26
PARTISAN REVIEW
historical memory, and that "our hope is in the historical." He has given us
a series of Cassandra-like warnings-both in poetry and in prose-----about
America's painful indifference to European experience, about the conse–
quences of what happens when "nature becomes theatre."
In
Milosz's
splenclid poetic argument wi th Robinson Jeffers he counters Jeffers's praise of
inhuman nature with his native realm where nature exists on a human scale.
Milosz models for us his own obsessive concern with our collective destiny,
what he calls "the riddle of Evil active in history." Like Aleksander Wat,
whose memory he has devotedly kept alive, he is deeply aware of our tragic
fragmentation, but rather than revel in it, he seeks to transcend it.
In
our age
of profound relativism, he offers a search for eternal values, eternal truths.
Czeslaw Milosz teaches us to love lyric poetry and also to distrust it. He
insists that his own poems are clictated by a daimonion, and yet he also exem–
plifies what it means to be a philosophic poet; he teaches us how to think in
poetry. His poetry is fueled by suffering, but it is also informed by moments
of radiant and unexpected happiness. He understands the cruelty of nature
and yet he also remembers that the earth meri ts a bi t, a tiny bi t, of affection.
He has taught us through Simone Weil that "contradiction is the lever of
transcendence." He has thought about the rise and fall of civilizations, he has
praised the simple marvels of the earth, the sky, and the sea. "There is so
much death," he writes in "Counsels," "and that is why affection / for pig–
tails, bright colored sails in the wind, / for paper boats no more durable than
we are." He writes of the eternal moment and the holy word:
15.
He has
reminded us how difficult it is to remain just one person, and he has deeply
posited our humanness. I love his poetry most of all for its radiant moments
of wonder and being, because of his tenderness toward the human.
Tomas Venclova :
I
am going to present a topic that is esoteric for anybody
not born in Lithuania. Technically, Czeslaw Milosz was born in Lithuania,
a country which shared Poland's fate for several centuries but was, and is,
a very specific cultural realm. He shares this background with his prede–
cessor, Adam Mickiewicz, who started his epic,
Pan Tadeusz,
with the
famous apostrophe: "Li thuania, my fatherland." Both poets were brought
up in similar social milieux of Polish-speaking gentry. Their birthplaces were
small manors called Zaosie and Szetejnie (Sateiniai in Li thuanian). Of
Mickiewicz's manor nothing is left; of Milosz's original manor, a school
where the poet's mother Weronika taught the neighborhood children still
remams.
Still, the two regions are different. When Milosz read
Pan Tade/./sz
in his
childhood, he was astonished by its inaccuracies, since, accorcling
to
his own
experience, there were no beech trees and no greyhounds in Li thuania. And
if people around Zaosie used Belorussian idiom, close enough to Polish, in
