself prescribes explicitly in his poetological writings such task of diversifying perspectivism.

7 The Realist Perspectivist Do you agree then To abolish what is, and take from movement The eternal moment as a gleam On the current of a black river? — “A Notebook: Bon By Lake Leman”

In his writings and social activism, Miłosz always placed himself outside of the consensus. He learned how to maneuver the subject matter of his works to such an extent that it became his philosophy of literature. As Miłosz championed movement and hope, they became not just solutions for political turmoil or private nostalgia but poetological recipes aimed at creating a kind of “ontology of literature.” That is, the understanding of literature as directly influencing being. Miłosz’s relentless work of engaging and deflecting the authorial personae, from Poland and the USA, vividly testifies to this project. Miłosz’s movement oscillates between diverse elements. As we read in the epigraph, the “eternal moment” is the “what” that Miłosz wants to take out of the fleeting presence. This may be, for instance, the external now of the poet’s word from “Campo dei Fiori.” Miłosz weighs the difference between temporality and eternity. Human existence is in time, which entails transformation, and Miłosz wants to avoid fixity in his art in order to capture the changing flow of hours. That is why, in search for a prevailing comprehensive totality, Miłosz frequently considers events sub specie aeternitatis, from the perspective of eternity. From the two poles of stasis and action come Miłosz’s considerations of religion and politics, which dominate the Polish and American reception of his work. Events, thus, hold the key to understanding the main preoccupation of Miłosz’s literary endeavors, not objects. What is important is how the events take place, how they are then narrated and exposed by the speakers, and how they change with the changing speakers and perspectives. Miłosz is interested in how the time of an event relates to its description and how the description determines the outlook of the event. Is it delayed or diminished in importance? Or, is it sharpened and made controversial? While the “eternal moment” is the indescribable essence and content (the “what”) that Miłosz wants to convey in his art, “movement” is the source of his poetic descriptions. This fact has not been sufficiently foregrounded or analyzed

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in any of the previous major studies of Miłosz’s work. What binds the movement between ideas, and attaches it to Miłosz’s art is his perspective, understood as an affirmation of individual position or a location of existence in one’s own place on Earth. Perspectivism is the “how” of his poetics, the method used to represent the movements of life. In other words, to concentrate on movement, and to “describe” it, is Miłosz’s way of introducing reality into poetry—reality understood as an unending number of perspectives.1 The gathering of perspectives in unceasing motion presents much trouble to readers used to searching for a stable authorial persona and is one of the strongest reasons for misreadings of his work and the prevalence of certain themes in related scholarship. In fact, until now, the issues of movement between ideas and realist perspectivism in his work were largely uninterpreted. We should call Miłosz’s perspectivism “realist”, for its consequences do not lead to nihilism and begin with a firm rooting in one’s position. Such positive perspectivism means an unyielding conviction about the existence of things and praise for the presence of the visible world. In the absence of a hidden order, change is the most basic fact of human existence. The constant movement of thought and of the imagination goes beyond what is (and hence goes beyond science), and reaches out to what is not (yet).

The Burials of Walt Whitman Miłosz performed perspectives by assuming voices and positions of people, animals, and even inanimate objects; a rhetorical device called prosopoeia. He translated works of other authors and then braided intertextual allusions into his own work. Foreign voices emerge in direct or indirect quotes, or just by way of memory, bringing back the words of lost friends. Another way, in which Miłosz multiplies perspectives is by talking through literary personae, establishing unreliable or self-compromising speakers, or writing sections of his poems in different voices. At other times, Miłosz appropriates the ideas of others to get through them by full assimilation and then abandonment; he positions himself against other writers. This movement functions in many spheres simultaneously and, with time, Miłosz added more elements to his poetics. In the long poem With Trumpets and Zithers (1965) from City Without a Name, Miłosz’s speaker describes the multi-perspectivist approach with this compact image, “On many shores at once I am lying cheek on the sand.”2 An even better example comes from Miłosz’s poem “Throughout Our Lands” from the book King Popiel (1962). The text consists of fourteen parts of different length and style, each narrated by a different speaker or with a different focaliser

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under scrutiny of the narrator, each with a different perspective:  a tourist, a nomad, a naturalist, a hummingbird, the missionary Junipero Serra y Ferrer OFM (1713–1784), or the conquistador Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (1490– 1560). The first part operates in the voice of the speaker closest to the author and clearly projects the inspiration of such poetic work onto Walt Whitman: “When I pass’d through a populous city / (as Walt Whitman says, in the Polish version).”3 By beginning the long poem with the phrase of another, Miłosz not only inscribes himself into Whitman’s tradition of writing but incorporates the latter’s disposition toward reality. The title “Throughout Our Lands” is already an allencompassing gesture, like Whitman’s. It raises questions:  Are these Polish or American lands? Or, is this rather a general description of the earth? The central theme of Whitman’s poem, entitled “Once I  Pass’d Through a Populous City,” is time and the ambivalent power of remembering. Whitman’s speaker attempts “imprinting” his brain with all images but is left only with the memory of the woman he loved. The speaker repeats the events of their passion and parting for unknown reason, supposedly death. In a way, then, he does imprint the traditions he witnesses by way of particular memory and personal events.4 However, in this poem, the particular remains general, the memories are abstracted and typified into a procedure of a passionate relationship that lacks details, names, and descriptions. As in his other poems with great lists, Whitman offers an image both distinct and democratically open to the reader’s imagination. Whitman invites inscriptions and Miłosz answers the call with a text of his own, which is simultaneously an interpretation and a private perspective on the same issue: the love of place and the necessity of movement. Miłosz meditates on Whitman as a key to understanding American culture in his Visions from San Francisco Bay. Stable rhythmic patterns and anaphoric constructions form Whitman’s incantations and frequently resurface in the poetry of Miłosz, who translated many of his poems and inserted twelve into the book Unattainable Earth (1984). Among the poems translated by Miłosz is “O Living Always—Always Dying,” a text praising the unceasing transformation of the self as the source of poetry and the reason for a diversity of perspectives. Whitman conveys his praise of shifting subjectivity and changing identities in a motif of repeated dying and the process of shedding bodies like skin, “O the burials of me, past and present!”5

Double Vision of a Telescopic Eye Miłosz frequently shifts between his personal pasts and present, the historical events, and the possible futures from the viewpoint of the following generations.

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He never simply remains in one place, although he also never loses touch with the point of origin. That is, Miłosz—or his very similar speaker—frequently begins from himself, his own experience and perception, his memories or observations. The titles of Miłosz’s collections of essays vividly testify to this fact:  To Begin Where I Am or Beginning With My Streets. Individual perspective makes for a common starting point for many of his prose pieces, which then vary between essay, autobiography, self-fashioning, and fiction. He begins Visions from San Francisco Bay with the short phrase “I am here,” while The Native Realm starts with a chapter on the history of the place where he was born and raised. From situating his individuality on the map of life, Miłosz moves on to attempt to grasp a holistic view of events. The title of his book Unattainable Earth (1984), which in Polish reads “unencompassed,” testifies to this, and suggests the need to gather everything under one view. However, there is more to this title, due to the ambivalent use of the word “Earth.” The term means our planet but also “ground,” “soil,” “land,” or even, archaically, “a country.” This suggests that Miłosz seeks not only to encompass all human events from an external position but, rather, that he wants to pursue the task from the most localized place he can find. Miłosz’s considerations of perspective and movement reveal the need of a nomad to find home and hope in the invisible solace of a grand yet ungraspable vision. The tension between the local and the global reveals that this is more than a struggle for some divine outlook on events. This tension is conveyed even more strongly in Polish. The title of the book, Nieobjęta ziemia, includes the word “ziemia” used without a capital letter, in which form, in Polish, the word means just “ground, soil.” The book conveys a separate part under the same title, conveying mostly short prose poems, mostly untranslated. The cycle “Nieobjęta ziemia” reveals the impossibility of ever encapsulating the earth as the planet due to the minute particulars of local places and traditions. Furthermore, it suggests the inability to ever fully grasp the general truths of politics and history as well as the particular truths of everyday reality. The speaker moves up and down, from the universal to the specific, aware that he will never reach any divine perspective: “In my consciousness exists our whole circular Earth.”6 When thinking of earth both as ground and planet, one has to remember its constant movement, the invisible but incessant shift in cosmic space, the reversal of trajectories that mixes seasons and perspectives. The need to encompass both the planet and one’s local ground raises the question of individual change: Does one transform when altering the place of life? Does geography influence identity? In his Nobel speech, Miłosz calls the technique of considering simultaneously the particular and the general “double vision.” The speaker of Unattainable Earth

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names it, in turn, the “telescopic eye.” He considers individual experience from far away and up close, telescoped and microscoped, although he himself does not alter. On the one hand, the speaker argues the unimportance of individuals, the fleeting quality of their being, while, on the other hand, their growing complexity when scrutinized in detail, the exceptionality of each individual. Moreover, we may not enter into the thoughts of another and see clearly one’s perspective. This leaves us with the necessity to suspect and guess, and with the use of language, to approximate a shared view. “Only then does one see that there are no two identical persons and that we may only guess how it happens inside our neighbors.”7

Presence as a Safe House Miłosz’s contradictions reveal that his perspectivism comes from the need for detachment; his need to seek the broadest encompassing perspective and appraise the general events abstracted from time and space. However, hope in a multiplicity of perspectives alone does not reveal how to achieve a state of ideological balance, so important to Miłosz. In his work, Miłosz attempts to superimpose the black-and-white individual perceptions with a movement between multiple oppositions. There are only a few poems in which Miłosz attempts to give a name to this poetics of kaleidoscopic movement. In “Mittelbergheim” (1951) from the collection Daylight (1953), Miłosz’s speaker presents movement not only as the source or product of poetry but also as its shifting and elusive aim—“the moving frontier” hiding the true presence of things. Mittelbergheim is an Alsatian wine village renowned for its picturesque beauty. The name means a place that offers shelter or home in the middle of a mountain; positioned neither atop nor below on the plain, but in-between; in a neither-place; in a site of balance. It may also mean the safe inside of a mountain, its literal middle. The speaker presents the “moving frontier” as the in-between position that encompasses both the earthly and the divine, and which operates in the invisible space, where “color and sound” achieve ideal forms and “come true” by way of anti-linguistic abstraction and separation.8 The image evokes legends, similar in many countries, about the just ruler or the good knights of old waiting in slumber inside the mountain to return in times of need. In Poland, this myth takes the form of a sleeping knight under the Giewont Mountain, whereas, in Germany, it is the Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa who waits for his time under the Kyffhäuser mountain range. The mythic residue in the image emphasizes the feeling of protection. A poet living inside a mountain is protected by language, by tradition, and by his own works.

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To live inside a mountain in Polish culture unavoidably evokes the volcanic context. Adam Mickiewicz in his drama The Forefathers Eve III (1831) famously compared the Polish nation to lava, “Nasz naród jak lawa.” The meaning of the simile is in tune with the revolutionary timbre of the time. The dependent Polish nation boils and gathers heat under the surface so as to burst with rage and, when the right time comes, retake independence. This context, however important and always unavoidably available in Miłosz’s writing, due to his rooting in Polish literary tradition, may not rightly serve “Mittelbergheim” and but is a distant reference. Nevertheless, the position proposed by the speaker of the poem appears here in marked contrast to the romantic call to arms. The simile of nation as lava suggests preparation, hardening of spirit, and gathering of energies for future action. Whereas the speaker of “Mittelbergheim” wants to sleep inside the mountain as his proper place, which underscores individuality, unconsciousness, passive observation, and a recollection of thoughts.9 Miłosz arrived at Mittelbergheim tortured by the ideological issues of his time. In Paris he was under attack from compatriots for his previous engagement with the communist diplomatic service, and made him doubt his calling as a writer. The Alsatian countryside gave him a new perspective and a spiritual experience of renewal, unavailable in the busy capital. The speaker, a traveler, finds himself in the village of Mittelbergheim, where he experiences the feeling of belonging to the here and now of the place. He takes possession of the landscape and the slow flow of time of the rural area. That is, the speaker contemplates presence as a safe house from all the ideological turmoil redundant in poetry. Its epiphanic qualities reveal the sensuality of images juxtaposed with rapture.10

The Peak Position and the Middle Ground The speaker of another poem, “This Only” from the 1985 Kroniki, produces the words with which Miłosz described his poetics. The speaker attempts to describe the experience of return. He speaks of a traveler visiting a place he intimately knows, onto which he projects previous memories of arriving at the same spot. Those memories do not compare the stable images of now and then, but the emotions inspired by traveling to this place. The text begins similarly to the “A Notebook: Bon By Lake Leman,” with a landscape in the fall, but the second verse presents the traveler who may be the author himself. Immediately, the speaker moves into the past and to the memories that led the traveler instead of a map. The link between map and memory overshadows the rest of the poem with all its consequences. The speaker suggests that it serves a guiding function and gives reference to the images perceived. The

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poem is about the meaning of place and return, about the possibility of discovering the same place after many years.11 The Polish title “To jedno” also means “this one thing.” This reading finds its way into the poem in the voyager’s yearning for an extralinguistic unity with existence and his need for an erasure of opposition between subject and object. He wants to achieve this not by multiplying perspectives, but through perception and a denigration of all interpretation applied to any viewpoint. To that end, he speaks of an “edge” where the opposition between self-consciousness and belonging is annulled. That is, the speaker means the dissolution of boundaries, where one is no longer bound by the body but spread in the horizon. The speaker means an epiphany, in which there is no longer a difference between one person and the other, without “demands.” He does not only de-subjectivize his perspective but also requests the return of past visual pleasure, available only for a moment by blurring the subjective time—the chronicle of transience and loss. There is a contradiction here, because only this “I” that is to be removed from experience could truly delight in the return of the past. The paradox is present in the possibility that the speaker is talking about himself in the third person, separate but the same. This need is a request to return to the paradisiacal condition of perception; before the breaking of primordial unity.12 The “edge” that the speaker hopes to achieve here is very similar to the “moving frontier” from “Mittelbergheim” and offers not just an end of cognition but also a shelter and a place-in-between. In “This Only” Miłosz calls it “a feast in motion,” which in Polish is precisely a “feast of motion,” “świętem ruchu.” The term suggests a celebration of movement and a sacralization of change, like the “black river” from “A Notebook: Bon By Lake Leman.” All three poems are set in the mountains. These approximations of a simultaneously poetic and existential peak—an epiphany—suggest a perfect place for the poet, a place that has no name but for the metaphors invented by the writer. Such site retains certain nameable qualities such as in-betweenness, peacefulness, double vision, or a center of change. Therefore, Miłosz wants his poems to project a detached place observing over all movement; a secure position overseeing all perspectives, where there is no contradiction anymore, even if one has to operate exclusively with paradoxes. We may call this place the peak position but it could equally likely be called the middle ground of Miłosz’s poetics; just as Mittelbergheim means simultaneously the middle and the inside of a mountain. Miłosz’s speaker signals that the “feast of motion” is an event worthy of celebration not only by way of vision, or vision memorized, but also by way of rhythm, a repetition of images that consoles and

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shares the certainty and directedness of existence. This is part of Miłosz’s solution to the unending change of ungraspable oppositions that he deems reality.13

The Movement If we were to use only Miłosz’s poetry to explain his poetics, we would have to say the following: with the use of the technique of the “telescopic eye” or “double vision,” Miłosz aims to grasp the “eternal moment” by immersing himself in “a feast in motion,” “a moving frontier,” or “a black river” of “movement.” As one may find in Miłosz’s untranslated long poem Traktat moralny (1947), these measures enable one to attain “mobile wisdom.” However, we should not expect Miłosz’s poetry to shed its veil of mystery and explain itself, because it would simultaneously lose all of its allure and ambivalence. Thankfully, we do not have to rely on his poetry exclusively, for Miłosz attempted to explain his poetics, as did several scholars subsequently.14 The best way to better grasp Miłosz’s poetics is to read The Witness of Poetry. In the chapter “Poets and the Human Family,” Czesław Miłosz reveals that his interest in “movement” comes directly from an important fragment by Oscar Milosz. The latter states that poetry “appears to us bound, more rigorously than any other mode of expression, to the spiritual and physical Movement of which it is a generator and a guide.” In other words, poetry generates and guides spiritual and physical movement. Czesław Miłosz comments on the words of his uncle: It is worth noting that it is not the word Progress but Movement (capitalized) that is used, and this has manifold implications, for Progress denotes a linear ascension while Movement stresses incessant change and a dialectical play of opposites. By its nature poetry engenders Movement, change, and may even be found at the origin of scientific discoveries, if not directly than through osmosis. It also functions as a “guide” to Movement, and this we may interpret to mean that the language of every historical period receives its definite shape through poetry.15

What follows is that poetry, for Miłosz, means non-evolutionary, detached change. What has here been dubbed “oscillation between perspectives” and is called by many names in Miłosz’s poetry, he defines this time as “a dialectical play of opposites.” That is, after infusing poetry with the agency of witnessing, Miłosz brings about an idea that poetry does not only convey but also motivates movement, “physical and spiritual.” Such movement should be understood as social effects emerging in times of revolution and the reconfiguration of political ideas, religious worldviews, or scientific hypotheses. Such “Movement” then testifies to the capability of literary imagination to influence the reader. Several scholars provide further support to understand Miłosz’s poetics, although, they point to the issues of perspectivism in Miłosz’s oeuvre with

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different formal approaches. They call his poetics a “quest for critical perspective,” in which his “polyphonic poetry” conveys a “fullness of speech” and a multiplication of diverse “mutually supplementing testimonies” that lead a “dialogic process of restoration.” With regard to Miłosz’s many personae, Aleksander Fiut speaks of “mediumist lyric,” while others seek a dynamic and processual “personality in motion,” “negative self-presentation,” or, simply, “narrative identities.” Some go even as far as to apply to Miłosz’s poetry the concept developed by the English Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821). That is, Keats’s concept of the “negative capability,” whose notion of being “content with half knowledge” and “capable of being in uncertainties” was certainly close to Miłosz’s own ideals.16 From among all the scholars contemplating Miłosz’s poetics, only the Dutch Slavist Arent van Nieukerken calls him a “perspectivist.” Although, Nieukerken introduces the idea with much doubt, as if as a side-note, which makes him precede the term with an adjective “(unwilling?),” secured with a question mark and separated from the main text by parentheses. Nieukerken inserts the word “unwilling” because the term “perspectivism” is linked to the nihilism in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Miłosz scholars know well how critical he was of Nietzschean philosophy and, until now, no one dared to draft a thorough critical comparison of the two. However, methodologically, there is more in common between Miłosz and Nietzsche than the former would ever care to admit. In truth, Miłosz is quite the willing perspectivist.

William Blake’s Divine Imagination In the context of multiplying perspectives, in The Witness of Poetry, Miłosz refers to William Blake as the defender of “naive imagination” against the objectivity of a scientific worldview. Naive imagination may prevent the “erosion of belief ” in worlds other than the mathematically determined one. Thus, a purely scientific perspective excludes all non-scientific values, which may also touch upon the concept of truth itself. This is a paraphrase of Blake’s position, as Miłosz enacts perspectivism by assuming the approach of the ideas he currently tackles. This is intertextuality in process, a dialogue of minds by way of harmonious appropriation and revaluation. His literary method is to assume the views of a thinker and abandon them, to switch between positions. To this extent, one may find a protagonist and an antagonist of Miłosz’s reflections in The Witness of Poetry, and those are, accordingly, William Blake and Friedrich Nietzsche. Miłosz takes plenty from both critics of modernity. What he develops from their approach to perspectivism is an idea useful for both the minutiae of life and philosophical abstraction.17

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Miłosz continues rephrasing Blake’s thought by saying that the truth’s “criteria will be recognized as valid only within an arbitrarily selected system of references.” Thus, Miłosz presents the scientific worldview as a singular “objective” perspective, upon which everyone may agree and which everyone may follow. The opposite is the “Divine Imagination” introduced by Blake, which offers a diversity of perspectives. Both outlooks search for an encompassing, or, divine perception of life gathered in a single if fragmented view. However, the scientific approach wants to cut everything down to its most essential core, to a single mathematical order, whereas the poetic mode permits a multiplicity of perspectives and uses this gathering as its golden rule. Blake’s approach nicely introduces the source of Miłosz’s approach to Nietzsche. While in agreement with Nietzsche’s idea that perspectivism undermines all knowledge, Miłosz retained belief in a transcendental power sanctioning the existence of objective being. From that point onward, Miłosz applied his hope for an unreachable objectivity to every field of life, doubtful but faithful in received traditions, be they aesthetics, religion, politics, or the everyday. Remembering that poetry may never be assessed in philosophical terms, one may call Miłosz’s version of perspectivism “positive,” or—remembering his interest in Thomist personalism—an anthropocentric persistence of thought. In fact, Miłosz may have arrived at his understanding of perspectivism through Saint Paul’s Hymn from 1 Cor 13:12, especially the famous phrase “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Apart from its function in Paul’s theology and the Hymn itself, the fragment reads, “do not get too proud human because only God knows it all.” Everything in this world is illusory knowledge, refracted light distorting the true image, preventing a full view. We remain captured within our own perspective as if petrified in amber, says Miłosz. We are perspectival beings existing for only a moment in the context of eternity and thereby cognize only a fragment, he often adds. We ourselves are fragments and hold only fragmentary insights. Perspective understood in this way refers strongly to hope and desire. We hope our desires come true in the future. We are desiring beings which is why Miłosz would certainly argue that it motivates religion to approach this fact, understood as a limitation that we have to overcome.18

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Perspectivism Miłosz believes in science as a tool for bettering the existence of mankind. However, he still points to the imagination, religiosity, and corporeality, as the ways to work through the essentializing and reductionist demons of the scientific

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worldview that led to the “numerical” treatment of people in the Second World War camps. Blake distances himself from the one-dimensionality of the scientific worldview and offers instead a positive plurality of perspectives by reconnecting with the spiritual, the corporal, and the imaginary. Nietzsche criticizes the same sources of modernity with different methods—and a negative outcome—by denying the existence of God-the-objective-viewer. Miłosz scholarship has of yet insufficiently foregrounded the full scope of his dialogue with Nietzschean philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher counted among the three great masters of suspicion, alongside Karl Marx and the Austrian psychotherapist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Critics agree that Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil (1886) displays his skepticism of the elementary assumptions of the general worldview in the most comprehensive way. The book concentrates on the psychological sources of values and appraises this process. As the specialist in the subject, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, explains, Nietzsche subverts the most everyday truths and common sense objectivity, beginning with the thought that perspectivism “is the fundamental condition of all life.”19 To deny all possibility of external sanction to objectivity, Miłosz rejects Nietzsche’s aims but agrees with his need to repetitively reassess the very framework of reality. Both begin with a bold claim and then evaluate it from different perspectives. Miłosz frequently uses the same method: employing a projection of oneself as the best viewpoint available to him. Although, despite the chaos inherent to the dynamic process of life, Miłosz calls for enchanting reality back into order by way of poetry and art.20 The entry point for Nietzsche’s reflection is the assumption of complete inadequacy of himself and the reader. Miłosz presumes differently: he universalizes the personal to the extent that it is available for all and appears to them—in line with Whitman’s poetics—as the modern Everyman. Where Nietzsche wants to display only “his” truths, Miłosz retains the hope that his views may be abstracted to the level of wide translatability by way of differentiation and multiplication. For Nietzsche, the truth is a “metaphysical illusion,” whereas Miłosz always seeks reasons for an overarching and underlying cohesion of existence, against his own doubts. Nietzsche’s approach stems from a psychological relativism of morality and religion, whereas Miłosz starkly distances himself from psychological argumentation. Nevertheless, Miłosz agrees with Nietzsche that human life is and should be value-oriented. Both promote suspension of ideological decisiveness as the only way to observe the work of values. However, Miłosz finds solace

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in the transformation of cultural traditions, even if it requires constant scrutiny, and he cares for it as something enabling the appraisal and sheltering of values.21 Nietzsche moves his philosophical considerations outside of an expectation of results or solutions toward a more reluctant goal of uncovering unexpected viewpoints. In a similar vein, Miłosz shifts the task of poetry to express not only private discontents but also to philosophize on the diversity of worldviews. Nietzsche’s method of working through problems is more his philosophy than what he actually says. The “how” precedes the “what” just as, for Miłosz, the oscillating movement between ideas is more important than the eternal moment he wants to capture in his poems. Nevertheless, Miłosz contradicts the results of Nietzschean considerations by offering hope as the salutary element to all doubt and instability, always pointing to the unknown and upholding the possibility of a good closure. In comparison with the more optimistic Miłosz, therefore, Nietzsche appears to engage in a negative kind of perspectivism. That is, Nietzsche, distant from epistemological skepticism, has fundamental doubt about the possibility of ever cognizing reality. In Nietzsche’s “socio-hermeneutical” doctrine of perspectivism, the essential element is the incorporation of the subjective into the expression of a worldview. This leads to the understanding that there can be no “context-free” truths and no possibility of making objective judgments. Hence, every truth is incomplete, partial, personal, and perspectival.22 To express this view, Nietzsche preferred to write in “impromptu remarks” gathered in seemingly arbitrary collections, which is his “method in disguise” that applies randomness to his texts and forms their structure. Similarly to Nietzsche, in Unattainable Earth Miłosz offers many untitled fragments of his own mixed with similarly fragmentary parts clearly titled “Epigraphs.” That is, Miłosz mixes his own creative writing with citations without information to allow readers to easily discern between them. This mixing further broadens Miłosz’s style and suggests that the source of his own short notes may lie outside of the creative process. The word “epigraph” comes from the Greek noun epigraphe, “an inscription,” and the verb epigraphein, “to mark the surface, pierce, write on, inscribe, register, endorse.” It means typically a quotation at the beginning of a text, a motto indicating its theme, inviting comparison, or enlisting a context. It may refer to a phrase placed on a monument or coin. An epigraph, thus, has either a leading function that eases the reader into text and gives context to the sentences that follow; or, it inscribes a symbol of power (monument or coin) into a broader discourse by connecting communities, linking events, and acknowledging a vision.

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In both cases, the epigraph enables a linking of the past and the present, the old traditions with the modern ones. In English, Miłosz translates the title “Epigraph” as “Inscript,” a rare word with a completely different set of meanings which supplement the Polish original. An “inscript” means either “something inscribed, an inscription” or, in geometry, “a line inscribed in a figure, a chord;” it comes from the Latin noun inscriptum, meaning “that which is written on anything.” With information about the “inscript” Miłosz’s “epigraph” gains the quality of something ordered and externally applied. That is, it fits nicely into Miłosz’s hope to link traditions so as to find internal harmony and classical beauty through non-traditional means. At times, epigraphs are anthologized, typically gathered from other authors. But Miłosz does something different, he collects them side by side with his notes and fragments, marked only with italics and a proper subscription, which blends them together, inscribing Miłosz’s thoughts into some bigger flow of suprahuman exchange of thoughts. This is why we should regard Miłosz’s fragments in Unattainable Earth as “quasi-epigraphic.” What Miłosz does by introducing his quasi-epigraphic fragments is a novelty of sorts, one that offers brief insight into his momentary epiphanies or everyday recognitions. Miłosz’s quasi-epigraphic fragment appears to have the quality of a side-note but frequently holds reflections important for grasping his broader understanding of poetry itself. By suggesting a fragmentary genre of quasiepigraphs, Miłosz employs his idea of “a more spacious form” through pieces of seemingly irrelevant poetic prose. The quasi-epigraphic fragment is the poetry of brief existential notes; a suggestion that fits into Miłosz’s call for an end of genealogy and its substitution by the art of interpretation; a displacement of the conventional by the inimitable; and a gesture of concentration on a single text in the face of excess. More generally, the effect of Miłosz’s search for such a form is the mosaic and heterogenic quality of his poems, borrowing from various linguistic registers and stylistic possibilities. Most importantly, Miłosz’s form of quasi-epigraphs is similar to Nietzsche’s impromptu remarks and serves the same function of multiplying perspectives.23

Against Nihilism The misunderstanding prevalent among Miłosz scholarship is that he was utterly critical of Nietzsche. However firmly this view is attached in Miłosz’s writings, the matter is more complicated. On the same page of The Witness of Poetry where Miłosz considers Blake’s approach to modernity, he juxtaposes it to Nietzsche’s,

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who, in The Will to Power (1887), prophesies a state of mind which, after a century, has become quite prevalent. Miłosz was very critical of the idea of the “will to power,” which he expresses explicitly in his essay “Absolute Freedom” from the wartime collection Legends of Modernity, first published in 1996. There, Miłosz calls Nietzsche the “anti-rationalist.” However, what Miłosz analyzes is mostly the application of Nietzschean philosophy by the French novelist André Gide (1869–1951) and its critique by the Italian author Giovanni Papini (1881–1956). Both writers concentrated predominantly on the early meaning of the “will to power” presented by Miłosz as “growing is itself the goal.” Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power emerges first from the evolutionist theory transposed onto social issues as power struggle, which, only after some development, he moves onto the field of ontology. In Nietzsche’s ontological reflection, the “will to power” is present even in the inanimate objects, frozen in the state of potentiality, thus erasing the difference between being and becoming. “The world seen from inside,” writes Nietzsche, “the world determined and described with respect to its “intelligible character”—would be just this will to power and nothing else.” Even though Miłosz forcefully disagreed with the first, social understanding of the will to power, he could have subscribed to this fragment by Nietzsche, as it recalls the perspectivism permeating all assumptions. Nevertheless, Miłosz would never agree with the last three words, “and nothing else,” because they leave no room for hope.24 Despite the distance between the two minds, there are many signals of intellectual struggles led by Miłosz, who engaged Nietzschean perspectivism with an aim to work through its nihilistic conclusions. This is the reason behind Miłosz’s unexpectedly ambivalent ending to “Absolute Freedom.” “Unexpectedly,” because Miłosz wrote it in Warsaw occupied by Nazis, whose ideology was based on a simplistic reading of Nietzsche’s “will to power.” Alongside evolutionary theories and eugenics, the Nazis used the idea to formulate an ideology absolving genocide and the camps with the argument that their expansion should be understood as a force majeure. Knowing all this and writing in the midst of war, Miłosz was still able to offer a subtle summary of Nietzsche’s influence, even though the former was only able to publish Legends of Modernity fifty years after the war. Instead of blaming Nietzsche, Miłosz accused his readers of intellectual abuse.25 Miłosz returned to his consideration of Nietzsche in the most important moment of self-presentation, during his Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1981. In The Witness of Poetry, Miłosz poses Nietzsche as the antagonist of Blakean perspectivism and considers a fragment from The Will to Power. Nothing will be left after our deaths because there is no objectivity, no “true world,” suggests Nietzsche, just an unending set of perspectives and what appears to them. The

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simplification of every thought undermines the certainty of fame or eternal life that gave the hope to poets of the past. For Nietzsche, nihilism as the rejection of objectivity is the only available philosophia, the “love of wisdom” as the divine position of the reflecting mind. Miłosz quotes the following fragment by Nietzsche: What is a belief? How does it originate? Every belief is a considering-somethingtrue. / The most extreme form of nihilism would be the view that every belief, every considering-something-true, is necessarily false because there simply is no true world. Thus: a perspectival appearance whose origin lies in us (in so far as we continually need a narrower, abbreviated, simplified world). / That is the measure of strength to what extent we can admit to ourselves, without perishing, the merely apparent character, the necessity of lies. / To this extent nihilism, as the denial of a truthful world, of being, might be a divine way of thinking.26

Although initially Miłosz seems to criticize Nietzsche’s position and to distance himself from the German philosopher, he still finds something for himself in these writings. “[W]‌e have no right to degrade that clear and cruel consciousness,” Miłosz persuades, “for it is not so far from a certain heroic virtue.” However, this insight leads Miłosz to other solutions than those offered by Nietzsche and many of the twentieth-century thinkers. For Miłosz, the fact that there is no “true world” but only a “perspectival appearance” is an opportunity not to deny nihilisitically the possibility of a truthful world, but to deny the possibility of a singular objective perspective on the world. In other words, there may be no objective way for the world to present itself to us but its “apparent” character necessitates no lies. It necessitates a plurality of truths, an agreement that there may be more than one perspective, and that this multiplicity is good. Where Nietzsche proposes denial as the “divine way of thinking,” Miłosz offers a different kind of “superhuman greatness,” not by separation from but by bonding with “the great human family.” Miłosz opposes the consciousness of oppressive and reductive objectivity by applying Blakean “Divine Imagination” with its unending treasury of perspectives of all people and moments. A bond with “the great human family” means for Miłosz writing about others and their troubles, and gaining in return their trust and gratitude, their reciprocity and readership. It means generalizing the most everyday things and seeking subtlety in the seemingly obvious. The concept of “the great human family” comes from Oscar Vladislas Milosz, and Czesław Miłosz presents it at length in The Witness of Poetry, but it is worth mentioning that scholars frequently compare it to the idea formed by Miłosz’s literary competitor and exiled writer, Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969), who wrote about the “interhuman church.”27

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Miłosz’s idea of the interconnectedness of people was construed as an answer to Niezschean nihilism. In contrast to Miłosz, Nietzsche was certainly not a Christian, and when he said that God is dead, he meant that there is instead only a multitude of perspectives, none of them dominant. For Miłosz, there truly is only perspectivism, but—in the same place—there is also God and the ungraspable but present truth.28 The interpersonal edge of Miłosz’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s “prophecy,” is thus based on assuming different perspectives. “[W]‌hatever Nietzsche might say,” argues Miłosz, “the very act of naming things presupposes a faith in their existence and thus in a true world.” Poets of all languages repeat this credo, insists Miłosz, for they are seeking new names for reality. And Miłosz hopes that the prevalent scientific worldview will soon be amended with the understanding of reality “as a labyrinth of mirrors, no less magical than the labyrinth seen by alchemists and poets.” A labyrinth of mirrors perfectly encapsulates Miłosz’s proposal for Divine Imagination as a network of interpersonal perspectives, each adding to the infinite and ungraspable totality of reality. Miłosz clearly defines the goal of multiplying perspectives, with the use of Blake’s “Divine Imagination,” in The Land of Ulro: “To swim upstream through history, reducing it not to Hegelian categories but embracing the multiplicity of human lives, in all their particularity, and then to behold the figure of the God-man and touch His garment, requires a supreme imagination.”29 For Nietzsche, the insight available from perspectivism is always very narrow, and he does not believe that it may lead to any greater whole. Nietzsche promotes the ideals of change, processuality, and the instability of perceptions. Although Miłosz accepts Nietzsche’s findings, he seeks for himself a higher moral ground with the use of positive perspectivism; one that retains hope for completeness. In this context, Miłosz writes about epiphanies as units of perception that take on a certain unconsciously assumed faith in “a deeper, more essential reality hidden in things or persons.” This statement by Miłosz is neither a speculation nor a theory nor an esoteric credo, but a creative postulate practiced in his poetry, always open to new aspects of reality.30

The Utopian Hope A more complex answer to the nihilism of Nietzschean perspectivism comes with Miłosz’s understanding of hope, which he formulates in The Witness of Poetry. In a way, Miłosz states that nihilistic perspectivism gives way to hope, because in the face of catastrophic events and realizations—it is the only thing

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available. Miłosz describes a vertical and a horizontal axis, the former consisting of the metaphysical and the latter of the historical perspective. The spatiotemporal positioning allows Miłosz to create the image of poetry as memory of the past, witness of the present, and hope for the future.31 Miłosz’s hope is not only a virtue or an ideal; it is not just an optimistic gaze into the future. Miłosz’s hope means coming to terms with the present in order to produce the necessary vision of a distant future goal. To that end, Miłosz displays a truly prophetic disposition and explains how strong, irrational, and incomprehensible is his desire for something that does not yet exist but approaches. To prepare the future of his dreams, Miłosz unavoidably reminisces and enchants the past “Polish poetry became a home for incorrigible hope, immune to historical disasters.” That is, for Miłosz, poetry is in a sense the best tool for expressing hope. Miłosz explains that poetry feeds on uncertainty and disappointment while remaining in perfect connection with the present moment, in which time simultaneously is and will be. In this way, poetry has the power to bring things and ideas into being.32 In this context, Miłosz reflects on why his prewar poetry has been called “catastrophist.” Critics point out that Miłosz as a “catastrophist” not only predicts the coming war, the crumbling of sociopolitical order, or the end of the European status quo; he goes further, to the point of eschatology, modernizing the theme of annihilation and meditating on the possible destruction of the whole universe. That is, Miłosz envisions catastrophe as a cleansing event not morally or physically but ontologically, marking a change to all reality; a revolution and an apocalypse. In this context, Miłosz’s reflection on hope points in the direction of an idealist “purified reality.”33 In the context of catastrophism, Miłosz explains that hope is to give rise to new poetry, which he calls “eschatological poetry.” Miłosz argues that “eschatological poetry” conveys the hope for change and is the only viable way for true poetry to continue. However, Miłosz’s eschatology means “final things” in both religious and political dimension, which is why he speaks of poetry realized through revolution and apocalypse. The hope of working out a positive outcome through a purification of thought—not burning down the world—accompanies his writing. The source and target of eschatological poetry is the people in their traditions and events; it tackles issues from all areas of life and art: “the poets of the past … did not assign poetry a narrow territory, did not leave religion, philosophy, science, and politics to ordinary people who supposedly were unable to share in the initiations of the elite.” Eschatological poetry should, thereby, aim to communicate the most troubling issues to “the man in the street” and “the great soul

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of the people;” it should be open, hopeful, egalitarian, transparent, and in touch with everyday speech. In this way, Miłosz follows Walt Whitman’s ideals of a poetic language available to all users. The same egalitarian drive which made the Romantics learn folktales and lore, motivates Miłosz to include in his work scientific, technological, and urban jargon.34 When Miłosz considers the notion of hope as a way to rework Nietzschean perspectivism, he alludes to a wartime poem, “Hope,” again from the book Rescue. The poem comes from the cycle The World (A Naive Poem) written almost concurrently with “Campo dei Fiori,” in 1943. The series is amazingly pastoral for a piece written in the midst of wartime atrocities, though Miłosz called all his writings of the time “triumphal poetry” that “celebrated the holiday” of his “coming into health” as a writer. The eponymous “Hope” is not only a virtuous or trustful projection into the future but also holds elements of a moral principle. This “hope” means the awareness of reality, the true presence of things that remain separated by the insufficiency of poetic tools. The poem “Hope” presents the conviction that the world is not a figment of imagination but exists independently from the cognizing subject and that the senses are a trustworthy instrument for perceiving earthly reality. In a way, then, the hopeful cycle The World already performs eschatological poetry which Miłosz theorizes almost forty years later. It is understandable, therefore, that the philosophical ramifications of the whole cycle have led scholars to draw broad conclusions about the poem “Hope,” from the overcoming of anthropological nihilism to the negation of subjectivist idealism and solipsism. The poem “Hope” pronounces an epistemological surety of sensual cognition and, without the ability to get to the essence of things, still trenchantly acknowledges their existence. In interviews, Miłosz calls this epistemological disposition a “naive” or “radical realism;” an instance allowing for consideration of this poem as the source of his realist perspectivim.35

“Heraclitus” It is not the poem “Hope,” however, that best exemplifies Miłosz’s notion of “eschatological poetry,” but “Heraclitus” from 1960. In fact, “Heraclitus” also displays best also Miłosz’s realist perspectivism, which testifies to the strong link between the two ideas. Miłosz offers his perspectivism in the two concise verses: “Particular existence keeps us from the light. / (That sentence can be read in reverse as well).” According to Greek tradition, the first line would mean that we have to abandon individual consciousness to achieve the heights of objective perspective, although the speaker subverts this by declaring that the opposite may be equally true.

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This poem, written in 1960, is about the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (c.535—c.475 BCE), famous for the fragments that survive to this day, and are considered obscure but inspiring, conveying a vast philosophy in short form. Nevertheless Aristotle’s criticism of Heraclitus, his aphoristic style, and paradoxical claims raise valid questions about knowledge and the world, greatly inspiring such thinkers as Nietzsche.36 Heraclitus is said to operate on the verge of rationality and counts among the Presocratic philosophers. Patricia Curd of Purdue University explains that Presocratics lived in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE. In antiquity, they were considered the first philosophers and scientists of the Western world that have abstracted and passed on their ideas about the general rules of nature. For the most part, they predated Socrates and, if not, they were not influenced by his thought; these are the only qualities that collect them as a single group. Apart from that, they did not share a common outlook on things. The prefix “pre-” indicates also their uncertain position in the world of “philosophers.” They would not have associated themselves with this term as defined by Plato and Aristotle. Rather, they were men of wisdom who sought to formulate views on the world in the broadest way possible by considering theology alongside what we now call physics or epistemology or chemistry. In Western culture, they were the first to formulate abstract ideas by working on the verge of myth and logos, science. Their writings come as half poetry and half philosophy, not yet logically ordered, empirical, or completely rational. They establish the foundations of science but also precede them.37 In this way, the Presocratics appear to have been inclined to what Miłosz calls “encompassing” the world and searching for “a more spacious form” to name its phenomena. As a Presocratic, Heraclitus shared their interest in the nature of the physical world and its cosmology, its origin, and development. However, Heraclitean fragments display more interest in the human subject and the nature of “philosophical” inquiry: the possibility of understanding and its limits. To test the boundaries of knowing, Heraclitus worked with opposites, such as the famous proverb about the river as the same entity but never holding the same water, “no man ever steps in the same river twice,” and panta rhei, “everything flows.” In Miłosz’s poetry, rivers usually refer to these famous utterances by Heraclitus. This shift of perspectives, depending on micro- and macro-observation, had interested Miłosz since his school years, and persisted as a recurring motif in his poetry.38 In the verses “Particular existence keeps us from the light. / (That sentence can be read in reverse as well)” the speaker performs a Heraclitean contradiction. He divides the particular from the general, the individual from the abstract.

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In the preceding line, we read that the division is not only between the individual and the objective perspectives but also between the animal and the spiritual, the corporal and the intellectual, where “the light” opposes “An animal’s; that is, our own.” The paradoxical verses display the appeal of this Greek notion to modern readers, who seek knowledge as Heraclitus did, “beyond the means of any language.” The many perspectives come together in the two contradicting lines just as in Heraclitean fragments. Heraclitus, in general, refers to a single verifiable rule that controls the cosmos yet remains hardly graspable for humans, which he calls logos, meaning in Greek, variously, “word, science.” This divine source of cosmic order appears, for Heraclitus, in the sign of fire; because it is ever-changing and the same. Heraclitean fire is rational, intelligent, and, to a certain extent, cognizable. If substituted by fire, Miłosz’s “light” appears to convey the paradox of the irresistible fate of a planned cosmos and individual freedom. That is, Miłosz’s “light” performs here not only the manner of the Heraclitean thought but also builds on his symbol.39 This paradox relies on the change of perspectives, and the whole poem “Heraclitus” exemplifies Miłosz’s prowess in and need for shifting viewpoints in a single short poem. The text in Polish is written without rhyme or stanzas, in the long classical 13-syllable verses, with four exceptions marking the self-reflective moments and the coda. The speaker begins by presenting the eponymous philosopher, his approach to individuals and language, and moves on to describe his appearance. The second verse is unusually long and consists of 17 syllables. This verse’s meaning is metapoetic: the lyrical “I” abstracts the individual fate of Heraclitus. However, soon, the speaker changes the vantage point and individual toes in a sandal appear to be an image of how words are bound together in Heraclitus’s sentences both organically and artificially. He pitied them, himself deserving pity. Because this is beyond the means of any language. Even his syntax, obscure—as went the reproach— Words so combined they had triple meaning Encompassed nothing. Those toes in a sandal,

The Same River The suggestion that the toes belong to Heraclitus, as if even this fragment of his “body” was unavailable, is immediately undermined in the lines that follow. The speaker reflects on corporeality, the fact of having bodies with needs, joys, and limitations. The particulars of life come together to form a universal pattern for

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the philosophical mind, so that one no longer reads about Heraclitus but about the possible image of his contemporaries. The speaker mentions Artemis, the Greek goddess of the wild and animal side of human existence, its erotic urge. We see a caressed girl, a man sweating from tiresome work or sexual ardor, and they all come together in a unity combining eroticism and knowledge, love and a meditation on the origins. The images coalesce in the next phrase, where erotic dreaming, memories of love, and the fetal position remind us that we share in the same experiences; that our particularity depends on the same origin.40 The bracketed self-referential fragment, which we have already considered, differs from the rule of 13 syllables, in lacking two syllables. Aside from the Heraclitean reading of those last two lines, they furthermore display a very Christian moment. Artemis signifies the difference between the Greek “pagan” and the Christian imagination. The former celebrated life itself and not life beyond, depicting Hades as the land of shadows, while the latter concentrates on what lies after, producing intricate depictions of the afterlife. For Miłosz, the (unattainable) earth is also constant struggle and belief suspended between the celebration of the present bodily moment and the hope for future spiritual continuation. Heraclitus conveys this dilemma in his paradoxes and Miłosz praises him for this in a letter to the American poet Thomas Merton (1915–1968), to whom he mentions this poem:  “It seems to me you are right when you stress “intuition prechretienne” of Heraclitus…. In Heraclitus there is the thought of the future, of our common future, true dialectic as opposed to the false one. As to his Fire, among many meanings I remember what Oscar Milosz said about “incorporeal light” as the first stage of Creation.”41 A girl’s breast so fragile under Artemis’s hand, Sweat, oil on the face of a man from the fleet Participate in the universal, existing separately. Our own when we are asleep, devoted but to ourselves, In love with the scent of perishable flesh, With the central warmth under the pubic hair, Our knees under our chin, we know there is the All And we long in vain. An animal’s; that is, our own. Particular existence keeps us from the light (That sentence can be read in reverse as well).

The speaker then moves back to a quotation about Heraclitus; gathering voices about a figure that becomes increasingly fictional; suggesting that all we know of him may be untrue and just a matter of viewpoint distanced by time and textual testimony. The quotation about the philosopher is also two syllables shorter than the rest, which this time may suggest the distortion of perspectivism: how

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historical records about an individual influence subsequent readings of his thought. The image comes from the famous biographer of ancient Greek philosophers, Diogenes Laertius (c. third century AD), the author of the classical work, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. Laertius’s remarks are tainted by his moment in time and, supposedly, the Epicurean philosophy he subscribed to; a philosophy contrasting that of Heraclitus, which the speaker marks with the words “as went the reproach.” The speaker continues by explaining that Heraclitus hated the fact that no “moment of consciousness” may transform our animal selves. The term, here, means both an elevating of individual perspective to a divine level through epiphany and a broadening of this viewpoint through methodical abstraction. The English translation performs Heraclitean “syntax, obscure” through a repositioning of the word “never,” which should come after “will.” In the original, Miłosz frequently plays with syntax but the Polish language is itself much more flexible than English, since the inflection of words, their declension, and conjugation, allow for more movement within a phrase. In English, the detachment of the word “never” conveys that the distortion of cognition lies within the language itself. “Nobody was so proud and scornful as he.” For he tortured himself, unable to forgive That a moment of consciousness never will change us. Pity turned into anger. So he fled from Ephesus. Didn’t want to see a human face. Lived in the mountains. Ate grass and leaves, as reports Laertius.

At this point, the speaker’s perspective zooms away from the site of events; that is from the Asiatic Greece, the site of all Presocratic philosophers. The speaker observes the sea from high above—using Miłosz’s “telescopic eye”—with and without the waves. There is a dialectic process between the sea as a single abstract entity with or without the waves, on the one hand, and the waves, repeatable but individual, on the other. The image of the waveless sea is a creative reiteration of the Heraclitean aphorism about the same river having always different water. However, the image also works within the larger symbolism and the meaning of waves in Western culture. A wave is dangerous when close by and romantic when observed from a distance. A wave may mean a generation of people or a generation of philosophers or poets, making their mark on society and ceasing. A wave signifies the hope of return within an invisible order of things. A wave, finally, suggests a rhythm: of a poem, life, art, or thought. From afar, however—if we apply Miłosz’s “double

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vision”—rhythms group into epochs, movements, or fashions, but from up close they appear in new forms and divisions, revealing differences within the seemingly smooth surface of a particular time. The phrase about waves is a marker of the poem’s inner rhythm; it is the second verse in brackets and the second attempt at performing a Heraclitean aphorism. The functional pulse of the poem emphasizes the meaning, which reads that there is a pattern hidden within the particular; that the particulars belong to a much broader rhythm. Then again, from a high enough perspective, all rhythm appears to be part of the same movement. The sea lay down waves beneath the steep shore of Asia (From above the waves are not seen, you look just at the sea).

Love The train of association leads the speaker to depict historical waves and consider what happened on the marine border of Europe and Asia. The idea is that all the events in time become irrelevant from the perspective of eternity; and that this perspective makes all of them relevant and intertwined. The speaker recalls the cultural diversity of the area by examples, referring to the memories of experiences, books, and newspapers. He enumerates: a scene of (epiphanic) transubstantiation in the Catholic Church; the titular character of Ludovico Ariosto’s epic Orlando Furioso (1516) about the insanity of love; and a fish kissing the lips of a dead female soldier. Just as Heraclitus’s philosophy survives to this day in fragments only, so Miłosz presents his understanding of reality—as fragmentary, perspectival. And there, is it an echo of bells tinkling at a monstrance? Or Orlando Furioso’s golden clothes afloat? Or is it a fish’s mouth nibbling lipstick From the lips of a radio-girl drowned in a submarine?

The intertextual references to Heraclitus, Diogenes Laertius, and Ariosto’s epic reveal that intertextuality is yet another way for Miłosz to introduce novel perspectives. Furthermore, the internal references convey a pedagogical marker, because they often require no previous knowledge or interpretive ability. Instead, Miłosz introduces other elements of culture and offers his own interpretation, the context necessary to read the surface meaning of the poem. Such intertextuality forms an image of the writer as a teacher and erudite. This is an overt quality of Miłosz’s texts: to recall the communal foundations of existence and share it with “the great human family.” Miłosz’s perspectivism is thus linked to gathering,

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collecting, and quoting; to inscribing oneself always in a tradition, a context or a blending of contexts, a hybridization, and a superimposition of images.42 The three scenes refer to different moments in history—the longue durée of the Church, the medieval crusades, the Italian Rinascimento, the twentiethcentury wars—and they finalize the poem by pointing to the seeming brevity and equal importance of all historical presences. The link between them is the concept of love: the equality between animals through mortal body (“radio-girl”), the insane earthly love of Orlando, and the divine love of Christ, who, in Catholic tradition, shares his own flesh with the community of believers. Christian culture transposes love from the bodily and the psychological to the metaphysical. Miłosz uses it as a form of development toward Heraclitean philosophy of the “incorporeal light.” This accumulation of images from different times and perspectives performs Miłosz’s “feast of motion,” the hopeful “eschatological poetry” that allows for withstanding the nihilistic conclusions of Nietzschean perspectivism. This kind of humble approach to reality comes from Miłosz’s deep understanding of Saint Paul’s Hymn. For, even though Miłosz champions hope, his poem “Heraclitus” reveals that Miłosz hoped to orient and link readers with the Christian virtue of caritas, the love of humankind; or, as Paul wrote in Greek, agape, which means also God’s love for the people. Already this one word, used to convey the most basic and important of virtues, opens our perception of reality to not only the interhuman, by way of emotions or morals, but—just like Miłosz proposed—to the political-religious connectedness of all things.

Conclusion Situating and Movement In his tripartite poem “In Cabin’d Ships at Sea,” Walt Whitman compares his famous book of poems, Leaves of Grass, to a ship. First, however, Whitman describes the feelings of the “voyagers,” rocked by the rhythm of the pulsating expanse of waters. An allegorical reading allows us to assume that the voyagers are poets. The sky connects with the sea and the earthly connects with the heavenly, just as the “endless motion” and “melancholy rhythm” motivate a contemplation of the “boundless vista.” All these elements are available in Miłosz’s poetry; he, too, speaks of himself as a “voyager” attempting to grasp the “unattainable earth,” and searches for the source of his writing in “a moving frontier.”1 As we know by now, Miłosz revels in contradiction, which he calls “a dialectical play of opposites”—it is an oscillation between perspectives. Miłosz contrasts opposing views, seems to fully agree with one, then say “yes, but there is another similarly important opposition,” and continues to spiral in quick shifts of observations—not by switching sides but by multiplying antinomies. Among the antinomies, Miłosz still seeks the most elementary and commonsensical pairings. But the longer he explains, the more oppositions proliferate. How else to grasp anything stable from movement? Even the explanation of his own poetics that Miłosz offers in The Witness of Poetry appears self-contradicting. We read about the spiritual and the physical, which then overlap with Miłosz’s ideas on apocalypse and revolution or, on a broader level, with metaphysics and politics, or even history and nature. However, Miłosz moves on to write about hope and fear, telescoping and microscoping, moment and eternity, the landscape and the place, the longue durée and the event. In his poems, Miłosz operates within these sets in his poems, by positioning them against each other or layering one over another. What links these contradictions is not—as many scholars would like to argue—some hidden order, but the necessity of displaying movement in the interpersonal dimension. However, this mixing of perspectives has a somewhat hidden agenda, which is, of course, also a paradox. By naming so many oppositions, Miłosz removes himself from any possible consensus, rejects any stable authorial persona, but at the same time creates an unwieldy nebula of antinomies with its own weight and trajectory. This fact would go unnoticed if not for the comparison of his transatlantic reception—that there is a general gravitational push and pull of his ideas; an unnoticeable motion too general and too simple to easily grasp when

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observing it up close, from one side only. In physics, the gravitational antinomies situate the time-space relationship, and Miłosz applies the same rule to his poetics and the movement of thought. The gravitational metaphor comes from Miłosz, whose strong interest in the German physicist Albert Einstein (1879–1955) motivated many curious passages in his works. Most notably, Miłosz defers to the image of gravitational relations in the first part of his untranslated long poem for the death of his mother, entitled “Mother’s Grave” (1949). Miłosz’s mother, Weronika, died on the 22nd of November 1945, near Gdańsk, Poland, and was buried in Sopot, a small health resort nearby. Due to this fact, the speaker is very close to the author. The long poem consists of nine parts, each with one stanza comprised of a different number of lines, not rhymed but formed syllabotonically with 11-syllable verses in hypercatalectic iambic pentameter. The text is a reworking of a threnody—a song of lamentation for the dead—in which the returning pattern gives the soothing quality of an orderly form. However, Miłosz utilizes the caesura and verse endings to underscore parts with an enjambment, which builds up a contrasting emotion of instability.2 The formal tension between chaos and order presents itself also in the contents of the stanza at hand. In the first three verses, Miłosz uses “double vision” to compare the solar system to the structure of an atom. This time, the movement he imagines is circular. The electrons/planets encircle the core in a tension between their own centrifugal energies and the centripetal gravitational attraction of the atom/sun—in a balance of equal forces. The physical observation conveys again the Heraclitean “mobile wisdom” that things simultaneously change and remain the same. As the particles revolve rhythmically around the central point of gravity, so do the thoughts of the speaker cyclically situate his approach to the death of the mother. The main question is unsolvable and typical for a threnody, namely, how to conquer death and change time? The gravitational metaphor introduces the contemplation of time in its most detailed and broad perspectives, from a moment to the whole history; and aptly so, because gravitation is very relevant to our understanding of time. The speaker continues to pinpoint the place that interests him most, the ground in which his mother’s body lies. As in the title Unattainable Earth, here too, Miłosz uses the word “ziemia” which means “ground,” but when capitalized may mean “the planet.” The preceding mention of planets strengthens the ambivalence between the soil holding the grave and the planet as the grave of all people. This “point in the earth” that is the final and undeniable reference to any living being—meaning the person that gave birth to us and her place of eternal slumber—holds the absurdity of life, in which forms and bodies suddenly appear

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wooden like the coffin, “a senseless dream.” The speaker worries that our works are futile and that passing time destroys memory as well as any mementos of good deeds. Thus, he repeats that we live in uncertainty while the world seems to work perfectly well, as even the smallest and the biggest of natural elements continue relentlessly with their work, neglectful of the tragedy that befalls the individual. Small silver globe in movement and the planets Are like electrons running on a track Around the sun of atom. But for us There exists always one point on the earth That returns in a senseless dream, Where mannequins with wooden necks, Headless, lead a dance or dogs Jump on their knees from carved wood. Between the memory that bothers By saying “It is for naught to conquer the past” And the oblivion that is an offence To our concepts of our own goodness, We live unstable, while hastily As flies in light of unceasing lamps An electron passes another in void.3

When writing about the grave of the person closest to him, Miłosz unexpectedly employs the language of science; he needs certainty. In fact, Miłosz systematically returns in his poems to the ideas from the scientific world, especially the rules of the universe discovered by Albert Einstein. Miłosz wrote “Mother’s Grave” in 1949, when he was residing in Washington D.C., where he also met Einstein. Einstein’s thought inspired Miłosz to ground his view of the world and poetry in a scientific outlook that would allow for the presence of a “metaphysical” perspective. Miłosz speaks about Einstein frequently and in superlatives. In an interview, Miłosz unabashedly declares that he not only exchanged letters with Einstein but actually “worshipped him” and approached him “with enormous reverence.” In 1948–1949, Miłosz even wrote an untranslated ode “To Albert Einstein,” praising him for undermining the prevalent mechanistic worldview and giving hope for reconciliation between science, art, and religion:  “I am ashamed to speak loudly. I am provoked by this matter, / Which is difficult to define. The matter of hope.” Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize for explaining the photoelectric effect, to which “Mother’s Grave” alludes. In the poem, Miłosz compares planets around the sun to an electron because the same ideas, promoted by Einstein, established

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the field of modern cosmology. From this smallest of issues, Einstein was able to generalize on concepts of time, space, and matter.4 Einstein’s theory of relativity undermined the ideas of Isaac Newton by postulating a union of time and space that effected the formulation of the concept of space-time. Newton founded his “classical mechanics” on the idea that space is independent of bodies and that time flows regardless of the presence of events. Before Newton, many thinkers maintained that time and space were not real, but rather abstractions of cyclic change and the arrangement of bodies. Against Newton’s conception of gravity, Einstein proposed how strong gravitational fields may influence space-time. The elementary difference between Newton’s and Einstein’s assumptions—the difference so important to Miłosz— revolves around the method of their inquiries. Both observed scientifically; however, Newton did so with the naked eye while Einstein theorized from knowledge of the invisible. Newton’s discoveries were easy to confirm with everyday experience, whereas most of Einstein’s theories find assertion only in experiments made in very specific conditions. Einstein negates the commonsensicality of physics as observations of the tactile, material world. In modern science, therefore, the naked eye has no more access to the truth of the everyday unless one considers the invisible and hidden processes. This “esoteric” factor, among others, made both Oscar Milosz (OVM) and Czesław Miłosz foreground Einstein over Newton as the champion of an alliance between the empirical sciences and the sciences of the spirit, Geisteswissenschaften.5 As Einstein’s worldview extends beyond the specialized field of physics, it is of great importance to Miłosz’s poetic imagination. Miłosz links poetry with science, because movement for him is not only a matter of poetics, but a general order of things. Furthermore, Miłosz always underlines how his thought on the matter originated not from Einstein, but from OVM. In a footnote to his long poem Apprentice (2002)—in homage to OVM—Miłosz writes that OVM’s “The Letter to Storge” “presents a cosmological exposition that corresponds precisely to Einstein’s theory of relativity, even though the author was then unaware of Einstein’s discovery.” Aside from the conjunction of poetry and science, the most important presupposition of Miłosz’s commentaries here is that poetry precedes the scientific and imagines the possibilities for future research and theorization. In this case, poetic imagination puts forth its reliance on home so that even the contemplation of time and matter suddenly returns to its premodern form. That is, before modernity and Newton, time and space were perceived as homely and safely structured, retaining a hierarchy of beings and the promise of an afterlife.6

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In “The Letter to Storge,” OVM addresses Storge as a friend, even though it is an abstract quality. “Storge” is Greek for love, affection, and devotion; separate from “eros,” the carnal love, and from the Christian “agape,” the brotherly love. The text is a manifesto in a Presocratic manner, concentrated on elementary things. OVM draws existential and artistic laws from the same source: from observing and meditating on the basic rules of the physical world. OVM wants to answer simultaneously questions in theology, poetology, and physics.7 The narrator argues that everything in the natural world may be reduced to “situating.” In French, OVM uses the verb situer, which we may translate as “situating” thus conveying the noun “site,” whereas Czesław Miłosz translates it as umiejscawianie, “positioning, finding the right place” “To situate” in Latin is situare, which means “to position, arrange” or even “to leave, set down.” But the etymology of ordering expands in the light of another translation of situer, that of “locating,” which comes from the Latin “locare” as in “local”, and entails also “putting-in-place.” “Situating,” thus, for OVM means not just “positioning, arranging,” or “putting-in-place” but at the same time “putting-in-perspective.” Moreover, it entails a “situation,” an instantaneous event and an encounter with the other. For OVM, human perspective operates in a perpetually unstable and emergent existence. Furthermore, OVM suggests that individual perception should be the beginning of all scientific exploration. “Situating,” understood as perspectivism, entails the self-awareness of the individual moving body—consciousness—which the speaker calls “the love of movement,” or Thought. The narrator explains further that thinking enables us to “situate all things” by way of cognition and self-consciousness, although bound to a “movement of the universe.” That is, the physical movement of the planets, the movement of the body, and the movement of thoughts are all connected to each other by analogy and by the erasure of division between time and space. The same principle organizes poetry, continues OVM, which makes rhythm “the highest earthly expression of what we call thought.”8 The speaker argues that there is no difference between movement as perceived by either scientist or artist. Movement, he continues, presents itself either as the never-ending process of intellectual defining or the always-shifting patterns of fashionable creation. That is, to embrace movement one has to understand the diversity and the shifting of perspectives as well as the relational functioning of referentiality. Czesław Miłosz rephrases OVM’s train of thought in his own way in a quasi-epigraph from Unattainable Earth:  “The incessant endeavor of the mind to encompass the world in its infinite diversity of forms with the use of science or art is the same as the chase after the subject of our amorous desires.”9

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Hence, movement for Miłosz means a change in outlook and form; or, in design and intention. Movement is also a word that we use to describe the various aesthetic groups. We can say that Miłosz moves, but he does not want to be part of any movement. Let us try to consider the term in its many uses. Miłosz does not want to subscribe to fixed categories. He oscillates between them and, when we think of his life, seems also to have always centered himself, situated himself. As with the electrons from the poem “Mother’s Grave”, Miłosz appears moved by opposing forces: the gravitational pull to the center of attention and the centrifugal energy to always contradict the status quo. His “quest for reality” applied to poetics and life appears to be an ever-renewing struggle to situate himself at the best viewpoint, a place on earth encompassing geography, existence, politics, religion, history, and poetry. This, however, is not a narcissistic need to assume the position of a stable omphalos, the navel of the world. Rather, Miłosz wants to root himself firmly in the place of belonging, Lithuania and California, and then move beyond himself as far as possible. He wants to be in the center, to be the center, and to get out of it, get out of himself, at the same time. This testifies to the tensions of his poetry, oscillating between rooting himself and shifting perspectives; between exceeding himself and searching for a stable home. Walt Whitman does a similar thing, always talking about his person but then spreading himself out in an encompassing birds-eye view of America or the whole earth. There are many examples, such as the poem “Starting from Paumanok,” where Whitman’s speaker invites the reader, “See, revolving, the globe.”10 Wherever he lived, Miłosz has done his best to paradoxically find the mainstream and try to situate himself in a contraposition, participating by observation. He removes himself from prewar Polish nationalism and anti-Semitism, wartime martyrdom, postwar Communist government, the French love of theory, American anti-Communism, and idealization of individualism. Miłosz puts distance between himself and his homeland, between himself and the cultural traditions he has embraced and developed. His move into exile was never only a matter of geography: he also moved between cultures. When in Poland he searched for French inspirations, in France he looked to the American ideas, in California he studied Chinese and Japanese worldviews or translated the Bible from Aramaic and Ancient Greek. Whenever presenting poetry to a broader audience, Miłosz immediately positions himself on the outskirts or, rather, in a locus governed by his own rules, in a “province” of his own.11 Miłosz, however, never shunned obligations to his region of origin and the broad tradition of Polishness. Sadly, one could even argue that the degree of

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earnestness that Miłosz developed toward his source culture, was possible only thanks to his living outside of the self-derogatory and self-ironic Polish society. Miłosz frequently spoke of responsibility toward language and culture. He aimed to create and encyclopedically embrace all kinds of traditions. This can be done only with a great deal of flexibility and openness, a fluid movement alongside other people, traditions, and texts. Miłosz explains that with certain branches of abstract thinking there appears a “deprivation” of thought, which he wants to oppose with poetry understood as a holistic attention to the non-mathematical, singular troubles and joys of the individual situated in the society.12 Miłosz’s movement has no target or destination; it is neither evolution nor affirmation from an emanationist system. Movement functions for him within the largest possible thematic network of oppositions, in the “more spacious form.” The development of ideas for Miłosz proceeds by way of musical movements, retaining the same themes but varying and complicating them in new ways, tried out in different variations and keys, as short songs and longer treatises. While Miłosz himself wants to retain individual perspective, or even the perspective of his Lithuanian home, his geographic and political movements—and the movements of his environment—reverberate in his poetry. Miłosz moved from the provinces to the center, from Vilnius to Warsaw, the center of Polish culture. On the global scale, he moved to Washington, then to the capital of the nineteenth century, Paris, then to another province, in California, paradoxically embroiled in the central events of the student counterculture, and finally to Kraków. At the same time, his political worldview shifted frequently. Miłosz began with communist thought and worked with the Communist government, although, due to the influence of the esoteric OVM, Miłosz never fully assumed the scientific conclusions of his colleagues or the exclusive aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism. He experienced wartime Warsaw always on the edges of the mainstream, supportive neither of the communists nor of the nationalists. Instead, Miłosz listened closely to his friend and Hegelian philosopher, Tadeusz Kroński, distanced from the current events by the power of the abstracting thought. Miłosz did not want to belong to the American poetry of experience and witnessing, even if he learned from it to a great extent. He always retained a strong connection to Polish culture but never wanted to be absorbed by its ritualistic religiosity. He loved his new Californian home but did not want to abandon his Lithuanian background. He always tried to sidestep the theorizations of the fashionable French thinkers, even if his criticism kept his interests in their field of study. Miłosz always violated what each culture called certain and, instead, preferred to say, “yes, but.” His need to differ does not mean constant negation

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but, instead, an oscillation between ideas concurrent with evading capture into a clear-cut, defined position. Miłosz’s main principle is difference by way of unending movement between commonly accepted concepts and presenting them as contrasting and oppositional. He did that in the name of art understood as a premodern task of simultaneous imagining the political and the religious; that is, aesthetic and ethical maximalism coming from the common source of reality. With whomever or whatever group Miłosz linked himself, it was but a momentary movement, a tangential event, and an opportunity for thought; while his individual perspective approximated another. His appropriation for the needs of the Solidarity movement, and Miłosz’s reluctance to support it more forcefully reveals his detachment and his need to be neither a voice for a broader movement nor a moral authority. Miłosz always wanted to find a position outside. He wanted to keep on the outskirts and retain the powerful position of the newcomer or the child who points to the emperor and dares to speak aloud what the others can see but do not name: that he is not wearing anything at all. All the time, Miłosz was aware that a stabilization of his authorial persona would come about, especially with more international praise, such as the Nobel Prize. That is why after the award, he began to give many interviews, presenting himself with his own voice, or prepared introductions to his many works in an effort of self-situating. From this comes the American perception of Miłosz as the witness to history and exile; or, the Polish construction of Miłosz as prophet, bard, and cultural legislator. Although, in relation to his not-belonging policy—from yet another perspective—Miłosz’s authorial persona appears, inadvertently and perhaps against his will, as quite American, as if mobilized by the Emersonian call for self-reliance.

Endnotes Introduction 1. Robert W. Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York: Random House, 1957); Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 73; Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1972), 7; Robert C. Elliott, The Literary Persona (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1980); Jérôme Meizoz, Postures Littéraires: Mises En Scène Modernes de L’auteur (Genève: Slatkine Éditions, 2007); “Modern Posterities of Posture:  Jean Jacques Russeau,” Authorship Revisited: Conceptions of Authorship Around 1900 and 2000, eds. Gillis J. Dorleijn, Ralf Grüttemeier, and Korthals A. Liesbeth (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2010), 81–94; La Fabrique Des Singularités: Postures Littéraires II (Genève: Slatkine Éditions, 2011). On the ancient theory of persona, see Diskin Clay, “The Theory of the Literary Persona in Antiquity,” Materiali E Discussioni per L’analisi Dei Testi Classici 40 (1998), 9–40; Ronald G. Mayer, “Persona(l) Problems. The Literary Persona in Antiquity Revisited,” Materiali E Discussioni per L’analisi Dei Testi Classici 50 (2003), 55–80. 2. Czesław Miłosz, Wiersze / Świat. Poema naiwne / Głosy biednych ludzi / Noty (Warszawa: Biblioteka Więzi, 2011), 9–10. 3. Ibid., 1; transl. MG. 4. Miłosz’s thought about the epigraphic “two fears” driving his work is so important that he reiterates it ten years later in Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 125: “I was stretched, therefore, between two poles, the contemplation of a motionless point and the command to participate actively in history; in other words, between transcendence and becoming. I  did not manage to bring these extremes into a unity, but I did not want to give either of them up.” 5. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Other Poetry and Prose, Criticism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), poem “Walt Whitman” 14:51. 6. Aleksander Fiut, The Eternal Moment:  The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 88, 105, 123, 127, 163, 179–80. 7. Czeslaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems 1931–2001 (New  York:  Ecco Press, 2003), 240–41; Arent van Nieukerken, “‘Kłopoty z opisem rzeczy’, czyli (nie)możliwość mimesis w epoce relatywizacji podmiotu,” Postscriptum polonistyczne 1, no. 7 (2011), 98; Ewelina Gajewska, “‘Ani za świątobliwie, ani zanadto świecko’. O języku Traktatu Teologicznego,” in Poznawanie Miłosza

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3: 1990–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut, 2011, 830; Ryszard Nycz, “‘Nostalgia za nieosiągalnym’. O późnych poematach Czesława Miłosza,” in Poznawanie Miłosz 2:  Część Pierwsza, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków:  Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000), 297–98; Seamus Heaney, “Secular and Millennial Miłosz,” in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 447–48. The matter of Miłosz’s “daimonion” has been sufficiently described by Joanna Dembińska-Pawelec in “Rytmiczne szepty Dajmoniona. O mediumicznej funkcji poezji Czesława Miłosza,” Postscriptum Polonistyczne 1, no. 7 (2011), 119–38. The matter has been also touched upon in the context of artistic taste by James S. Hans, The Sovereignty of Taste (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003).

1  The Writer as Proteus and Silkworm 1. Czesław Miłosz and Aleksander Fiut, Czesława Miłosza autoportret przekorny (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1981), 321, 334–35. 2. Czesław Miłosz, Ewa Czarnecka, and Aleksander Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 322; Homer, The Odyssey (London: Penguin Books, 2009), Vol. 4: 450, 470–80. 3. Miłosz, Czarnecka, and Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 322; Miłosz and Fiut, Czesława Miłosza autoportret przekorny, 1981, 109, 120, 335. In 1937, Miłosz wrote a poem entitled “Wcielenie” (“Incarnation”) about which he said in an interview that it holds “a great longing for salvation [and] also includes an intuition of crucifixion, or a desire for it. It’s a very unpleasant poem, and I dislike it for that reason…. I was embarrassed, because the author and the persona in that poem are somehow shamelessly close; there is too little distance on the persona. And that makes for a certain immodesty. I want to publish “Incarnation” along with a commentary in which I say: It’s tough, but you have to own up to such things.” Cf. Zbigniew Kaźmierczyk, “Wcielenie—wczesny wiersz Miłosza,” in Poznawanie Miłosza 3: 1990–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011). 4. For a thorough theoretical reflection in the matter of introducing artistic change to the receiving culture, see Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004). 5. Miłosz, Czarnecka, and Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 325–26; Miłosz and Fiut, Czesława Miłosza autoportret przekorny, 1981, 340. 6. Cf. Maciej Sarbiewski, Epigrammatum liber. Księga epigramatów, eds. Magdalena Piskała and Dorota Sutkowska (Warszawa:  Instytut Badań Literackich Państwowa Akademia Nauk, 2003); Samuel T. Coleridge, “On Poesy or Art,” in The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: W. Pickering, 1836), par. 6–7, 17; Cf. Lidia Wiśniewska, “Miłosz and the Philosophy (of the Unity) of Contradiction,” in Miłosz in Pamiętnik Literacki [Literary

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    Memoir]: Selected Papers, ed. Tomasz P. Górski (Warszawa: Instytut Badań Literackich Państwowa Akademia Nauk, 2013), 87. Apart from the authors listed, important to Miłosz, the notable thinkers writing about coincidentia oppositorum where the medieval philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) and the modern psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). 7. In the context of Miłosz’s essays, the concept first appeared in the book Kryzys świadomości europejskiej w eseistyce polskiej lat 1945–1977 (Vincenz - Stempowski - Miłosz), (Warszawa: Eterna, 1990) by professor Andrzej St. Kowalczyk from the University of Warsaw. 8. Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle or the Mansions (London: Thomas Baker, 1921), 75–76. 9. Czesław Miłosz, Nobel Lecture. Odczyt w Akademii Szwedzkiej (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 6. 10. Miłosz, Czarnecka, and Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 325–26. 11. Cf. Czesław Miłosz, “A Poet Between East and West,” Michigan Quarterly Review 16, no. 3 (1977), 263–71. More reflection in the matter of abjection and writing, see Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 12. Ávila, The Interior Castle or the Mansions, 76. 13. Francesco Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum Familiarium Libri). Vol. 1: Books I–VIII (New York: Italica Press, 2005), 42, 45. 14. Czesław Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2011), 318, 337; transl. MG. The second time Miłosz employed the motif was just one year later, in 1948, when praising the debut of the postwar Polish poet, Tadeusz Różewicz (1921–2014), in the untranslated “Do Tadeusza Różewicza, poety:” “Four hundred blue rivers labored / For his birth and a silkworm / Spun for him its sparkling nests.” The words of admiration are sincere, even if the poem itself plays with subtle irony and self-irony not absent from the three short verses. 15. Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 244. 16. Miłosz, Czarnecka, and Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 326. One must not, however, mistake the unchanging core of the self-image—which Miłosz wants to project—with the assumption that he declared to hold a complete knowledge of himself or that his “inner self ” really was resistant to change. In matters of identity and self-perception, no one can aspire to more but a hope for stability. Miłosz himself always defers the assumption of some higher insight or full self-awareness. Instead, he brings together and oscillates between the silkworm and the protean metaphors. Even in the light of his late “theological” meditations, Miłosz retains this ambivalence, pointing to the constant movement as the preserver of the only hope that he so favored: that of being complete. 17. Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting (London: Chatto and Windus, Picadilly, 1883), 11. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) had similar

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ideas to Diderot, though he wanted theater play to motivate the audience not emotionally but rationally, toward a critical appraisal of their social environment. This social edge, or the belief that art can inspire practical action, remains in all Miłosz’s considerations of literature as part of a generational experience, close to Brecht’s. 18. Judith A. Dompkowski, with her book “Down a Spiral Staircase, NeverEnding:” Motion as Design in the Writing of Czeslaw Milosz (Bern:  Peter Lang Publishing, 1990), 84, is the first scholar to explicitly tackle the issue of movement in Miłosz’s writing. However, she concentrates mostly on his personal movement through historical events and geopolitical belonging. Her most promising chapter about “Miłosz within the Sphere of Self ” speaks only of Miłosz’s “fragmented self;” a quite controversial positioning of the matter. Unfortunately, Dompkowski never fully transposes her reflections onto the sphere of poetics and identity. 19. Miłosz, Czarnecka, and Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 320–21. 20. Ibid., 322–29. 21. Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum Familiarium Libri) Vol. 1: Books I–VIII, 45. Miłosz wrote in The Captive Mind about Polish intelligentsia that they hide their true beliefs to retain good relationship with the ruling Communist Party and a comfortable level of life. Although, after his defection in Paris, Miłosz thought “ketman”—as he called this practice—is unavoidable for him and other Polish émigrés even in the West. As Karwowska quotes in “Czesław Miłosz’s Self-Presentation in English-Speaking Countries,” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne Des Slavistes 40, no. 3/4 (1998), 276, Miłosz wrote in 1955 to young Polish poets in London, saying that, “The times are such that one cannot state publicly in writing what one really thinks about poetry. Personally I try to avoid doing so … Sometimes I even blame myself for “wearing a mask” or several masks. But for all I know this may sometimes be a necessary condition of effective action. The “ketman” which I described in my book is not confined to one political system only. It is an artistic method par excellence.” 22. Zdzisław Łapiński, “Między polityką a metafizyką. O poezji Czesława Miłosza” (1980), Poznawanie Miłosz 2:  Część pierwsza (Kraków:  Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000), 7–32, was probably the first scholar to explicitly point out the two extremes of Miłosz’s writing as politics and metaphysics. 23. Miłosz, “A Poet Between East and West,” 2. 24. David S. Gross, “Czesław Miłosz’s Roadside Dog and the Search for SelfDefinition,” World Literature Today 73, no. 4 (1999), 649; Czesław Miłosz, Second Space: New Poems (New York: Ecco Press, 2005), 53. Joanna Zach, a specialist in the study of Miłosz’s works, pointed out in a conversation with me that, paradoxically enough, Miłosz’s self-situating strategy confirms what Miłosz tried to oppose in Witold Gombrowicz’s concept of the self.

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25. Nieukerken, “ ‘Kłopoty z opisem rzeczy’, czyli (nie)możliwość mimesis w epoce relatywizacji podmiotu,” 65; Aleksander Fiut, Moment wieczny: Poezja Czesława Miłosza (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1998), 134; Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 132, 137, 157–58, 169. 26. Miłosz, Piesek przydrożny, 105; transl. MG. 27. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 1196; transl. MG. 28. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 582; New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 227. 29. The second speaker of Diderot’s The Paradox of the Actor, 11–12, remarks with Enlightenment era reluctancy that actors are in contact with ghosts: “According to you the likest thing to an actor, whether on the boards or at his private studies, is a group of children who play as ghosts in a graveyard at dead of night, armed with a white sheet on the end of a broomstick, and sending forth from its shelter hollow groans to frighten wayfarers.” 30. Cf. Nieukerken, “Kłopoty z opisem rzeczy”, czyli (nie)możliwość mimesis w epoce relatywizacji podmiotu, 93.

2  Modernist Hagiography 1. Miłosz, Nobel Lecture. Odczyt w Akademii Szwedzkiej, 76. 2. Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 1–7, 16, 20, 54, 70, 82–83, 86, 90, 127, 134, 141, 165–66, 169, 171, 180, 189–90; Fiut, Moment wieczny: Poezja Czesława Miłosza, 17, 88; Cf. Bogusław Grodzki, Tradycja i transgresja: od dyskursu do autokreacji w eseistyce i “formach pojemnych” Czesława Miłosza (Lublin:  Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie Skłodowskiej, 2002). The most thorough appraisal of his self-situating and reception comes from Bożena Karwowska, a scholar of Miłosz from the University of British Columbia, in “Czesław Miłosz’s Self-Presentation in English-Speaking Countries” and The Critical Reception of Czesław Miłosz and Josif Brodsky in English-Speaking Countries (Diss. University of British Columbia, n.d.,), in which Karwowska underlines how the changing political and social conditions of Miłosz’s life influenced his writing. Cf. Magdalena Kay, “Assessing the Anglo-American Legacy of Czesław Miłosz,” The Polish Review 56, no. 4 (2014), 293–94. 3. Czesław Miłosz, Post-War Polish Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 57; Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature (Toronto:  Macmillan, 1969), 529; Karwowska, “Czesław Miłosz’s SelfPresentation in English-Speaking Countries,” 286; Michał P. Markowski, “Miłosz: Dylematy autoprezentacji,” in Poznawanie Miłosza 2: Część pierwsza 1980–1998, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000), 328. 4. Cf. Marta Wyka, “Jak Miłosz czyta Mickiewicza,” in Poznawanie Miłosza 2:  Część druga 1980–1998, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków:  Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001), 92–101; Cf. Clare Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern

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Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 1–44, 234–65; Cf. Ewa Kołodziejczyk, “Amerykańskie abecadło Czesława Miłosza,” Przekładaniec 25 (2011), 18; Cf. Bogdana Carpenter, “The Gift Returned:  Czesław Miłosz and American Poetry,” in Living in Translation: Polish Writers in America, ed. Halina Stephan (Amsterdam– New  York:  Rodopi, 2003), 66, 74; Leonard Nathan and Arthur Quinn, The Poet’s Work: An Introduction to Czeslaw Milosz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), ix; Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 241. 5. Karwowska, “Czesław Miłosz’s Self-Presentation in English-Speaking Countries,” 280; Cf. Andrzej Walicki, Zniewolony umysł po latach (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1993). 6. Karwowska, “Czesław Miłosz’s Self-Presentation in English Speaking Countries,” 283–84; Andrzej Franaszek, Miłosz:  Biografia (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2011), 594, 664, 669, 671; Irena G. Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 77, 271; Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 530. 7. Karwowska, “Czesław Miłosz’s Self-Presentation in English-Speaking Countries,” 287; Nathan and Quinn, The Poet’s Work: An Introduction to Czeslaw Milosz, 1991, ix. 8. Karwowska, “Czesław Miłosz’s Self-Presentation in English-Speaking Countries,” 293, 295; Cf. Carpenter, “The Gift Returned: Czesław Miłosz and American Poetry,” 2003, 48–49. 9. “When I said the truth, offensive smiles of the journalist rats / Let me in on a secret, as if we both knew all about it. / And for years I could only hold contempt, / Conscious, that they will receive the final triumph, / For they did receive in turns, what they wanted: / Each a respective portion of nothingness.” Berkeley 1970. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 622; transl. MG. Karwowska, “Czesław Miłosz’s Self-Presentation in English-Speaking Countries,” 277. 10. Especially Łukasz Tischner in his Miłosz and the Problem of Evil (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015); Czesław Miłosz, The Land of Ulro (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), Vol. 55. 11. Karwowska, The Critical Reception of Czesław Miłosz and Josif Brodsky in English-Speaking Countries, 63, 82, aptly remarks how Miłosz in many ways influenced Fiut’s work. 12. Miłosz, Czarnecka, and Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 268–69: “I think that the People of the Book are the people of both the Old Testament and the New Testament, the word in general. Stéphane Mallarmé is no great master of mine. I have many objections to nineteenth-century French aestheticism, but it was Mallarmé’s dream to turn the world into a book. To turn the world into a book is man’s ultimate dream. … What was Flaubert trying to do? After all, he could not bear life, he was disgusted by the bourgeois, the France of his time, so he tried to turn life into a book. The existence of

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the Book, the Bible, is man’s bulwark against chaos. The People of the Book are against the insidious, immoral sea, against chaos.” The concept of “the Book” was used by Ryszard Nycz, Sylwy współczesne. Problem konstrukcji tekstu (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1984), 58; Marian Stala, Trzy nieskończoności. O poezji Adama Mickiewicza, Bolesława Leśmiana i Czesława Miłosza (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001), 136; Joanna Zach, Miłosz i poetyka wyznania (Kraków: Universitas, 2002), 259–67. 1 3. Fiut, Moment wieczny. Poezja Czesława Miłosza, 88, 294; Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 194. The first suggestions that Miłosz’s work is a unique complex united on a deeper level—other than the same biological instance of the writer—appeared in the contributions to the special issue of World Literature Today (1978), the first academic reflection about his work available in English. Tomas Venclova, “Czesław Miłosz: Despair and Grace,” World Literature Today 52, no. 3 (1978), 393–94, writes that Czesław Miłosz’s uncle and French post-symbolist Oscar Milosz encouraged him to perceive poetry as “a rarity,” unveiled fully only in the Bible and aftwerward only as an exception from the norm, available in the writings of few authors, among few works. For Venclova, Miłosz’s “poetic world” is that exception, a necessity in the face of atrocities, a bricolage made from the fragments of culture. Krzysztof Dybciak, “Holy Is Our Being ... and Holy the Day,” World Literature Today 52, no. 3 (1978), 415–19, calls Miłosz “a poet of integrity” who tries to gather all human experience in harmony, simplicity, faith, and order. Jan Błoński, “Poetry and Knowledge,” World Literature Today 52, no. 3 (1978), 529, writes that Miłosz’s poetry is “homogenous yet multiform.” Irena Sławińska, “The Image of the Poet and His Estate,” World Literature Today 52, no. 3 (1978), 398, when presenting Miłosz before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, expounds on his uniqueness, because he decided to keep on working in his native language and, thus, “gave up the chance of entering the international literary scene.” At present, the statement appears to have been premature, but what remains vivid is the need of Polish scholars for a unique ambassador of Polish culture. Two years later, Andrzej Werner, “Świadomość kryzysu czy kryzys świadomości (O esejach Czesława Miłosza),” in Poznawanie Miłosza, ed. Jerzy Kwiatkowski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1985), 529, considers Miłosz’s essayistic output as diverse yet highly coherent. Fiut comes close to the idea of “the Book” already in 1980, in “Poezja w kręgu hermeneutyki,” Teksty 58–59, no. 4–5 (1981), 52–76, where he compares the topos of world as “the Book” to Miłosz’s poetry as a hermeneutic reflection on culture. Even Nycz, “Prywatna księga różności,” Teksty 58–59, no. 4–5 (1981), 203–33, remarks how noteworthy is the relation between forms of poetic experience and construction that find their origins in the topoi of the garden, the forest, and the Book. The garden is to be for Miłosz the unapproachable reality. The forest, according to Nycz, is a Dantean metaphor of

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life. The Book, Nycz continues, in its elementary eschatological dimension, uncovers the hidden structure of reality and, thus, recreates the symbolics of the garden. Stanisław Balbus, “ ‘Pierwszy ruch jest śpiewanie’ (O wierszu Miłosza—rozpoznanie wstępne),” Poznawanie Miłosza, ed. Jerzy Kwiatkowski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1985), 461–64, seeks a singular stylistic dominant in Miłosz’s writing that is to suggest the existence of a stable aesthetic attitude: “thinking in verse.” Edward Możejko, “Between the Universals of Moral Sensibility and Historical Consciousness: Notes on the Writing of Czesław Miłosz,” in Between Anxiety and Hope: The Poetry and Writing of Czesław Miłosz, ed. Edward Możejko (Edmonton:  University of Alberta Press, 1988), 17, 25, remarks that Miłosz has “consistency” unequaled by other authors and “clarity” coming from underlying integrity. Judith A. Dompkowski, “Down a Spiral Staircase, Never-Ending:” Motion as Design in the Writing of Czeslaw Milosz (Bern: Peter Lang Verlag, 1990), 113, stresses the inseparable “complete fusion” of poetry, history, and morals. Marian Stala, “Ekstaza o wschodzie słońca. W kręgu głównych tematów poezji Czesława Miłosza,” in Poznawanie Miłosza 3: 1999–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 109, in 1999 suggests Miłosz’s poetry is diverse on the surface and uniform in deep structure. 14. Miłosz, Nobel Lecture. Odczyt w Akademii Szwedzkiej, 6. 15. Authorized King James Version. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 466; transl. MG: “And yet it has happened to someone else. / The Book of colours and flashes, flavors and smells / Is equally well mine and not mine. / What belongs is but a tone, as wind in the wires, / A constantly surfacing great miserere.” 16. Maurice Blanchot, “The Absence of the Book,” The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 423–25, considers the concept of “the Book,” while he analyzes Mallarmé’s ideas closely in his other text from the same collection, “The Book to Come:” “Something is there that the book presents in presenting itself, and that reading animates and reestablishes through its animation in the life of a presence. Something that, on the lowest level, is the presence of a content or a signified then, on a higher level, the presence of a form, of something that signifies or operates; and, on a still higher level, the development of a system of relations that is always already there, if only as a possibility to come. The book enfolds time, unfolds time, and holds this unfolding in itself as the continuity of a presence in which present, past, and future become actual … the work … claims to be singular: unique, irreplaceable, it is almost a person. Hence the dangerous tendency for the work to promote itself into a masterpiece, and also to essentialize itself, that is to say, designate itself by a signature.” 17. Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 194. 18. Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 28:  “Czeslaw Milosz told us that after Mallarmé we [the French],

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and the West with us, were trapped in a hopeless hermeticism. That we had drained the source of the poem. That philosophical abstraction was like a glaciation of the territory of poetics. And that the East, armed with its great suffering, the guardian of its own living word, could lead us back to the path of a poetry sung by an entire people. / He also told us, this great Pole, that the poetry of the West had succumbed to a closure and an opacity at whose origin there lay a subjective excess, a forgetting of the world and of the object. And that the poem needed both to conserve and to provide a knowledge devoted to the wealth without reserve of what presents itself.” 19. Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry:  The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture 1981–82 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 19, 47, 97; Cf. Igor Jankowicz, “Czyja mowa?,” Tygodnik Powszechny, 2011. 20. Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 21, 85. 21. Blanchot, “The Absence of the Book,” 425; Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 3, 187, 194–95; Małgorzata Rybka, Zamieszkać w zdaniu:  O składni tekstów poetyckich Czesława Miłosza (Poznań:  WiS, 2002), 129–33; Cf. Joanna Dembińska-Pawelec, Poezja jest sztuką rytmu: O świadomości rytmu w poezji polskiej dwudziestego wieku (Miłosz–Rymkiewicz– Barańczak) (Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, 2010). This “true language” is for Fiut such that it bridges “the chasm between the subjective and the objective, the sign and the signified.” Although, comparative linguistic analysis by Rybka points out that Miłosz’s language and style change with time so much that it becomes nearly impossible to perceive his work, at least on the formal level, as a single stroke of genius or a host for a hidden unity. Moreover, the eschatological understanding of “the Book” motivates many Polish readers to concentrate on the religious or, as they usually call it, “metaphysical” part of Miłosz’s thought. The approach of those critics inevitably leads to a suggestion that Miłosz’s work as nearly equaling the Bible in spiritual wisdom; a comparison already suggested by Fiut. The approach then forcefully pushes the interpretive energies of Polish readers to engage with the symbolic language of mystics instead of literary analysis. 22. Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 194–95. 23. In 1984 Miłosz wrote a short poetic prose, in which he sarcastically mimicks the thought of the French existentialist thinker, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). The speaker first assumes Sartre’s reasoning, denigrating the idea of “the Book of all things,” only to criticize his approach and suggest that the notion should actually be cherished. This figure of “the Book” is “unaccessible to human mind” but denotes all reality: it imbues existence with the certainty of an invisible order of things. Only from the acceptance of the universe as coherent and accessible may one consider what morality means. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 897; transl. MG: “The twentieth century, the century of moralism. How dare you ensure yourself that your being is inscribed with

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sense in the Book of all things, unaccessible to human mind, and that you are under special care! What about the others? Their prayers have not been fulfilled, but what does it concern you, you bastard (salaud). This here is the gist of the thoughts of the twentieth century thinker, Sartre, the moralist.” 24. In What Is A Classic? (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1945), 29, T. S. Eliot gave a famous speech for the Virgil Society entitled after Sainte-Beuve’s essay. For Eliot, Virgil is to be the “absolute” European classic, because he delivers a “critical criterion” for European civilization as it originated from the Roman empire. When Eliot applies the “gravity” of history to Virgil, it is due first to the historical circumstances in which he delivers his speech. It is 1944, and the ongoing war with Germany caused much doubt about the durability and humanity of European civilization. Eliot sought a stable foundation relatable for all the struggling nations of Europe. 25. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953), 41, 64–81. Berlin and Fiut both struggle to ascribe a singularity of intent into Tolstoy and Miłosz, so that their voices will be heard better from the “nebula” of Eastern Europe. However, in contrast to Berlin’s Tolstoy, Fiut assumes that Miłosz wants to preserve the oppositions. Still, both authors seek an “(impossible) vantage point” external to conventional expectations about life. Berlin’s Tolstoy, like Fiut’s Miłosz, observes and describes the minute details but remembers that, “the truth is there, and not ‘here’.” That is, truth is not found in the observable features but in a hidden image of a whole. 26. Czesław Miłosz, “Przedmowa,” in Malarz życia nowoczesnego (Gdańsk: słowo/ obraz terytoria, 1998), 6–7; transl. MG. 27. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 1–3, 15. “In the most frivolous work of a sophisticated artist belonging to one of those ages which, in our vanity we characterize as civilized, the duality is no less to be seen; at the same time, the eternal part of beauty will be veiled and expressed if not by fashion, at least by the particular temperament of the artist. The duality of art is the fatal consequence of the duality of man.” 28. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London:  Phaidon Press, 1995), 6–7, 8–9; Cf. Możejko, “Between the Universals of Moral Sensibility and Historical Consciousness: Notes on the Writing of Czesław Miłosz,” 15–16; Cf. Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 7, 18, 53–54, 101, 130, 134, 145, 159, 181, 190–92; Fiut, Moment wieczny: Poezja Czesława Miłosza, 82, 201; Agnieszka Kosińska, “Kim nie był Czesław Miłosz,” Miłosz:  Przewodnik Krytyki Politycznej (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2011), 106. 29. Hence the Christian Feast of Epiphany celebrated on the 6th of January, which reminds the faithful of how Jesus Christ manifested the miracle of divinity in human form to the three Kings, or Magi. On the understanding

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and importance of epiphanies in the ancient times, see Georgia Petridou’s Divine Epiphany in Greek Literature and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Theodore Ziolkowski, “ ‘Tolle Lege’: Epiphanies of the Book,” The Modern Language Review 109, no. 1 (2014), 5; Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confesions, Book VIII, par. [XII] 29. 30. Joyce ponders on conveying the fleeting beauty in his posthumous Stephen Hero (1944). Like Baudelaire, the protagonist of Stephen Hero declares that epiphanies are abrupt momentary openings within individual casual events that lead to the appreciation of existence as it is: “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself ” and the “most delicate and evanescent of moments.” James Joyce, Stephen Hero (New York: New Directions, 1963), 211. The first to write about Joyce’s epiphanies was Harry Levin in his book James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (New York: New Directions, 1960), [especially] 28–31. Levin was the one to uncover the manuscript of Stephen Hero in the Harvard library, which was Joyce’s draft of his famous The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where the protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, elaborates his theory of the epiphany. The story of how Joycean epiphanies came to the focus of the scholarly community describes, among others, Robert Scholes in his article “Joyce and the Epiphany: The Key to the Labyrinth?,” The Sewanee Review 72, no. 1 (1964), 65–77. On the popularity of the term “epiphany” in English culture, its use, and its Christian origins with Thomas Acquinas and Saint Augustine of Hippo, see Theodore Ziolkowski’s article “Tolle Lege: Epiphanies of the Book,” The Modern Language Review 109, no. 1 (January 2014), 1–14. Yeats takes the idea of “whatness” from Thomas Acquinas’s notion of “quidditas.” For more on that see also Irene Hendri’s article “Joyce’s Epiphanies,” The Sewanee Review 54, no. 3 (1946), 449–67. 31. Agnieszka August-Zarębska, Poezja wobec rzeczywistości. Poetyckie epifanie Jorge Guillena i Czesława Miłosza (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2006), 7, 96–97; Stala, Trzy nieskończoności. O poezji Adama Mickiewicza, Bolesława Leśmiana i Czesława Miłosza, 144; Nycz, Sylwy współczesne. Problem konstrukcji tekstu; Aleksander Fiut, W stronę Miłosza (Kraków:  Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003); Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 26, 28. Jan Błoński, Miłosz jak świat (Kraków:  Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 5, 7–8, 52, analyzes Miłosz’s “prophecies,” “theological-political treatises,” and semi-religious “epiphanies.” For Błoński, Miłosz is to create a quasi-religious theory of imitation through epiphanic writing, in which he hopes for the objectification of lyric into a poetic theology of imagination. Zajas in Miłosz i filozofia (Kraków: Baran i Suszczyński, 1997), 61–71, argues that gathering detailed fragments serves Miłosz not principally to reveal the diversity of the sensible world, but to prove the impenetrability of the secret of sheer existence. For Miłosz, says

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Zajas, the presence of God is to unveil itself in things through epiphany. Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 8; Cf. Krzysztof Zajas, “Epifanie botaniczne Czesława Miłosza,” Wielogłos 1, no. 1 (2007), 110–18; Cf. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 823. A renowned Canadian philosopher fascinated with Miłosz, Charles Taylor, gives a more general definition in his book Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 419, which works better for Miłosz. Taylor speaks of epiphany as a phenomenon that defines modernist art and holds the utmost “moral and spiritual significance.” For Taylor, epiphany reveals that a work of art may be “the locus of a manifestation which brings us into the presence of something which is otherwise inaccessible, and which is of the highest moral or spiritual significance; a manifestation, moreover, which also defines or completes something, even as it reveals.” Taylor writes mostly about Baudelaire but lists many other kinds of epiphany and authors. Polish readers often suggest the term “religious experience,” because Miłosz remarked in several places about how important to his development in his youth was the lecture of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience:  A Study in Human Nature (London: Longman, 1902), that attempted to pragmatically describe the eponymous issue. In turn, Hans U. Gumbrecht in Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 111, offers a most insightful elaboration of the concept of presence as an extralinguistic quality and also considers the concept of “epiphany” in a different way: “By “epiphany,” I am [referring] to the feeling … that we cannot hold on to the presence effects, [and] that they … are ephemeral.” 32. While visiting my friend Marcin Szafarz in Kraków, I met with Aleksander Fiut, who told me that he never interpreted the poem “A Notebook: Bon By Lake Leman” in a separate chapter, because for him the whole book is its close reading, distributed among all of Miłosz’s works. 33. Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 27, 190; Cf. Jan Prokop, “Antynomie Miłosza,” Poznawanie Miłosza, ed. Jerzy Kwiatkowski (Kraków:  Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1985), 229–30; Cf. Andrzej Kijowski, “Tematy Miłosza,” Poznawanie Miłosza, ed. Jerzy Kwiatkowski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1985), 158, 173. 34. Cf. Michael Ferber, A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Learned in the classics, Miłosz begins with a very precise verse that recalls the works of Virgil. The beech tree appears in the first three of Virgil’s Eclogues and is associated since with pastoral poetry. As contrast, the white poplar appears in Virgil’s Aeneid (5:134), who says that the “oarsmen in the racing boats in the funeral games are crowned with poplar leaves;” the tradition comes from Homer’s Illiad (13:389), who calls poplar acheiros, which links it with the underworld and one of its rivers, Acheron. Finally, the spruce is a link to a tradition closer to the modern times, that of

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the Christian Feast of Nativity of Jesus Christ, and symbolizes immortality and perennial nature. 35. Homer, The Odyssey, 11: 13–14. 36. In Polish, the poem has an endnote stating that it was written in the town of Bon, which is on the south side of Lake Leman, in France. However, the speaker stands on the north side of the lake, which is symbolical. Most probably it is Lausanne or Vevey, places popular among artists and literati, such as Lord Byron, important to the Polish Romanticism, Adam Mickiewicz, or Henryk Sienkiewicz, the legislator of Polish nationalist fantasies. The real side of the author and the traditional side of Polish literati are also present in the Polish title of the poem “Notatnik: Brzegi Lemanu” meaning precisely “Notebook: the Banks of Leman.” 37. Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, viii. 38. Light as the metaphor for truth and wisdom dates to Plato’s metaphor of the cave through the Augustinian concept of divine illumination to the concept of the Enlightenment. This current of thought is promoting a visual means to achieve ecstasy and union with the divine. It is active mysticism, in which the absolute is a final, pure, and dazzling light, surpassing thinking and speaking. Cf. Hans Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,” Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David M. Levin (Berkely: University of California Press, 1993), 44; Cf. Walter C. Curry, Shakespeare’s Philosophical Patterns (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 1937), 147; Cf. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of Renaissance (London: Westview Press, 1972), 129. 39. The denomination of the priest is unclear, it might be Greco-Catholic, which allowed for marriage. 40. Augustine of Hippo, “Exposition on Psalm 137,” Exposition on the Psalms (Michigan: New City Press, 2001). The first line of this psalm has been used in the work by T. S. Eliot that Miłosz translated, The Waste Land, in a way that reveals at least a strong dialogue between the two poets. In the context of the title of Miłosz’s poem, “A Notebook: Bon By Lake Leman,” Eliot paraphrases the initial verse of the psalm especially meaningfully in The Waste Land, Vol. 182, “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept….” For his purposes, Eliot changed the rivers of Babylon to “waters of Leman”—a stupefying act in such close vicinity of a river song for the London Thames— and Miłosz references the rivers of Babylon, when his speaker observes Lake Leman. 41. Earthquakes occur when Jesus dies on the cross in Mt 27:51, when an angel opens the stone covering his grave in Mt 28:2, and the earth trembles constantly during John’s description of the end of days in Revelation 6:12; 8:5; 11:13, 19; 16:18; cf. Isaiah 29:6.

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42. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto (New York: Verso, 2012), 35; Cf. Michael Berman, “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air:” The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). The English translation of the second stanza of “A Notebook: Bon By Lake Leman,” omits the penultimate verse from the Polish original, which reads “Czysty, gwałtowny, wre na nowo świat,” “A pure, violent world boils anew.” 43. From Plotinus through Ficino, the mystical tradition is situated in the ambiguity of shutting one’s eyes and seeing such light inside, in the screeningoff of the gaze and looking even further, in search of a reality transcending linear time and materiality. More on the matter of occularcentrism in Miłosz’s works, see Kris van Heuckelom, “Patrzeć w promień od ziemi odbity:” Wizualność w poezji Czesława Miłosza (Warszawa: Instytut Badań Literackich Państwowa Akademia Nauk, 2004) as well as van Heuckelom’s “Poetry in the Era of Ocularcentrism: The Lux/Lumen Opposition in the Work of Czeslaw Milosz,” The Polish Review 50, no. 2 (2005), 131–54; Cf. Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,” 46; Cf. Miłosz, Second Space: New Poems, 31; Czesław Miłosz, Road-Side Dog (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 5. 44. The use of the river as an image of the flowing time is a customary motif in literary tradition and it accompanies Miłosz’s writing from the beginning; metaphorically capturing the ambivalence of stability and liquidity. Miłosz deliberates upon it in the final text from Road-Side Dog, 208, entitled simply “Rivers.” In 1936, Miłosz wrote the symbolist “Slow River” and, four years later, the untranslated poem “Rzeka,” gathered in Rescue. In “Rivers” (1980), from the book Hymn of the Pearl, the existence of one being or the whole civilization and its longevity is subjective, dependent on perspective, and may thus be called the eternal moment. “Rivers Grow Small” (1963) from Bobo’s Metamorphosis speaks of perspective subjectively changing with the passing of time. In a later poem “Rivers,” Miłosz writes “Tylko trwa wieczna chwila,” which translates into “Lasts only the eternal while.” The lingering of a “while” refers directly to the famous sentence from Goethe’s work Faust and reveals this intertextual reference hiding within “eternal moment.” As a result, Miłosz’s concept directly engages Goethe’s reflection on the matter of subjectivity, existence, and experience. Faust—a late medieval German scholar—makes a bet with Mephistopheles that he will go to serve the latter in Hell, if a moment fills him with such happiness that he would want to preserve it from the passing of time. Faust is to say exactly “Verweile doch, du bist so schön,” “Last, beautiful while, do not pass!” Nicholas Boyle, a specialist in Goethe from Cambridge University, explains that in these words Faust seeks a solution to the life of a “post-Christian man, man after the curse” of modernity, living in a world forsaken by God, where one is like Job that may struggle only with the Devil. Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001,

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397; Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 769; Johann W. Goethe, Faust: Eine Tragödie (München: C. H. Beck Verlag, 2008), Vol. 1700, 11582; Johann W. Goethe, Faust (Warszawa: Świat Książki, 2006); Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: Faust Part One (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 51–52. 45. Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 4; Thomas S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (New York: Brace & World, 1963), 208; Cf. Hans P. Rickman, “Poetry and the Ephemeral: Rilke’s and Eliot’s Conceptions of the Poet’s Task,” German Life and Letters 12, no. 3 (1959), 174–85. 46. Ralph W. Emerson, Self-Reliance:  The Over-Soul and Other Essays (Claremont:  Coyote Canyon Press, 2010), 55–68. In some philosophical traditions, soul is understood as the motive force, the source of life understood as movement. Emerson draws on the thought of many earlier philosophers, especially Neoplatonists. Miłosz’s position is closer to the classical American poet at one time embraced by Emerson, Walt Whitman, who introduced his opus magnum, the collection of poem Leaves of Grass and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Other Poetry and Prose, Criticism, v, by praising the paradigm American poet who is to incarnate American “geography and natural life and rivers and lakes;” he “sees eternity” not in himself or events even, but in others, “in men and women.”

3 Self-Definition 1. Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 16: “The double meaning of witnessing—eyewitness testimony based on firsthand knowledge, on the one hand, and bearing witness to something beyond recognition that cannost be seen, on the other—is the heart of subjectivity.” Cf. Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer, eds., Between Witness and Testimony: The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001), xii. 2. Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler, eds., Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma (New York: Routledge, 2003), 2–5, explain that an event to be witnessed is such that inflicts physical or psychical trauma, which is ancient Greek for “wound”. The context of trauma gives the concept of witnessing space outside of the juridical and religious interpretations. As embedded within the bodily, traumatic witness changes the understanding of evidence, authenticity, memory, and history. A “traumatic event” urges or yearns for putting it into words yet defers from it, thus it “cannot be anticipated or reproduced.” Miłosz in Nobel Lecture (Odczyt w Akademii Szwedzkiej), 20, himself considers the possibility that “there is no other memory than the memory of wounds.” Cf. Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer, Between Witness and Testimony: The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation, xv; Cf. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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3. Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, 18; Allison A. Trites, The New Testament Concept of Witness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 163. 4. For more on the meaning and etymology of the word “martyr,” see Norbert Brox, Zeuge Und Märtyrer: Untersuchungen Zur Frühchristlichen Zeugnis-Terminologie (München: Kösel Verlag, 1961); JohannesBeutler, M artyria:  Traditionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen Zum Zeugnisthema Bei Johannes (Freiburg: Verlag Josef Knecht, 1972); Candida R. Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom:  Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2012), 26–27, 33, 163–67. For the understanding of martyrdom in non-Christian cultures, see the collection edited by Margaret Cormack, Sacrificing the Self:  Perspectives on Martyrdom and Religion (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002); Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God:  Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 42, endnote 1, 56. 5. Ibid., 44–45; C. D.  af. Wirsén, “Award Ceremony Speech,” in Nobel Lectures:  Literature 1901–1967, ed. Frenz Horst (Singapore:  World Scientific, 1999), 36–44; Henryk Sienkiewicz, “Banquet Speech,” in Nobel Lectures: Literature 1901–1967, ed. Frenz Horst (Singapore: World Scientific, 1999), 45–46. 6. Adam Mickiewicz, The Books and the Pilgrimage of the Polish Nation (London: James Ridgway, Picadilly, 1833), 21. 7. Cf. Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 226, 313; Czesław Miłosz, Poszukiwanie ojczyzny (Kraków: Znak, 2001), 146, 147; transl. MG. 8. Cf. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 215– 16: “These three sparsely settled countries underwent an intensive colonization, chiefly German and Polish, which marked the advance of Christianity. The result was that two different languages entered into use there: the masters, that is the landholders, spoke … Polish (in Lithuania) in part because the newcomers brought with them their own language and customs, and in part because the local nobility adopted them. The common people, however, spoke their native tongue and preserved their cultural heritage from a legendary past.” 9. Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 89–90. 10. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz:  The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 27; Clement of Alexandria quoted in Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, 21, 41–42, 52, 61. The Polish word for the verb “to witness” is świadczyć, which incidentally also means “to offer a service.” Świadczyć serves as root for many other meaningful words in Polish, conceptually related with witnessing, most importantly doświadczyć, “to experience,” and świadomość, “consciousness.” 11. This relates most interestingly to the fact that Agamben locates the witness within the bodily. Andrea Frisch, The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing

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and Testimony in Early Modern France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 144–47. 12. By Puritans, I mean the Separatists from the Church of England that moved to America and established the colony of Massachusetts Bay led by John Winthrop in 1628. Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, 59; Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963), 90; Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, 26. 13. Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom:  Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions, 44–46; Owen C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience:  Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (London: Routledge, 1972), 236–38; Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea, 34–35, 41, 62, 68, 93, 113; Darret B. Rutman, American Puritanism: Faith and Practice (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1970), 91; Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 7, 45, 59, 82, 132, 148. Later, the candidates were expected to voice their “experience of a work of grace, that is, how they had received saving faith.” That is why, at one point, even “a theological morphology of conversion” in ten stages had been established to evaluate an individual’s development on the path to sainthood. For the Puritan elite, their way of speaking—not writing—was the only way to completely control meaning. They enacted the Gnostic antimartyrdom by assigning signification exclusively to visible rites, by the contention that Christians represent Christianity better than any art would ever do. 14. More on Mary Rowlandson’s text and the Puritan ideological tool of exemplification, see Mitchell R. Breitwieser, American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning:  Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson’s Captivity Narrative (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 15. Czesław Miłosz, Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942–1943 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 9, 11: “[A]‌ race of indefatigable conquerors, colonizers, and sailors seemed to provide one more weapon in defense of these thinker’s belief that man, lost in the wilderness, in the company of wild animals and wild tribes, loses nothing of his moral worth—that on the contrary, only in those circumstances does he achieve it. Thanks to this belief, a farmer in a plaid shirt saying his evening prayers on the doorstep of a cabin he has built with his own hands in the woods beside Mississippi or Missouri River, could feel pure and noble as he made do without confessor or preacher. Beside him, gleaming in the setting sun, his rifle leans against a bench carved out of a tree trunk. He has used it to eliminate more than one Indian in self-defense or while participating in a raid against the original inhabitants of the land he has acquired by force.”

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16. Czesław Miłosz, Milosz’s ABC’s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 311–13. The piece is important for Miłosz as a closure of the collection. In Polish, the title is “Znikanie” which positions it at the end of the ABC, but the English “Disappearance” would occlude its compositional importance by placing it in the “D” section. That is why, I assume, Miłosz asked the translator, Madeline G. Levine, to formulate an “Envoi” section at the end, only for his reflections on “Disappearance.” 17. Madeline G.Levine, “The ABC Books as Notes for a Novel in Progress,” World Literature Today 73, no. 4 (1999), 643–44. 18. Cf. Marek Zaleski, Zamiast (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2005), 6. In search of literary solace, Miłosz considers Orpheus, the patron of poets and protagonist of his last long poem, a quasi-threnody on the death of his second wife, Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus, says the speaker of “Disappearance,” has “to agree to certain terms before he is let into Hades in search of Eurydice,” he has to honor “the line dividing the two worlds” of the living and the dead. The figure of Orpheus serves here as contrast to the reflection on how words, gestures, and memories grow gradually bleaker. Mnemosyne, the mother of the Muses, is the patron of Orphic poetry, memory, and excursions to the world of the dead, in hope to bring back the past. Miłosz, Milosz’s ABC, 311. 19. Although, Jewish martyrdom has been described already in the biblical account of the Maccabees as well as in Jewish poetry in the Middle Ages. For more, see Susan L. Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Frisch, The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France, 144: “The body of the Catholic martyr is resolutely nonlinguistic. It does not suffice to talk about it or read about it or hear about it; one must view it, touch it, embrace it.” Still, the body of the Catholic martyr is meaningful by way of observation and individuation, which sets it aside from the body of the Muselmann that Giorgio Agamben describes. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, 31. 20. Ibid., 17, 33–34, 39, 151, 156–57. Witnessing is different after Auschwitz because it is related to the condition of every citizen in modern political systems. Post-camp witnessing is different because the human subject of witnessing halves into the speaking and the mute, the human and the inhuman. In his considerations, Agamben reworks the concerns voiced previously by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 2006), and Maurice Blanchot in The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). The four authors pointed out that the source of the methodical genocide in the camps was the ideology of the enlightenment, the domination of the rational, division of social roles into citizens and others, the

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organization of the state, the division of work, the separation of the judge, the executioner, and the victim, as well as the impossibility to transfer the event in writing. 21. Czesław Miłosz, Zniewolony umysł (Paris: Instytut Literacki, 1953), 177. 22. Miłosz, The Captive Mind, 184. 23. Ibid., 207. In Polish, instead of “wasteland,” the narrator says clearly The Waste Land, referring to T. S. Eliot’s work and its detachment from real-life experience. 24. Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, 85–86; Miłosz, The Captive Mind, 216. Miłosz’s writes about poetic witnessing in “Strategy” from Road-Side Dog, 100. 25. Giovanna Tomassucci, “Opisywanie końca światów,” Rodzinny świat Czesława Miłosza, eds. Tomasz Bilczewski, Luigi Marinelli, and Monika Woźniak (Kraków:  Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2014), 211; Cf. Bożena Shallcross, The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 2011), 79, 84; Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 57. 26. Stefan Chwin, Miłosz: Interpretacje i świadectwa (Gdańsk: TYTUŁ, 2012), 33. 27. Marisha Chamberlain, “The Voice of the Orphan,” Ironwood 18, no. 9.2 (1981), 28, 31–32, 35. 28. Shallcross, The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture; Cf. Irena G. Gross, “Miłosz i wojna: Mówię do ciebie milcząc,” Miłosz i Miłosz, eds. Aleksander Fiut, Artur Grabowski, and Łukasz Tischner (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka—The Gould Center/Miłosz Institute, 2013), 813–26. 29. Cf. Chamberlain, “The Voice of the Orphan,” 32. 30. Tomassucci, “Opisywanie końca światów,” 202. 31. Biedny (poor) is also the sheer state of bodily existence, precious yet susceptible to death and decay. So Miłosz uses the term to name the “miserable bones” of the Venetian courtesans, the “poor ashes in Sachsenhausen,” the “poor plaything” of the body as a puppet, the “poor life,” the “poor lives of beings,” the “poor, arthritically swollen knees,” the “splendor [of] the earth’s poor moment,” the “poor degenerate animal,” the “poor earth” that was insufficient for the philosophizing Miłosz, the “poor body” separated from the soul, and, finally, the “poor flesh.” “No More,” “Elegy for N.N.” from From the Rising of the Sun, “A Mirrored Gallery,” “The Hooks of a Corset,” “With Her,” “Six Lectures in Verse,” “Either-Or,” “Conversation with Jeanne [Hearsch],” “Rays of Dazzling Light,” “Consciousness.” Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931– 2001, 158, 267, 326, 363, 411, 433, 463, 499, 540, 543, 605, 625, 635, 745; Czeslaw Milosz, Selected and Last Poems: 1931–2004 (New York: Ecco Press, 2011), 288. 32. Coming from the reading of the whole of Miłosz’s cycle Voices of Poor People, I  develop here the idea of “eschatological anxiety” by the Polish author

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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, important to Miłosz, differently to George Z. Gasyna’s text on Miłosz as exile, “A Mind Divided: The Dual Exile of Czesław Miłosz,” Russian Literature 52 (2002), 355–77. 33. Cf. Jarosław Fazan, “Czesław Miłosz i Paul Celan—dwa postkatastrofizmy/ dwie reakcje na Zagładę,” Miłosz i Miłosz 572–74. Cf. Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 44. 34. Ibid. 35. Tomassucci, “Opisywanie końca światów.” 36. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 144, transl. MG. 37. The destruction of the Ghetto means that a whole community was murdered. The speaker seems to present this as a paradox: more than one person died in inhumane circumstances but still the whole world did not end. Life should have stopped when a whole community ceased to exist in Warsaw. The poem is part of the cycle “Voices of Poor People” that begins with “A Song on the End of the World” where on “the day the world ends” the same bee that here builds on the destruction of people “circles a clover” and nothing changes. Eliot’s famous phrase from The Hollow Men, “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper” returns in Miłosz’s text as “There will be no other end of the world.” “A Song on the End of the World” and in “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” speak of the end of times both as a personal issue and an imperceptible fate. The tragedy of a whole community remains invisible to the broader public. 38. Grudzińska Gross, “Miłosz i wojna: “Mówię do ciebie milcząc,” 822–23. 39. Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 46. 40. See, an overview of this critical comparison in Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West, 246; Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 56; Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962, 82. 41. In these images, Shallcross notes Miłosz’s prophetic aspiration as speaking of an apocalypse fulfilled by images of annihilation. Shallcross, The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture; Cf. Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 45–46. 42. Czesław Miłosz and Cynthia Haven, Conversations (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 132–33; Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 45. 43. Shallcross, The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture, 76. 44. Ibid., 76, 80–81. 45. Ibid., 80, interprets the mole as related to Rilke’s image of the afterworld as mines, based on Rilke’s poem “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes.” The figure of the mole may, however, allude also to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Miłosz read at the time. The eponymous character ponders how fleeting the good reputation of men may be if they carry a moral defect, “some vicious mole of nature” that may incapacitate their political careers. The mole from Hamlet refers both to

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the animal and a birthmark, and is thus symbolic of a hidden inherent vice or the original sin. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, original sin is the reason for death. Hamlet wanders among the bones of the dead before the burial of Ophelia in Act 5 Scene 1, where he considers that, once dead, the lowly gravediggers will be equal to kings. This medieval topos of danse macabre comes to an interesting comparison of adjective “poor Yorick,” the king’s jester who Hamlet personally refers to as Alexander the Great and “Imperious Caesar.” The mole as birthmark betokens here both madness and the inherent vice, thus approximating meditations on death with escape from humanity and reason. Małgorzata Grzegorzewska, Scena we krwi. Szekspira tragedia zemsty (Kraków: Universitas, 2007), argues that the “mole” in Hamlet may mean both birthmark and subterrenean animal. For more on Miłosz’s translating Shakespeare and his relationship with the English writer, see Agnieszka Romanowska, “Szekspir Czesława Miłosza,” Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae Cracoviensis, no. 4 (2009), 111–28. 46. Cf. Shallcross, The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture, 82–83. 47. Fiut, The Eternal Moment:  The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 42, 45, 191; Chwin, Miłosz:  Interpretacje i świadectwa, 33; Julia Fiedorczuk, “A-ekologiczne marzenie Miłosza,” in Miłosz: Przewodnik Krytyki Politycznej (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2011), 244–46; Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry:  The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture 1981–82, 43:  “integrated into Nature, man also changes into a statistical cipher and becomes expendable.” 48. Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz; Miłosz, Czarnecka, and Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 264; Shallcross, The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture, 63, 72, 82. 49. Ibid.; Tomassucci, “Opisywanie końca światów,” 206.

4  The American Witness 1. Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens:  Poems, Poets, Critics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 223. 2. In the debates surrounding Vendler’s essay, I do not mention some important texts, because I use them elsewhere and they were not created from a solely American perspective. I  mean especially the chapter from Bożena Shallcross’s book The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), where she analyzes Miłosz’s “A Poor Christian Looks At the Ghetto,” and Irena G. Gross’s book, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Especially, Grudzińska disengages from the American debates on witnessing. It is so most probably due to the fact that she remains in touch with both Polish and American criticism. Grudzińska’s work examines instead

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the biographical bind of Miłosz’s work: how his literary developments were propelled both by literary and real-life friendships and how he considered much more than just witnessing. That is, Grudzińska reminds us of Miłosz’s interests in imperialism, colonialism, religion, exile, and language itself. 3. The exilic vein is displayed most vividly by the articles from the second special edition of World Literature Today (Autumn, 1999) devoted to Miłosz. The publication testifies to the transatlantic delay in reception, considering that the exiled writer moved back to Poland eight years earlier. Louis Iribarne, “The Human Thing: Encomium for Czesław Miłosz,” World Literature Today 52, no. 3 (1978), 365. Marisha Chamberlain, “The Voice of the Orphan,” Ironwood 18, no. 9.2 (1981), 28–35, upholds Iribarne’s vein of reading and argues that Miłosz perceives himself “as a product of history” and that the “assumption that private life is embraced and controlled by history is rare among American poets.” Others, especially Zbigniew Folejewski, “Czeslaw Milosz: A Poet’s Road to Ithaca between Worlds, Wars, and Poetics,” Books Abroad 43, no. 1 (1969), 17– 24, Magdalena Kay, “Assessing the Anglo-American Legacy of Czesław Miłosz,” The Polish Review 56, no. 4 (2014), 287–95, Tony Judt, “Captive Minds,” The New York Review of Books, September 2010, and Jarosław Anders, “Czesław Miłosz: A Testament of Exile,” in Between Fire and Sleep: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry and Prose (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 67–82, take the idea of Miłosz’s affinity with history for granted and treat it as baseline for further inquiries. Or, like Naomi R. Lowinsky, “Citizen at the Edge: Czeslaw Milosz and the Poetry of Redemption,” Psychological Perspectives: A Quarterly Journal of Jungian Thought 51, no. 1 (2008), 11–35, they use Miłosz’s biography and poems to come to terms with the changing of times. The idea that Miłosz is the “poet of witness”—even if not worded directly—returns when scholars foreground Miłosz’s early “catastrophism” as a lasting quality of his works, here excel George Gömöri, “ ‘Truth’ and ‘Beauty’ in Miłosz’s Poetry,” World Literature Today 52, no. 3 (1978), 413–15, Olga Scherer, “To Ulro through San Francisco Bay,” World Literature Today 52, no. 3 (1978), 408–12, Jerzy J. Maciuszko, “The Moral Aspect of Czesław Miłosz’s Creativity,” World Literature Today 73, no. 4 (1999), 675–76, and Możejko, “Between the Universals of Moral Sensibility and Historical Consciousness:  Notes on the Writing of Czesław Miłosz.” Another broad vein of interpretating of Miłosz, beginning with the same assumption of witnessing, is the one considering his exilic condition. David Rivard, “[Review of] Provinces by Czesław Miłosz: Robert Hass,” Harvard Review 1 (1992), 132, find Miłosz’s poetry to be “a voice marked by its journeying.” David A. Goldfarb, “The Polish Poet: Traveler, Exile, Expatriate, World Citizen,” Ulbandus Review 7 (2003), 155–73, presents Miłosz also as the victim of history, a lone survivor of its cruelties, who barely made it to the safe shores of America. Cf. Edward D. Blodgett, “Miłosz as Witness,” in Between Anxiety and Hope: The Poetry and Writing of Czesław Miłosz, ed. Edward

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Możejko (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1988), 144. Cf. Bożena Karwowska, “Czesław Miłosz i Cheslaw Milosh. Czytanie Miłosza w kontekście zainteresowań anglojęzycznej publiczności literackiej,” in Miłosz i Miłosz, eds. Aleksander Fiut, Artur Grabowski, and Łukasz Tischner (Kraków: Księgarnia Akademicka—The Gould Center/Miłosz Institute, 2013), 874. 4. Aside from Aleksander Fiut’s The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, one should also mention the scholarly collection produced by the Canadian Polish diaspora, Edward Możejko, ed., Between Anxiety and Hope: The Poetry and Writing of Czesław Miłosz (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1988). 5. Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 59–60. 6. Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, 40; Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics,201–209, 216, 219. 7. Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, 223. 8. Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind (New York: Vintage Books, 1955); Bożena Karwowska, The Critical Reception of Czesław Miłosz and Josif Brodsky in English-Speaking Countries (Diss. University of British Columbia, n.d.); Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz; Mark Rudman, “No Longer in Continuous Time,” Ironwood 18(9), no. 2 (1981), 11–27. 9. Carpenter, “The Gift Returned: Czesław Miłosz and American Poetry,” 2003, 61; Cf. Bogdan Czaykowski, “From Rhythm and Metaphysics to Intonation, Experience, and Gnosis: The Poetry of Bolesław Leśmian, Aleksander Wat, and Czesław Miłosz,” in The Mature Laurel: Essays On Modern Polish Poetry, ed. Adam Czerniawski (Chester Springs: Dufour Editions, 1991), 35–50; Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, 211. 10. Although, Miłosz remained reluctant to the 1960s counterculture. In turn, within Polish culture, he was reluctant toward the opposition of positivism versus Catholicism. Cf. Andrzej Walicki, Zniewolony umysł po latach (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1993), 170, 230; Cf. Bruce F. Murphy, “The Exile of Literature: Poetry and the Politics of Other(s),” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (1990). 11. For Clare Cavanagh, “Miłosz, prowincja, Kalifornia,” Zeszyty Literackie 4, no. 116 (2011), 114–22, Native Realm is Miłosz’s version of The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Cavanagh assigns to this text the genres of Bildungsroman, Künstlerroman, and the picaresque. As Miłosz himself underlines a similar quality in the essay about Robinson Crusoe, “The Legend of an Island,” from his Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942–1943 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 9. The fragment conveys one of Miłosz’s earliest uses of the word świadectwo, “testimony,” already referring here not to people in the act of witnessing but to a textual element of culture: “It should be clear from what has been stated here that, treated this way, Robinson Crusoe expands to fit the dimensions of a phenomenon whose meaning significantly transcends both the English

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novelist’s intentions and its own literary and artistic qualities. It is an evidence [świadectwo], a spool on which the thread of one of our contemporary myths is wound.” Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, 2, 4, 6–7. 12. Miłosz, The Captive Mind, 3, 25 ix. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience:  Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 20, argues that witnessing trauma means coming to terms with the event of the wounding, be it psychic or physical suffering. 13. Miłosz, The Captive Mind, 41. 14. Six years after writing The Captive Mind, when his memory had partly faded, Miłosz describes a similar experience in an unexpectedly personal manner in Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, 249, where he links it to the Second Warsaw Uprising, from 1944. Here, he keeps the first-person pronoun, and, thus, we receive a second description of a similar event. However traumatic it may be, it still serves its function to introduce Miłosz’s most important wartime lecture, which plays the crucial role in the dramatic encounter: “Ten carefree minutes under a cloudless sky. Then, unexpectedly, everything burst and my angle of vision changed as I found myself advancing on all fours. This outer-city district, where vegetable gardens and sparsely scattered houses bordered the fields, was so thickly planted with SS troops that the insurrectionists never managed to capture it. Machine guns fired at anything that moved. Heavy fire broke loose at our every leap, nailing us to the potato fields. In spite of this I never let go of my book—first of all out of respect for social ownership, since the book bore a call number of University Library; secondly I needed it (although I could stop needing it). Its title: The Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot, in the Faber & Faber edition.” 15. Vendler, The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics, 157; Czesław Miłosz, “A Poet’s Reply,” The New York Review of Books, July 1988; Karwowska, The Critical Reception of Czesław Miłosz and Josif Brodsky in English-Speaking Countries, 15, 24. 16. Charles Simic, “A World Gone Up in Smoke,” The New York Review of Books, December 2001; Michael Scammel, “Loyal Toward Reality,” The New York Review of Books, September 1998; Dennis J. Enright, “Child of Europe,” The New York Review of Books, April 1974. 17. Seamus Heaney, “The Impact of Translation,” in The Government of the Tongue:  Selected Prose 1978–1987 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 34, 39; Seamus Heaney, “Beginning With My Streets by Czesław Miłosz [Review],” Harvard Review 1 (1992), 136; Seamus Heaney, “Seamus Heaney on Czesław Miłosz’s Centenary,” The Guardian, April 7, 2011; Seamus Heaney, “In Gratitude for All the Gifts,” The Guardian, September 11, 2004. 18. Sven Birkerts, “The Rage of Caliban,” in The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry (New  York:  William Morrow, 1989); Sven Birkerts, “ ‘Poetry’ and ‘Politics,’ ” in The Electric Life: Essays on Modern Poetry (New York: William Morrow, 1989), 81–84.

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19. Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, 241. 20. Miłosz, The Captive Mind, 184; Miłosz, Zniewolony umysł, 177. For more on the origins of the modern concept of the eyewitness, see Frisch, The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France. 21. Only a few pages later of Miłosz’s The Captive Mind, 216, we may read how the speaker considers this issue by alluding to the synecdoche of modernist Anglo-American poetry—T. S. Eliot’s The Wast Land, “A real “wasteland” is much more terrible than any imaginary one.” 22. Ibid., 184. Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, 238. 23. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962, 3; Cf. Miłosz, “A Poet Between East and West.” 24. Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture 1981–82, 17. 25. Bogdana Carpenter, “The Gift Returned:  Czesław Miłosz and American Poetry,” in Living in Translation: Polish Writers in America, ed. Halina Stephan (New York: Rodopi, 2003), 62; Bruce Bawer, “Helen Vendler, Poetry Critic,” The Hudson Review 41, no. 4 (1989), 631. 26. Murphy, “The Exile of Literature: Poetry and the Politics of Other(s),” 162–65. 27. Miłosz, Road-Side Dog, 56. 28. Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 77. 29. Ryszard Nycz, “Czesław Miłosz: poeta XX wieku w przestrzeni publicznej,” Teksty Drugie, no. 5 (2011), 13–14. Issues of authenticity were recently raised by Ulla Haselstein, Andrew S. Gross, and Mary A. Snyder-Körber, the editors of The Pathos of Authenticity:  American Passions for the Real (Berlin: John F. Kennedy-Institut für Nordamerikastudien, 2010). Nostalgia for authenticity is a popular theme among the readers of Miłosz, undertook, among others, by Agnieszka Rydz, “Holograficzny model reminiscencji w poezji Czesława Miłosza,” Przestrzenie Teorii, no. 15 (2011), 71–94, Tomas Venclova, “Czesław Miłosz: Despair and Grace,” World Literature Today 52, no. 3 (1978), 391–95, Lidia Banowska, Miłosz i Mickiewicz: Poezja wobec tradycji (Poznań: Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 2012), Krzysztof Biedrzycki, Poezja i pamięć: O trzech poematach Czesława Miłosza, Zbigniewa Herberta i Adama Zagajewskiego (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2008), Leonard Nathan, “ ‘Veni Creator’ Czesława Miłosza. Próba Lektury,” in Poznawanie Miłosza 2: Część pierwsza 1980–1998, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000), 230–46, and Ryszard Nycz, “Nostalgia za nieosiągalnym. O późnych poematach czesława Miłosza,” in Poznawanie Miłosza 2:  Część pierwsza 1980–1998, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000), 296–307. 30. Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West, 148, 238–65; Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, 125. The first author on the list of American writers who inspired Miłosz already in his early

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years is Walt Whitman. Whitman’s example explicates how “self-celebration and witness to history are not mutually exclusive,” writes Cavanagh. 31. Karwowska, “Czesław Miłosz’s Self-Presentation in English-Speaking Countries,” 291, 294; Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture 1981–82, 11. 32. Miłosz, “A Poet Between East and West,” 266. 33. Stanisław Barańczak, distinguished poet and professor of Polish Literature at Harvard University, reminds us in “Język poetycki Czesława Miłosza,” in Poznawanie Miłosza, ed. Jerzy Kwiatkowski (Kraków:  Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1985), 419–45, that Miłosz is aware of a triple imperfection of representation due to the “apertures” of senses, memory, and then language. For Miłosz, language is too general to describe a particular sensual experience, an experience always recovered by memory. 34. Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture 1981–82, 3–4. 35. Czesław Miłosz, Szukanie ojczyzny (Kraków: Znak, 1992), 93, transl. MG. Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture 1981–82. 36. Ibid.,  16–17.

5  The Polish Prophet 1. Stefan Chwin, Miłosz: Interpretacje i świadectwa (Gdańsk: TYTUŁ, 2012), 148–49, 201, 203, 205–6, 208–9, 211–12, 214; Cf. Magdalena Błędowska, “Ten płaszcz jest za ciasny. Miłosz w czasach Solidarności,” in Miłosz: Przewodnik Krytyki Politycznej (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej, 2011), 195–211; Czesław Miłosz, Zaraz po wojnie:  Korespondencja z pisarzami 1945–1950 (Kraków: Znak, 2007), 280–81; transl. MG. 2. Miłosz, Czarnecka, and Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 178; Grudzińska Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets, 293. There are two books which consider Miłosz’s relation to Mickiewicz and the Romantic tradition: Elżbieta Kiślak, Walka Jakuba z aniołem: Czesław Miłosz wobec romantyczności (Warszawa: Prószyński i S-ka, 2000); Banowska, Miłosz i Mickiewicz: Poezja wobec tradycji. 3. Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 208–32; Banowska, Miłosz i Mickiewicz: Poezja wobec tradycji, 37, 152, 282–83; Kiślak, Walka Jakuba z aniołem: Czesław Miłosz wobec romantyczności, 282. Miłosz wrote in Szukanie ojczyzny, 86, that Mickiewicz, “the greatest poet writing in Polish, owes his linguistic discipline exactly to the Enlightenment writers;” transl. MG. 4. Maria Janion, Do Europy tak, ale razem z naszymi umarłymi (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2000), 20–22; Miłosz, Szukanie ojczyzny, 106; Grudzińska Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets, 292–93. Miłosz never abandons Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz (Mr. Tadeusz) or Zdania i uwagi (Sentences and Remarks). Those texts exhibit the approval

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of existence, simplicity, and even humility. The fact that both Miłosz and Mickiewicz taught Polish literature to the world critically analyzes and compares Marta Piwińska, “Prelekcje o Polsce dla zachodu. MickiewiczMiłosz,” Poznawanie Miłosza 2: Część druga 1980–1998, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001), 71–79. 5. Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 231–32. 6. Ibid., 225–26; Grudzińska Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets, 150: “In the Polish literary tradition, the poet may raise his voice to challenge God, but he never lowers himself to the level of a tyrant.” 7. Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 227–29; Andrzej Chojecki, “O tytule eposu Adam Mickiewicza,” in Balsam i trucizna. 13 tekstów o Mickiewiczu, eds. Ewa Graczyk and Zbigniew Majchrowski (Gdańsk: ATEXT, 1993), 87; Henryk Markiewicz, “O falsyfikowaniu interpretacji literackich,” Pamiętnik Literacki 87, no. 1 (1996), 59; Cf. Grudzińska Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets, 292. 8. Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 197, 201–3. 9. Czesław Miłosz, Księgi biblijne. Przekłady z języka greckiego i hebrajskiego (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2003), 283–84; transl. MG: “wieszcza albo wieszczka.” 10. Kiślak, Walka Jakuba z aniołem. Czesław Miłosz wobec romantyczności, 15, 19; Czesław Miłosz, Milosz’s ABC’s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 187. 11. Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 122, 303. 12. Witold Doroszewski, ed., Słownik języka polskiego (Warszawa:  Polskie Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1958); Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 306–7. 13. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 360; transl. MG; Milosz, New and Collected Poems:  1931–2001, 131, 307, 385; Cf. Jerzy Jarzębski, “Być wieszczem,” Poznawanie Miłosza 2:  Część druga 1980–1998, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2001), 102–3. 14. Czesław Miłosz, Ogród nauk (Kraków: Znak, 2013), 11; transl. MG; Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 165; Czesław Miłosz, Ziemia Ulro (Kraków:  Znak, 2000), 174. 15. Grudzińska Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets, 298; Cyprian K. Norwid, Promethidion. Rzecz w dwóch dialogach z epilogiem (Wrocław:  Ossolineum, 1995), 64; Cf. Kiślak, Walka Jakuba z aniołem. Czesław Miłosz wobec romantyczności, 63. 16. Ibid., 63; Jan Błoński, “Jeszcze o poezji i świętości,” in Poznawanie Miłosza 2: Część pierwsza 1980–1998, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000), 41; Jarzębski, “Być wieszczem,” 102–3. Marek Zaleski, “Arcywzór biografii poety,” in Zamiast:  O twórczości Czesława Miłosza (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2005), 280.

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17. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 430, 950, 1351; Miłosz, Second Space: New Poems, 56; Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 709; Miłosz, Road-Side Dog, 8. 18. Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 461. 19. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 142, 1196; transl. MG; Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 74; Czesław Miłosz, Selected and Last Poems 1931–2004 (New York: Ecco Press, 2011), 275. 20. Miłosz, Second Space: New Poems, 50. 21. Franaszek, Miłosz: Biografia, 9; transl. MG: “The life of Czesław Miłosz is a chronicle of the past century and with his death an epoch was ending; a man was leaving, whose importance was equal to that of Adam Mickiewicz. But a model of culture was also leaving, in which a poet could and wanted to achieve the highest goals in the political, social, or religious issues of his time.” Cf. Dybciak, “Holy Is Our Being ... and Holy the Day,” 415–16. 22. For more on the Polish discourses of dependency, see Hanna Gosk, “Polski dyskurs kresowy w niefikcjonalnych zapisach międzywojennych. Próba lektury w perspektywie “Postcolonial Studies,” Teksty Drugie, no. 6 (2008), 20–33; Hanna Gosk Ewa Kraskowska, eds., (P)o zaborach, (p)o wojnie, (p)o PRL: Polski dyskurs postzależnościowy wczoraj i dziś (Kraków: Universitas, 2013). 23. That is why, for instance, Miłosz criticized Grochowiak and Maciejewski, the authors of anthology of contemporary Polish poetry, for introducing his work as that of the national bard. 24. Cf. Cavanagh, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West, 253–55; Cf. Walicki, Zniewolony umysł po latach, 222. 25. Cf. Grudzińska Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets, 290–91; Marcin Brocki, “Struktura semantyczna dyskursu wokół pogrzebu Miłosza i roku Miłosza,” in Spotkanie z człowiekiem. Zaczynając od Czesława Miłosza, eds. Grzegorz Dąbrowski, Barbara Dwilewicz, and Kamil Pietrowiak (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2011), 215–25. When in Poland, Miłosz pronounced himself Lithuanian, defended homosexuals, was perceived by many only as a former collaborator with the Communist regime, and proposed non-dogmatic interpretations of the Catholic doctrine. In this regard, Grudzińska Gross’ comparison of Brodsky’s and Miłosz’s burial ceremonies is most telling. The former had a private ritual in a desolate place, whereas the latter a grand ceremony attended by thousands. 26. While Miłosz develops the concept of saving/redemptive poetry throughout his work, the term offers the ambiguity of poetic reluctance available already in the poem “In Warsaw.” The speaker’s reluctance to mourn the absence of the dead or to lovingly praise their past lives becomes the epitome of the tension between witnessing and saving/redeeming; that is, for Miłosz’s active non-participation. All these issues surface in Miłosz’s Nobel Lecture. Odczyt w Akademii Szwedzkiej, 20, when he says that “[i]‌t is possible that

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there is no other memory than the memory of wounds.” Cf. Nycz, “Czesław Miłosz: Poeta XX wieku w przestrzeni publicznej.” The cult of memory prevalent to the ill-experienced communities of East Central Europe, suggests Miłosz, may be the antidote for the discontents of the Western societies. Following Miłosz’s thought, reality and authenticity are available by way of traumatic memory and liminal experience, where “witnessing” is perception and the memory of truth. In the The Land of Ulro, 11, Miłosz weighs the reasons for poetry between the melancholic memory, “Mnemosyne mater musarum,” and the restorative imagination that establishes a brilliant thing as “a moment torn from the throat of motion.” The verb ocalać appears in the following poems: “The Bird Kingdom,” “Na pewną książkę,” “Farewell,” “In Warsaw,” “Dedication.” 27. Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 77. The text of “Dedication” begins with an address to a specific person, another poet, most probably the nationalist Tadeusz Gajcy (the beginning “you” denotes just one person in Polish): “You whom I could not save/Listen to me.” 28. Miłosz, Czarnecka, and Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 137, 322. 29. The phrase “w Warszawie” appears in three other places in the volume: in “Na literata warszawskiego”, “Campo di Fiori”, “Pieśni Adriana Zielińskiego.” For more about the tonic verse, see Miłosz’s explanation of the Polish versification system, “On Polish Versification,” in his The History of Polish Literature, 541–44. 30. Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 75–76. 31. The litany-like introduction of “In Warsaw” recollects the classical Polish “Hymn” (1561) by Jan Kochanowski, which begins: “What wilt Thou from us, Lord, for Thy bounteous gifts, / What for Thy goodness which is measureless?” Jan Kochanowski, Pieśni (Wrocław: Ossolineum, 2005), 3. 32. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 75. 33. For a different take on ritual mourning in “In Warsaw,” see Krzysztof Kłosiński, “Mnemosyne,” in Poznawanie Miłosza 3: 1999–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 93–108. 34. As the German philosopher Max Scheler (1874–1928) wrote, through the tragic knot “the blindness of order is transformed into the enmity of fate; the tragic is always personal, but it makes manifest a sort of cosmic sadness which reflects the hostile transcendence to which the hero is a prey.” 35. For more metaphors with the amber stone in Miłosz’s poetry, see his poems “Nie ma wzroku,” “Zoile,” “Lauda.” 36. “Imagination becomes embattled with movement, on behalf of the moment, and whatever is restored to brilliance becomes, so to speak, a moment torn from the throat of motion, a testament to the durability of even the most ephemeral instant, to the trickery of the nullifying memory.” Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 11. For more on memory and forgetting, see

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Karl Kerenyi, “Mnemosyne-Lesmosyne:  Über Die Quellen ‘Erinnerung’ Und ‘Vergessenheit’ in Der Griechischen Mythologie,” Schweizer Monatshefte: Zeitschrift Für Politik, Wirtschaft, Kultur 24, no. 10–11 (1944), 678–87 and Friedrich Hölderlin’s famous poem “Mnemosyne.” Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 159, 291, 299, 401; Zajas, Miłosz i filozofia, 97–122 and Danuta Opacka-Walasek, “Apokatastaza w poezji Czesława Miłosza,” Poznawanie Miłosza 3:  1999–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 172–94, believes that the two great semantic figures prevalent to Miłosz’s work are apocalypse and apokatástasis; tension between the two is to fund the internal dialectics of his poetry. According to Bogdan Czaykowski, “The Idea of Reality in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz,” Between Anxiety and Hope: The Poetry and Writing of Czesław Miłosz, ed. Edward Możejko (Edmonton:  University of Alberta Press, 1988), 88–111, Miłosz is to work not only outside of the framework of the rational but also outside Christian orthodoxy, curious about gnostic ideas. Możejko, “Between the Universals of Moral Sensibility and Historical Consciousness: Notes on the Writing of Czesław Miłosz,” 18, remarks how Miłosz “is ever more fascinated by the mysteries of human existence, and … knowledge of God.” Ks. Jan Sochoń, “Pochwała rzeczy. O poezji Czesława Miłosza,” in Poznawanie Miłosza 3:  1999–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 257–62, believes that Miłosz’s “philosophy of being” is visible in the gesture of unity with the pain of others and comes from his Catholicism and “deep” personal experience. Andrzej Wierciński, Der Dichter in Seinem Dichtersein: Versuch Einer Philosophisch-Theologischen Deutung Des Dichterseins Am Beispiel von Czesław Miłosz (Bern: Peter Lang Verlag, 1997), 1–2, Polish author of a monograph about Miłosz in German, considers the notion of Dichtersein, writer-being, which operates between philosophy, theology, and poetics. For Wierciński, Miłosz is to tackle the issues of modernity and alienation of God through reflection on the nature of poetry and the role of the writer. Stala, “Ekstaza o wschodzie słońca. W kręgu głównych tematów poezji Czesława Miłosza,” 170, believes Miłosz is motivated by the hope for religious inspiration. Marta Wyka, “Planeta Miłosz,” Poznawanie Miłosza 3: 1999–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 11, seeks “fundamental generalizations” that are to pervade Miłosz’s work from the onset, counting among them Miłosz’s preoccupation with the “great metaphysical operation” of the twentieth century, understood as inscribing meaning within the turmoils of history. Grudzińska Gross, Czesław Miłosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets, 270: “In its highest form, friendship is a kind of love, and even of affiliation with God: Miłosz’s apokatastasis is an overcoming of the loneliness into which we are thrown by death—it is a return not so much to our corporeality as to “God’s friendship.” Miłosz, Czarnecka, and

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Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 247–48. Aleksander Fiut, “Facing the End of the World,” World Literature Today 52, no. 3 (1978), 423. 37. Miłosz, “A Poet Between East and West,” 266.

6  The Gnostic Bard 1. Jan Błoński, “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” in My Brother’s Keeper: Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust, ed. Anthony Polonsky (London: Routledge, 1990), 41–42. It is not the only occasion when Miłosz’s work stirs fierce debates in his distant homeland. Other texts include The Captive Mind, “You Who Wronged,” and the untranslated “One” (The Women). Michał Głowiński, “Błoński’s Essay Years Later,” Holocaust: Studies and Materials, no. 1 (2008), 23, 25–26. For more on the debate surrounding the publication of Błoński’s essay, see the collection My Brother’s Keeper: Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 1990). The notion of “shared responsibility” was posed before Błoński by the famous literary scholar, Artur Sandauer, in his small book O sytuacji pisarza polskiego pochodzenia żydowskiego w XX wieku (rzecz, którą nie ja powinienem był napisać…) (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1982), 44–45, about the situation of a “Polish writer of Jewish descent” that he published already in 1982, five years before Błoński’s essay. Already there, he remarks upon Miłosz’s poem “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” but among other works. 2. Błoński, “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto,” 41–42. 3. Miłosz, Czarnecka, i Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 134; Anthony Polonsky, ed., “Ethical Problems of the Holocaust in Poland. Discussion Held at the International Conference on History and Culture of Polish Jewry in Jerusalem on Monday 1 February 1988,” in My Brother’s Keeper: Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust (London: Routledge, 1990), 215; Cf. Mikołaj Kunicki, Between the Brown and the Red: Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland—The Politics of Bolesław Piasecki (Athens: Ohio Univesity Press, 2012); Głowiński, “Błoński’s Essay Years Later,” 24. 4. Ibid.,  26–27. 5. Irena Grudzińska Gross, “Miłosz i wojna:  Mówię do ciebie milcząc.”, w Miłosz i Miłosz, eds. Aleksander Fiut, Artur Grabowski, and Łukasz Tischner (Kraków:  Księgarnia Akademicka  – The Gould Center/Miłosz Institute, 2013), 826; transl. MG: “The feeling of guilt for not your own deeds creates a paradoxical situation, transforms the newly-guilty into a victim, removing the true victims from view. The weight of guilt for not-your deeds is too great and, in the end, rejected (along with the facts?) in an attack of aggression on the “accuser.” 6. The main point of Grudzińska Gross’s Polish article, Ibid., 813–15, 823, is that there are two contradictory vectors in Miłosz’s wartime writings, positioned

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   within the silence about wartime violence and the fragments of reality calling for speech. 7. Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 61, 65–66, 92–93; Miłosz, Ziemia Ulro, 9; Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture 1981–82, 23–24. Right after the war, Miłosz prepares a book only to be published in the nineties, Legends of Modernity. There, Miłosz critically reflects on the myths related to the rise of modernity and the influence of the Enlightenment, such as individualism (Robinson Crusoe), city as monstrous organism (Balzac’s The Human Comedy), or resentment against social inequality (Stendhal’s The Red and the Black). 8. Zbigniew Kaźmierczyk, Dzieło demiurga. Zapis gnostyckiego doświadczenia egzystencji we wczesnej poezji Czesława Miłosza (Gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 2011), 24; Czesław Miłosz i Cynthia Haven, Conversations (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 170: “The real, by which I mean God, continues to remain unfathomable.” Cf. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Kabbalah bases on the Old Testament as Renaissance Neoplatonism bases on the New and, via Oscar Milosz, all form the backdrop of many of Miłosz’s poems. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 113–16, 123. Jonas’s book conveys a translation of a famous short Manichean text in Syrian called “Hymn of the Pearl.” Miłosz emulated the text in Polish as the introduction to his volume Hymn of the Pearl from 1981. The hymn describes in visual images the journey of the immortal soul, the Child, to the divine source, his Father the King. In the chapter about the hymn, Jonas explains that the word “luminous” was used by the “Chinese Manicheans” to signify our real selves, our hidden and transcendent nature awaiting discovery, and Miłosz uses this insight when giving title to his A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry (Orlando: Harcourt, 1996). In the English edition, Miłosz begins Hymn of the Pearl with his elementary text about his exile, “A Magic Mountain.” 9. Cf. Kaźmierczyk, Dzieło demiurga. Zapis gnostyckiego doświadczenia egzystencji we wczesnej poezji Czesława Miłosza, 15; Roman Archutowski, Historia Kościoła Katolickiego w zarysie (Warszawa: Książnica Atlas, 1928), 34–36; transl. MG: “From the beginning of its existence, the Church had to fight for the purity of its beliefs. Its opponents were pagans and evil Christians. … Among the heresies … aside good gnosis there was false gnosis. It was about 30 different systems forcibly joining religious and philosophical Eastern and Greek thought with Christian beliefs, though to the detriment of Church teachings. … Manicheism was similar to Gnosticism. … This sect comprised either of strict ascetes or licentious debauchers. Their immoral life discouraged all the people of good thought and exposed them to persecution.”

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10. Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 37. Kaźmierczyk, Dzieło demiurga. Zapis gnostyckiego doświadczenia egzystencji we wczesnej poezji Czesława Miłosza, 15–19, explains that “gnosis” means knowledge and cognition of divine secrets reserved for the initiated elite while “Gnosticism” designates ancient Christian confessions deemed heresies. The latter taught a dichotomous vision of existence in the evil material world that one should reject on his or her way to the good spiritual domain. Finally, “Manicheism,” which Miłosz mentions most often from among the abovementioned, was a syncretic religion developed around a Gnostic core. It appears that Miłosz perceives gnosis to last through the ages and appear among not only spiritual leaders and communities but also in a secular way among writers and philosophers. 11. Cf. Miłosz, Czarnecka, and Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 120; Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity, 32–36. 12. Ibid.,  42–46. 13. Miłosz, Czarnecka, and Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 120; Jonas, The Gnostic Religion:  The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity, 206–8. 14. Miłosz’s take on Gnosticism is complex and ambivalent. One of the earliest references to Manicheism appears in Miłosz’s novel The Issa Valley. The protagonist Tomasz discovers that Nature has a dark side of cruelty and procreation. Miłosz returns to the reflection on nature in Visions from San Francisco Bay (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), on the one hand describing his childhood “love affair” with “Juliet-Nature” as ending abruptly with the development of a rational mind and—as he adds in Native Realm: A Search for Self-definition—his passion for dualistic medieval heresies from Archutowski’s handbook. On the other hand, Miłosz denies the possibility of there ever being such a thing as “I and Nature” and denies the importance of the Manicheic thread in his work in A Year of the Hunter (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995). There, Miłosz characterizes excessive interest in nature as pantheism, and explains his Manichean interests as strong but not decisive. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity, 210–15; Cf. Miłosz, Czarnecka, i Fiut, Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz, 168; Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-definition, 117; Cf. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture, 369–78; Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 17–21; Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter, 78: “It may have been a mistake to … indulge myself by writing such a capricious book [as The Land of Ulro], a book that isolates me from Poles, who are fundamentally an antimetaphysical people.” 15. Miłosz, Ziemia Ulro, 10; transl. MG. “My observation of those figures [Swedenborg, Blake, Mickiewicz, Dostoyevsky, and Oscar Milosz] and my elaboration of their views were sometimes rather simple-heartedly interpreted

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as my complete support for faith against reason, or even regarded as my full engagement in “mysticism.” The culprits were my stylistic methods, meaning that I identified with the thought I currently described. The same method influenced the reception of The Captive Mind, which was sometimes fought off as a Marxist book, due to interpretations taking related speech for the author’s own beliefs.” 16. Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, 24–25. 17. Miłosz, Ziemia Ulro, 160–63. 18. Norhtrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry:  A Study of William Blake (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1990), 41; Cf. Łukasz Tischner, Miłosz and the Problem of Evil (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015); Cf. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture, 377. Miłosz picked the moment in time when the discourse of modernity accelerates and he takes an interest in those who worked actively against it as a force that divides the world. That is, Miłosz wants to map the changes within the nexus of science and metaphysics at the moment of their division and he revaluates the origins of modernity by means of literary reflection. 19. William Blake, The Four Zoas, 25:  5–6, 39; Cf. Andrew Lincoln, Spiritual History:  A Reading of William Blake’s Vala, or The Four Zoas (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1995), 217; Frye, Fearful Symmetry:  A Study of William Blake; Miłosz, Ziemia Ulro, 57; Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 122, 258; Cf. Elżbieta Kiślak, Walka Jakuba z aniołem:  Czesław Miłosz wobec romantyczności (Warszawa: Prószyński i S-ka, 2000), 243, 253; Cf. Adam Mickiewicz, “Literatura słowiańska,” Dzieła: Tom XI (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1998), 383. 20. Tadeusz Sławek, “Miłosz, czyli o chrześcijaństwie,” Poznawanie Miłosza 3: 1999–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 59–80; Jan Błoński, “Jeszcze o poezji i świętości,” Poznawanie Miłosza 2: Część pierwsza 1980–1998, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000), 46; Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 60, 227. 21. Miłosz, Czarnecka, and Fiut, Conversations with Czesław Miłosz, 168; Miłosz, A Year of the Hunter, 78; Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 413; Nathan and Quinn, A Poet’s Work, 10. 22. Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, v; A Year of the Hunter, 78. Many others write about Miłosz’s work from the “metaphysical” perspective. For instance, Charles S. Kraszewski’s Irresolute Heresiarch: Catholicism, Gnosticism, and Paganism in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012) is a biographically ordered set of close readings following the changes in Miłosz’s worldview, comparing it with Catholic orthodoxy. However, Sławek, “[Review of] Irresolute Heresiarch by Charles S. Kraszewski”, Slavic Review 72, no. 2 (2013), 396–97, aptly points out that Kraszewski’s thesis

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bases on a doctrinal consideration of Catholicism, alien to Miłosz. A similarly biographical close reading, however in a personal tone of “enamored reading,” presents Ewa Bieńkowska, W ogrodzie ziemskim: Książka o Miłoszu (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Sic!, 2004). Finally, a thoroughly religious reading of Miłosz’s work comes from Tomasz Garbol, Po upadku:  O twórczości Czesława Miłosza (Lublin:  Wydawnictwo Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 2013). 23. Fiut, Moment wieczny:  Poezja Czesława Miłosza, 123, 157, 195; Ireneusz Kania, “Największy triumf mędrca:  Takiego traktatu młody człowiek nie napisze,” Poznawanie Miłosza 3:  1999–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 665–72; Miłosz, Second Space: New Poems, 47, 62. 24. Halina Turkiewicz, Czesław Miłosz: Między “gotykiem duszy” i “renesansem ciała,” Spotkanie z człowiekiem:  Zaczynając od Czesława Miłosza, eds. Grzegorz Dąbrowski, Barbara Dwilewicz, and Kamil Pietrowiak (Wrocław:  Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2011), 129–42, compares Miłosz’s work with the literary works of Pope John Paul II, so as to extract from their works moments of division between the bodily and the spiritual. Bernadetta Żynis, Między “człowieczością” a “starym, lubieżnym dziadem,” Spotkanie z człowiekiem:  Zaczynając od Czesława Miłosza, eds. Grzegorz Dąbrowski, Barbara Dwilewicz, and Kamil Pietrowiak (Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2011), 171–92, also remarks that Miłosz’s reflection on humanity stretches between the spiritual and the physical. Those two articles consider, even if not explicitly, elements of Miłosz’s work that he himself called Manichean. From Miłosz’s allusions to manicheist thought come articles and whole books, such as Łukasz Tischner, Sekrety manichejskich trucizn: Miłosz wobec zła (Kraków: Znak, 2001), recently translated by Stanley Bill as Miłosz and the Problem of Evil; or Zbigniew Kaźmierczyk’s Dzieło Demiurga. Zapis gnostyckiego doświadczenia egzystencji we wczesnej poezji Czesława Miłosza (Demiurge’s Creation. Gnostic Experience of Existence in Miłosz’s Early Poetry). 25. Cf. Shallcross, The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture, 73. 26. Grudzińska Gross, “Miłosz i wojna:  Mówię do ciebie milcząc,” 816. The neatly utilized rhythm of the poem makes it structurally about the ups and downs of life. The eight-by-eight structure suggests a perfect order and, in fact, a possible link to philosophy understood as means to improve the soul. Miłosz’s poem has eight stanzas of eight verses just as the game of chess has eight times eight fields, which offers further interpretational pathways. Cf. Giordano Bruno, Cause, Principle and Unity:  And Essays on Magic (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2004), 50; Cf. Daniel E. O’Sullivan, Chess in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: A Fundamental Thought Paradigm of the Premodern World (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012); Ann E.

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Moyer, The Philosophers’ Game: Rithmomachia in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 3–6. 27. Grudzińska Gross, “Miłosz i wojna: Mówię do ciebie milcząc;” Natan Gross, Poeci i Szoa: Obraz zagłady Żydów w poezji polskiej (Sosnowiec: Offmax, 1993); Michael Ignatieff, “Art of Witness,” The New York Review of Books, marzec 1995. 28. John Parras, “Czesław Miłosz,” in Encyclopedia of American Poetry, ed. Eric L. Haralson (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001). 29. Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 33. 30. Grudzińska Gross, “Miłosz i wojna: Mówię do ciebie milcząc,” 817. 31. Cf. Ibid.; Czesław Miłosz, Rozmowy Polskie 1999–2004 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004), 648. 32. Czesław Miłosz, The Seizure of Power (New  York:  Criterion Books, 1955): “They’re burning the Jews now. It will be our turn next.” 33. Grudzińska Gross, “Miłosz i wojna: Mówię do ciebie milcząc,” 819; Miłosz, The Seizure of Power: Czesław Miłosz, Spiżarnia literacka (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004), 64–66; transl. MG. 34. Grudzińska Gross, “Miłosz i wojna: Mówię do ciebie milcząc,” 821. The matter discusses also Andrzej Franaszek in Miłosz: Biografia (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 2011), 354. Polish nationalist readings of this issue, unfortunately, proliferate, which argue the absence of the sky-carrousel as if it lessened the shared responsibility of the Polish society for the extermination of the Jewish people. For the nationalist readings, see Ewa Kurek, “Zagłada Żydów: Winy realne i metafizyczne” Solidarni 2010, 2015; Tomasz Szarota, “Karuzela na placu Krasińskich: Czy śmiały się tłumy wesołe?” Rzeczpospolita, February 28, 2004; Mariusz Solecki, “Karuzela z nieporozumieniami” Polonia Christiana, 2015; or Nekanda-Trepka documentary film Karuzela. 35. Grudzińska Gross, “Miłosz i wojna: Mówię do ciebie milcząc;” Cf. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 36. Shallcross, The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture, 73; Parras, “Czesław Miłosz”; Grudzińska Gross, “Miłosz i wojna: Mówię do ciebie milcząc,” 817. 37. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 225; Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 193. Yates’s approach has been persuasively criticized for essentialism by Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture, 77–78. 38. An individual differentiates him- or herself from the crowd by opposition. Death erases the consciousness along with its opposition to the crowd. But death also reveals the continuity embedded within the crowd. The rhythm of life and death reminds that the two complement each other. Miłosz wanted the poem to use the particular events of the Ghetto’s destruction and Bruno’s death as exempla for the rhythmic order of life. With its detached tone,

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symmetrical build, chess-like structure, and stable intonation, the poem points to the fact that the described images are just part of a broader picture; they are “pauses” in the rhythm of the world, freckles on the face of nature. With this poem, Miłosz scrutinizes the impersonality of the huge machinery of the world and its insensitivity to the fate of the individual. On this very general level, the classical form detaches the text from interpretations of accusation of or protest against the rules of life, God’s order, or natural laws and allows for perceiving the events as a set of tragical nexi in the private histories of each of the victims. Miłosz’s choice of classical form returns dignity to the victims. The meaning of rhythm in the “Campo dei Fiori” functions, thus, on many planes. On the microscopic scale, it is about the changing fates of the individual. On the macroscopic scale, it is about the changing times and societies in history. Moreover, the text highlights the interchange between faith and reason, individual belief and social exclusion, and—finally—the returning role of literary imagination as the means to find the hidden, metaphysical, order of things. 39. Grudzińska Gross, “Miłosz i wojna: Mówię do ciebie milcząc,” 816, argues that the comparison of the individual to the population of the Ghetto is Miłosz’s way to underline the individual death of each of its inhabitants as lonely and dignified. Shallcross, The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture, 152, aptly notices that Bruno was actually led to execution with his tongue in a gag, that is, literally mute. 40. Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 33–34. 41. Ibid., 103; Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (London: Athlone Press, 1981), 229, 238. 42. Shallcross, The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture, 74–75.

7  The Realist Perspectivist 1. Marina Ciccarini, “Czas na nadzieję w Świadectwie poezji Czesława Miłosza,” in Rodzinny świat Czesława Miłosza, eds. Tomasz Bilczewski, Luigi Marinelli, and Monika Woźniak (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2014), 155. 2. Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 226. 3. Ibid.,  182. 4. Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Other Poetry and Prose, Criticism; poem 26 “Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City,” 5. For more on Miłosz’s relation with the writings of Whitman, see Marta Skwara, “The Poet of the Great Reality: Czesław Miłosz’s Readings of Walt Whitman,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 26, no. 1 (2008), 1–22, Christopher Clausen, “Czeslaw Milosz:  The Exile As Californian,” The Literary Review, 1983, 337–49 and William Heyen, “Piety and Home in Whitman and Milosz,” in

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Walt Whitman of Mickle Street, ed. Geoffrey M. Sill (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 291–96. Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Other Poetry and Prose, Criticism; poem 185 “O Living Always—Always Dying.” 6. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 830; transl. MG: “In my consciousness exists our whole circular Earth, which means that I live in a time when successive attempts at establishing a universal state, beginning with Alexander the Great, may finally find support in imagination. /// Black, high woods, where, as they say, bears still live, is Kiejdzie, whose Lady does not allow to hunt there. Each time I drove by, I always felt the charm of a secret. But I was never to learn what the Kiejdzie manor or the Lady looked like, their daily routines and what happened to her.” 7. Ibid., 899; transl. MG: “We do not know the hells and heavens of the people we pass by on the streets. There are two possible perspectives. From the first one, on a tiny globe in the mould-line of a city move microscopic creatures, less durable than the ephemeral mayfly. And what meaning have the inner states of beings lacking any reason to exist, perfectly replaceable? From the second perspective, with an upturned telescope, each of the creatures grows to the size of a cathedral and more, towering with complexity over all nature, animate and inanimate. Only then does one see that there are no two identical persons and that we may only guess how it happens inside our neighbors.” Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, 2–3: “The first germ of this book, then, was the desire to bring Europe closer to the Europeans. Today, I would define my aim differently. There is a new organ, which we may call the telescopic eye, that perceives simultaneously not only different points of the globe but also different moments of time; the motion picture created it in all my contemporaries. And I, more often than my contemporaries, had to make use of it, tossed as I was by circumstances from one civilization into another, from high-pressure areas into low, and vice versa.” 8. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 385. 9. Adam Mickiewicz, “Dziady. Część 3,” in Dzieła: Tom III (Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1999), 209. 10. Adam Zagajewski, “A Defense of Ardor,” in A Defense of Ardor:  Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 21–22; Louis Iribarne, “Lost in the ‘Earth-Garden’: The Exile of Czesław Miłosz,” World Literature Today 73, no. 4 (1999), 637; Bieńkowska, W Ogrodzie Ziemskim: Książka O Miłoszu, 103; Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 104. 11. Ibid., 460; Cf. Ireneusz Kania, “Czesław Miłosz a Buddyzm,” Miłosz i Miłosz, eds. Aleksander Fiut, Artur Grabowski, and Łukasz Tischner (Kraków:  Księgarnia Akademicka—The Gould Center/Miłosz Institute, 2013), 161.

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12. Cf. Jerzy Jarzębski, “Być samym czystym patrzeniem bez nazwy,” Poznawanie Miłosza 3: 1999–2010, ed. Aleskander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 240; Cf. Kris van Heuckelom, “Poezja Czesława Miłosza wobec tradycji okulocentryzmu:  Rzecz o późnym wierszu Oczy,” Poznawanie Miłosza 3:  1999–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków:  Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 937. 13. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 930. 14. Nieukerken, “Kłopoty z opisem rzeczy, czyli (nie)możliwość mimesis w epoce relatywizacji podmiotu,” 96; Joanna Zach, “Traktat moralny: Poezja jako akt umysłu,” Teksty Drugie, no. 5 (2008), 180–87; Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 337. transl. MG. 15. Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture 1981–82, 35. In English version the word is spelled incorrectly as “nothing.” The Polish version, Czesław Miłosz, Świadectwo poezji: Sześć wykładów o dotkliwości naszego wieku (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2004), 40, has simply the word “zauważmy.” 16. Victor Contoski, “Czesław Miłosz and the Quest for Critical Perspective,” Books Abroad 47 (1973), 35–36, 40; Jan Błoński, “Bieguny poezji,” in Miłosz jak świat (Kraków: Znak, 2011), 141; Barańczak, “Język poetycki Czesława Miłosza;” Kim Jastremsky, “Dialogiczny proces rekonstrukcji: Polifonia Miłosza jako krok w stronę poetyckiej apokatastazy,” Postscriptum polonistyczne 7 (2011), 99–118; Fiut, Moment wieczny: Poezja Czesława Miłosza, 226; Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 122, 137, 140, 145, 147, 166–67; Nycz, “Czesław Miłosz: Poeta XX wieku w przestrzeni publicznej,” 20; Zach, Miłosz i poetyka wyznania, 7, 10; Cf. Przemysław Michalski, “Co można powiedzieć? Poezja konfesyjna i konfesyjność poezji,” Przekładaniec 25 (2011), 165–76; Chamberlain, “The Voice of the Orphan”; Donald Davie, Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 30. In “The Idea of Reality in the Poetry of Czesław Miłosz,” 96, Czaykowski remarks how something in Miłosz’s writing “is unique today: the reality of the thing, the return of the thing.” For more on “thing theory,” see Bill Brown’s A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) as well as Miłosz’s essay “Rzeczywistość” from Ogród Nauk. 17. Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture 1981–82, 47. 18. Petrification in an amber stone is one of Miłosz’s favorite metaphors, Wiersze wszystkie, 322, 384, 483, 658, 665, 795, returning in many of his prose texts and poems; among others: “Nie ma wzroku,” “Zoile,” “Oda do ptaka,” “Lauda,” “Ogród ziemskich rozkoszy: Lato.” 19. Cf. Rolf-Peter Horstmann, “Introduction,” in Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xxiv; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4.

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The only account about Miłosz and Nietzsche comes from Dorota Heck, “Nietzsche Miłosza,” in Poznawanie Miłosza 3: 1999–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 305–32, who worked out a thorough synthesis of citations, however with little evaluation. 20. Horstmann, “Introduction,” viii, xix. 21. Ibid., xiii–xx. 22. Ibid., xxii–xxiii. 23. Nieukerken, “Kłopoty z opisem rzeczy, czyli (nie)możliwość mimesis w epoce relatywizacji podmiotu,” 77; Dariusz Pawelec, “Treny,” Poznawanie Miłosza 3:  1999–2010, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków:  Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 211; Gajewska, “Ani za świątobliwie, ani zanadto świecko”. O języku “Traktatu teologicznego,” 830; Barańczak, “Język poetycki Czesława Miłosza”; Kazimierz Wyka, “Ogrody lunatyczne i ogrody pasterskie,” in Poznawanie Miłosza, ed. Jerzy Kwiatkowski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1985), 32; Cf. Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler, Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma, 33. 24. Miłosz, Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942– 1943, 51, 58; Horstmann, “Introduction,” xxvi; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 36 par. 25. Miłosz, Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942– 1943, 62–63.: “It is perhaps wrong to saddle a writer with responsibility, to accuse him of crimes he did not commit. It would make no sense, just as accusing Nietzsche would make no sense. And yet, readers who designate a place for [the antirationalist thinkers] in the stacks of their libraries, valuing them as creative writers, have the right to reject them as moralists—to reject them and to condemn them in the name of things that are greater than literature. This would require them to condemn some part of themselves, some corner of the heart. When these works fade into the distance, when they disappear within the colors of their time and none of their pages can awaken internal dialogues, they will return as evidence… but will they return as beauty?” 26. Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Random House, 1986), transl. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollindale. Quoted in Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture 1981–82, 47–48. 27. Ibid.,  26–27. 28. Ibid.,  48–49. 29. Ibid., 57; Miłosz, The Land of Ulro, 266. 30. Czesław Miłosz, A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, 3; Nieukerken, “ ‘Kłopoty z opisem rzeczy’, czyli (nie)możliwość mimesis w epoce relatywizacji podmiotu,” 96. 31. Ibid., 4–5; Ciccarini, “Czas na nadzieję w Świadectwie poezji Czesława Miłosza,” 153.

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32. Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry, 13, 15; Cf. Ciccarini, “Czas na nadzieję w Świadectwie poezji Czesława Miłosza,” 155–56. 33. Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture 1981–82, 36; Fiut, The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, 73, 79, 182. 34. Cf. Blodgett, “Miłosz as Witness,” 145; Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry: The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture 1981–82, 28–30, 35–37. 35. Krzysztof Dybciak, “Poezja pełni istnienia,” Poznawanie Miłosza, ed. Jerzy Kwiatkowski (Kraków:  Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1985), 198; Aleksander Fiut, “Wygnanie z raju,” Poznawanie Miłosza, ed. Jerzy Kwiatkowski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1985), 333; Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 49. Interesting analyses of Miłosz’s long poem The World (A Naive Poem) offered Jacek Łukasiewicz, “Przestrzeń świata naiwnego,” Poznawanie Miłosza 2:  Część pierwsza 1980–1998, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000), 129–52, Marian Stala, “Poza ziemią Ulro,” Poznawanie Miłosza 2: Część pierwsza 1980–1998, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków:  Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000), 153–70, and Aleksander Fiut, “Poema nienaiwne,” Poznawanie Miłosza 2: Część pierwsza 1980–1998, ed. Aleksander Fiut (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2000), 171–96. Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, 247; Stanisław Balbus, “Pierwszy ruch jest śpiewanie (O wierszu Miłosza—rozpoznanie wstępne),” Poznawanie Miłosza, ed. Jerzy Kwiatkowski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1985), 485; Aleksander Fiut, “Poezja w kręgu hermeneutyki,” Teksty 58–59, no. 4–5 (1981), 52–76. Barańczak, “Język poetycki Czesława Miłosza,” 433; Aleksander Fiut, “W obliczu końca świata,” Poznawanie Miłosza, ed. Jerzy Kwiatkowski (Kraków:  Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1985), 188; Ryszard Matuszewski, “Czesława Miłosza dążenie do formy pojemnej,” Poznawanie Miłosza, ed. Jerzy Kwiatkowski (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1985), 145; Czesław Miłosz and Aleksander Fiut, Czesława Miłosza autoportret przekorny (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1981), 87; Czesław Miłosz, Rozmowy polskie 1979–1998 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2009), 503–4. 36. Milosz, New and Collected Poems:  1931–2001, 165; Leonard Nathan and Arthur Quinn, The Poet’s Work:  An Introduction to Czeslaw Milosz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Patricia Curd, “Presocratic Philosophy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2012. 37. Curd, “Presocratic Philosophy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2012. 38. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 948. 39. Curd, “Presocratic Philosophy.” 40. Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2001, 166, introduced those images already in “Greek Portrait” from 1948, an ekphrasis of unknown artwork, in which the speaker most probably assumes the position of Heraclitus describing his own visage and fate. Markedly, “Greek Portrait” follows the poem “Heraclitus” in the book King Popiel and Other Poems.

234

Endnotes

41. Czesław Miłosz and Thomas Merton, Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz, ed. Robert Faggen (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 100. 42. Nieukerken, “Kłopoty z opisem rzeczy, czyli (nie)możliwość mimesis w epoce relatywizacji podmiotu,” 92.

Conclusion 1. Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Other Poetry and Prose, Criticism, poem 3. 2. The small number of one-syllable words in Polish only allows for the iambic metrum to be performed with an additional syllable. Due to this fact, it is sometimes harder to decide whether the metrum is iambic or trocheic. In this case, Miłosz underscores the iambic rhythm by ending some of the verses on the 10th syllable and other on the one-syllable, accentuated word. 3. Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 313; transl. MG. 4. Miłosz, Second Space: New Poems, 73; Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931– 2001, 269. The photoelectric effect proved that electrically charged particles escape from an illuminated piece of metal and that they are identical to electrons. This irregularity allowed Einstein to theorize that light is not only a wave but also consists of electron-like particles called photons that carry their own energy. Miłosz’s comparison of electrons to planets corresponds with the scope of Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity. These explained the behavior of light under microscopic conditions when influenced by gravitation, in the macroscopic situation of a solar system. Miłosz speaks in the text of electrons and light because the photoelectric effect led to Einstein’s corpuscular theory of light and his further development of the theory of relativity that completely remodeled the previous assumptions of Newtonian physics. For Miłosz, Einstein’s theory implies “a rejection of eternal space and eternal time (i.e., of the cosmology of Isaac Newton).” In “An Appeal” (1954) the speaker imagines Newtonian space as “a frozen prison” whereas Einstein’s space as “the relation/Between movement and movement.” 5. Nota bene, this shift from one physicist to another as patron of the dominant worldview begins first with Blake’s critique of Newton’s mechanistic approach to the world. 6. Miłosz, Second Space: New Poems, 73, 83–84; Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 249; Miłosz, Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition, 174; Miłosz and Haven, Conversations, 154. 7. Oskar Milosz, Storge (Kraków: Znak, 1993), 39, 42. All fragments are translated by me from the Polish version—MG. 8. Ibid., 37. “In truth, we bring into nature neither space nor time but only the movement of our body and the knowledge, or more precisely, the constatation

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and love of this movement, the constatation and love that we call Thought, and that give us the first and elementary ability of situating things, beginning with ourselves.” 9. Ibid., 41–42, 44, 46; Miłosz, Wiersze wszystkie, 909; transl. MG. “the highest expression of love in science is the multiplication and division of infinity by infinity, and in art it is the rhythm that is always shooting up anew, never satiated. The moment has arrived to erase this antinomy.” “To situate a body in measurable space means to pronounce and specify a movement in relation to the movement of another body.” 10. Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Other Poetry and Prose, Criticism, poem 10. “Starting from Paumanok.” 11. Czesław Miłosz, A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry, xv. 12. Ibid., xvi. “It has happened that we have been afflicted with a basic deprivation, to such an extent that we seem to be missing some vital organs, even as we try to survive somehow. Theology, science, philosophy, though they attempt to provide cures are not very effective …. Abstract considerations will be of little help, even if they are intended to bring relief. Poetry is quite different. By its very nature it says: All those theories are untrue. Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot … look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, exciting and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint.”

Index A Adorno, Theodor W.   75, 210 Agamben, Giorgio  75, 76, 207–210, 228 Alvarez, Al  95, 98, 99, 129 Ambivalence  20, 32, 41, 79, 82, 97, 101, 142, 153, 168, 186, 195, 206 Andrzejewski, Jerzy  18 Apokatástasis  127, 222 Aquinas, Thomas  53 Augustine  20, 55, 62, 80, 156, 203, 205 B Badiou, Alain  50, 200 Bard  19, 36, 111–113, 115–120, 122, 133, 134, 136, 138, 140, 142–144, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154, 156, 158, 192, 220, 223 Baudelaire, Charles  55–57, 202–204 Bawer, Bruce  104, 105, 217 Berlin, Isaiah  54, 202 Birkerts, Sven  100, 104, 216 Blake, William  17, 26, 118, 119, 133, 140, 141, 142, 169–171, 173–176, 225, 226, 234 Blanchot, Maurice  49–51, 200, 201, 210 Błoński, Jan  134–136, 159, 199, 203, 219, 223, 226, 231 Bruno, Giordano  143–148, 150–158, 227–229 Bujnicki, Teodor  117 Bystander  76, 77, 89, 101, 134, 136, 143, 150, 151

C Cavanagh, Clare  9, 84, 106, 107, 122, 197, 212, 215, 217, 218, 220 Chamberlain, Marisha  78, 89, 211, 214, 231 Christ, Jesus  23, 25, 28, 55, 69, 86, 111, 123, 126, 148, 156, 184, 202, 205 Chwin, Stefan  78, 82, 211, 213, 218 Classic  30, 40, 47, 53, 54, 57, 61, 82, 93, 112, 113, 144, 173, 180, 182, 188, 193, 202, 204, 207, 221, 229 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  24, 194 Conrad, Joseph  114 D Daimonion  20, 22, 23, 41, 108, 124, 194 Derrida, Jacques  158, 229 Descartes, René  40, 41 Diderot, Denis  33, 195–197 Double vision  163, 167, 168, 186 E Einstein, Albert  186–188, 234 Eliot, T. S.  17, 34, 54, 84, 102, 103, 107, 156, 201, 202, 205, 207, 211–213, 216, 217 –– The Waste Land  84, 102, 156, 205, 211 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  66, 192, 207 Epigraph  172, 173, 189, 193 Epiphany  55–57, 62, 64, 75, 142, 167, 182, 202–204

238 F Fear  18, 19, 43, 46, 83, 86, 100, 101, 107, 135, 153, 185, 193 Flaubert, Gustave  48, 198 Fiut, Aleksander  21, 23, 25–27, 35, 36, 43, 47–54, 56, 57, 78, 110, 121, 169, 193–205, 207, 211–213, 215, 217–219, 221–223, 225–227, 230–233 –– Moment wieczny  57, 197, 199, 202, 227, 231 –– The Eternal Moment  47, 48, 51, 54, 56, 57, 193, 197, 199–205, 207, 212, 213, 215, 231, 233 G Gałczyński, Konstanty Ildefons 117 Genette, Gerard  49 Gide, André  174 Giovanni Papini  174 Gnosticism  19, 72, 78, 127, 130, 133, 134, 136–144, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154, 156, 158, 209, 215, 222–227 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  113, 114, 206, 207 Gross, Jan  136 Grudzińska Gross, Irena  9, 83, 118, 136, 198, 211–213, 218–220, 222, 223, 227–229 Guilt  22, 76–81, 83, 85, 88, 90, 135–137, 145, 147, 150, 151, 223 H Hass, Robert  108, 214 Heaney, Seamus  99, 100, 194, 216 Heraclitus  24, 66, 178–184, 233

Index

I Immorality  28, 38, 90, 101, 103, 131, 156, 199, 224 In-between  38, 60–63, 87, 165, 167 Iribarne, Louis  100, 214, 230 Ironwood  92, 211, 214, 215 J Jonas, Hans  138, 139, 224, 225 Joyce, James  56, 203 Jung, Carl Gustav  40, 195, 214 K Kafka, Franz  86, 90 Karwowska, Bożena  95, 196, 197, 198, 215, 216, 218 Keats, John  169 Krasiński, Zygmunt  117, 149, 150, 228 L Linneaus, Carl  40 M Macdonald, Dwight  98 Mallarmé, Stéphane  48–51, 198, 200 Manicheanism  44, 138–140, 142, 159, 224, 225, 227 Martyrdom  69–73, 78, 79, 100, 152, 154, 190, 208–210 Marx, Karl  45, 50, 62, 96, 112, 119, 171, 206, 226 Mask  18, 21, 25, 34, 37–42, 47, 196 Merton, Thomas  181, 234 Metaphysics  6, 18, 19, 43, 45, 51, 68, 75, 79, 80, 86, 94, 107, 115, 118, 119, 120, 121, 136, 140, 142, 143, 145, 153–155, 158, 159, 171, 177, 184, 185, 196, 201, 215, 225, 226

Index

Mickiewicz, Adam  30, 31, 61, 65, 70, 71, 112–115, 117–120, 126, 166, 197, 199, 203, 205, 208, 217–220, 225, 226, 230 –– Forefather’s Eve  61, 113, 114 –– Lausanne Lyrics  65, 114 –– The Books and the Pilgrimage of the Polish Nation  70, 208 Miłosz, Czesław  17–57, 59, 60, 62, 64–68, 71–125, 127–159, 161–235 –– “A Nation”  71, 72 –– “A Notebook: Bon By Lake Leman”  56–59, 61, 63, 65, 161, 166, 167, 204–206 –– “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto”  67, 78–80, 83, 84, 90, 134–136, 143, 212, 213, 223 –– “A Song on the End of the World”  129, 212 –– “About a Book”  125 –– “Ars Poetica?”  20 –– “Campo dei Fiori”  67, 122, 136, 143–147, 151–153, 155–159, 161, 178, 229 –– “Confession”  119 –– “Dedication”  105, 106, 121, 122, 221 –– “Disappearance”  74, 210 –– “Heraclitus”  24, 66, 178–184, 233 –– “How Could One Forget”  49 –– “In Warsaw”  121–123, 125, 127, 129, 220, 221 –– “Mittelbergheim”  165–167 –– “Mother’s Grave”  186, 187, 190 –– “My Faithful Mother Tongue”  31 –– “Sienkiewicz, Homer i Gnębon Puczymorda”  71 –– “This Only”  165–167 –– “Throughout Our Lands”  162, 163 –– “To the Detriment”  40, 119

239 –– “When I Said”  47, 198 –– “You Who Wronged”  111, 134, 158, 223 –– A Book of Luminous Things  137, 224, 232, 235 –– Apprentice  188 –– Beginning with My Streets  164, 216 –– City Without a Name  31, 162 –– Collected Poems  46, 98, 193, 195, 197, 198, 204, 206–208, 211, 212, 215–217, 219–222, 228–230, 233, 234 –– Daylight  71, 165 –– King Popiel  162, 233 –– Kroniki  119, 166 –– Legends of Modernity  74, 174, 209, 215, 224, 232 –– Miłosz’s ABC  74, 210, 219 –– Nieobjęta ziemia  164 –– Nobel Lecture  43, 137, 195, 197, 200, 207, 208, 220 –– Postwar Polish Poetry  44, 45 –– Rescue  18, 75, 79, 80, 121–123, 129, 143, 178, 206 –– Selected Poems  45, 46 –– Świadectwo poezji  108, 231 –– The Captive Mind  26, 37, 46, 76, 77, 96–98, 101, 196, 208, 211, 214–217, 223, 226 –– The Emperor of the Earth  45, 46 –– The History of Polish Literature  26, 44, 45, 112, 115, 197, 198, 208, 218, 219, 221, 223, 226 –– The Land of Ulro  26, 27, 47, 140–142, 176, 198, 219, 221, 224–226, 232 –– The Native Realm  27, 32, 38, 46, 73, 93, 96, 97, 101, 112, 140, 164, 193, 215–217, 225, 226, 230, 233, 234

240 Miłosz, Czesław (cont) –– The Separate Notebooks  46 –– The Three Winters  51, 114 –– The Valley of Issa  26, 44, 46, 142, 225 –– The Witness of Poetry  46, 50, 91, 96, 98, 107–110, 137, 168, 169, 173–176, 185, 201, 207, 218, 224, 231, 232, 233 –– To Begin Where I Am  164 –– Traktat moralny  30, 168, 231 –– Treatise on Theology  120, 142 –– Unattainable Earth  163, 164, 172, 173, 186, 189 –– Visions from San Francisco Bay  163, 164, 225 –– With Trumpets and Zithers  41, 162 Milosz, Oscar Vladislas  19, 26, 91–94, 137, 140, 168, 175, 181, 188, 199, 224, 225, 234 –– “The Letter to Storge”  188, 189 Movement  17, 19, 21, 32, 35, 39–41, 43, 60, 64–66, 85, 115, 116, 127, 133, 158, 161, 162–165, 167, 168, 172, 182, 183, 185–192, 195, 196, 207, 221, 234, 235 Murphy, Bruce F.   104, 105, 215, 217 N Newton, Isaac  141, 188, 234 Nietzsche, Friedrich  119, 169–176, 178, 179, 184, 231, 232 Norwid, Cyprian Kamil  118, 219 O Ocalenie; salvation; rescue  62, 63, 81, 120, 121, 124, 138, 148, 156, 194 Origen 127 Orr, David  104–106

Index

Oscillation  20, 21, 32, 35, 47, 161, 168, 185, 190, 192, 195 P Persona  17–20, 23–26, 28, 29, 32, 34–44, 46–50, 53, 54, 58, 60, 77, 79, 82, 84, 91–94, 96–98, 101, 105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 118, 119, 122, 129, 136, 137, 141–143, 147, 151, 152, 158, 161–163, 169–172, 185, 192–194, 196, 212, 213, 216, 221, 222, 227 –– Authorial persona  17, 18, 35–37, 39, 42–44, 46, 49, 50, 53, 54, 82, 92, 107, 110, 111, 118, 119, 122, 136, 161, 162, 185, 192 –– Literary persona  17, 18, 110, 193 –– Persona-in-motion  18 Perspectivism  18, 20, 24, 32, 34, 38, 39, 42, 84, 97, 100, 104, 112, 121, 127, 134, 139, 140, 156, 159, 161, 162, 164–166, 168– 172, 174, 176, 178, 180–184, 189, 229 Petrarch, Francesco  29–31, 37, 195, 196 Poetics  18, 19, 24, 32, 34, 47, 50, 51, 53, 57–59, 67, 77, 79, 84, 96, 104, 106, 107, 121, 125, 162, 165–169, 171, 185, 186, 188, 190, 196, 201, 214, 222 Poetology  110, 189 Politics  18, 19, 26, 32, 36, 37, 43–45, 47, 54, 65, 70, 92, 94–96, 98, 100, 103, 104, 106, 107, 111, 112, 115, 116, 118–122, 133, 134, 139, 142, 143, 151, 159, 161, 164, 170, 177, 184, 185, 190, 191, 192, 196–198, 203, 210, 212, 220, 215–217, 220, 223 Poor  79–83, 86, 90, 112, 117, 134, 211, 213

Index

Pound, Ezra  17, 94 Presence  22, 49, 50, 53, 56, 57, 59, 60, 62–66, 68, 70, 74, 77, 86, 89, 112, 127, 143, 150, 153, 158, 161, 162, 165, 166, 178, 184, 187, 188, 200, 204 Prophet  23, 58, 62, 63, 74, 87, 111, 112, 114–116, 118–122, 124–126, 128, 130, 132–134, 177, 192, 212, 218 Prosopopoeia 121 Proteus  21–24, 26–28, 30, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 194, 195 Puritanism  72, 73, 94, 95, 100, 104, 127, 133, 148, 154, 209 R Religion  19, 23, 26, 32, 34, 37, 43, 44, 47, 51, 54–56, 61, 67–69, 74, 75, 78, 85–87, 89, 94, 100, 104, 111, 112, 114–116, 118, 120, 121, 124, 133, 134, 136–143, 148, 151–153, 159, 168, 170, 171, 177, 184, 187, 190, 192, 201, 203, 204, 207–209, 214, 220, 222, 224, 225, 227 Responsibility  78, 79, 89, 90, 134–137, 143, 147, 159, 191, 223, 228, 232 River  58, 61, 62, 64–66, 124, 125, 161, 167–182, 195, 204–207, 209 Romanticism  23, 29, 30, 31, 34–37, 57, 61, 69, 71, 72, 77, 84, 90, 111–117, 120, 121–124, 126–128, 130, 131, 133, 166, 169, 178, 182, 205, 218 S Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin  54, 202 Sarbiewski, Maciej Kazimierz  24, 194

241 Schiller, Friedrich  30, 113 Science  19, 40, 51, 90, 100, 114, 119, 138, 140, 152, 153, 155, 162, 170, 177, 179, 180, 187–189, 226, 235 Self-presentation  35, 36, 38, 44, 169, 174, 196–198, 218 Self-situating  38, 43–45, 47, 110, 118, 192, 196, 197 Shakespeare, William  129, 130, 131, 193, 205, 212, 213 Shallcross, Bożena  78, 79, 89, 152, 211–213, 227–229 Sienkiewicz, Henryk  69–71, 205, 208 Silkworm  21, 22, 24–34, 36, 38–40, 42, 194, 195 Simic, Charles  99, 216 Situating  20, 37, 44, 164, 185, 187, 189, 191, 235 Słowacki, Juliusz  117 T Teresa of Ávila  25–28, 195 Testimony  68, 75, 76, 107, 108, 136, 147, 149, 158, 181, 207, 209, 210, 215, 217 The Book  48–54, 56 The Camps  75, 76, 79, 81, 103, 134–136, 171, 174, 210 The New York Review of Books (NYRB) 104 Tygodnik Powszechny  134, 136, 149, 201 V Vendler, Helen  91–96, 98–100, 103–107, 109, 213, 215–217 Vilnius  113, 191 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro)  82, 116, 202, 204

242 W Warsaw  18, 34, 36, 43, 55, 67, 71, 74–77, 81, 82, 85, 88, 89, 95, 101–103, 111, 113, 121–130, 143, 144, 146–148, 151, 154, 159, 174, 191, 195, 212, 216, 220, 221 Whitman, Walt  17, 19, 20, 38, 106, 162, 163, 171, 178, 185, 190, 193, 207, 218, 229, 230, 234, 235 Witkacy (Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz) 24 Witness  36, 43, 46, 50, 67–70, 72–79, 81, 84, 90–96, 98–110, 112, 120–122, 124–133, 137, 144, 146, 150, 151, 154,

Index

155, 158, 159, 163, 168, 169, 173–177, 185, 191, 192, 201, 207–211, 213–218, 220, 221, 224, 228, 231–233 Witnessing  67–69, 72–79, 84, 90, 91, 94, 95, 100, 101, 106, 108, 109, 112, 120, 122, 124, 127, 129–133, 150, 151, 154, 158, 159, 168, 191, 207, 208, 210, 211, 213–217, 220, 221 World Literature Today 92, 100, 196, 199, 210, 214, 217, 223, 230 Y Yeats, W. B.  17, 156, 203

CROSS-ROADS POLISH STUDIES IN CULTURE, LITERARY THEORY, AND HISTORY Edited by Ryszard Nycz Vol. 1 Małgorzata Budzowska: Phaedra – Ethics of Emotions in the Tragedies of Euripides, Seneca and Racine. Translated by Adriana GrzelakKrzymianowska. 2012. Vol. 2 Andrzej Zawadzki: Literature and Weak Thought. 2013. Vol. 3 Maria Janion: Hero, Conspiracy, and Death: The Jewish Lectures. Translated by Alex Shannon. 2014. Vol. 4 Grzegorz Grochowski / Ryszard Nycz (eds.): From Modern Theory to a Poetics of Experience. Polish Studies in Literary History and Theory. 2014. Vol. 5 Anna Nasilowska (ed.): Wisława Szymborska´s poetry. Choice of Essays. Translated by Karolina Krasuska and Jedrzej Burszta. 2015. Vol. 6 Zdzisław Łapiński (ed.): “Miłosz Like the World”. Poet in the Eyes of Polish Literary Critics. Translated by Grzegorz Czemiel. 2015. Vol. 7 Włodzimierz Bolecki: A World Apart by Gustaw Herling. Translated by Agnieszka Kołakowska. 2015. Vol. 8 Jakub Momro: Literature of Consciousness. Samuel Beckett – Subject – Negativity. Translated by Jan Pytalski and Cain Elliott. 2015. Vol. 9 Katarzyna Majbroda: Clifford Geertz´s Interpretive Anthropology. Between Text, Experience and Theory. 2016. Vol. 10 Michał Głowiński: Myths in Disguise. 2018. Vol. 11 Mikołaj Golubiewski: The Persona of Czesław Miłosz. Authorial Poetics, Critical Debates, Reception Games. 2018. www.peterlang.com