Jean Ward

This article discusses the decade-long correspondence of Czesław Miłosz
and Thomas Merton, published fi rst in a Polish translation in 1991, and only later, in
1997, in the original English. Though Merton offered to write in French, a language that
Miłosz at the time knew much better than English, Miłosz chose to use the latter. The
article concentrates on Miłosz’s side of the correspondence, comparing the impression
of struggle and incomplete command that his letters evoke in the original version with
the linguistic elegance and control implied by the Polish translation. The article suggests
that Miłosz’s slightly foreign English is a kind of refl ection of the theme implied by
the English title of the correspondence, Striving Towards Being. Moreover, the article
argues that writing in English, despite the constraints that it imposed, enabled the Polish
poet to discover a childlike freedom of expression and to meet his “correspondent,”
a fellow-sufferer from spiritual homelessness, in sympathetic understanding, though
the external experience of the two was very different. Paradoxically, each partner, in his
search for someone who “spoke the same language,” found what he sought in a person
who, in the literal sense, did not.

FOR HERE HAVE WE NO CONTINUING CITY, BUT WE SEEK ONE TO COME. FRIENDS UNITED BY EXILE: ON THE CORRESPONDENCE OF CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ AND THOMAS MERTON
This article considers the decade-long correspondence of Czesław Miłosz and Thomas Merton, published first in a Polish translation in 1991, and only later, in 1997, in the original English. Though Merton offered to write in French, a language that Miłosz at the time knew much better than English, Miłosz chose to use the latter. The article concentrates on Miłosz’s side of the correspondence, comparing the impression of struggle and incomplete command that his letters evoke in the original version with the linguistic elegance and control implied by the Polish translation. Miłosz’s slightly
foreign English seems a reflection of the theme implied by the English title of the correspondence, Striving Towards Being. The article also suggests that writing in English, despite the constraints that it imposed, enabled the Polish poet to discover a childlike freedom of expression and to meet his “correspondent”, a fellow-sufferer from spiritual homelessness, in sympathetic understanding, though the external experience of the two was very different. Each partner, searching for someone who “spoke the same language”, found his interlocutor, paradoxically, in a person who, in the literal sense, did not.

A close, and sometimes polemical, reading of Joanna Rzepa’s study Modernism and Theology: Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Czesław Miłosz reveals the cognitive fruitfulness of a comparativist perspective in considering the nature of the relationship between theological and literary modernisms in a broad European context that, through Rilke, even takes in Russian Orthodoxy. The article shows how in the British context, in which 1922 is a key year for literature, the once clear connection between modernist concerns in theology and literature has been largely forgotten. In Polish literature in turn – since modernism is generally equated with the “Young Poland” movement around the turn of the twentieth century and thus coincides with the most heated period of the modernist controversy in the Catholic Church – the connection is more obvious. In discussing the questions raised by Rzepa’s study, the author is led to reflect on how the substance of historical modernist – anti-modernist debates, as well as their rhetoric, continues to be of importance in the present day, in certain respects very disturbingly so.

Language, Suffering, Silence. Czesław Miłosz and the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill’s prose writings contain one or two references to Czeslaw Miłosz, in which the Polish poet is heavily and unfairly criticized. Hill bases his criticism on a short fragment, taken out of context, from Jane Zielonko’s translation of The Captive Mind. No reference is made to any other of Miłosz’s writings, although a considerable number of them are available in English. This article considers how some signifi cant departures from the original in Zielonko’s translation combine with a most surprising disregard on Hill’s part not only for the “contexture” of Miłosz’s huge oeuvre, but also even for The Captive Mind as a whole, to lead to an unjust and distorted understanding of Miłosz’s moral and poetic outlook. The misunderstanding is all the more remarkable given the very many similarities between the two poets, especially in regard to the question of the “immorality of art” and to what Donald Davie describes as “the insuffi ciency of lyric”. The article compares Hill’s attitude to the translated text and to Miłosz’s oeuvre unfavourably with that of Davie, who is much more cautious in his judgments.

Remarks on the most recent translation of T.S. Eliot’s poetry
In this review of Adam Pomorski’s translation of Eliot’s poetry into Polish, the author
endeavours to show the translator’s achievement in correcting the rather over-spiritualised
understanding of this poetry that has developed in Poland as a result of earlier
translators’ work. Pomorski, in contrast with his predecessors, lays emphasis on the
‘physical’, rather than the ‘metaphysical’ elements in Eliot’s poetry. His translatory
choices, while excellently suited to such poems as Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service
or The Hippopotamus, tend, however, to fl atten out references to the spiritual, giving an
‘over-physicalised’ impression of the poet’s oeuvre as a whole. This translation does not
entirely do justice to the subtle balance of the physical and the metaphysical in Eliot’s
poetry; nor does it bring out the unifying element of ‘auto-allusion’. Pomorski thus by
implication opts for the view that sees Eliot’s later work not as a development of the
earlier but as a turning away from it. With few exceptions, the translator’s explanatory
notes are accurate and helpful to the Polish reader. When it comes to sensitivity to
rhyme and rhythm, Pomorski cannot be faulted. This is both a scholarly and a poetically
admirable addition to the corpus of available translations.

This consideration of some approaches to the relationship between literature and religion in what Charles Taylor termed “a secular age” is written from a Polish-English “border perspective.” It takes account especially of the work of Nicholas Boyle, Michael Edwards, David Jasper and Kevin Hart; but its inspiration derives from the opening line of William Blake’s poem Auguries of Innocence, both in the original and in the Polish translation by Zygmunt Kubiak. The analysis of this one line suggests some elements of a possible approach to “literature and religion,” especially but not only in a “secular age.” The combination of the original and the translated versions implies an ideal: to appreciate the mystery of every “grain of sand” as a separate, individual world (“a world”) and at the same time to relate that particular wealth to the whole, discovering the world (“świat”) in that grain of sand. This is clearly an impossible ideal, but one that is worth pursuing in the humble spirit also implied by the poem’s opening quatrain.