He hesitated. His stare was quite piercing, almost unnervingly so, and exceptionally vital for a man in his eighth decade. His eyebrows were long and ferociously spiky. He was hunched inside a black leather jacket, which somewhat brought to mind the presence of Francis Bacon. His reply, when it came, was slow and sure, and spoken in a meticulously cadenced English. 'The twentieth century is a century of horrors, so a poet would like to scream, but you cannot do it, you cannot write poetry by screaming. Screaming is a physiological reaction. As for poetry itself… poetry is a language that explores - indeed, it is obsessed by - the basic questions of life and death, of modern man in a new situation, looking for a new awareness, implicitly philosophical…'

Did this mean that his approach was basically a Christian one, and if so how did this square with his admiration for Samuel Beckett? That word admiration provoked an unusually strong reaction. 'I've always seen myself as an adversary of Beckett,' he said, thinking to correct my misapprehension. But I persisted because I knew that he had praised Beckett in a book called The Land of Ulro, which has been described as 'a maverick work of spiritual autobiography.' 'Are you then,' I asked 'perhaps a great admirer of the purity of his godlessness?' 'Yes,' he confirmed, 'of the purity of his despair. But I have been opposed to his vision. I have always tried to oppose it.'

Czeslaw Milosz was born in rural Lithuania in 1911, but the language of his family had been Polish since the 16^th century, and it was Polish that he learnt at school. In Lithuania, the separation between the two languages is, according to Milosz, a relatively simple matter. 'Unfortunately, in Lithuania the split went so far that whoever wrote in Lithuanian was Lithuanian, and whoever wrote in Polish was Polish, and that's why I become a purely Polish poet.

Milosz has lived the life of a perpetual émigré, first moving to Warsaw, and from there to Paris in the 1930s, where he felt peculiarly isolated. After his wartime experiences in Poland, he entered the Polish diplomatic service, but he split with the regime in 1951, and travelled West. In 1961 he moved to California to take up a professorship at Berkeley, where he has lived ever since. As he described his wanderings to me, I began to think about another displaced poet, Joseph Brodsky, and the fears and anxieties he was said to have experienced as a result of being estranged from his native idiom.

Though a long-time inhabitant of the New World, Milosz's Collected Poems cast many longing, backward glances at the rural Lithuania of his childhood. In fact, he spends so much of his time unpicking the threads of its fascinatingly convoluted history in poems that often mingle prosaic exposition with intense verse interludes, that he might almost be accused of a kind of nostalgia for lost worlds of elegance and simplicity. But Milosz is not that kind of a writer - as anyone will know who has read any of his tough-minded and pessimistic volumes of essays and autobiography. Milosz has been a witness to some of the worst barbarities of the 20^th century - in the Warsaw Ghetto, for example. The poems themselves are often prolonged meditations upon the dilemma of fallen man in the world; man's impotence in the face of its cruelties; the inadequacies of reasoned responses to the seemingly unstoppable forces of unreason. And yet there is a calmness, a high, eloquent polish to the presentation of his material - as if the sordidness of reality has been purified by literary mediation. 

*

MG You have lived in the United States, in exile from your home country, divorced from your native idiom - the Polish language - for more than thirty years. As far as the writing of poetry is concerned, has this been a problem? How have you come to terms with it?

CM For me this is a source of constant amazement. I should have felt some anxiety because of that, but I never have. I had terrible anxieties during my first years of exile, but of a different nature. Not fear that language would be lost, but that I had lost my readers. I felt that a bond between a certain number of readers and the poet is important. I found myself completely alone. After a long while I discovered that loneliness was very healthy, very good. But exile as I define it is a poison that either kills you or makes you stronger.

MG   And you feel it has made you stronger.

CM  Yes, you see I have never felt any doubts about being submerged in my native tongue. Constantly. I use the English language for everyday purposes, but I write in my tongue. So this is completely two worlds.

MG   You have these two strands, being of both Lithuanian and Polish parentage. What has the Lithuanian strand contributed, and what the Polish, to your work?

CM   I must explain this by analogy with the situation of the Irish poet writing in English, with the difference that Gaelic in Ireland survived only in some remote villages, while Lithuanian is very vigorous as a written language in Lithuania, so the situation developed differently. Unfortunately, the split into two languages went so far that whoever wrote in Lithuanian was Lithuanian, and whoever wrote in Polish was Polish, and that's why I became a purely Polish poet.

MG   I don't quite understand. Why did you become a purely Polish poet?

CM    I went through schools speaking the Polish language. Besides, Polish has been the language of my family since the sixteenth century.

MG So you did not speak Lithuanian?

CM  In childhood, a little, and now that I have been learning Lithuanian, I am able to read newspapers - but no more. So that's a peculiar split, you see… Emotionally I consider that I am a permanent émigré because I emigrated from Lithuania to Warsaw before the Second World War. Poland was my first country of emigration…

MG Looking back to your experiences during wartime, in some of the poems about the Warsaw Ghetto there seems to be a quite extraordinary serenity, almost a controlled serenity, about the language…

CM  About the language! I don't know what you mean.

MG  Well, I was thinking in particular about that poem in which a carousel plays a part.

CM  Oh yes…

MG The most terrible things are happening, but….

CM It's not precisely a carousel. It is what is called in America a chairoplane. I don't know the English equivalent. By the word carousel you mean something with…

MG  Horses…

CM  Children with horses, whereas in a chairoplane you fly high.

MG I don't know the equivalent either, but the word carousel is definitely used in the translation, I remember… And, as I say, there is a sense of serenity in the poem which is particularly disturbing because one is aware of the horrifying facts with which the poem is in fact dealing…

CM   Precisely, precisely, precisely… This is an artistic procedure, of describing with presumed calm things that are horrible.

MG You have talked of yourself as being a 'catastrophist' all your life. But again, throughout the poetry, in the recollection of the past, there is a quite extraordinary sensuousness, almost a pastoral idyll at times…

CM I can tell you one thing. Some aspects of our catastrophe get lost in translation, some things are omitted. That ominous atmosphere of the '30s is somehow eliminated when the work is translated into English.

MG   Why do you think that happens? It's nothing to do with the nature of the English language - or is it?

CM It is hard to answer that question. Some poems of mine were eliminated from the collection to which you are referring. I myself made those eliminations.

MG Why did you wish to eliminate those poems? Why was it important to do so?

CM I can tell you briefly. The 20^th century is a century of horrors, so a poet would like to scream, but you cannot do it, poetry, by screaming.

MG Never?

CM No. Well, not never. Sometimes you do, but screaming is a well… a sort of physiological reaction, and you have to overcome it through artistic means.

MG You have to recall in tranquillity.

CM Yes, precisely. So maybe it is for that reason.

MG In one poem you talk about poetry pushing aside thought, cheating thoughts. What do you see as the fundamental value of poetry in the 20^th century? What use is the poet? Does he exist to cleanse the language?

CM It seems to me, to put it briefly, that philosophy, which has enjoyed such a high status in Western thought, has now been, for several decades, in a rather poor, if not pitiable, state.

MG Parlous, and especially in England perhaps…

CM Especially perhaps in England, which is a country of logical positivism and so on…

MG Putting matchsticks together…

CM Poetry is a language of exploration, obsessed by the basic questions of life and death, of modern man in new situations, looking for a new awareness, implicitly philosophical, but not in the sense of the last decades.

So maybe it is about going back to the sources of philosophy. Which doesn't mean that I assign the same place to various currents in poetry, or to particular personalities, because poetry goes through a series of revolutions like all the arts. Every year we have new tendencies. We live in an accelerated world. There is this curious wandering of the zeitgeist from one country to another. For instance, the last big upsurge in French poetry was around the time of the First World War, and I consider the most important poets to have been Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire and, perhaps as a final fulfillment of Symbolism, Paul Valéry. And then in the last few decades French poetry became dormant, and the zeitgeist moved to other countries. As far as the European continent is concerned, Poland and Greece are quite active in this respect…

MG In your own poetry, is there an attempt to reconstitute the past?

CM Yes. In a rather Proustian way. I am interested in the past not so much for its own sake but because it is something which allows me a distance. It's…purifying.

MG Because of the terrors of the past?

CM No. Because of distance in time. Distance in space opens up the possibility of description. When you are too close to an object, you cannot describe it. So for me, for example, exile, that movement through space, played a positive role. I mean moving from Lithuania, my native space. There is movement in time. And then there is getting old. I am always seeking the purification of reality.

I am a great believer in Schopenhauer's theory of art. He considered that objective art - as in Dutch still life - was its highest manifestation.

MG Many of your poems seem to consist of lots of still lives, to a quite fascinating degree. Is there any reason to feel optimistic about the 20^th century at this point? Are there any signs of a spiritual revival?

CM Well, I am very much preoccupied by that problem. In fact, I have written essays on that subject. For me, a basic problem of art in the 20^th century is that it has separated itself from Christianity. I have written a long essay entitled 'On Erosion', in which I speak of the separation of art from Christianity. It is the source of many of the troubles of modern man. My basic orientation is Christian, and I consider that in order to approach reality, you have to have some basic faith in the existence of things because without such a faith you cannot describe reality. And in order to have faith in the description of things you have to assume that they are seen by God.

MG You are a great admirer of Beckett, aren't you?

CM I've always been an adversary of Beckett.

MG Do you not admire the purity of his godlessness?

CM Yes, the purity of his despair. But I have been opposed to his vision. I have tried to oppose it.

MG It's a vision shared by many in the 20^th century. So perhaps that is why you feel so pessimistic about the 20^th century.

CM You mentioned Brodsky earlier. There is one link - in fact, there are many links between our thinking, but one of them is our common admiration for a Russian philosopher called Lev Shestov, who also represented a kind of despair, but it is different from that of Beckett.

MG What kind of despair was Shestov's?

CM It was the despair of a man who rejected all consolations. In the sense that he considered that Christianity, for him, was too much marked by a kind of rosy vision, well not rosy vision exactly but stoicism, namely the attitude that is summed up by the phrase: grin and bear it. Acceptance of the world. But he did not want to accept the world. He said: the world is unacceptable. I have to scream against it. He said: they say that the world has submitted to necessities, and I have to accept those necessities. Why? Why? I don't accept. I scream. Basically he, Shestov, was a man of the Old Testament. He said to God: 'They say that God is love. Why do they say "God is love"? God is love? We don't know who God is. That's up to Him. He can do absolutely what he wants. So, in a sense, the Book of Job was his ideal, despair, undiluted despair, but underpinned by the complete freedom of God…

MG But the poet - as you have already said - cannot scream. You yourself cannot scream. You have to work surreptitiously.

CM Yes.

MG You have to inveigle your truths.

CM Basically, in my poetry there is a kind of disagreement with the world, and at the same time an acceptance, so I am not in the line of Shestov. I differ. I realize that I differ. But my difference is not on the philosophical plane, but much more on the artistic plane.

MG Joseph Brodsky made an effort - or, at the very least, he seems to feels that it is possible - to commune outside his language. I get the impression that, for you, it was not possible, for a long time, to translate your poetry into English in a way that would give a proper representation of it. Do you feel slightly differently about all that, now that you have worked with your two poet-translators, Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass?

CM What you must remember is that my first period of exile was in France. I was completely isolated and excluded by French intellectuals, who were all expressing admiration for Stalin. I felt like a kind of leper. And so the idea of translating my poetry into French never occurred to me. But even after I moved to America - and I moved mostly for economic reasons, to teach at the university -

I had doubts about translating my own work, and so I began by translating other poets, younger poets such as Zbigniew Herbert, and only slowly did I start to translate my own poetry. And so this has been a very fascinating, late discovery, that I am able to communicate with listeners, with readers, in another language…

MG  So that sense of a loss of readership began to disappear. There seemed, at last, the possibility of finding a new readership…

CM Yes, and I'm surprised to what extent I am now a poet of California, and I have my readers there. So that is a very strange transformation.

MG So you would modify those bleak statements, made in The Land of Ulro I think, that man, born into an age of decline, has been reduced to a supererogatory number…

CM Not necessarily. You see a basic difficult in communicating is not so much linguistic as historical. Namely that certain historical facts which mean something to the readers of Poland do not mean anything to the readers in Western countries.

MG But we can learn, can't we?

CM No, because there are allusions to historical occasions or allusions to certain literary forms which are also historical elements. For instance, if I write a poem which imitates a madrigal of the 18^th century, written in Polish, that allusion is incomprehensible to the Western reader… So it is not only a question of knowledge, but of being rooted in a certain tradition, and besides certain words have strong historical connotations…

MG For example…

CM Particular words. Practically every word has its roots in the past of a given language, a written language. And there are emotional connections of a given word with the same word when used in the 16^th century. And the interplay in time with the past is constantly present in the poetry of a given language. This obviously presumes that a poet is not a complete barbarian, and that he has some training in his literature, his language. At least that he reads his Shakespeare novels…

MG I feel that's somehow too extreme. As an extension of that argument, I could say that it would be impossible for us to fruitfully talk to each other because we had not shared the same experiences. For me, when I read about the Warsaw Ghetto, I cannot re-experience it, but in a sense you're saying that therefore we shouldn't because I could not even begin to understand…

CM No, I wouldn't go so far. But the fact is that there is a certain realm of experiences which are very little known outside of the people who experience them. For instance, the war of the trenches of the First World War, it's largely remained confined, and I rather believe that one of the peculiar aspects of the 20^th century, of its horror, is that people didn't realize what was going on - sometimes in their neighbouring streets, and sometimes in their country. Ignorance. Let us say I believe that the Germans under Hitler arranged themselves so they didn't really know what was going on.

MG By 'arranged themselves', you mean that to a degree they acquiesced in their own ignorance.

CM Yah, but the degree of real innocence, of ignorance of what was going on, was enormous in my opinion. I have heard about a memoir of a German woman whose husband was stationed in Poznan in Poland, and she describes the year 1942 as the happiest year of her life because of the social life - German society - there: concerts, balls and so on. And as for Stalin's terrors, people were too afraid to talk, and even to think about what was going on in the Gulags. Many were really innocent. They didn't imagine. They didn't realize. So when Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago was finally published over there, there was a tremendous shock. It was not just the contemporaries who didn't want to know, but also the new generations who were being brought up in ignorance. So the amount of ignorance in the 20^th century was enormous.

MG Perhaps television will help to eradicate some of that ignorance…

CM Television? You know, I couldn't even look at a film made on the Holocaust by an American television network because I don't think that these are matters that can be melodramatised and translated into a fiction. As you know, television is almost compelled to give a narrative, and in a way that is a betrayal of reality, especially when it is rendered melodramatically…

MG It's true. A dozen frozen images might be better…

CM Yah, frozen images. In America I recently watched a history of the Civil War, and it included many morbid photographs of the dead. While the war lasted, exhibitions of those photographs were very popular, but as soon as the war had ended, the men who took those photographs went bankrupt. No one wanted to look at them any more. It was immediately pushed into the past, a very strange phenomenon…

MG You take the view that photographs don't dishonour the dead - unlike a narrative. You don't like your own novels, do you? You don't regard them as possessing the consequence of your poetry…

CM I have written two novels. The first, The Seizure of Power, was written for a competition. The competition was held in Geneva, for a European literary award, and you had to present an unpublished novel, in manuscript, in one of the Western languages. So I presented that one, in French - it was written very fast, in Polish, and translated by my French friend. And it won the award. The Seizure of Power is a novel about Poland in 1945, and it is now described as a very honest - the most honest - presentation, a sort of algebraic equation. Very detached. It deals with what happened. So it probably has some value from that point of view. Someone has discovered its value…

MG You sound peculiarly detached from it.

CM Detached? Yes…

MG As if you don't value it to the same degree…

CM Yes.

MG Why is that?

CM Well, detachment is my strength and my weakness if you like… The second novel is Issa Valley, which tries to put some kind of distance between itself and the political realities of the 20^th century. It is based on my own childhood in Lithuania. It is, I should say, a theological novel, a novel about the evils of the world, about death and so forth. OK?

MG Yes. You've merely described them to me. You haven't done any more than that, which rather denigrates them…Do you have any reason to feel more optimistic about the future of Lithuania? Or does that really not concern you any more?

CM No, no, it is of concern to me. I have published various articles and interviews about Lithuania. I consider the three Baltic states that remain today to be the last heritage of the pact between Hitler and Stalin. And since those two traded in countries, this is the last vestige of that infamous trade. Those three countries should be independent, and Western governments should recognize their independence. This would be logical for America because America has never recognized the occupation that came about as a result of the pact between Stalin and Hitler. So I am actively interested. And they like me very much in Lithuania. In fact, I have an invitation from the University of Vilnius, but still, somehow, I am not eager to apply for a Soviet visa to go there…

MG   So you think, essentially, that fundamental changes have not happened - or are unlikely to happen in the near future.

CM I don't know…Well, fundamental changes have happened already, and this is to do with the way in which these countries have been recovering the meaning of their situation. There is a very strong movement towards independence, which I think should be called national rather than nationalistic. There is a difference.

MG A very great difference. There is an element of the irrational in the word nationalistic.

CM  My brother, who lives in Warsaw, has just returned from Lithuania. He speaks Lithuanian, so at least one part of my family considers itself Lithuanian. And then there was my cousin, the poet Oscar Milosz, who was the first representative of the independent Lithuania in Paris after the First World War. He had no dilemma. He wrote in French, not Polish, so for him it was easy…

MG You've said that poetry is dictated by a daimonion. To what extent then do one own rational choices come into play when one is writing poetry?

CM There are certainly rational choices, but how it all comes about I do not understand. I know that I have always been subject to the power of incantation, I would practically be unable to live with that…