To the Polish poet To Česlav Miloš (1911 - 2004) World War II did not go down easy. He found himself in Warsaw during the German invasion, after which he fled to Ukraine. But, after learning that his wife had failed to leave Poland, he tried to return to her via Romania, then again via Ukraine - the Germans were advancing on one side, the Russians on the other - and then via Lithuania. In the summer of 1940, he returned to Warsaw. There he participated in various resistance activities, including providing shelter and transporting Jews. He was captured in 1944 and interned in a camp for a while. As the Red Army approached Warsaw, and the Nazis burned the city in revenge, Milosz and his wife, with little more than the clothes on their backs, set off for a village near Krakow, where they found a brief respite from history, though not from poverty. And then:
One January afternoon in 1945, I stood on the threshold of a peasant's hut; a few small-caliber shells were just about to fall along the village street. And then, in the valley between the snow-capped hills, I saw a column of people slowly advancing. It was the first detachment of the Red Army. It was led by a young woman in felt boots, with a semi-automatic rifle in her hands. And I, like all my compatriots, was thus freed from the domination of Berlin, in other words, I fell under the domination of Moscow.
And so history found him once again. And he did not yet realize how strict and cruel its new form would be.
Already renowned as a significant young poet, the new Polish communist authorities saw in him an attractive representative of their ideas, despite the fact that he was not a communist himself. He accepted to serve that government as a cultural attaché, first briefly in New York, then in Washington, and finally in Paris. During this period he became convinced that his deeply ingrained humanism was incompatible with submission to the Polish regime. Defection was always possible, but the price of defection was high:
My mother tongue, a work in my mother tongue, is the most important thing in the world to me. And my country, where what I wrote could be printed and reach an audience, lay within the Eastern Empire. My intention and goal were to preserve freedom of thought in the field in which I dealt; I tried, with full consciousness and conscience, to subordinate my actions to the fulfillment of that goal. I served abroad because I was thus not under direct pressure and could, in what I sent to the publishers, be bolder than my colleagues at home.
His difficult situation was further complicated by the “Red Scare” in the United States, which left him stranded in Paris, while his wife and children were in Washington. American officials considered him a communist, which he was not: hence his despair while working for the Polish government, whose leaders were horrified by his lack of commitment to the cause, and at one point even took away his passport. By early 1951, tensions had become too great; he requested, and was granted, political asylum in France. He would not visit Poland again until, after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, the People’s Republic of Poland began to see him as an asset again. They even allowed some of his works to be published there.
Immediately after he defected, he began writing the book I quoted, the book that would make him famous, A trapped mind (1953). It is probably the most bitter and lucid book ever written on why totalitarianism attracts intellectuals. Taking and adapting a term from Islamic theology, he argues that such intellectuals justify their submission to totalitarian regimes by applying don't go.
To say something is white and think it is black; to smile inwardly while being serious on the outside; to hate while expressing love; to know and pretend not to know and thus make a fool of your opponent (even while he makes a fool of you) - all these actions lead a man to value his cunning above all else. Success in this game becomes a source of pleasure.
It is a ketman. It is a strategy of self-preservation: “Above me, storms rage and huge ships sail; but all my efforts are directed at holding on tightly to the rock, otherwise the waters will carry me away and not a trace of me will remain.” And how can someone who is trapped by such an illusion ever extricate themselves from it?
During this turbulent period, Miloš continued to write poetry, and the poems from those years were collected in To a poet in a new world. They chose and sang the songs Robert Haas i David Frick. Has, a longtime colleague of Miloš's at the University of California, Berkeley, regularly worked with the poet on English versions of his poems. The vast majority of the poems in the last English edition published during Miloš's lifetime, New and collected poems 1931 - 2001, were translated in collaboration between the two, even though Has does not speak Polish.
When Miloš retired from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Berkeley, he was replaced by David Frick. A prominent scholar of Polish and Lithuanian language and culture, Frick roughly translated most of these poems into English before his death in 2022, after which Hass completed the work with Polish-speaking colleagues. He dedicated the book to Frick.
In the preface to the book, Hass points out that Miloš was never satisfied with the poems from this period. Even when he first published them in a book, in 1953, he struggled to arrange them coherently into a collection in which to present the poems, and later he was convinced that he never found the right order for them. Perhaps over time, the poems themselves began to like him less. In With new and collected poems only 13 poems from that period appear, while in To a poet in a new world total 45.
However, Hass and Flick came to the conclusion that if all the poems from the period 1946 to 1953 were translated and printed chronologically, they could also be experienced as the story of an extraordinarily gifted man who had gone through multiple traumas and was trying to think through and write his way back to mental and moral health. I think they were right about that.
If you read the poems collected here chronologically, you will see, first and foremost, a man contemplating hope, what it reflects, and what happens when you lose it. Practitioners of ketman have, of course, rejected hope, but there are so many of them that one who rejects ketman could perhaps not be more filled with hope than they. In “Two Men in Rome,” one of the earliest poems included here, written in New York in 1946, Miloš makes a kind of vow:
Yes, I was a witness. But never reconciled.
No one alive will tear my consent from my lips.
Not every believer will receive forgiveness.
If your Vatican lies in ruins,
I will continue on, to carry through the storms
aurea aetas from heart to heart.
But what to say (about) those who have forgotten the aurea aetas, the Golden Age, and instead have reconciled themselves, dedicated themselves to simple self-preservation? One literary form that spoke to this state of affairs is satire, but Miloš laments in another poem from 1946: “The age of satire is over.” Yet the following year, this time writing from Washington, Miloš addresses himself with a kind of poem-prayer. Jonathan Swift, because satire is, after all, a form of hope: “This is what your lips have said: Humanity is not yet hopeless.” And that is why, in the last verse, he says: “I will persevere, my Dean.”
“I will persevere.” “I will carry on.” But just a few pages later he speaks of “the torch of hope,/ Day by day extinguished.” “From now on silence,” why write at all? Two years later, in the poem “My Mother’s Grave,” he now asks her to mediate, as he had asked Swift:
Help me create a love that lives forever.
from my constant quarrel with the world.
A unique bond of inspiration and action,
unknown to the creations of unthinking nature.
… Help me, mother. Strengthen me in man.
what you knew as childish passions.
Don't let me put down my burden.
(I suspect Miloš was alluding to the famous verse Robert Frost from his poem "Lesson for Today": "I was in a love feud with the world".) And a year later, in 1950, he wonders why it is harder for him to hope than others: "Where they see a drop, I see an ocean/where they go singing, I barely carry hope".
But, though barely, he still moves forward with hope. He carries his burden. And he finds solace in the fact that he is one of those strange beings who simply cannot forget, cannot forever delude themselves, cannot surrender and give up. These beings are called poets. To the legislators of the world, he says: “Do not feel safe. A poet remembers. / You may kill one, but another is born.” This is from one of his last poems written in America. A year later, in 1951, he returned to Europe, to Paris, cut off from his wife and children, but he still calls:
To sing me a new song
at a time when those who are silent
In countries in the East and West,
and on the shores of the bloody sea,
they try to hide from others with their hands
the spring that beats in their chests,
hot and nameless
a source of cautious hope.
This poem was literally written at the same time as his defection, after which he would write A trapped mind, with his bitter and, yes, satirical exposure of the ketman in intellectuals who despair within themselves. He has definitely linked his fate with the fates of his fellow poets, and with those who nurture their hope in silence.
The most excellent poem in this collection, and also the longest, is called “Tractate on Morality.” It is one of his masterpieces, and it is a key poem from this period because it announces a commitment to the vocation of the poet, to the poetic voice, even without hope. Indeed, in the final verses of this poem, Miloš writes: “I do not offer you hope.” Although, I may have quoted this selectively, the entire verse reads: “For now, I do not offer you hope.” That is: hope that we can attain, but for now we must learn to manage without it. But how?
Today I invite you all to the boat
that will carry us over the rapids
time to new shores.
There are, it is suggested in the “Treatise on Morals”, two essential elements of this call, this strategy, one negative and one positive. The first is “discipline/deprivation”: one must get used to functioning without something, to turning one’s head; “you must resist/filling in the gaps with theories”… “Please do not draw conclusions/in a schoolboy manner, from my words”… “Beware of fools”, because fools always have theories and conclusions. “Competent fools”, and there are many of them, are especially dangerous. Furthermore, one must take care not to “be in the company of those/blind as moles”, those who would “like to live in their own parish” and ignore the state of the world.
It's easier than you think to lose your soul.
in inappropriate company,
because you are a sponge, you absorb everything.
Hence the necessity of disagreement. But what then to cultivate, what to strive for? The answer, in short: wisdom. The ultimate goal is, “let’s call it musical knowledge,” a “flexible” wisdom. But for now,
Goodbye. Let's pass it from hand to hand.
A shared gift of humble wisdom.
As you can see, I don't have a recipe,
I don't belong to any sect,
And salvation is within yourself.
Maybe it's just health.
Mind, balanced heart.
Because sometimes a simple medicine helps...
That humble wisdom begins with a courageous look into the Heart of Darkness. If you cannot do that, then you will join the ranks of the self-deceivers, the excuse-makers, the ones whose company, if you are wise, you will avoid. What people fear most is to see the world as it is; what they call “hope” is really just a form of denial. But if you reject the lie, if you look into the heart of darkness, and if you are willing to strive for “the common gift of humble wisdom” with “a balanced heart,” then and only then can true hope be granted to you. Then, poet, you can follow your true calling: “in difficult times,/you must be an ambassador of dreams.”
(Glif editorial team; Source: Hedgehog Review; Translated by: Matija Jovandić)
Bonus video:
