Born in Lithuania in 1911, the descendant of a Polish-speaking family that had been in that region for generations, Czeslaw Milosz first came to prominence as a poet in Poland in the early 1930s. In the war years, during the Nazi occupation, Milosz was in Warsaw, where he wrote and edited material for the resistance. In 1946, he entered the diplomatic service of the newly founded People’s Republic of Poland. From 1946 to 1950, he was stationed in Washington, D.C. The following year, after returning to Poland, he defected to the West.
Milosz lived in France from 1951 to 1960; it was there that he wrote The Captive Mind, a study of intellectual accommodation to Stalinism. In 1960 he came to the United States to teach at the University of California at Berkeley, where he soon became a tenured professor. He has lived in Berkeley ever since, becoming an American citizen in 1970.
In 1980, Milosz received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Widely regarded as one of the greatest living writers, he has been a significant influence on contemporary American poetry. Though fluent in English, he continues to write almost exclusively in Polish–his native language and its literature, he has said, make up his “estate.” In the 1970s he began to translate the Bible into modern Polish, and he has thus far completed a number of books, including Job, the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, the Gospel of Mark, and Revelation.
Having recently celebrated his eighty-sixth birthday, Milosz shows few signs of slowing down. He has recently published a personal anthology of world poetry, with commentary, A Book of Luminous Things (Harcourt Brace); and with Leonard Nathan, he has translated the poems collected in Talking to My Body (Copper Canyon), by the Polish poet Anna Swir. In addition, his correspondence with Thomas Merton has been published in Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz (Farrar Straus Giroux). Earlier this year, Robert Faggen visited Milosz at his home in Berkeley.
How did you first conceive of your new anthology, A Book of Luminous Things?
I conceived it originally as an anthology in Polish, and it has appeared in Poland, though under a different title. In Polish, the title is something like “The Book of Useful Things” or “Excerpts from Useful Books.” But the idea was identical. It is something conceived in a struggle against certain tendencies present in modern thought and poetry.
As I tried to explain in my introduction, I wanted to restore equilibrium between the subject and the object. Modern poetry, like modern art in general, has become more and more subjective, increasingly concentrated upon our perceptions at the expense of the world that is before us. I even draw on some Eastern traditions, because I see that a great deal of Chinese poetry, for instance, may be under the influence of Taoist and Buddhist thought in which there is a kind of a cohabitation of the subject and the object. This may seem surprising; we typically associate the East with an emphasis upon what is internal and, therefore, subjective. But in fact, in ancient Chinese poetry the subject–instead of trying to dominate nature and things, as in the Western tradition–somehow identifies with the object of perception. And in that way, the poetry achieves a certain equilibrium.
As the title suggests, this is a book about things seen by various poets, and seen with a certain detachment, in a state of contemplation. In my introduction I invoke Schopenhauer, for whom Dutch still lifes are the ideal in painting. So let us say that the whole book is considered with a great respect for the Dutch still lifes and their luminous grasp of things.
What you say brings to mind another language of vision, quite different from that of the Eastern traditions. I’m thinking, for example, of Paul’s words in Romans: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.”
There was, of course, a great argument in the first centuries of Christianity that the created world is sufficient to prove the existence of God. Perhaps in the idea of an anthology largely descriptive of simple visible things, there is sort of a gratitude to God for creation, an approval of being, against nothingness.
I also have the sense, though, reading your commentary in the second section of the anthology under the heading “Nature,” that the visible world, the world of creation, is something that troubles you, and that there is a tension there.
Of course, the world troubles me very much, to say the least. In that regard, I guess, the Book of Job remains the last word. When we ask why there is evil in the world, we haven’t gotten any further than Job. Of course, the conclusion of Job is very weird. God seems to say, “Why do you judge me by your standards? I do what I want, that’s not your business.” The Book of Job ends by berating man about the incomprehensibility of what is done by God.
I have always wondered too about Job’s “comforters,” who tried to convince him that if he suffers, obviously he is guilty. They seem to be very reasonable men. Why does Job constantly scream that he is innocent? Who is innocent? Who among humans can say that he is completely innocent?
You have described yourself, and others have described you, as a very “instrumental” poet: you allow other voices to speak, to use you as their vehicle. This whole anthology seems to me to be like another poem, in that you have allowed all of these voices to speak through you. It seems a continuation of your poetic tapestries of the late 1970s, The Separate Notebooks and From the Rising of the Sun, and, later, Unattainable Earth.
Yes, I am very glad that you mention this; what you say is precisely what I had in mind. It may be that this quality–the touch of my own presence–is more marked in the Polish edition because I translated most of the poems, whereas, in the English edition, I use already extant translations.
One of the most striking sections in A Book of Luminous Things is the section titled “Woman’s Skin.” Though the other sections, such as “Travel,” “The Secret of a Thing,” and “Nature” suggest your enduring preoccupations as well as understandably general concerns, “Woman’s Skin” seems somewhat more personal.
Well, I confess here that I’m in love with a woman who lived sometime around the year 1200, a Chinese poet named Chu Shu Chen. Perhaps I should read the poem of hers that I included, entitled “Morning”:
I get up, I am sick of
Rouging my cheeks. My face in
The mirror disgusts me. My
Thin shoulders are bowed with
Hopelessness. Tears of loneliness
Well up in my eyes. Wearily
I open my toilet table.
I arch and paint my eyebrows
And steam my heavy braids.
My maid is so stupid that she
Offers me plum blossoms for my hair.
I suppose our intimate connection is largely due to the fact that she lived eight hundred years ago. That’s long enough to establish a love relationship, yes? I also included a poem written by a Chinese emperor who opens one eye in the morning and looks at a woman, a concubine or a wife, who gets up and, in the mirror, paints her face. He wonders why, for whom? The desire is to eliminate the masquerade.
Following the section called “Non-Attachment,” made up of poems suggesting a way of finding peace in a world of infernal passions, you include an “anti-chapter” and you come back to “History,” the concluding section of the anthology. Are history and history’s tragedies something that we always have to come back to?
It seems to me you bring up one of the most difficult issues. We cannot turn our back on history, however we may try. But there are many ways of establishing our relationship to history. As you know, in Warsaw during the war, I wrote the most serene poems in my career. They were connected with history, but connected in a negative way. They restored normalcy to a world that was completely disturbed–that was their unmentioned context. So in the midst of massacres a poet can write poems, peaceful poems, as many old Chinese poets did, but a relationship between the poem and its circumstances exists somewhere deep.
In the same way, I think, the poems of Anna Swir, whom I have translated, are intimately related to her war experiences even when she writes about love. Her erotic poetry probably would have been different without those experiences. Some people say that her love poems are very cruel, because she objectivizes her subject. We have a man and woman, the intimate relationship of male and female, and yet the voice of the poet is very impersonal. There is something almost calligraphic about her poems.
In one poem, “A Plate of Suffering,” Swir writes, “This morning / a vast new world / is created for me, / especially for me, what a luxury! / The world of suffering.” This appears to be a strange mix of sensuous joy and spiritual despair.
Yes, and that represents a link, I should say, between her love poems, very blatant erotic poems, and her poems about hospitals, for instance–about old women in hospitals. She is writing out of compassion, compassion for the situation of women, but not in any typically fashionable form of anger or pity.
In a poem you wrote about translating Anna Swir while you were on an island in the Caribbean, you include what could be a definition of poetry: “Whatever we do, desiring, loving, possessing, suffering is always only meanwhile. For there must be something else true and stable.” That echoes a definition of the poet from a poem in Provinces: “The poet, someone who always thinks of something else.” And, earlier, you drew on your cousin Oskar Milosz’s definition of poetry as “the passionate pursuit of the Real.”
By “the Real,” he meant God. Poetry, like every human action, is only meanwhile. And awareness of that postulates that something unchangeable and stable may be good. I must add that I have received a copy of a huge book on my poetry written by a Polish priest and entitled Poetry and Theology. He proves that I am all right from the point of view of Catholic orthodoxy.
Is he right?
The situation in theology is very peculiar. Over a period of centuries, theology developed a special language, and today this language somehow doesn’t penetrate minds outside the theological guild. This is precisely the argument of that priest: that poetry should be for a theologian a source of inspiration and new language.
So he finds in your work something that is much closer to what theology should be drawing on. Why do you think theology has gotten into this predicament?
For many reasons which I cannot trace here, because a full answer would have to take account of the transformation of Western civilization since the Middle Ages. Certainly the rise of science and technology has played a part in theology’s troubles.
In The Land of Ulro, you address the impact of science on the religious imagination. Do you see Christianity and science at odds, or does Christianity in some respects lead to science in emphasizing Incarnation, God’s creation, and the drive toward the new?
Nineteenth-century science was unremittingly hostile to any notion of religion. And we are, to a large extent, children of the nineteenth century. We use scientific images taken from the nineteenth century. Twentieth-century science has penetrated our consciousness only very slowly. Einstein’s theory of relativity, the theory of quanta and so on: despite whole libaries of competent popularization, these developments are far more difficult to imagine than the concepts of nineteenth-century science.
But they do have their effect–and, of course, the most important discovery of modern science that can be translated into the imagination is the Big Bang. In the writings of my cousin Oskar Milosz, which predate that theory of cosmic origins, there are passages that–read today–clearly seem to be speaking of the Big Bang, the beginning of space and time. He invokes theologians of the Middle Ages, who had a theory of the creation of the world through the transmutation of nonphysical light into physical light, and hence the beginning of time and space. This is important, because it upsets Newtonian notions of eternal categories of space and time. In the Newtonian imagination, time and space were like enormous containers in which things were happening independently of those containers. But if we take Einstein and the Big Bang seriously, space and time are no longer these terrible containers separated from God and man. Oskar Milosz thus re-imagined a world in which it is possible for humans to feel human.
It seems that poetry today, if it is serious, is a kind of exploration of our place in the universe, and precisely not putting in practice any system–even theological systems or scientific systems–but just groping. That’s why poetry and the imagination can be important. I believe that in my anthology there are many poems that redefine our place in the universe. If you take the work of Wislawa Szymborska, who recently won the Nobel Prize, I especially selected those poems in which she deals with a contrast between us as human beings and nature.
As in her poem “In Praise of Self-Deprecation.”
Yes, yes, because there she implies that barracuda with moral problems cannot be imagined. “The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with. / Scruples are alien to the black panther. / Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions. / The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.” This is in contrast to our constant torment, doubts, insecurity, and so on.
This reminds me of one aspect of Genesis, or of the Garden of Eden: We are related to other creatures, we are from dust, yet we are also supposed to have dominion over other creatures.
The dominion of man over all creation was very important for civilization. But, at a given moment, that dominion breaks down. For Descartes, for example, animals were living machines, but with the progress of biological science especially, the borderline between human beings and animals now is very blurred. The question is difficult; our position of dominion is not clear. And yet, at the same time, as “In Praise of Self-Deprecation” shows, there is an enormous distance between us and animals.
Robinson Jeffers, with whose work you have had a long dialogue, tended to grant moral superiority to nonhuman creatures.
Yes, but that was part of his perverse philosophy, which resulted from crossing Friedrich Nietzsche with biological science. He called the result “Inhumanism.” I am very ambivalent about what Jeffers had to teach, but I appreciate his daring. He was a poet in revolt against modernism. He rebelled against pure form and condensation. He said, reportedly, “I want to speak my mind, my philosophy.” It’s too constricting to be caught in the necessity of constant experimentation, speaking through objective correlatives and creating metaphors. In that way, he was very bold. But the weak points of his thinking are also obvious. It is perverse to say that “distraction which brings an eagle from the sky is better than pity.” That’s perverse! That is not true! There is a certain scale of human decency that speaks against that sort of thing.
Jeffers’s sense of inhuman nature as an absolute good that will survive the destruction of humanity can be related to apocalyptic thought in American culture. You have translated the Book of Revelation; how do you take its message?
The Book of Revelation is a very curious book. The Beast of which John writes is Rome, primarily. So his vision was taken from history, but at the same time, it was moved into another dimension; it became generalized, applicable to other historical situations. That is meta-history in a way. Thus the Apocalypse can still be read today.
I have lived in apocalyptic times, in an apocalyptic century. To live through the Nazi and Communist regimes in Poland was quite a task. And, indeed, there is a whole literature of the twentieth century that is deeply apocalyptic. My work to a large extent belongs to that stream of catastrophist literature that attempts to overcome despair, often through the use of rather ironic procedures. As you know, during the German occupation of Warsaw, I wrote a poem called “A Song for the End of the World.” The essence of the poem is that the end of the world is going on constantly, and we have a man binding tomato plants who says, “there will be no other end of the world.” In a way, he is the savior of the world; whatever is going on, there will always be a man binding tomatoes. But I have always tried to liberate myself from complete despair by postulating a world that will exist after we are no more.
In addition to Revelation, you have translated many other books of the Bible. Which have been the most challenging?
No matter what book of the Bible you choose to translate, you are confronted with the problem of finding the right level of language: neither archaic nor journalistic, but somewhere between those two poles. Most modern translations of the Bible into English fall into journalism, excessive colloquialism.
My problem in translating the Bible into modern Polish was to maintain a high style without archaism. So, for example, when I translated the Psalms, I took as my ideal some fifteenth-century Polish translations. I had to cope with the perennial problem of readers of the Psalms–namely, that the author asks constantly for favors for himself. It’s a childish sort of address to the Father to grant him riches and prosperity and to save him from danger and so on. This demands a considerable dose of humility on the part of the translator and the reader.
In your letters to Thomas Merton, you discuss some of the aspects of life in the United States that troubled you, particularly racial tension and television. How did you find America in the late 1950s?
You see, I came to America in a very privileged position because I came here to teach and I didn’t go through many of the experiences that are shared by ordinary Americans or immigrants. But I was sensitive to the toughness of American life, the sheer difficulty of surviving in this environment. Political terror confronted every person in Poland under the communist system. But when I came to America, I saw that the same amount of fear can be inflicted by the economy–not by the secret police, but by the economy. So I have experienced in my life two types of society: one in which fear is political, and another in which fear is economic.
In the letters, you tell Merton that you have always been crypto-religious. It seems that your sense of being Christian or Catholic was in very grave doubt. Has this changed for you? Or what kinds of crisis were you experiencing at the time in relation to the Catholic church?
I would say that I have been in a crisis all my life, and I am not an exception in this century.
When you met Merton, how did you find him?
I found him a very lovable man, heavyset, with a pleasant face. Absolutely the contrary of how we imagine a monk. A man liking humor, jokes, drinks.
Well, he seemed to be himself very much troubled by the Catholic church, particularly on the question of pacifism, and you objected to his staunch pacifism.
Yes. And I quarreled with him over the American idealism about nature. Nature is not really very good. On the other hand, I do not accuse nature of cruelty, because nature is innocent. I have dealt with this problem more recently in a poem “To Mrs. Professor in Defense of My Cat’s Honor and Not Only.”
One lyric of yours, “To Raja Rao,” contrasts the comforts of Eastern philosophy with your own predicament as a Christian. At the end of the poem, you say that your lot is “reading Pascal.” Why?
Pascal lived at the time when so-called libertinism and agnosticism were already widespread. And he was writing against the wolf of skepticism, Montaigne. Pascal personifies a man in crisis. So for a man in crisis as I am, Pascal is a spiritual brother in a way. Pascal said that “to believe and to doubt, and to gain this belief is for man what running is for a horse.” Every hour, I believe this one hundred times. And in this way, belief can be nimble.
How would you react to a critic who called you a Christian poet?
Well, I feel that he pulls the blanket to his side a little. But it would be pleasant for me.
Do you find that in America there’s some embarrassment about being involved in poetry and being a Christian? Have you found that something you have been uncomfortable with in public, that somehow American culture is not receptive to that?
No, I do not take this too much into account. My position is determined by my situation in Poland, not in America. In Poland they grasp rather well my position, which is not that of an official Catholic and not connected with those who invoke Catholicism for political purposes. I do not try to call myself Catholic, because it is a dangerous label. It leads logically to the Christian Democratic Party.
One of the sections of A Book of Luminous Things is called “Travel,” and you allude there to a theme that has been a preoccupation your entire life, the desire for “somewhere else,” movement to a better world. To what extent does this movement represent both a gain and a loss?
When I was in America for the first time, after the war, I was very restless. I didn’t like communism, and I didn’t like capitalism. For a while, I thought of going to Primavera. Primavera was a commune founded by the Hutterites in the forests of Paraguay. They wanted to practice a kind of basic Christianity, with a life of hard work and simplicity. I used to meet the delegates from that sect in Washington. Fortunately, my wife, who was more sober than I, was opposed to that idea. Later on I heard from a Swiss friend who, before the war, spent time in such a commune in Germany. There was a shortage of women, and the women who were there were very unhappy. So life “somewhere else” is not necessarily better. But there was something very attractive about the idea of Primavera.
In Scripture, labor and individual responsibility are part of the movement toward freedom. In Romans 8, Paul writes that “the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.”
Yes, for me this is a crucial passage from the New Testament. It is very mysterious. In the Roman Catholic catechism, we read that nature was created by God as immortal and was ruled by different laws than are in effect today. Original sin changed nature into the nature of today. And, at the end of time, the fulfillment of redemption means a world without death and decay. In that way, man’s redemption by Christ brings redemption to nature, saves it from mortality. This stresses the central role of man in the universe. It is, I should say, a most anthropocentric vision, both mysterious and profound.
Robert Faggen is associate professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College and adjunct associate professor at Claremont Graduate School. He is the author of Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin, just published by the University of Michigan Press, and the editor of Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.
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