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Since the envoys had brought news of the arrival of the Emperor, Bolesław’s kingdom had been overwhelmed by an all-encompassing state of commotion. Aside from the settlers living deep within the deepest forests, there was probably no one who did not, in some way or other, (...)
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8
The phones are always going wrong, so my parents aren’t upset when there’s no dialling tone. They’re at the fortieth birthday party of a female friend from their class at high school. They say they’re going downstairs to the phone booth for a (...)
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Czesław MiłoszWhere the Sun Rises and Where it Sets
This astonishing poem shows the life at an inhabitant of a small country on the frontier of Western civilization. This country (Lithuania) has in the last century passed from hand to hand, failling victim to succesive foreign occupations. Once, during the youth of the hero (who is very simllar to Milosz himself) the Polish part of the country (Wilno) was free. However, liberty did not last long. Now he is living far from his native soil, in California (as is Milosz). But power of poetry enables him to return often to Lithuania. In this memory ages and continents intertwine. When in the first part of the poem he undertakes a nostalgic pilgrimage to the "vast lands", where is "flickering of hazy trains", where children walk by an open field" and "all is gray beyond an Estonian village", he hears simultaneously "a storm from Pacific beating against the window". The poem is extremely personal, but Milosz sucessfully evades the pitfall of easy sentiment and narcizm by showing this pilgrimage on the borderline between time and eternity from differing points of view. Identity of life is something which is not given, but must be achieved. The old man, trying to revive the paradise of childhood, and the youth who fourty years ago roamed the streets of the ancient city of Wilno, are equal partners. Hence, tension arises between the author as a yong man, attempting to conquer the world, and his subsequent incarnation as an experienced and afflicted exile, who tries to sort out the meaning of individual existence and the fate of the community to which he once belonged. In a mental voyage the author visits his native Lithuania. California and the South of France, areas differing in natural and cultural condition, and describes the country-side and the customs of the locals. He wants to save from the flux of time and nothingness everything that is part of the existence of man in its particularity. Each particular existence (yong Milosz, but also the "old servant woman, Lisabeth") is inextricably bound up with other existences, equally concrete, which only as a whole shape the infinite "chain of being". Even the most trifling detuails in this chain are significant.Synonimous with the Fulness of Time is "the communion of saints". This condition can only be attained through the "Judgment" (lasting since the beginning of Time, but often overlooked by man: "for we lived under the Judgment, unaware"). The author believes in "apokatastasis", that "means restoration" of everything, which has been consumed by nothingness, to its native splendour. Meaning pertains only to the whole of the world in its multiform tangibility and particularity. Representing the unimaginable varioly, beauty and plenitude of this whole, that is the substance of our sublunar world and, at the sama time, something beyond it ("For me, therefore, everything has double existence./ Both in time and when time shall be no more"), the poet employs many stylistic devices (verse, poetic prose, more or less veiled quotations of other poets -eg. William Blake- lyrical interludes etc.). Thus, it could be asserted, that traditional metaphysics of representation are expressed by the adoption of same post-modern elements.
Where the Sun Rises and Where it Sets
VII. Bells in WinterOnce, when returning from far Transylvania
Through mountain forests, rocks, and Carpathian ridges,
Halting by a ford at the close of day
(My companions had sent me ahead to look
For passage), I let my horse graze
And out of the saddlebag took the Holy Scripture;
The light was so gracious, murmur of streams so sweet,
That reading Paul's epistles, and seeing the first star,
I was soon lulled into a profound sleep.
A young man in ornate Greek raiment
Touched my arm and I heard his voice:
"Your time, O mortals, hastens by like water,
I have descended and known its absyss.
It was I, whom cruel Paul chastised in Corinth
For having stolen my father's wife,
And by his order I was to be excluded
From the table at which we shared our meals.
Since then I have not been in gatherings of the saints,
And for many years I was led by the sinful love
Of a poor plaything given to temptation,
And so we doomed ourselves to eternal ruin.
But my Lord and my God, whom I knew not,
Tore me from the ashes with his lightning,
In his eyes your truths count for nothing,
His mercy saves all living flesh."
Awake under a huge starry sky,
Having received help unhoped for,
Absolved of care about our platry life,
I wiped my eyes wet with tears.
No, I have never been to Transylvania.
I have never brought messages from there to my church.
But I could have.
This is an exercise in style.
The pluperfect tense
Of countries imperfective.
Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Lillian Vallee
Czeslaw MILOSZ (b. 1911) - winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in literature, is a poet, essayist, novelist and translator.
Polish edition by Wydawnictwo Literackie and Spoleczny Instytut Wydawniczy ZNAK
English edition by Ecco Press: New York 1988
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