Czesław Miłosz
For the next meeting we agreed on this occasion we’d each choose a piece of writing by Czesław Miłosz, and then discuss our choices.
Poems by Miłosz in Polish can be found at poezja.org and literatura, and in English translation at The Nobel Prize and poets.org (Academy of American Poets).
Zielony Balonik book club notes:
On Miłosz’s Głosy biednych ludzi (Voices of Poor People)
‘How horrible it is to hear the poor lament; the voice of the poor has no poetry.’ (Carolina Maria de Jesus 1914-1977)
I don’t know how Miłosz would have reacted to these words from a Brazilian slum dweller, nor why he chose the title ‘Voices of Poor People’ for the sequence of poems he wrote in war-time Warsaw. At the heart of this sequence is the ground-breaking poem, ‘Biedny chrześcijanin patrzy na getto’ (‘A poor Christian looks at the ghetto’), which is ‘the most significant poem in the cycle,’ according to Miłosz’s biographer (Franaszek 2017 p216).
That’s an understatement. To my mind this powerful, unique poem is the strongest and best poem that has come out of the literature of the Second World War, ranking alongside Paul Celan’s ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Death Fugue’) as a poem with endless layers of meaning, a poem where the sound of the words adds to the sense, a poem that lasts beyond the events it describes. Both poems should be read aloud to hear the music like a deep bell tolling.
As well running events in the Miłosz centenary year, led by Ken, Zielony Balonik read the biography Miłosz by Andrzej Franaszek a few years ago. Having just re-read this magnificent work, I planned to explore young Miłosz’s journey to Paris with student friends in 1935, where he visited his cousin Oskar and also witnessed the wretched conditions of ‘migrant Polish peasants and labourers, who are hopeless, drunken and filled with animosity towards the French.’ (F. p.131) I wanted to link this with a 1928 novel by Stefan Żeromski, Nawracanie Judasza (The Conversion of Judas), with scenes set in Paris among the exploited Polish migrant community, but since the ghetto poem has been selected today, I decided to explore the catalyst that produced this poem and what Miłosz saw as an entirely new poetry.
We have to recall that Miłosz, like everyone in Occupied Warsaw, was living with fear of arrest in random round-ups, as well as the struggle to eke out some sort of existence on starvation rations and, above all, to maintain an intellectual life.
Luckily for him, and for poetry, he joined the team of ‘hungry, overworked librarians’ (F. p 193) to save books – the Germans wanted to create a Staatsbibliotek Warschau – and also to hide, among the officially catalogued titles, books printed by the underground press. And, of course, to read.
He started to study English, plunged into Eliot’s The Waste Land and Browning’s monologues and discovered a new approach to poetry as a chorus of many voices, but the real impetus came from discussions with friends including Jerzy Andrzejewski, later famous for Popiół i diament (Ashes and Diamonds), and Tadeusz Kroński, nicknamed Tiger, a man with a diamond sharp intellect and a sparkling conversationalist. Miłosz devotes several chapters to Kroński in Rodzinna Europa (Native Realm, 1959). Franaszek draws on this material in his biography.
Miłosz, a child of Lithuania, no stranger to Russia under the Tsars and under Stalin, educated in the classics and in the Polish Romantics (how could he not be, living in Wilno?) writes there, ‘I admitted a brutal truth to myself: Polish pre-war society […] meant absolutely nothing to me, and I was indifferent to its latest pathetic and messianic embodiment.’ (Native Realm, p.247, quoted by Franaszek, p.209)
This huge reversal, itself something of a conversion, produced a new kind of poetry which Miłosz saw as a way of wisdom, ‘like a diamond cutting glass.’
And so he focuses on a mole that burrows through the artefacts left after human life has gone: paper, linen, flax (he doesn’t mention feathers which floated everywhere during Nazi raids on the Ghetto), ash from buildings, human ash, a leafless tree – yes, there was a tree like that outside the notorious Pawiak prison (and a tree like that too on the slopes of Monte Cassino where Wojtek the two year old brown bear, kept watch as his co-soldiers crawled up mine-filled slopes).
Alas, the mole keeps on burrowing through shattered buildings today as bombs and drones annihilate human life and, like Miłosz we are ‘afraid, so afraid.’
So we turn to his poem not for hope, nor for consolation, because the voices of the poor have no poetry but because, as John Donne wrote, ‘any man’s death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind.’ And involved means, as Miłosz points out, being ready to bear responsibility.
Jenny Robertson
On The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz, translated by Jane Zielonko (Penguin Classics, 2001)
There have been many reprints of The Captive Mind with different covers followed by countless reviews over the years the number of which have risen exponentially in the modern era of internet technology. They are interesting in themselves for they demonstrate responses over the post Second World War decades and, as in 2024, we are not in any kind of global comfort zone. Recognition should be given not only to the author, but also to Jane Zielenko, for translating a difficult philosophical work, and Bill Woodrow, the sculptor of the bronze image Listening to History on the cover of my personal copy which I first read in 2001.
I decided to re-read this book to remind myself of the intensity of experience and thought as the background to my enjoyment of the poetry of Czesław Miłosz. I could read afresh with the benefit of being more educated in Polish literature via Zielony Balonik and witnessing the ways in which Poland has managed its transformation in Europe since the first publication of the book in 1953. How I would have wished to have a conversation with Czesław Miłosz to have his own reflections on where we are today not just in Europe but in the wider world as expounded in Autocracy Inc by Anne Applebaum.
In the conclusion to his Author’s Note in 1981 he says” in the history of totalitarianism, the thirty years which have elapsed since have not removed the deeper reasons for the tenacity of the phenomenon.” And now another 43 years has passed and that tenacity remains with ferocity, alongside the weakening of international and national democratic governance. In the present day context it was difficult to enjoy the book and at times I would feel despair that “the trireme“ of totalitarianism is winning over the “awkward raft with its paddles” of democracy.
His own experiences from his youth in Lithuania and the war time years in Warsaw are powerfully described with humanity and humour and with the skill of observation of the personalities of his peers. How each survived, or did not, in those catastrophic times makes for compelling reading as in a novel rather than a straight history. The narrative is interlaced with philosophical references and comment, which at times seemed repetitive and frankly heavy going. The two elements together formed the basis for the Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta chapters masking the real Jerzy Andrzejewski, Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Putrament and Konstanty Gałczyński. My favourite was Delta and I was easily reminded of a certain “literary politician” in the UK!
Everyone has agreed that this book is a classic. It has its place not just in history but also in modern political thought. I am glad that I took on the challenge of reading it for the second time after a 23 year interval. The status and sovereignty of poets and poetry is a central theme during chaos and catastrophe and therefore provides the context to better understand and appreciate the poetry of Czesław Miłosz and other lesser known Polish poets. And I had to laugh when I read that Delta had submitted a thesis on a non-existent Scottish poet, Morris Gordon Cheats!! A very unusual Scottish-Polish connection!
Krystyna Szumelukowa