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PARTISAN REVIEW
various languages, which may be explained by an elusive osmosis
and not necessarily by direct borrowings . But borrowings have been
common. For instance, at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries a Frenchman was able to read a poem on the ruins of
Rome signed Joachim du Bellay; a Pole knew the same poem as the
work of Mikotaj Sep-Szarzynski; a Spaniard, as the work of
Francesco de Quevedo; while the true author, whom the others
adapted without scruple, was a little-known Latin humanist, Ianus
Vitalis of Palermo. The acceleration of exchanges made the osmosis
and mutual borrowings among the poets of the twentieth century
obvious, so that Warsaw or Budapest, or my Wilno, was not outside
a certain circuit. Even in distant New York, the literary groups of
the 1930s, with their leftism, Marxism, and "literature for the
masses," faithfully repeated the main concerns of the literati in my
province. Besides, literary New York was composed mostly of
immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe.
In addition to the South-North and West-East axes, there is a
third I would like to discuss : the Past-Future axis. In our time we
have quite often heard that poetry is a palimpsest that, when
properly decoded, provides testimony to its epoch. Such an assertion
is correct, however, on condition that it not be applied in the manner
preferred by Marxist-oriented schools of sociology, including the
sociology of literature. Having spent time in the limbo of social
doctrines, I know their sterility too well to return to them here,
even though I did once observe them being applied most ingeniously–
and comically-in the quarrels of the Polish avant-garde of the
twenties over which kind of rhyme is socialist. I do not doubt,
though, that posterity will read us in an attempt to comprehend
what the twentieth century was like, just as we learn much about the
nineteenth century from the poems of Rimbaud and the prose of
Flaubert.
Clearly I am reflecting upon what sort of testimony about our
century is being established by poetry, though I realize we are still
submerged in our time and our judgments should be assessed in
advance as uncertain. Let me approach this topic in a roundabout
manner beginning with Mozart's opera
The Magic Flute
and a fIlm by
Ingmar Bergman with the same title, a fIlm that better perhaps than
any other demonstrates what fIlm art is capable of, especially now
when its technical perfection is primarily used to debase man.
The
Magic Flute
introduces us to a climate so radically different from that
in which we live that the very contrast between the aura of the late
