R.I.P., Czeslaw Milosz

Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz has died, at the age of 93. Strange, but my eyes filled up with tears when I heard. His poetry has always meant a great deal to me – and I am thankful to my sister Siobhan for introducing his work to me.

Known for his poetry, yes, he also is known for his continuous and courageous denunciation of evil, and of telling the truth about communism, and dictatorships. His life is a tale of inspiration, and bravery. He grew up in Poland, and lived under first the Nazis, and then under communism – before finally fleeing to the United States. He had seen it all. After Poland wrenched itself free in 1989, he moved back to Krakow. God. To wait that long to go home. His poetry, then, is the poetry of persistent exile. Maybe that’s why it has such sweet melancholy, such clarity. He was always known as an “intellectual”, whatever that means. To me it means a certain kind of writer, usually of the Eastern European variety. Writers who write with a certain abstract distance, perhaps because they have seen so much tyranny, they feel an urgency to try to describe it – writers who contemplate the big questions, and try to find new forms with which to express themselves – writers like Milan Kundera, Vaclav Havel, Kafka, Czeslaw Milosz.

Yet somehow – these “intellectual” writers do not sacrifice the heart. Their writing does not come off as cold. Or clinical. On the contrary. It pulses with life, humanity, compassion.

For example, here is Milosz’s poem “Encounter”. I cannot read it without feeling a lump rise in my throat, and I have read it countless times. Notice the sparseness of the language (which may be due to it being a translation, not sure – he wrote in Polish, it was almost a political act for him to do so) – notice the cold clarity of the images … and then notice how he bursts forth into warmth in the last lines.

Encounter
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Here’s another extraordinary poem. I’m no literary scholar or anything, but the images in this poem terrify me – and I can guess why. There’s a sense of human beings being ground up, chewed up – a monster from the deep rising to engulf us all … We are all ‘so little’.

The poem is called “So Little”.

So Little
I said so little.
Days were short.

Short days.
Short nights.
Short years.

I said so little.
I couldn’t keep up.

My heart grew weary
From joy,
Despair,
Ardor,
Hope.

The jaws of Leviathan
Were closing upon me.

Naked, I lay on the shores
Of desert islands.

The white whale of the world
Hauled me down to its pit.

And now I don’t know
What in all that was real.

Maybe the writers trapped in Eastern European countries, or living in exile, felt too much, and yet they were determined, above all else, to describe the tyranny under which they lived, the double-tyranny actually: the tyranny of fascism or communism, and the tyranny of being an artist in such societies. Artists were usually the first ones attacked – most of all, the writers. Writers are dangerous, after all!! Most had to flee in order to continue writing. Others, like Havel, stayed put – and lived a life of persecution and constant imprisonment, refusing to shut up – and a life where his plays would never be produced in his own country, and yet were huge successes the world over. Like Havel said, “I decided to behave AS IF I were free.”

So the poems, the plays, the books of these writers – are much more than what is on the printed page. They are affirmations of the human spirit. They are a testament to the difficulties inherent in even getting the damn thing published in their own country. They are EVIDENCE that you can NOT hold people down forever. You may control a person’s movements, a person’s ability to travel … but you can NOT control what goes on in that person’s head. No matter how hard you try.

I am grateful to Czeslaw Milosz, for his courage, his gift, and his persistence. He’s an inspiration.

If you’re interested – here is the speech he gave in 1981, accepting his Nobel Prize in Literature. It’s a doozy – I highly recommend it. This is a man, a Polish man, in exile – it is 1981 – the Solidarity movement was just heating up, things were starting to shift, crack, break apart … Milosz had lived long enough to see it. Freedom was still almost a decade away, but the spirit of that exhilarating time in history is in his speech.

In it, Milosz says, “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”

He was that pistol shot. It was his destiny to be so.

Rest in peace, sir.

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7 Responses to R.I.P., Czeslaw Milosz

  1. Steve says:

    Wow. I’d never heard of him, but wow. Thanks for telling us about him.

    The word “Leviathan” just gave me shudders when I read it. How large and great and evil is that.

  2. red says:

    Steve:

    I am exactly the same way about “Leviathan”. Terrific word. Terrifying word!

    You are most welcome, by the way … Czeslaw Milosz is a good poet to know. :)

  3. MikeR says:

    That’s good stuff, red. I hadn’t heard of Milosz either. It requires a lot of courage to write poetry that spare and intense, even completely apart from the brutal political realities he faced. We are all so little, in merciless negation of any illusions to the contrary…

  4. Steve says:

    From his speech:

    “One of the Nobel laureates whom I read in childhood influenced to a large extent, I believe, my notions of poetry. That was Selma Lagerlöf. Her Wonderful Adventures of Nils, a book I loved, places the hero in a double role.”

    Has anyone read this? Is it good?

  5. Chrees says:

    I also highly recommend Milosz’s “The Captive Mind” to understand what it was like to live under Communism.

  6. Czeslaw Milosz

    Other than Michael Young over at Hit & Run, very little blog-reaction so far to the death of Czeslaw Milosz at 93.

  7. Sally says:

    You can hear Milosz read a couple of his poems at the Internet Poetry Archive, which is referenced in this blog entry.

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