POEMS
Czeslaw Milosz
Far Away
"Great love makes a great grief"
- Skarga
The chronicler is breathing, his heart is beating.
This is rare among chroniclers, for they are usually dead.
He tries to describe the earth as he remembers it
I.e. to describe on that earth his first love
For a girl bearing some ordinary name
From whom he will never again receive a letter
And who astonishes him by her strong existence
So that she seems to dictate what he writes.
[t happened a long, long time ago.
[n a city which was like an oratorio
Shooting with its ornate towers up to the sky
Into the white clouds, from among green hills.
We were growing there next to each other, unaware of it,
[n the same legend: about a subterranean river
Nobody has ever seen, about a basilisk
Under a medieval tower, about a secret passage
Which led from the city to a remote island
With the ruins of a castle in the middle of the lake.
Every spring we took the same delight in the river:
Ice is breaking, it flows, and look, ferry boats
Painted in blue and green stripes,
And majestic raft trains drift to the sawmills.
In the sun of April we were walking in the crowd.
Expectation was timid, nameless.
and only now, when every "he loves me, loves me not"
Is fulfilled, when ridicule and grief
Are alike and I am at one
With those girls and boys, saying farewell,
[ realize how strong their love was for their city.
Though they were unaware, it was to last them a lifetime.
They were destined to live through the loss of their country,
Editor's Note: "Far Away"
©
1991 by Czeslaw Milosz. Translated by the author and Robert
Hass.
Reprinted by permission.
