oh god
The radio just announed that Czeslaw Milosz is dead.
Just yesterday I was reading the following, quoted by Norman Davies in Rising '44:
TRAPPED
The time was drawing near for the destruction of Warsaw. You could already hear Russian artillery fire. Rumours of an insurection were greeted joyfully: a chance to throw oneself at one's tormentors and take revenge ... Soon, however, came news that there would be no Uprising. One of my socialist colleagues told me that to take action now, when the premiere of the [Polish] London government [in exile] was flying to Moscow, would be nonsense. Stalin was too clever to negotiate with anyone using such a trump card...
That day, 1 August [1944], [Yanka] and I were walking over to Tiger's for an afterdinner chat and a cup of tea. I had something terribly important to discuss; namely, my new translation of an English poem. On leaving for a walk one should never be too sure of returning home, not only because something may happen to one personally, but also because the house may cease to exist. Our walk was to last a long time.
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 thickly planted with SS troops. Machine guns fired at anything that moved. Not far away some friends lived; but when neither running nor walking is possible, three hundred feet becomes a whole journey. ... 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 the University Library; secondly I needed it (although I could stop neeting it). Its title: The Collected Poems of T. S. Elliot, in the Faber & Faber edition.
It was dawn of the next day by the time we crawled up to the island; that is, to a small modern flat with beautiful flowers in the courtyard; the open spaces around it made it seem completely cut off from the outside world [where the Uprising raged].
Here is the valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge
Going into white fog. Here is a broken city,
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
When I am talking with you.
From Dedication, 1945
REFUGEE
During our two weeks of the forced interment I dug out a volume of sociological essays about prewar Poland, The Young Generation of Peasants, and plunged into a sorry reckoning with my own and my country's past, from time to time dropping flat on the floor as bullets traced patterns across the plaster.
At night, dots of varicoloured lights moved over the city; they were Germans firing at the Polish and British planes flying in to drop supplies. We passed several days and nights in the granary, where the nearby highway was patrolled by [Germans]. They had chosen the slaughter of civilians as their vocation. Those bodies of dead women we had passed in the fields were their work.
Is it possible to surround a city of over a million with a cordon of guards? We found out that it was when we were caught and put behind the barbed-wire fence of a camp. Every morning the daily catch was sent to another camp in nearby Prushkov. These people were sorted into transports for concentration camps in Germany. We had to get out of there at all costs.
Human solidarity. Rescue showed up that evening in the form of a majestic nun. She commanded me severly to rmember that I was her nephew. Her quiet, authorative tone and the fluency of her German forced the soldiers into unwilling respect. Her conversation with the officer lasted an hour. Finally she appeared on the threshold: 'Hurry up, hurry up.' We passed through the main gate. I had never met her before and I never met her again. Nor did I ever know her name.
In Warsaw
What are you doing here, poet, on the ruins
Of St. John's Cathedral this sunny
Day in spring?
What are you thinking here, where the wind
Blowing from the Vistula scatters
The red dust of the rubble?
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.
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.
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 of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me. Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.
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
Only the two salvaged words:
Truth and justice.
1945
Czeslaw Milosz lived another 60 years and died in the year when the events of that fateful summer are being remembered throughout Poland.
Just yesterday I was reading the following, quoted by Norman Davies in Rising '44:
TRAPPED
The time was drawing near for the destruction of Warsaw. You could already hear Russian artillery fire. Rumours of an insurection were greeted joyfully: a chance to throw oneself at one's tormentors and take revenge ... Soon, however, came news that there would be no Uprising. One of my socialist colleagues told me that to take action now, when the premiere of the [Polish] London government [in exile] was flying to Moscow, would be nonsense. Stalin was too clever to negotiate with anyone using such a trump card...
That day, 1 August [1944], [Yanka] and I were walking over to Tiger's for an afterdinner chat and a cup of tea. I had something terribly important to discuss; namely, my new translation of an English poem. On leaving for a walk one should never be too sure of returning home, not only because something may happen to one personally, but also because the house may cease to exist. Our walk was to last a long time.
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 thickly planted with SS troops. Machine guns fired at anything that moved. Not far away some friends lived; but when neither running nor walking is possible, three hundred feet becomes a whole journey. ... 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 the University Library; secondly I needed it (although I could stop neeting it). Its title: The Collected Poems of T. S. Elliot, in the Faber & Faber edition.
It was dawn of the next day by the time we crawled up to the island; that is, to a small modern flat with beautiful flowers in the courtyard; the open spaces around it made it seem completely cut off from the outside world [where the Uprising raged].
Here is the valley of shallow Polish rivers. And an immense bridge
Going into white fog. Here is a broken city,
And the wind throws the screams of gulls on your grave
When I am talking with you.
From Dedication, 1945
REFUGEE
During our two weeks of the forced interment I dug out a volume of sociological essays about prewar Poland, The Young Generation of Peasants, and plunged into a sorry reckoning with my own and my country's past, from time to time dropping flat on the floor as bullets traced patterns across the plaster.
At night, dots of varicoloured lights moved over the city; they were Germans firing at the Polish and British planes flying in to drop supplies. We passed several days and nights in the granary, where the nearby highway was patrolled by [Germans]. They had chosen the slaughter of civilians as their vocation. Those bodies of dead women we had passed in the fields were their work.
Is it possible to surround a city of over a million with a cordon of guards? We found out that it was when we were caught and put behind the barbed-wire fence of a camp. Every morning the daily catch was sent to another camp in nearby Prushkov. These people were sorted into transports for concentration camps in Germany. We had to get out of there at all costs.
Human solidarity. Rescue showed up that evening in the form of a majestic nun. She commanded me severly to rmember that I was her nephew. Her quiet, authorative tone and the fluency of her German forced the soldiers into unwilling respect. Her conversation with the officer lasted an hour. Finally she appeared on the threshold: 'Hurry up, hurry up.' We passed through the main gate. I had never met her before and I never met her again. Nor did I ever know her name.
In Warsaw
What are you doing here, poet, on the ruins
Of St. John's Cathedral this sunny
Day in spring?
What are you thinking here, where the wind
Blowing from the Vistula scatters
The red dust of the rubble?
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.
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.
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 of festivities,
The greenwood into which Shakespeare
Often took me. Leave
To poets a moment of happiness,
Otherwise your world will perish.
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
Only the two salvaged words:
Truth and justice.
1945
Czeslaw Milosz lived another 60 years and died in the year when the events of that fateful summer are being remembered throughout Poland.