CZESLAW MILOSZ
Robert Faggen:
Now we're at the finale of what has been one of the most
joyous three-and-a-half-day periods of my life, the International Milosz
Festival.
Robert Pinsky
will introduce
Mr. Czeslaw Milosz.
Robert Pinsky:
In
the unforeseeable, peculiar and glorious career of
Czeslaw Milosz one of the many wonders is the fact that he has become,
for young poets in our country, an essential American poet-perhaps even
the most important living American poet. When I ask the poets in their
twenties who study with me to make anthologies of the poetry that means
most to them, no author's name appears more often than his-a name many
of them revere despite the difficulty they have pronouncing it. When I ask
them to choose a poem to learn by heart, it is often a poem by Czeslaw
Milosz, in translation. This is a profoundly significant form of laurel as well
as a strange one, a transplant that has reached across languages, cuI tures,
decades, vastly different colors and epochs of experience.
Prizes, in and of themselves, are baloney. No award commi ttee, indeed no
critic, no curriculum, can ensure the long-term life of the art they elevate to
wide notice. The work of an artist ultimately survives or not, depending on
what that work means to artists who come afterwards. What will they hunger
for, to feed their own art? Such hunger, in the long run, is a compass or indi–
cator as accurate as the gesture of plants turning toward the sun.
This phenomenon-the importance of an Eastern European poet, and
a poet who wri tes in a language never associated wi th great poli tical, eco–
nomic, or military power, for American poets younger than himself-has
its own history. Intense engagement with Czeslaw Milosz's poetry could
be observed among young American poets before the 1980 Nobel Prize,
before the days of Solidarity in Poland, before lines of Milosz's were
inscribed on a monument in Gdansk, before he was celebrated in a coun–
try where publication of his work and mention of his name were once
forbidden.
We can speculate that for Polish poets who began learning their craft
in the 1960s-the generation of Adam Zagajewski and Stanislaw
Baranczak-Milosz was an attractive figure first because he was forbidden
by the regime, and then because, along with his brilliance as a writer and
his freedom from the moral compromises of the Soviet era, Milosz repre–
sented certain values: the then-secret trove of the Polish and European
past, and the tantalizing, then-precluded trove of the West. But what made
American poets esteem the work of Milosz as central, even before his offi–
cial ennoblement in 1980? Why did the original
Selected Poems
of 1973 and
Bells ill Winter
in 1978 make such a distinct impression upon poets of my
generation:> I well remember how many of us were discussing
Bells in
Willter,
translated by Lillian Vallee and published by the Ecco Press in its
