CZESLAW MILOSZ
A
Year of the Hunter
AlIgHSt
3, 1987. I shall copy out something I wrote in my notebook
two years ago, because it is connected with what I observed yesterday:
Marek Zaleski's book,
The Adventllre of the Second Avant-garde.
It's
exactly as if I were discovering myself in another, distant incarnation.
Denial: This can't be me. And yet it is me. Curiosity, because I come
across quotes from articles, from letters, that I had completely forgotten
I ever wrote. I also discover the logic of my ali enation. Just because my
slender volumes of poetry, and my colleagues', appeared in editions of
one hundred or three hundred copies, that doesn't mean they had that
many buyers. In those days I was convinced that we write for perhaps
twenty or thirty individuals, for our fellow poets; that belief is returning.
Right beside us, thousands are waiting, attentively pricking up their ears
whenever a poem mentions politics, poised to adopt us under the condi–
tion that we serve the cause. A leftist cause, obviously. On the bottom is
the great mass of those who read nothing because they are illiterate or
barely literate, the mass for whom television was invented. Somewhat
higher, a clear-cut division: On one side, progressivism, leftist inclinations,
an openness to innovation, snobbery, a dubious intellectualism, the shift–
ing borderline between Polish and Yiddish (in Wilno, between Yiddish
and Russian) - because that entire milieu was eighty percent Jewish. On
the other side, right-wing tendencies, ritual Catholicism, an absence of
intellectual interests. My fate was determined by a traumatic distaste for
the latter camp. Warm, getting warm, in a moment I'll find the key, be–
cause I said "traumatic." An intellectual confronting primitives? A Jew
confronting goyim? A wise man versus fools? A mystic versus believers in
the religion of the folk, in which the Mother of God plays an ancillary
role? Unquestionably, alluding to my Lithuanian ancestry was one more
way of cutting myself off from my real or imagined arch-Polish persecu–
tors. I am probably being unjust, but I am not interested in a sociologi–
calor political analysis of that era. That is how I felt at the time. But
Editor's Note: These excerpts are adapted from
A Year oj the Hllllter
by Czeslaw
Milosz, translated by Madeline G. Levine, to be published in August by Farrar,
Straus
&
Giroux. Translation copyright
©
1994 by Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. All
rights reserved.
