| English |
| Polish |
8 December 1980
I
My presence here, on this tribune, should be an
argument for all those who praise life's God-given, marvelously
complex, unpredictability. In my school years I used to read
volumes of a series then published in Poland - "The Library of
the Nobel Laureates". I remember the shape of the letters and
the color of the paper. I imagined then that the Nobel laureates
were writers, namely persons who write thick works in prose, and
even when I learned that there were also poets among them, for a
long time I could not get rid of that notion. And certainly,
when, in 1930, I published my first poems in our university
review, Alma Mater Vilnensis, I did not aspire to the
title of a writer. Also much later, by choosing solitude and
giving myself to a strange occupation, that is, to writing poems
in Polish while living in France or America, I tried to maintain
a certain ideal image of a poet, who, if he wants fame, he wants
to be famous only in the village or the town of his birth.
One of the Nobel laureates whom I read in childhood influenced to
a large extent, I believe, my notions of poetry. That was
Selma Lagerlöf. Her
Wonderful Adventures of Nils, a book I loved, places the
hero in a double role. He is the one who flies above the Earth
and looks at it from above but at the same time sees it in
every detail. This double vision may be a metaphor of the poet's
vocation. I found a similar metaphor in a Latin ode of a
Seventeenth-Century poet, Maciej Sarbiewski, who was once known
all over Europe under the pen-name of Casimire. He taught poetics
at my university. In that ode he describes his voyage - on the
back of Pegasus - from Vilno to Antwerp, where he is going to
visit his poet-friends. Like Nils Holgersson he beholds under him
rivers, lakes, forests, that is, a map, both distant and yet
concrete. Hence, two attributes of the poet: avidity of the eye
and the desire to describe that which he sees. Yet, whoever
considers poetry as "to see and to describe" should be aware that
he engages in a quarrel with modernity, fascinated as it is with
innumerable theories of a specific poetic language.
Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native
tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who
lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those
old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.
When adapting himself, he hears an internal voice that warns him
against mask and disguise. But when rebelling, he falls in turn
into dependence upon his contemporaries, various movements of the
avant-garde. Alas, it is enough for him to publish his first
volume of poems, to find himself entrapped. For hardly has the
print dried, when that work, which seemed to him the most
personal, appears to be enmeshed in the style of another. The
only way to counter an obscure remorse is to continue searching
and to publish a new book, but then everything repeats itself, so
there is no end to that chase. And it may happen that leaving
books behind as if they were dry snake skins, in a constant
escape forward from what has been done in the past, he receives
the Nobel Prize.
What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle
down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for
reality. I give to this word its naive and solemn meaning, a
meaning having nothing to do with philosophical debates of the
last few centuries. It is the Earth as seen by Nils from the back
of the gander and by the author of the Latin ode from the back of
Pegasus. Undoubtedly, that Earth is and her riches cannot
be exhausted by any description. To make such an assertion means
to reject in advance a question we often hear today: "What is
reality?", for it is the same as the question of Pontius Pilate:
"What is truth?" If among pairs of opposites which we use every
day, the opposition of life and death has such an importance, no
less importance should be ascribed to the oppositions of truth
and falsehood, of reality and illusion.
II
Simone Weil, to whose writings I am profoundly
indebted, says: "Distance is the soul of beauty." Yet sometimes
keeping distance is nearly impossible. I am A Child of
Europe, as the title of one of the my poems admits, but that
is a bitter, sarcastic admission. I am also the author of an
autobiographical book which in the French translation bears the
title Une autre Europe. Undoubtedly, there exist two
Europes and it happens that we, inhabitants of the second one,
were destined to descend into "the heart of darkness of the
Twentieth Century." I wouldn't know how to speak about poetry in
general. I must speak of poetry in its encounter with peculiar
circumstances of time and place. Today, from a perspective, we
are able to distinguish outlines of the events which by their
death-bearing range surpassed all natural disasters known to us,
but poetry, mine and my contemporaries', whether of inherited or
avant-garde style, was not prepared to cope with those
catastrophes. Like blind men we groped our way and were exposed
to all the temptations the mind deluded itself with in our
time.
It is not easy to distinguish reality from illusion, especially
when one lives in a period of the great upheaval that begun a
couple of centuries ago on a small western peninsula of the
Euro-Asiatic continent, only to encompass the whole planet during
one man's lifetime with the uniform worship of science and
technology. And it was particularly difficult to oppose multiple
intellectual temptations in those areas of Europe where
degenerate ideas of dominion over men, akin to the ideas of
dominion over Nature, led to paroxysms of revolution and war at
the expense of millions of human beings destroyed physically or
spiritually. And yet perhaps our most precious acquisition is not
an understanding of those ideas, which we touched in their most
tangible shape, but respect and gratitude for certain things
which protect people from internal disintegration and from
yielding to tyranny. Precisely for that reason some ways of life,
some institutions became a target for the fury of evil forces,
above all, the bonds between people that exist organically, as if
by themselves, sustained by family, religion, neighborhood,
common heritage. In other words, all that disorderly, illogical
humanity, so often branded as ridiculous because of its parochial
attachments and loyalties. In many countries traditional bonds of
civitas have been subject to a gradual erosion and their
inhabitants become disinherited without realizing it. It is not
the same, however, in those areas where suddenly, in a situation
of utter peril, a protective, life-giving value of such bonds
reveals itself. That is the case of my native land. And I feel
this is a proper place to mention gifts received by myself and by
my friends in our part of Europe and to pronounce words of
blessing.
It is good to be born in a small country where Nature was on a
human scale, where various languages and religions cohabited for
centuries. I have in mind Lithuania, a country of myths and of
poetry. My family already in the Sixteenth Century spoke Polish,
just as many families in Finland spoke Swedish and in Ireland -
English; so I am a Polish, not a Lithuanian, poet. But the
landscapes and perhaps the spirits of Lithuania have never
abandoned me. It is good in childhood to hear words of Latin
liturgy, to translate Ovid in high school, to receive a good
training in Roman Catholic dogmatics and apologetics. It is a
blessing if one receives from fate school and university studies
in such a city as Vilno. A bizarre city of baroque architecture
transplanted to northern forests and of history fixed in every
stone, a city of forty Roman Catholic churches and of numerous
synagogues. In those days the Jews called it a Jerusalem of the
North. Only when teaching in America did I fully realize how much
I had absorbed from the thick walls of our ancient university,
from formulas of Roman law learned by heart, from history and
literature of old Poland, both of which surprise young Americans
by their specific features: an indulgent anarchy, a humor
disarming fierce quarrels, a sense of organic community, a
mistrust of any centralized authority.
A poet who grew up in such a world should have been a seeker for
reality through contemplation. A patriarchal order should have
been dear to him, a sound of bells, an isolation from pressures
and the persistent demands of his fellow men, silence of a
cloister cell. If books were to linger on a table, then they
should be those which deal with the most incomprehensible quality
of God-created things, namely being, the esse. But
suddenly all this is negated by demoniac doings of History which
acquires the traits of a bloodthirsty Deity. The Earth which the
poet viewed in his flight calls with a cry, indeed, out of the
abyss and doesn't allow itself to be viewed from above. An
insoluble contradiction appears, a terribly real one, giving no
peace of mind either day or night, whatever we call it, it is the
contradiction between being and action, or, on another level, a
contradiction between art and solidarity with one's fellow men.
Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable and if
it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet's mouth cannot
even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing
compared with action. Yet, to embrace reality in such a manner
that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of
despair and hope, is possible only thanks to a distance, only by
soaring above it - but this in turn seems then a moral
treason.
Such was the contradiction at the very core of conflicts
engendered by the Twentieth Century and discovered by poets of an
Earth polluted by the crime of genocide. What are the thoughts of
one of them, who wrote a certain number of poems which remain as
a memorial, as a testimony? He thinks that they were born out of
a painful contradiction and that he would prefer to have been
able to resolve it while leaving them unwritten.
III
A patron saint of all poets in exile, who visit their towns and
provinces only in remembrance, is always Dante. But how has the
number of Florences increased! The exile of a poet is today a
simple function of a relatively recent discovery: that whoever
wields power is also able to control language and not only with
the prohibitions of censorship, but also by changing the meaning
of words. A peculiar phenomenon makes its appearance: the
language of a captive community acquires certain durable habits;
whole zones of reality cease to exist simply because they have no
name. There is, it seems, a hidden link between theories of
literature as Écriture, of speech feeding on itself,
and the growth of the totalitarian state. In any case, there is
no reason why the state should not tolerate an activity that
consists of creating «experimental» poems and prose, if
these are conceived as autonomous systems of reference, enclosed
within their own boundaries. Only if we assume that a poet
constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in
search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people
unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot. And, alas, a temptation to pronounce
it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which
doesn't allow one to think of anything else. That is why a poet
chooses internal or external exile. It is not certain, however,
that he is motivated exclusively by his concern with actuality.
He may also desire to free himself from it and elsewhere, in
other countries, on other shores, to recover, at least for short
moments, his true vocation - which is to contemplate Being.
That hope is illusory, for those who come from the "other
Europe", wherever they find themselves, notice to what extent
their experiences isolate them from their new milieu - and this
may become the source of a new obsession. Our planet that gets
smaller every year, with its fantastic proliferation of mass
media, is witnessing a process that escapes definition,
characterized by a refusal to remember. Certainly, the
illiterates of past centuries, then an enormous majority of
mankind, knew little of the history of their respective countries
and of their civilization. In the minds of modern illiterates,
however, who know how to read and write and even teach in schools
and at universities, history is present but blurred, in a state
of strange confusion; Molière becomes a contemporary of
Napoleon, Voltaire, a contemporary of Lenin. Also, events of the
last decades, of such primary importance that knowledge or
ignorance of them will be decisive for the future of mankind,
move away, grow pale, lose all consistency as if Frederic
Nietzsche's prediction of European nihilism found a literal
fulfillment. "The eye of a nihilist" - he wrote in 1887 - "is
unfaithful to his memories: it allows them to drop, to lose their
leaves;... And what he does not do for himself, he also does not
do for the whole past of mankind: he lets it drop". We are
surrounded today by fictions about the past, contrary to common
sense and to an elementary perception of good and evil. As "The
Los Angeles Times" recently stated, the number of books in
various languages which deny that the Holocaust ever took place,
that it was invented by Jewish propaganda, has exceeded one
hundred. If such an insanity is possible, is a complete loss of
memory as a permanent state of mind improbable? And would it not
present a danger more grave than genetic engineering or poisoning
of the natural environment?
For the poet of the "other Europe" the events embraced by the
name of the Holocaust are a reality, so close in time that he
cannot hope to liberate himself from their remembrance unless,
perhaps, by translating the Psalms of David. He feels anxiety,
though, when the meaning of the word Holocaust undergoes gradual
modifications, so that the word begins to belong to the history
of the Jews exclusively, as if among the victims there were not
also millions of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians and prisoners of
other nationalities. He feels anxiety, for he senses in this a
foreboding of a not distant future when history will be reduced
to what appears on television, while the truth, as it is too
complicated, will be buried in the archives, if not totally
annihilated. Other facts as well, facts for him quite close but
distant for the West, add in his mind to the credibility of H. G.
Wells' vision in The Time Machine: the Earth inhabited by
a tribe of children of the day, carefree, deprived of memory and,
by the same token, of history, without defense when confronted
with dwellers of subterranean caves, cannibalistic children of
the night.
Carried forward, as we are, by the movement of technological
change, we realize that the unification of our planet is in the
making and we attach importance to the notion of international
community. The days when the League of Nations and the United
Nations were founded deserve to be remembered. Unfortunately,
those dates lose their significance in comparison with another
date which should be invoked every year as a day of mourning,
while it is hardly known to younger generations. It is the date
of 23 August 1939. Two dictators then concluded an agreement
provided with a secret clause by the virtue of which they divided
between themselves neighboring countries possessing their own
capitals, governments and parliaments. That pact not only
unleashed a terrible war; it re-established a colonial principle,
according to which nations are not more than cattle, bought,
sold, completely dependent upon the will of their instant
masters. Their borders, their right to self-determination, their
passports ceased to exist. And it should be a source of wonder
that today people speak in a whisper, with a finger to their
lips, about how that principle was applied by the dictators forty
years ago.
Crimes against human rights, never confessed and never publicly
denounced, are a poison which destroys the possibility of a
friendship between nations. Anthologies of Polish poetry publish
poems of my late friends - Wladyslaw Sebyla and Lech Piwowar, and
give the date of their deaths: 1940. It is absurd not to be able
to write how they perished, though everybody in Poland knows the
truth: they shared the fate of several thousand Polish officers
disarmed and interned by the then accomplices of Hitler, and they
repose in a mass grave. And should not the young generations of
the West, if they study history at all, hear about the 200,000
people killed in 1944 in Warsaw, a city sentenced to annihilation
by those two accomplices?
The two genocidal dictators are no more and yet, who knows
whether they did not gain a victory more durable than those of
their armies. In spite of the Atlantic Charter, the principle
that nations are objects of trade, if not chips in games of cards
or dice, has been confirmed by the division of Europe into two
zones. The absence of the three Baltic states from the United Nations is a permanent reminder
of the two dictators' legacy. Before the war those states
belonged to the League of Nations but they disappeared from the
map of Europe as a result of the secret clause in the agreement
of 1939.
I hope you forgive my laying bare a memory like a wound. This
subject is not unconnected with my meditation on the word
"reality", so often misused but always deserving esteem.
Complaints of peoples, pacts more treacherous than those we read
about in Thucydides, the shape of a maple leaf, sunrises and
sunsets over the ocean, the whole fabric of causes and effects,
whether we call it Nature or History, points towards, I believe,
another hidden reality, impenetrable, though exerting a powerful
attraction that is the central driving force of all art and
science. There are moments when it seems to me that I decipher
the meaning of afflictions which befell the nations of the "other
Europe" and that meaning is to make them the bearers of memory -
at the time when Europe, without an adjective, and America
possess it less and less with every generation.
It is possible that there is no other memory than the memory of
wounds. At least we are so taught by the Bible, a book of the
tribulations of Israel. That book for a long time enabled
European nations to preserve a sense of continuity - a word not
to be mistaken for the fashionable term, historicity.
During the thirty years I have spent abroad I have felt I was
more privileged than my Western colleagues, whether writers or
teachers of literature, for events both recent and long past took
in my mind a sharply delineated, precise form. Western audiences
confronted with poems or novels written in Poland, Czechoslovakia
or Hungary, or with films produced there, possibly intuit a
similarly sharpened consciousness, in a constant struggle against
limitations imposed by censorship. Memory thus is our force, it
protects us against a speech entwining upon itself like the ivy
when it does not find a support on a tree or a wall.
A few minutes ago I expressed my longing for the end of a
contradiction which opposes the poet's need of distance to his
feeling of solidarity with his fellow men. And yet, if we take a
flight above the Earth as a metaphor of the poet's
vocation, it is not difficult to notice that a kind of
contradiction is implied, even in those epochs when the poet is
relatively free from the snares of History. For how to be
above and simultaneously to see the Earth in every detail?
And yet, in a precarious balance of opposites, a certain
equilibrium can be achieved thanks to a distance introduced by
the flow of time. "To see" means not only to have before one's
eyes. It may mean also to preserve in memory. "To see and to
describe" may also mean to reconstruct in imagination. A distance
achieved, thanks to the mystery of time, must not change events,
landscapes, human figures into a tangle of shadows growing paler
and paler. On the contrary, it can show them in full light, so
that every event, every date becomes expressive and persists as
an eternal reminder of human depravity and human greatness. Those
who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent
forever. They can fulfill their duties only by trying to
reconstruct precisely things as they were, and by wresting the
past from fictions and legends.
Thus both - the Earth seen from above in an eternal now and the
Earth that endures in a recovered time - may serve as material
for poetry.
IV
I would not like to create the impression that my mind is turned
toward the past, for that would not be true. Like all my
contemporaries I have felt the pull of despair, of impending
doom, and reproached myself for succumbing to a nihilistic
temptation. Yet on a deeper level, I believe, my poetry remained
sane and, in a dark age, expressed a longing for the Kingdom of
Peace and Justice. The name of a man who taught me not to despair
should be invoked here. We receive gifts not only from our native
land, its lakes and rivers, its traditions, but also from people,
especially if we meet a powerful personality in our early youth.
It was my good fortune to be treated nearly as a son by my
relative Oscar Milosz, a Parisian recluse and a visionary. Why he
was a French poet, could be elucidated by the intricate story of
a family as well as of a country once called the Grand Duchy of
Lithuania. Be that as it may, it was possible to read recently in
the Parisian press words of regret that the highest international
distinction had not been awarded half a century earlier to a poet
bearing the same family name as my own.
I learned much from him. He gave me a deeper insight into the
religion of the Old and New Testament and inculcated a need for a
strict, ascetic hierarchy in all matters of mind, including
everything that pertains to art, where as a major sin he
considered putting the second-rate on the same level with the
first-rate. Primarily, though, I listened to him as a prophet who
loved people, as he says, "with old love worn out by pity,
loneliness and anger" and for that reason tried to address a
warning to a crazy world rushing towards a catastrophe. That a
catastrophe was imminent, I heard from him, but also I heard from
him that the great conflagration he predicted would be merely a
part of a larger drama to be played to the end.
He saw deeper causes in an erroneous direction taken by science
in the Eighteenth Century, a direction which provoked landslide
effects. Not unlike William Blake before him, he announced a New
Age, a second renaissance of imagination now polluted by a
certain type of scientific knowledge, but, as he believed, not by
all scientific knowledge, least of all by science that would be
discovered by men of the future. And it does not matter to what
extent I took his predictions literally: a general orientation
was enough.
Oscar Milosz, like William Blake, drew inspirations from the
writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, a scientist who, earlier than
anyone else, foresaw the defeat of man, hidden in the Newtonian
model of the Universe. When, thanks to my relative, I became an
attentive reader of Swedenborg, interpreting him not, it is true,
as was common in the Romantic era, I did not imagine I would
visit his country for the first time on such an occasion as the
present one.
Our century draws to its close, and largely thanks to those
influences I would not dare to curse it, for it has also been a
century of faith and hope. A profound transformation, of which we
are hardly aware, because we are a part of it, has been taking
place, coming to the surface from time to time in phenomena that
provoke general astonishment. That transformation has to do, and
I use here words of Oscar Milosz, with "the deepest secret of
toiling masses, more than ever alive, vibrant and tormented".
Their secret, an unavowed need of true values, finds no language
to express itself and here not only the mass media but also
intellectuals bear a heavy responsibility. But transformation has
been going on, defying short term predictions, and it is probable
that in spite of all horrors and perils, our time will be judged
as a necessary phase of travail before mankind ascends to a new
awareness. Then a new hierarchy of merits will emerge, and I am
convinced that Simone Weil and Oscar Milosz, writers in whose
school I obediently studied, will receive their due. I feel we
should publicly confess our attachment to certain names because
in that way we define our position more forcefully than by
pronouncing the names of those to whom we would like to address a
violent "no". My hope is that in this lecture, in spite of my
meandering thought, which is a professional bad habit of poets,
my "yes" and "no" are clearly stated, at least as to the choice
of succession. For we all who are here, both the speaker and you
who listen, are no more than links between the past and the
future.
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1968-1980, Editor-in-Charge Tore Frängsmyr, Editor Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1980
Czeslaw Milosz
