Diplomats Of Poland

"For a country without a past is nothing, a word That, hardly spoken, loses its meaning, A perishable wall destroyed by flame, An echo of animal emotions."

"A man should not love the moon. An ax should not lose weight in his hand. His garden should smell of rotting apples And grow a fair amount of nettles."

"Long into the night we were walking on the Piazza del Duomo. He: That I was too politicized. And I answered him more or less as follows:If you have a nail in your shoe, what then? Do you love that nail? Same with me. I am for the moon amid the vineyards When you see high up the snow on the Alps."

"We are a poor people, much afflicted. We camped under various stars, Where you dip water with a cup from a muddy river And slice your bread with a pocketknife. This is a place accepted, not chosen."

"And here I am walking the eternal earth. Tiny, leaning on a stick. I pass a volcanic park, lie down at a spring, Not knowing how to express what is always and everywhere: The earth I cling to is so solid Under my breast and belly that I feel grateful For every pebble, and I don't know whether It is my pulse or the earth's that I hear, When the hems of invisible silk vestments pass over me, Hands, wherever they have been, touch my arm, Or small laughter, once, long ago over wine, With lanterns in the magnolias, for my house is huge."

"Consciousness even in my sleep changes primary colors. The features of my face melt like a wax doll in the fire. And who can consent to see in the mirror the mere face of man?"

"I liked beaches, swimming pools, and clinics for there they were the bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. I pitied them and myself, but this will not protect me. The word and the thought are over."

"And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned, My face covered with a coat though now no one was left Of those who could have remembered my debts never paid, My shames not eternal, base deeds to be forgiven. And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned."

"I am only a man: I need visible signs. I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction. Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church lift its hand, only once, just once, for me. But I understand that signs must be human, therefore call one man, anyone on earth, not me — after all I have some decency — and allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you."

"You are a tongue of the debased, of the unreasonable, hating themselves even more than they hate other nations, a tongue of informers, a tongue of the confused, ill with their own innocence.But without you, who am I? Only a scholar in a distant country, a success, without fears and humiliations. Yes, who am I without you? Just a philosopher, like everyone else."

"I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees."

"Greece had to lose, her pure consciousness had to make our agony only more acute.We needed God loving us in our weakness and not in the glory of beatitude."

"Leaves glowing in the sun, zealous hum of bumblebees, From afar, from somewhere beyond the river, echoes of lingering voices And the unhurried sounds of a hammer gave joy not only to me. Before the five senses were opened, and earlier than any beginning They waited, ready, for all those who would call themselves mortals, So that they might praise, as I do, life, that is, happiness."

"Tell me, as you would in the middle of the night When we face only night, the ticking of a watch, the whistle of an express train, tell me Whether you really think that this world Is your home? That your internal planet That revolves, red-hot, propelled by the current Of your warm blood, is really in harmony With what surrounds you? Probably you know very well The bitter protest, every day, every hour, The scream that wells up, stifled by a smile, The feeling of a prisoner who touches a wall And knows that beyond it valleys spread, Oaks stand in summer splendor, a jay flies And a kingfisher changes a river to a marvel."

"And space, what it is like? Is it mechanical, Newtonian? A frozen prison? Or the lofty space of Einstein, the relation Between movement and movement? No reason to pretend I know. I don't know, and if I did, Still my imagination is a thousand years old."

"Now I am not ashamed of my defeat. One murky island with its barking seals Or a parched desert is enough To make us say: yes, oui, si."

"If I am all mankind, are they themselves without me?"

"The death of a man is like the fall of a mighty nation That had valiant armies, captains, and prophets, And wealthy ports and ships all over the seas."

"Przysięgam, nie ma we mnie czarodziejstwa słów. Mówię do ciebie milcząc, jak obłok czy drzewo."

"A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a half-thawed winter."

"Earth, what have I to do with thee? With your meadows where dumb beasts Grazed before the deluge without lifting their heads? What have I to do with your implacable births? So why this gracious melancholia? Is it because anger is no use?"

"Under various names, I have praised only you, rivers! You are milk and honey and love and death and dance. From a spring in hidden grottoes, seeping from mossy rocks, Where a goddess pours live water from a pitcher, At clear streams in the meadow, where rills murmur underground, Your race and my race begin, and amazement, and quick passage."

"We go down with the bells ringing in all the sunken cities. Forgotten, we are greeted by the embassies of the dead, While your endless flowing carries us on and on; And neither is nor was. The moment only, eternal."

"Our memory is childish and it saves only what we need."

"I still think too much about the mothers And ask what is man born of woman. He curls himself up and protects his head While he is kicked by heavy boots; on fire and running, He burns with bright flame; a bulldozer sweeps him into a clay pit. Her child. Embracing a teddy bear. Conceived in ecstasy."

"I think that I am here, on this earth, To present a report on it, but to whom I don't know. As if I were sent so that whatever takes place Has meaning because it changes into memory."

"How it should be in Heaven I know, for I was there. By its river. Listening to its birds. In its season: in summer, shortly after sunrise. I would get up and run to my thousand works And the garden was superterrestrial, owned by imagination."

"But where is our, dear to us, mortality? Where is time that both destroys and saves us? This is too difficult for me. Peace eternal Could have no mornings and no evenings, Such a deficiency speaks against it."

"I knew that I would speak in the language of the vanquished No more durable than old customs, family rituals, Christmas tinsel, and once a year the hilarity of carols."

"I read the beautiful writing of Milosz when he says, especially his magnificent essays, that if he would not write in Polish, he wouldn't be who he is. And I think he kept his language as a way of keeping his Polish soul and his European soul and the World War II soul."

"[F]or us - writers and artists bringing original expression to politics and social issues at the end of this century where neither socialism nor capitalism has achieved justice and human fulfilment for all - Czeslaw Milosz has the rubric: "Ill at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic/In the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of corruption.""

"Czesław Miłosz wrote, “Language is the only homeland.” … What he meant, I think, is that when borders collapse, when flags change, when your birthplace wakes up with a different name—sometimes six names—you realize your country hasn’t just split; your language has, too. Suddenly, one tongue wears four alphabets. Six new passports, three new anthems, and a dozen ways to say mine. What lingers is the echo of a phrase that only your people say. A joke that dies in translation. The lullaby your grandmother hummed while shelling white beans into her apron, her voice low enough not to wake the war. What stays is the syntax. The cadence. The words no one else knows how to carry."

"When I curse Fate, it's not me, but the earth in me."

"I liked your velvet yoni, Annalena, long voyages in the delta of your legs. A striving upstream toward your beating heart through more and more savage currents saturated with the light of hops and bindweed. And our vehemence and triumphant laughter and our hasty dressing in the middle of the night to walk on the stone stairs of the upper city."

"Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience."

"What is this enigmatic impulse that does not allow one to settle down in the achieved, the finished? I think it is a quest for reality."

"Only if we assume that a poet constantly strives to liberate himself from borrowed styles in search for reality, is he dangerous. In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot. And, alas, a temptation to pronounce it, similar to an acute itching, becomes an obsession which doesn't allow one to think of anything else. That is why a poet chooses internal or external exile. It is not certain, however, that he is motivated exclusively by his concern with actuality. He may also desire to free himself from it and elsewhere, in other countries, on other shores, to recover, at least for short moments, his true vocation — which is to contemplate Being."

"During the thirty years I have spent abroad I have felt I was more privileged than my Western colleagues, whether writers or teachers of literature, for events both recent and long past took in my mind a sharply delineated, precise form. Western audiences confronted with poems or novels written in Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary, or with films produced there, possibly intuit a similarly sharpened consciousness, in a constant struggle against limitations imposed by censorship. Memory thus is our force, it protects us against a speech entwining upon itself like the ivy when it does not find a support on a tree or a wall."

"It would be more decorous not to live. To live is not decorous, Says he who after many years Returned to the city of his youth. There was no one left Of those who once walked these streets And now they had nothing, except his eyes. Stumbling, he walked and looked, instead of them, On the light they had loved, on the lilacs again in bloom."

"Masculinity and femininity, elapsed, met in him And every shame, every grief, every love. If ever we accede to enlightenment, He thought, it is in one compassionate moment When what separated them from me vanishes And a shower of drops from a bunch of lilacs Pours on my face, and hers, and his, at the same time."

"When I die, I will see the lining of the world. The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset."

"— And if there is no lining to the world? If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day Make no sense following each other?"

"— Even if that is so, there will remain A word wakened by lips that perish, A tireless messenger who runs and runs Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies, And calls out, protests, screams."

"Evil grows and bears fruit, which is understandable, because it has logic and probability on its side and also, of course, strength. The resistance of tiny kernels of good, to which no one grants the power of causing far-reaching consequences, is entirely mysterious, however. Such seeming nothingness not only lasts but contains within itself enormous energy which is revealed gradually."

"On the day the world ends A bee circles a clover, A fisherman mends a glimmering net."

"And those who expected lightning and thunder Are disappointed. And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps Do not believe it is happening now."

"Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy, Repeats while he binds his tomatoes: No other end of the world will there be, No other end of the world will there be."

"We were permitted to shriek in the tongue of dwarfs and demons But pure and generous words were forbidden Under so stiff a penalty that whoever dared to pronounce one Considered himself as a lost man."

"It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I've devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony."

"There was a time when only wise books were read helping us to bear our pain and misery. This, after all, is not quite the same as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings."