Issue 3 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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And in 1977, the hundredth anniversary of his birth was celebrated by a special exhibition of Milosziana at the Bibliotheque Nationale. There was a two-day seminar colloque in Fontainebleau where he is buried, to which I contributed a paper entitled 'Oscar Milosz and William Blake'. He is highly regarded in French literature. Abroad, he is little known, but his name can be found in some literary encyclopedias. Curiously enough, you can find his name in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, because his mother was Jewish, but not in Catholic encyclopedias, although he was Catholic and considered himself a very devout Catholic. His influence was very strong when he was a young man. I received a very rigorous Roman Catholic education with a lot of the history of the Church, dogmatics and so on, which created in me a great interest in heresies. And, for your information, I am teaching a course at Berkeley entitled 'Manichaeism', that is, the heresy of Manichaeism, where I deal with the medieval and some modern Manichaeists. The duality that you mentioned is a very good observation, a true observation. They have always attracted me, dualistic thinkers. One of the twentieth century thinkers I like very much, and about whom I spoke in my Manichaeism course, is Simone Weil, who had very strong sympathies for the Albigensians. Albigensians in the south of France were the direct inheritors of the Manichaean duality, the two principals of God and Satan, so in part this answers the question. C: One of the things you return to is the multiplicity of the selves in one self, in one individual. In 'Lesson' you talk about the idea of locked rooms inside you . . . M: Also in 'Ars Poetica' [Bells In Winter]. C: Yes, also in 'Ars Poetica' and through all of 'From the Rising of the Sun.' You say there is a troubadour from Provence, that he is speaking in your voice, and at one time you and he were the same. We found that a fascinating thing, this idea of many selves within the self, and we were wondering if you would talk about it. M: Yes, of course, that is a very intelligent observa- 80 tion. There is an issue of World Literature Today dedicated to my work. One article is by Jan Blonski, a personal friend of mine, a professor at the University of Cracow. He analyzes one poem and he says practically the same thing you do, that the difficulty in analyzing my poetry consists in those multiple voices, multiple personalities, so that even within one poem, you can see contradictory voices, a sort of polyphony. He invokes, of course, the theory of polyphony in literature. Dostoevsky has been called a polyphonic writer because voices speaking in his work are all part of his personality and he is for none of them exclusively and for all of them together. So he analyzes my poem and says there are voices contradicting each other, internal dialogue, parts of one personality, for and against, and it is true, I guess. I am terrified by those voices and poems which range from ecstasies to black despair, in one person. I cannot do anything but give them free rein. C: Not only are there different voices in dialogue, but at the same time they come from all different parts of history. M: Yes, and this is quite a problem in translating, because certain allusions are connected with the history of the language, and the history of poetry in a given language, so there are many poems of mine where there are linguistic allusions. There is, for instance, one line obviously referring to a poet of the eighteenth century, a pastoral poet, which, of course, is lost in translation. They cannot be reproduced, and yes, your observation is correct because I consider my poetry deeply rooted in the whole tradition, a certain tradition of history of the area from which I come and the history of the language. In 'From the Rising of the Sun' there is a whole chapter missing because it wouldn't be comprehensible in English. The chapter refers to the district in which I was born and there are localities, places; there are fragments in prose from old chronicles referring to those places. And then it closes into a very small area where my family lived for several centuries and there are even inventories from the sixteenth century. Humor and drama are constantly fused in this particular chapter. I 81
also describe my high school years and my fascination with heresies and with dualities that you mentioned, which originated when I was a schoolboy. But I mention by name various friends of my youth, and so it would be very difficult to understand without notes. C: What do you think has been lost in translation of your work? M: That is the great obstacle, the historical references. C: We noticed in your Selected Poems that credit is given for all the translations except 'The Raja'. Is that the only thing you have ever written in English? M: I guess it's the only thing. It was written in the form of a letter. C: We were fascinated by that because you have done so much translation from Polish to English, and from Hebrew to Polish. When you write, do you still write in Polish? M: Only in Polish. I feel no temptation to write in English because I am so rooted in one language. My poems in English would be poorer, they would be without that multifaceted character, without allusions. In the history of the Polish language there were bilingual poets, but in another language they were usually weaker, one-leveled, while they were multi-leveled in Polish. Of course, there were cases where they were better in other languages. There is a Polish writer who was brought up in German schools. He wrote German and his German writings are better than his Polish work. That is a question of the language in which one is brought up. My French cousin spoke very fluent Polish yet didn't consider himself a Pole, but a Lithuanian. He wrote only in French; that was his language of expression. He never could write in any other language. C: The idea of persona comes up many times in your poems. When writing in English, do you feel freer to create a persona, a very identifiable one from which to speak? M: I don't know. To be frank, I haven't given much thought to the idea of writing in English. It seems to me that writing in Polish gives me enough trouble. There is something here I would like to read to you— 82 'Hypothesis': "If, she said, you wrote in Polish to punish yourself for your sins, you will be saved" [Bells In Winter]. C: Have you worked with young writers at Berkeley? M: Young writers in Berkeley? No, no. In the sense that I never taught any creative writing. Some young people with literary ambitions profited from our seminars and I also profited from their participation. I gave seminars in translation so we would sit down and together translate poems from Polish into English, occasionally from Russian into English, and I used the technique I learned when I was a high school student. I am very much indebted to my high school; that is why I am horrified by the situation in this country at the high school level, because you have to learn everything later on. C: That has become very obvious to us. M: But we had a very good Latin teacher, with whom we translated Ovid in a very democratic way. He would give his version, a line, and then say: "Now, who wants to improve? You suggest this, all right, let's read it—how does it sound? What do you think about the improvement? No good? Let us try another solution ..." And so on. So I would bring my translation to class, and then ask the students' opinion, and we would work together on a given line, line by line in the poem. Some of the students profited, and I profited from teaching them. Largely, the result of those seminars is my anthology of Postwar Polish Poetry. C: Relative to our situation in this country, you have written in isolation without a large community of people around you doing the same thing. Do you have any thoughts on that? M: Let us first distinguish ... I lived in a community as long as I was in Poland. The communal character of literary life was ten times stronger than in America. It was very strong before the War, but it was also strong during the War, and even stronger after the War, because during the War there existed the world of the Underground. It was a compact community, everybody 83
Page 1 and 2: ROBERT TAYLOR, JR. Union Street Sta
Page 3 and 4: espect for those who supervise him
Page 5 and 6: In bed, on the verge of sleep, she
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 and 36: JAMES BRASFIELD The Stringer Called
Page 37: C: You have translated Whitman into
Page 41 and 42: sequence and sequence. Not in the b

Issue 3 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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