Book Review : Poet Dwells on Wartime Odyssey

The Collected Poems 1931-1987 by Czeslaw Milosz (An Ecco Press Book: $30; 521 pages)

In a recent poem, Polish emigre Czeslaw Milosz noted that the 20th Century is drawing to a close and “I will be immured in it like a fly in amber.” Immured, perhaps, and transfixed by its horrors but, as this remarkable collection of his life’s work amply demonstrates, inspired to acts of creation that both embody his times and transcend them.

This volume leaves no doubt that the Swedish Academy was right on target when it awarded Milosz the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980.

In its themes, Milosz’s poetry reflects his personal odyssey. Born in Lithuania in 1911, he studied in Wilno, the Lithuanian capital, and witnessed firsthand the Nazi destruction of Warsaw. After the war, he served the Polish Communist regime as a diplomat in Washington until his defection in 1951. He spent nearly 10 years in Paris, settled in the United States in 1960 and began a long teaching career at Berkeley. But he has always remained a poet in self-conscious exile.

Nightmare of War

Years before the nightmare of the war that befell Europe, Milosz lamented the fate of “this sad planet,” eerily arguing that one life was not enough “to look at all evil, at the decay of bodies.” As a young man, he would see his fill--and draw the moral lessons.

Looking at the Warsaw ghetto during the uprising in 1943, he learned the meaning of guilt, unrelieved by his genuine powerlessness to stop the slaughter there, knowing that the victims would “count me among the helpers of death; the uncircumcised.” And by the time of the general Warsaw uprising of 1944, his youth had vanished in the maelstrom: “For since I opened my eyes I have seen only the glow of fires, massacres,/Only injustice, humiliation, and the laughable shame of braggarts.”

If anything, his dark vision gained a new intensity during the period that he lived in the United States as a Polish diplomat. As explained in his 1968 autobiography “Native Realm,” he led a “double life” during the postwar years, dispensing with his official duties as quickly as possible and then staying up late every night committing his real thoughts to paper.

In 1945, he had already recognized that Poland’s new rulers were “elevating men with the conscience of brothel-keepers.” From his American vantage point a year later, he bitterly wrote: “The laughter born of the love of truth/Is now the laughter of the enemies of the people.” His first work of prose, “The Captive Mind,” captured the psychological essence of the new order and won him early critical acclaim in the West.

While he explores similar subjects in his poetry, Milosz reaches further--for the external themes of the ephemeral nature of human experience, eros and decay, and the joy of poetical flights of fancy. He simultaneously exposes the evils of this century and seeks to avoid suffocation as an artist. Rather than trapping himself in the role of “professional mourner,” he exclaims at the end of the war, “I want to sing of festivities.”

Images of Human Suffering

But his metaphors and imagery constantly return to human suffering. “In the hall of pain, what abundance at the table,” he writes. For Milosz, exile is also part of that pain, an exile that is as much a state of mind as a physical fact. As the Swedish Academy put it in 1980, his poetry and prose depict “the world in which man lives after having been driven out of paradise.”

Milosz’s emotional ties to his countrymen remain strong. He bemoans Poland’s fate as “the back yard of empires,” and he has emerged as the poetic voice of those struggling for freedom against overwhelming odds. In 1980, Solidarity activists chose to engrave his words on a monument outside the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk to workers killed in protests a decade earlier. Excerpted from a poem in this collection, they read:

You who wronged a simple man

Bursting into laughter at the crime,

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.

You can kill one, but another is born.

The words are written down, the deed, the date.

Milosz has remembered, transforming the litany of wrongs into the basis for a tenuous but resilient hope and faith.

Milosz reads his poems at 8 tonight at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St. Reading is sold out. Standing-room-only tickets go on sale at 6 p.m. Call (213) 627-5599.

Nagorski, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is the author of “Reluctant Farewell: An American Reporter’s Candid Look Inside the Soviet Union” (Henry Holt).