It started in childhood.
Tomorrow, June 30, is Czesław Miłosz‘s 106th birthday. And the late Nobel poet himself offered me a kind of present.
As I was thinning the ranks of my bookshelves – a very rare and reluctant activity – I stumbled across a 1982 issue of Ironwood, a once esteemed by now defunct journal. It was one of many random journal issues around the house, and before tossing it in the discard pile, I thumbed through to see what treasures it might disclose. Surprise! I found a 1979 Q&A interview with Miłosz I swear I’d never seen before. I’m sure I hadn’t seen it when I compiled my Czesław Miłosz: Conversations. How did I miss it? On consideration, however, no surprise: I’d barely heard of the poet’s name back in 1982, and I think the volume had been sitting on my shelves undisturbed for all the years since. I was even more pleased to see that the interviewer is a Polish friend, Aleksander Fiut, of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
What better way to celebrate his birthday than to share a few excerpts from the interview? You won’t find this easily anywhere else.
The eminent writer is often considered a philosophical poet, which he denied in the interview: “Because the philosopher thinks first before he formulates his thoughts into sentences. Whereas for me, the meaning is incorporated into the sentence, already present in the rhythm,” he said.
“One develops one’s ear for language in childhood. I did not, after all, grow up in an environment where Polish was spoken daily. It’s true, we spoke Polish at home, but the language we heard around us was not Polish. It was either Russian, at the time of my childhood in Russia, or Lithuanian, or Byelorussian, or that strange mixture spoken by the people in Wilno … But it may be that it is a sensibility developed through contacts with West European languages. The incantation may also be the result of the influence of church Latin, I don’t know.”
Interlocutor
Much of the interview concerns questions of Polish prosody, which he was, however, reluctant to discuss: “These are, how shall I say, embarrassing questions. These are intimate questions, questions of private craftsmanship.”
From the interview:
Fiut: What makes you choose traditional poetic forms? When you write a poem, how does it happen? Maybe I’m entering here into the intimate sphere of craftsmanship, but this is really interesting to me. Why do you sometimes choose a simple form, say for example, from the Middle Ages, and at other times a very refined and complex form?
Miłosz: It’s difficult to answer. That is to say, some questions are easy to answer, but not necessarily truthfully. I’m used to always having an answer ready when students ask me. But that does not mean that the answer is the most truthful one. Here it seems to me that several factors come into play. Who knows? Maybe the fact that I found myself isolated from Poland, that I”ve had to establish myself inside Polish literature, make it my home, maybe that is one of the reasons. That is to say, the entire past of the language feels like a palace of mine, a palace that I visit. I go into this room, open that door…
Fiut: You seem to have, as it were, two heroes in Antiquity, Heraclitus and Herodotus.
Miłosz: I’ve read Heraclitus. As much of Heraclitus as there is to read that is, what has been preserved. The little, the few fragments which have been preserved.
Fiut: You seem to return often to these authors.
Miłosz: Because Heraclitus interests me.
Fiut: Why Heraclitus in particular?
Miłosz: Because when I was a student, I was fascinated by what is usually called the river of time. And I remember, I wrote an essay on this particular subject at the examination that took place at the end of secondary school. Well, as far as Heraclitus goes, it was his preoccupation with flux and change, with the river of time that interested me. That’s one thing. The other thing was that he wept so much over human fate.
Fiut: In “From the Rising of the Sun” you write: “And if they say that all I heard was the rushing of the Heraclitean river/That will be enough, for the mere listening to it wore me down.” Yet the poem “Heraclitus” does not deal with change, but with the dialectical relation between the particular and general existence that is the Cosmos.
Miłosz: The conflict between the universal and the particular: But that is, I imagine, the fundamental conflict that underlies everything I have written. That is a fundamentally unsolvable, awful problem. When you start thinking about it, you realize everything is there. The entire riddle of human existence. Also the conflict between free will and determinism. It’s the same. Or between grace and will, to use theological terminology, but there are no answers.
Tags: Aleksander Fiut, Czeslaw Milosz, Heraclitus, Herodotus