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PARTISAN REVIEW
complex while another trembled before the authority of his father, Milosz
presented authors not as paper figures but as as real men with foibles, dark
sides, and obsessions, as well as wi th talent and greatness. Milosz is able to
capture the essence of a phenomenon with a few strokes of the pen. When
he compared the image of the Teutonic Knights in the Polish national con–
sciousness with that of the Nazis, he captured the archetypal nature of this
image in a single sentence. The masterful portraits of the four writers in
The Captive lVIilld
are another good example. So is the
History:
Tadeusz
R6zewicz is "a poet of chaos wi th nostalgia for order";Jozef Czechowicz's
"lyrics can be likened to chamber music made poignant by the counter–
point of dark and metaphysical problems." Milosz's single-sentence
formulas often say more than lengthy monographs.
He once indicated that the decision to write the
History
meant over–
coming a host of methodological problems. Since the book was written for
a foreign audience, it required a different approach than that of a historian
of literature wri ting in Poland. The lack of familiari ty of American stu–
dents with Polish history and literature meant that he had to include much
background information, and the paucity of translations from Polish into
English made it necessary to include a larger-than-usual number of quota–
tions, combining the factual literary history with an anthology. Also, it had
to overcome a cultural barrier, since many Polish attitudes are difficult to
understand from an American perspective. There are numerous references
to figures and phenomena familiar to an educated English speaker: the
murder of Bishop Stanislaw in twelfth-century Poland is compared to that
of Thomas
a
Becket in England. Polish kings with their limited political
power are compared to American presidents. Also, Milosz carefully brings
out the ties in the presence of various Polish writers in either England or
America, such as the English translations of a sixteenth-century Polish
political writer, Wawrzyniec Goslicki, or Mickiewicz's and Sienkiewicz's
ties to America. The discussion of Mickiewicz's poem "Potato" is to a
great extent motivated by the fact that its action takes place in America.
The desire to bring Polish literature closer to American students has, how–
ever, other interesting results because it opens up new perspectives on
Polish literature itself. The effect can be unexpected, as, for instance, when
Mickiewicz's
KOllrad J.Jvallellrod,
considered to be the first Polish national
poem, is seen through American eyes and put side by side wi th the roman–
tic stories about Indians. 13y de-Polonizing and objectivizing Polish
literature, Milosz not only brings it closer to an American reader, but breaks
the magic circle of national and li terary taboos.
With few exceptions, Milosz's literary essays are on contemporary sub–
jects. They are sharp in tone, argumentative, polemical as well as personal.
Their goal is clarification, often by way of polemics, of Milosz's own vision
