UNDERSTANDING "THE WORLD"
John
Baarsch:
Welcome to the panel on Czeslaw Milosz's poem "The
World," written in Warsaw in 1943. This panel brings together three distin–
guished critics, two of whom are also distinguished poets:
Helen Vendler,
Porter University Professor at Harvard University;
Robert Hass,
a former
Poet Laureate of the United States, who teaches at the University of
California, Berkeley; and
Robert Pinsky,
the current Poet Laureate of the
United States and professor at Boston University. First, Professor Vendler.
Helen
Vendler:
Thank you, John. Thank you to Robert Faggen for inviting
me, to Czeslaw Milosz for writing the poem, and to my fellow panelists who
have translated it.
It's 1943, and Warsaw is occupied by the Nazis. Czeslaw Milosz, a poet
in his early thirties, seeing his world obliterated, reconstitutes it on the
page. "The World": it is a large title for an apparently modest poem, and
its subtitle "A Naive Poem" is consciously set before us as though to dis–
arm objection. The ignorantly naive does not call itself naive; this poem,
by choosing for itself the simple tones of fairy tales, children's hymns, and
primers, demands by its form that we recognize certain inalienable joys and
fears inseparable from childhood memory and childhood imagination.
In dreams, even decades after the war, Milosz repeats the loss of his pri–
mal world:
They ordered us to pack our things, as the house was to be burned.
There was time to wri tc a letter, but that letter was wi th me
We laid down our bundles and sat against the wall.
They looked when we placed a violin on the bundles.
My little sons did not cry. Gravity and curiosity.
One of the soldiers brought a can of gasoline. Others were tearing
down curtains.
In another nightmare, "In his dreams he is running through a dark garden.
/ His grandfather is there but the pear tree is not where it should be, / And
the
Ii
ttle gate opens to a breaking wave."
"The little gate" is the second thing we see in "The World." We have
approached it by the road, and through it we reach the porch which leads
to the rest of the house, the dining room, and the stairs. Milosz's titles insen–
sibly lead us into the lost world, and the poems introduce us gradually to its
few
dmll/(/fis
pcrSOIl(/(~a
brother and a sister, Mother and Father. When
compared to the rich and particular evocations of Milosz's Lithuanian
Edilor's Ilolc:
Unfortunately, we were unable
to
publish Mr. Hass's presentation.
