The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz by Aleksander Fiut (review)

Book Reviews255 approach to literary studies. This work ought to provoke more commentary and certainly lends itselfto further study. Retired Dreams ought to be required reading for students of the master, Machado de Assis. SUSAN CANTY QUINLAN University of Georgia ALEKSANDER FIUT. The Eternal Moment: The Poetry of Czeslaw Milosz. Trans. Theodosia S. Robertson. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1990. 226 p. The poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, the 1980 Nobel Prize winning laureate, has been periodically reviewed in American literary journals since the middle of the 1960s. By now, judging by the bibliography of "Selected Works about Czeslaw Milosz in English" given in the reviewed book, such works number well over 100. However, there has not yet been an in-depth comprehensive study of Milosz's poetic works in English, although there have been authors and critics who consider Milosz at once a national and a supranational, universal poet. Furthermore, such American critics as Louis Iribarne, Steven Miller, and Richard Howard include him in the American scene by comparing Milosz's poetry with Anglo-Saxon poetry. It has been, therefore, a pleasure indeed to have come upon this superb critical treatise on Czeslaw Milosz's poetic works in the flawless English translation by Theodosia Robertson. The author of this opus, Aleksander Fiut, has set for himself several objectives. Primarily his intent was to clear up confusion in respect to who Czeslaw Milosz is: a Polish poet, "a poet of culture," "a poet of history," "a poet ofthe Holocaust," or as Joseph Brodsky, another Nobel laureate, stated— "one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest" (1). Secondly, by conducting a hermeneutics of Milosz's poetic imagination, Fiut has sketched an outline ofthe fundamental problems in Milosz's poetry that allows interested observers to grasp its inner dynamics. He indicates the degree of complexity in respect to the place of Milosz's poetry, the personal experience ofthe writer, and shows where his poetics meets with philosophical and religious spheres. Thirdly, Fiut hopes that his observations will stimulate and encourage substantial comparative studies. "Such comparative approach would be particularly fruitful since Milosz skillfully adapts international contemporary poetry and, distilling what is best from Polish literary tradition, especially romanticism, creates an original variant of metaphysical poetry" (3-4). Fiut's laborious examination of Milosz's works has opened widely the door to the new understanding of poetics itself. In his work poetics is no longer a science of literary forms, genres, and devices, but a science which attempts to find the full sense in that complex notion which is art. His careful and analytical readings of Milosz's works uncover subtle biographical information, the piquant moments in his world view, his individual psychological peculiarities, his endeavor to seize by means of the language "the eternal moment," to achieve a mimesis faithful to a detail. Since the desire for complete mimesis can never be fulfilled, it gives, on one hand, a chance for the poetry 256Rocky Mountain Review to go on developing further in the way Milosz indicated in his Nobel Prize speech. The author wants to introduce change when realizing that his work, which seemed the most personal, appears now "to be enmasked in the style of others." The only way to counter the former trend is to continue searching and "to publish a new book, but then everything repeats itself, so there is no end to that chase" (160). On the other hand, an attempt to capture on paper even some tiny insignificant detail immediately encounters incomprehensible complexity due to limitations oflanguage. Knowledge here is based on insoluble contradictions and poetic mimesis is predicated on paradox: direct sensory experience, transitory and impermanent, cannot be reconciled with the distance that reflective memory grants; a faithfulness to detail cannot be reconciled with the natural tendency toward generalization; a moment cannot be contrasted with movement; et cetera. Fiut, in his laborious and systemic research work, has pointed out rightly that Milosz follows old Mickiewicz's credo in his writings: that the poet must work out a method of poetic description which on one hand would be faithful to the evidence of the five senses and on the other would convey the complexity of the...