ROBERT PINSKY
Ryan Winters:
Robert Pinsky
teaches in the Creative Writing Program at
Boston University. He is the author of five books of poetry, has translated
TI,e
II/femo
of Dante and
The Sep(/rate Notebooks
of Milosz, as well as many other
poems by Milosz, and has written influential books of criticism. I introduce
to you the Poet Laureate of the United States, Robett Pinsky.
Robert Pinsky:
It is an honor to read to you at a conference devoted to the
works of Czeslaw Milosz. It almost seems an invitation to catastrophe.
Two poems by Czeslaw that are particularly close to me I put into my own
book. One is "Inc1l1tation." The other is "Song on Porcelain"-this ver–
sion is slightly 1110re free than my version as printed in Milosz's books.
(CZCS /c1 II
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Rose colored CLIp and sa Ll cer,
Flowery demi tasses;
They lie beside the river
Where an armored col ullln passes.
Winds from across the meadow
Sprinkle the banks with down;
A torn apple tree's shadow
Falls on the muddy path;
The ground everywhere is strewn
With bits of brittle fi'oth-
Of all things broken and lost
The porcelain troubles me most.
I· ..
J
The porcelain in the poem is an image of lost Europe, as it thought it was,
or as it believed itself to be- its elegant manners, its art, its way of life.
Porcelain was a mania. Emperors collected it. It represents refinement, and
a Europe that tried to destroy itself. They were all Europeans after all. It
isn't as though Afi'icans or Asians or South Americans went there and per–
petrated a war or a holocaust. The porcelain is most disturbing, because it
suggests that what is lost is the same thing as the destruction , as though
Europe tore at itself, bit wounds into itself, and put itself in concentration
camps. And that disparity between historical ideal and historical reality is
what troubles the person who walks along the banks of the river.
When we 're reading Joyce we feel how Joycean we are, and when we
read Shakespeare we all tend to feel, ''I'm really like Shakespeare,"
although next week, we'll be Gogol or Dostoyevsky. Another of Milosz's
poems related to this notion is "Bypassing Rue Descartes."
