ABSTRACT
‘Efforts to paraphrase Blake through direct quotation are seldom successful […]; nor does it seem possible to do him justice in Polish’, 2 observes Czesław Miłosz at the beginning of his reflection on Blake in Ziemia Ulro, his spiritual autobiography, in which Blake is discussed as one of the four major influences upon the Polish poet’s intellectual life. ‘I am not now trying to convert anyone to Blake’, he insists a moment later, then adds: ‘still less when I foresee how he would be travestied in translation’. 3 One immediately sees the paradoxical position in which Miłosz places himself by opening his discussion of Blake in this way. In order to get across to his Polish reader — Ziemia Ulro is intended ‘for an exclusively Polish audience’, 4 Miłosz maintains — he must cite, that is translate, the texts he claims to be untranslatable. In other words, he must translate to demonstrate the untranslatability of Blake’s poetry. At the same time, he must do his best to render it translatable, because, even if he is not ‘trying to convert anyone to Blake’, his major motive remains to convey to his Polish public (whom he considers unacquainted with the originals) the powerful impression Blake’s prophecies made on him. He seeks to explain the reasons why he claims Blake to ‘figure importantly in [his] intellectual life’ and why he regards the English poet as one of the central ‘influences on [his] mind’s progress’. 5
