ABSTRACT
Heterogeneousness and a certain ambivalence, by which I mean a deep skepticism about single overarching answers and solutions, have always characterized the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz. Facing the River (1995), translated by the author and Robert Hass, is no exception to this rule. Here thirty-seven new poems and two texts combining prose and verse evoke the Polish writer’s Parisian sojourns in the 1930s, his teaching experiences in the United States (where he lived, beginning in 1960), Christian themes (such as Hell, sin, and pity), Dutch realist painting, embattled Sarajevo, Allen Ginsberg, and above all his childhood in Szetejnie, Lithuania, where he was born in 1911. (He died in 2004.) An unexpected return visit to Szetejnie, after a fifty-two-year exile, inspires Milosz to compose many of these poems as avowals, self-interrogations, and summings-up. As in the significantly entitled “One More Contradiction,” they pivot around an exacting question: “Did I fulfill what I had to, here, on earth?” In Milosz’s case, this need to acknowledge unappeasable doubts, to determine whether his life has been fashioned by fate (“Early we receive a call, yet it remains incomprehensible, and only late do we discover how obedient we were”) or by free will and thus perhaps self-delusion (“Out of self-delusion comes poetry and poetry confesses to its flaw”), is of course intensified by this homecoming which, for decades, because of political contingencies, remained inconceivable. This is not to say that any remarkable urgency or intensity informs the writing; these are meditative poems, prosaic in tone even when metered discreetly. Milosz uses the aphoristic compactness of poetic language as a means of provoking, not so much our feelings, as our thoughts on artistic egocentrism, the mystery of coexisting with other human beings who see “the same but not the same thing,” the unpredictable marvel of a “transubstantiated moment,” and—in nearly the last line of this volume—the altruism of poetry. “All we know is that sin exists and punishment exists,” he notes. “If only my work were of use to people and of more weight than is my evil.”
