Issue 3 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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An Interview with Czeslaw Milosz by Aaron Fischer and Deborah Gimelson COLUMBIA: When did you start writing and why? What was the motivation? MILOSZ: I started writing when I was a high school student and it's very hard to reconstruct such a remote period of one's life. In any case, I treated it first as a sort of exercise. I was experimenting with very classical forms and my guess is that those poems, although I don't have them, were not bad. They were, however, stylistical exercises. C: Who were you reading when you first started? Who were your favorite poets? M: Of course, I was interested in poetry written in the tongue in which I was educated—in Polish. And this poetry was quite interesting beginning with the sixteenth century. We had a lot of Latin in school, translated Ovid and Virgil in class, and Latin poetry influenced me considerably. We also had French, and in French we read some poets of La Pleiade. I guess one poet who influenced me and incited me to write stylistical, classical exercises was one of the French poets of La Pleiade, Joachim du Bellay. C: Do you find that you still return to these poets, or do you have other favorites? M: I have changed my interests to a considerable extent. For instance, I developed a taste for the medieval Polish language. I consider the best translation of the Psalms to have been done around 1400 in the medieval language. C: What is it about the language that attracted you? 76 M: We now enter a highly specialized field. Of course, you don't know anything about the character of the given language, the Polish language. In my opinion the medieval language was much more concise and energetic than the language that later developed. C: 7s this the same thing that attracted you to Latin poetry, the discipline and energy? M: Yes, except that maybe when I was in high school, as I said, I was attracted by classicism: regular stanza construction, meter and rhyme. Gradually I developed a taste for non-Latin forms which is, for instance, the form of Biblical verse. That is why my latest work is a translation of the Psalms [unavailable in English—eds.]. I learned enough Hebrew to be able to translate directly. Usually, Polish translations have been done on the basis of Latin and Greek. In order to compete with the medieval translations I translated from Hebrew. That's entering into competition with an unknown, anonymous monk who translated around 1400. C: In terms of classicism, your work has often been compared and contrasted to Cavafy's. What influence has he had on your work? M: I heard the name of Cavafy for the first time in the early Sixties, although some of my poems written during the war have a more or less similar approach, a feeling of historical tragedy. The discovery of Cavafy was very surprising for me. I was influenced, to some extent, by Polish poets, Polish poetry, but also by Eliot whom I discovered during the War. During the War, in order not to learn German, I learned English, and was able to read Eliot for the first time. And so I guess that there was an influence, but completely transposed, because Eliot dealt with a world very far from the world I lived in. I lived at the bottom of European hell and so I transposed, besides Eliot, the use of persona which stems from Browning, so there is a long line. There is a similar poet, a Polish poet of the nineteenth century, parallel to Browning, but not as difficult. In any case, because of the pressure of events, I was forced to take an interest in history and the historical situation. 77
C: You have translated Whitman into Polish, and he seems to be an influence, along with the Bible, in your newer work, especially in "From the Rising of the Sun' [Bells In Winter, Ecco Press]. M: Yes, yes. Though let us say that Whitman was not the only poet who used the long line. There is a whole tradition, quite a strong tradition, a very venerable tradition. That's the problem, for instance, when translating the Psalms. I tried to preserve what is called in French verset biblique, biblical verse. There is no word in English for verset, just verse. The translators of the King James Bible translated it into prose, while newer translators divide it into sections and write in a column, which in my opinion is also wrong. The idea is to preserve the flow, what you refer to as Whitmanesque, and we know that Whitman was inspired by the Bible; and also observe caesuras inside, because caesuras are justified. In the original Hebrew you have signs for caesuras. So I mark the caesuras by little stars. C: Earlier you mentioned your awareness of the "historical situation". Did you find it difficult to come to this country, where our sense of tradition and history is rather weak, and very little of our poetry seems written from any sense of tradition? M: Well, maybe things change. Immediately after the end of the War when I went abroad for the first time, I was connected with the Warsaw government, the new government. I had my own poems, written during the War, and some poems written by other Polish poets, and I tried to communicate the contents and to translate them to show them to some Americans. They didn't understand what it was all about. The same poems today seem more understandable and find an audience. The same poems. So there is an evolution which has occurred since, let us say, 1946. There is much more openness to a tragic historical experience among the Americans. C: Our attitude towards war has certainly changed in this country from the patriotic feeling surrounding World War II and Korea, to the negative feeling focused on Vietnam. 78 M: That isn't really what I meant. Things which occurred in Europe during those years of war took time to be assimilated. The American outlook changed, and I don't know whether this is a result of Korea or Vietnam. In any case, a feeling that our planet is a tragic place has somehow developed. C: What you are saying seems to be an encapsulation of the history of the last thirty years, in that there has been a strong sense of the tragic developing. This is especially true of the last 10 - 15 years, or of people in our generation. There is a new awareness of individual limitations, and of the amount of time it takes to change and accomplish things. M: Probably. My mentality is very un-American and I guess that our mentality over there still differs considerably because that moralizing side which is very strong in America is basically optimistic. Maybe we are pessimistic. Take, for instance, Zbigniev Herbert. What is interesting is his use of classical themes taken from the Greeks and the Romans. But really, those are paraphernalia. He uses them to get a distance, to watch the events of our time, to place in a certain perspective, to give a universal pathos or universal tragedy to the events of our century. And this may exemplify the anti-moralistic attitude in the sense that we should try to do our best to improve this world but we should be aware that it is always a place of tragedy. C: Which is extremely Cavafian. M: Very Cavafian in nature, yes. C: Many of the people you mention by name in 'From the Rising of the Sun' are Christian thinkers and Christian mystics who were concerned with questions of duality, duality of the spirit, duality of the individual, or of the world. M: True, that's very true. You see, one of the decisive influences in my life was my cousin who was a French poet. He was not a close relative of mine, but was a man of the same name. His name was Oscar Milosz. He migrated to France. As a matter of fact, his parents sent him to school in France when he was eleven. He received his education in France and became a French poet. In the spring of 1939 he died in France. 79
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Page 7 and 8: They sit together in the turret, on
Page 9 and 10: RICHARD SPEAKES Scrimshaw The man t
Page 11 and 12: ELAINE FORD Whin I met Ivor in a pu
Page 13 and 14: I'd only spoken it once. "Moira, an
Page 15 and 16: etween the gravestones and the pape
Page 17 and 18: in the street." "How do you know it
Page 19 and 20: CLEOPATRA MATHIS Journey in the Sno
Page 21 and 22: STEPHANIE STRICKLAND RICHARD HENSLE
Page 23 and 24: cloth from a New York mill, the col
Page 25 and 26: JANE MILLER The Heart Climbs Devili
Page 27 and 28: URSULE MOLINARO The Chemistry of Mi
Page 29 and 30: now. Any day now, perhaps. Perhaps
Page 31 and 32: silhouette on the historical balcon
Page 33 and 34: Where she had perhaps planted the t
Page 35: JAMES BRASFIELD The Stringer Called
Page 39 and 40: also describe my high school years
Page 41 and 42: sequence and sequence. Not in the b

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