Friday, August 27, 2004
Czeslaw Milosz
Obituary Czeslaw Milosz Aug 19th 2004 From The Economist print edition AP Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish émigré poet, died on August 14th, aged 93 HE WAS a poet who spanned his century. Born in a Lithuanian-Polish province of tsarist Russia, Czeslaw Milosz died having seen the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian empires rise and fall, while his two native lands finally escaped their miserable history to end up safe and free. He wrote about it all, mostly in exile in America, in essays, novels and volumes of poems. These lines of his are inscribed on a monument at the Gdansk shipyard, honouring Polish workers shot for striking against the dictatorship of the proletariat: Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date. In retrospect, the Communists and their goons who banned his poems should have been scared. History has proved Mr Milosz right about pretty much everything. But at the time, and particularly until he won the Nobel prize for literature in 1980, it was a long slog. When will that shore appear from which at last we see How all this came to pass and for what reason? he asked sadly in 1974 in ³From the Rising of the Sun², a poem that his friend and fellow-émigré, the Russian Joseph Brodsky, considered his best. His greatness was often against the spirit of the age, largely because the ages in which he lived had so many nasty spirits. He was liberal-minded, xenophile, wistful and tolerant, in a world that was none of these things. That made him, in his words, ³an ecstatic pessimist². Feeling gloomy, he cheerfully got on with writing. In pre-war Poland Mr Milosz felt stifled by the prevailing Catholic-nationalist ethos; he was sacked from a Polish radio station for being too pro-Lithuanian. Under Nazi occupation, he worked with the resistance, among other things translating ³The Waste Land² into Polish for an underground publisher. Before it showed its truly Stalinist face, he served the post-war regime as a diplomat; in 1951, he defected. For the next 40 years he tried to explain to the West both the real nature of Communism, and the things it had extinguished. Mr Milosz liked to describe himself as the last citizen of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a medieval superpower that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, noted for its religious and cultural tolerance. But that, and its surviving echoes in the modern era, had disappeared like Atlantis. Mr Milosz's erudite nostalgia for the ethnographical intricacies of the eastern Polish provinces, the ³border of Rome and Byzantium² as he put it, seemed fanciful and archaic. Now, as the European Union wonders how best to deal with its sullen, poverty-stricken eastern neighbours, his thoughts on culture and history could hardly be more topical. In his best-known prose work, ³The Captive Mind², Mr Milosz caught not only the nastiness of totalitarian ideology, but also its seductiveness. An intellectual who swallows the Communist medicine of the mind, he wrote, ³attains a relative degree of harmony...preferable to the torment of pointless rebellion and groundless hope.² His poems dealt with metaphysics, immortality, love, memory and beauty. A masterful observer of sights and sounds, he used small details from his youth to illustrate large ideas. That, he said, was a Proustian ³search for reality purified by the passage of time², as in the opening stanzas of ³Earth², written in 1949: My sweet European homeland, A butterfly lighting on your flowers stains its wings with blood, Blood gathers in the mouths of tulips, Shines, star-like, inside a morning glory And washes the grains of wheat. Your people warm their hands At the funeral candle of a primrose And hear on the fields the wind howling In the cannons ready to be fired. You are a land where it's no shame to suffer For one is served here a glass of bitter liquor With lees, the poison of centuries. Writing in Polish is not the easiest way to become world-famous, and it was only in 1973 that a volume of his poetry appeared in English. His recognition was aided by excellent translators, principally Richard Hass, an American poet laureate and a professor, like Mr Milosz, at Berkeley. The intellectual tussles of the cold war were tricky too. Diehard anti-Communists distrusted him for having served the regime at all. America at first refused to give him a visa, leaving him stranded and cash-strapped in Paris, where he was befriended by Albert Camus. Other intellectuals found his critique of totalitarianism too harsh. Pablo Neruda denounced him in a left-wing newspaper as ³The man who ran away². That charge hurt: Mr Milosz was always worried that he had betrayed his homeland by leaving it and was glad to return to newly free Poland for the final years of his life. He was welcomed as a literary giant. But like many east European intellectuals who flourished in adversity, he had little to say directly about the new era of uncaptive minds. ³Intellectuals have a certain image of things and don't know very well what is going on beneath, in people's heads, after those decades of totalitarian smashing and modelling,² he said. His many fans thought that too modest. Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2004. All rights reserved.
