MILOSZ AND WORLD POETRY
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hear in English and American poetry. And why wouldn't
I,
since my family
actually came from Eastern Europe, not from England? Our poetry comes
out of Mexico, China,japan, Thailand, and out of all the different countries
of Europe. Our poetry comes from everywhere Americans come from.
Milosz offers us an American poetry that's related to Europe, and to Eastern
Europe, in another way than American poets have often thought about.
Robert Faggen:
Seamus, I wonder whether you could perhaps comment on
whether or not there's any connection between the condi tion out of which
Milosz wrote-being in a Catholic-dominated country that has suffered
severe oppression-and your own experience, from another such country.
Seamus Heaney:
My country has suffered oppression. [n my lifetime, howev–
er, it has been relatively fi-ee of it. But [ want to go back to the previous
question, to the appeal of this poetry. I said once in an interview that what
attracted me in Milosz was a sense of a pre-Reformation world, a stirring of
the Catholic unconscious. What happened to the English language after
Shakespeare was that it was kind of swept clean of a lot of pre-Reformation
association and melody; it was Roundheaded a little bit by Milton, and
clipped down, and then lawn-mowed by Tennyson-Lawn Tennyson, as joyce
calls Sir Alfred. So what is in the poetry of Milosz for an Irish person from
my kind of background is largely cultural ratification, a Dantesque corrobo–
ration that says, yeah, the uruverse is much bigger than the Thirty-Nine
Articles. The language leads you into the eternal: the eternal margarita, which
is mentioned in the poem on Dante, is given a new radiance, is readrnitted
into the language. This is one of the virtues of the translations by Robert Hass
and others, this sense of opulence, which English poetry is particularly shy of.
Anything Cavalier, long-haired, Caroline, is clipped immediately by the lin–
guistic censor in England. But it is encouraged by Milosz in translation.
Robert Faggen:
I
suppose that the image of the snake at the end of
"Bypassing Rue Descartes" has a particular meaning for someone from
Lithuania_Tomas, perhaps you could explain that.
Tomas Venclova :
Well, in ancient Lithuania, snakes were considered holy
animals, and one was not supposed to touch a water snake: killing a water
snake was a sin. Those beliefs survived in Lithuania well into the nine–
teenth and even into the twentieth century. This is one of the instances of
this archaic
Weltanschal/I//lg
[ would also say that Milosz corrects it in
American attitudes, along with, for instance, the late joseph Brodsky. In
Eastern Europe, we have a much clearer feeling of the difference between
good and evil. Due to our experiences, those things must be distinguished_
