MILOSZ'S WO R.LD T O [)AY
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faithful. T hi s kind of renewal is only partl y possibl e, hence the necessity of
redoubling the poe ti c effort, and th e passage from simpl e speech to lofty ,
from metri cal to non - metri cal, from lea rned to simpl e, from straight to
ironic, ecs tati c to cyni cal. Once aga in, there is the issue of appropriateness,
so di sdained by contemporari es. Everything deserves a wo rd that will bring
it closer and domes ti ca te it.
Few poets give the world such an emphatic "yes" and at the same time
trust so doggedly in th e possibiliti es o f imitation. All possibl e literary
configurations--s tyli sti c and lexical-are put
to
the task. The world is worth
describing, Milosz seems to say, and it allows itself to be described. Thank you .
Alexander Fiut:
Th e ri ver of Mil osz's childhood fu sed w ith H eraclitus's
river in hi s matri cul ati o n essay.
It
also merged with Lethe, the river of for–
getting, from whose powers he protected himself and us with every word
he wrote. The meanin gs o f the river ordered almos t eve ry theme and
recurrent motif. Black waters lapped at Mil osz's pre-war poems. He writes:
"Under vari o us names, I have praised only you, rivers! / You are milk and
honey and love and dea th and dance." T he river becomes a symbol of w hat
a human existence is-life-giving and des tructive, un ending and ephemer–
al, elusive and unyieldin g, reco rded in m yth and debated by philosophers.
It is the mos t ancient representati on o f time, whi ch n ows quickly and
imperceptibly and can o nl y be frozen for an instant in memory. Thus in
rememberin g an old love, he asks: Was she then a cloud / Or a river wave,
and did she return / To nonexistence" ["A Photograph "]. The river also
was the site of initiati o ns: into eroti c ecs tasy, as in the poem " Capri ," and
into the child 's first del ights. His mother, Milosz confesses, taught him to
pronounce th e names o f the rivers " wi th respec t yet tenderly." It is no te–
worthy that only the river is rescued from th e dea thly power of nature; it
gli stens and gleams with an ex trao rdinary mul ti plicity of meanings.
In th e volume of poems
F(lcillJ! th e River,
Mil osz states: "Wherever I
wandered , through whatever contin ents, my face was / always turned to
the river" [" In Szetejnie" J. Thi s means that to place a foot on the bank o f
the river is to find onese lf in a place wh ere two basic elements meet. It is
also the drawing o f a seemingly indes tructibl e line. Yet one of the mos t
striking features later o n is hi s stubborn insistence on crossing the uncross–
able limi ts-of time and space, of a single life and one epoch, of one's own
body and one's native cuI ture. There were many such j ourneys in hi s ear–
lier poems. N ow, however, he takes thi s type o f excursion more frequently.
It is diffi cul t to li st the many va riants and possibili ti es. Mil osz always easi–
ly visited a bygone wo rld, but a journey to just one moment in time no
longer satisfies him . " House in Kras nogruda" depicts the same place in var–
ious hi storical peri ods. T he former Ca tas trophi st answers the hypothetical
