CZESLAW MILOSZ
471
the written word and of things as they are. Who knows? It may well be
that people need permanent duality , in ever changing degrees of inten–
sity. All those poets on several continents - Vallejo, Neruda, Alberti,
Aragon, Eluard, Quasimodo, Ritsos, Hikmet -
positive
that they are tak–
ing part in the colossal transformation of man into a new, radiant being;
glorifying the youth of the planet, enraptured, because they have signed
up with the right side, not the side of moribund capitalism. Translations
of these poets filled the pages of Polish journals. Polish poets who, in my
opinion, at a particular moment honestly believed, who were swept
away by the fever of fraternity , of the common march of the best part of
humanity: Mieczyslaw Jastrun , Konstanty Galczynski. Galczynski trans–
lated this Russian poem for us:
Let song upon song flow on,
let songs echo in every deed
where dream and reality meet ...
Let song after song flow on,
praising the names of the brave;
song swelling to praise that band
of men who vanquished oppression -
while over them now our R.ussia
extends her radiant hand.
- Aleksandr Prokofev
An example of the atmosphere of those days. Definitely incompre–
hensible to the Polish activists in the anti-Hitler underground, who sat in
their prison cells after 1945 awaiting the execution of their sentence: a
bullet in the back of the head.
Neruda. I remember our meetings, including the last one at the PEN
C lub Congress in New York in 1966, when I asked him why he had
written such disgusting things about me ("in the pay of the Americans, "
etc.), and he replied, "Milosz, I was wrong, I apologize." I don't know
what to think about his tame and the possiblity that it will endure. That
eloquence, those floods of words, practically logorrhea... .
Septell1ber
25, 1987.... Balzac lived during the reign of natural history;
he didn't have
to
wait for Darwin. In the
Comedie humaine
he wanted
to depict the species that make up human society. And he depicted them.
During the German occupation we read Balzac passionately because the
