Czesław Miłosz: Conversations (review)

Who am I? Not an honest stoneworker,A roofmaker or shipbuilder:I'm a double-dealer with a double soul.

—Osip Mandelstam, "Slate Ode" (1923, tr. Clare Cavanagh)

I am Miłosz, I don't want to be Miłosz, being Miłosz, I must be Miłosz, I kill theMiłosz in myself in order, being Miłosz, to be more Miłosz.

—Witold Gombrowicz on Miłosz, as quoted in Czesław Miłosz, Renata Gorczynska, Rozmowy: "Podrozny swiata" (2002)

Osip Mandelstam's fate as poet-martyr under Stalin tormented Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) late in life. "There is a legend, a myth of Mandelstam, which is in my opinion somewhat false," he complains in his marvelous conversation with Joseph Brodsky, "and this is all the making of him a saint, a saint of liberty" (115). How could the success story of Miłosz's last decades—the Nobel Prize in 1980, acclaim both in Poland and the States, where he served as de facto poet laureate in his later years, and finally, the triumphal return to his homeland after communism's fall—possibly compete with the legacy of the great poet who died in a Gulag transit camp for his poetic intransigence? Success doesn't sit well with traditions demanding that poets perish on barricades or memorize and burn manuscripts to escape official detection, the traditions into which Mandelstam and Miłosz were born. Russia and Poland may have had their historical differences, to say the least. Both nations love their poet-martyrs, though.

Their fates may have been different—but Miłosz shares his "double-soul" with the writer he considered modern Russia's greatest poet. Like Mandelstam, he was a born "contrarian" (his term), and nowhere is this clearer than in Cynthia Haven's beautifully edited collection. "I have the feeling of belonging to the West and quarrelling with it at the same time," he confesses in a interview of 1982 (42). Part of this quarrel lay in the function of modern poetry as Miłosz saw it. "There is probably no country as full of historical memory as Poland" (72), he remarks in another interview, and the poet who bears witness to history's atrocities speaks for his unhappy society at large. His voice becomes "a distillation of collective experience" (57) and as such reaches a vast audience impenetrable to Western poets trapped by a culture of individualism. So one strain of Miłosz's argument runs.

Poetry in his part of the world is both "witness and participant" in history, he insists in The Witness of Poetry.¹ Hence in part its great prestige among Anglo-American poets of the last few decades, where names like Brodsky, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Herbert, Szymborska, Zagajewski, and Miłosz have become a sacred litany of sorts among poets seeking the social engagement that their less oppressed nations have denied them. But woe betide the Western poet who takes Miłosz too much at his word, as his famously furious response to A. Alvarez's review of his Collected Poems (1987) reveals. Alvarez's essay, laudatory though it was, had the misfortune of being entitled "Witness." The term that Miłosz's own writings seem to invite provokes his wrath here. "Perhaps some Western writers are longing for subjects provided by spasms of historical violent change," he fumes, "but I can assure Mr. Alvarez that we, i.e. natives of hazy Eastern regions, perceive History as a curse and prefer to restore to literature its autonomy, dignity and independence from social pressures."²

Which Miłosz are we to believe? To her credit, Cynthia Haven makes no effort to reconcile the multiple Miłoszes that her expertly chosen interviews reveal. The conversations run from the announcement of his Nobel Prize in 1980 through Nicholas Wroe's 2001 profile in The Guardian, entitled—what else?—"A Century's Witness." Taken in tandem with Haven's fine introduction and chronology, the...