Museum of experience

Retelling the life of a poet who survived the horrors of the 20th century to write about it

Milosz: A Biography; Andrzej Franaszek, Edited and translated by Aleksandra and Michael Parker, Harvard University Press, ₹1,359

What is poetry which does not save/ Nations or people?

- Czeslaw Milosz

Awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Czeslaw Milosz in 1980, the Swedish academy said it was honouring the Polish poet for voicing ‘man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts’ with ‘uncompromising clear-sightedness.’

Milosz had a ringside view of some of the horrors of early 20th century, and it left a deep impression on him and his work. His biographer, literary critic Andrzej Franaszek, reveals in his detailed account, that from early childhood onwards, the years from 1911 to 1945, Milosz ‘was repeatedly exposed to war and acts of appalling cruelty.’ As Michael Parker, one of the translators of this biography, writes in the introduction, “What equipped [Milosz] for his truth-telling role was the incomparable quality of his intellect and poetic skills, which enabled him to endure and, much later, process imaginatively experiences and sufferings which might well have destroyed a less driven individual.” In the first 11 years of his life, his family had been caught up with the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Russian-Polish war. As Milosz wrote, “When I reached adolescence, I carried inside me a museum of mobile and grimacing images.” In his late 20s and 30s, he witnessed the Second World War and ‘lived through the hell of Nazi occupation.’ The book follows Milosz through his ‘mobile’ life—from his birth in Lithuania to his growing-up years in Poland, his diplomatic postings, which brought him much difficulty, and his eventual exile in Paris and the U.S. where he taught Slavic languages at Berkeley, and his ultimate return to Poland.

In his writings, he often returned to these themes—experiences of war and dictatorships, alienation, exile. In A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto , a response to the Warsaw ghetto uprising, he offers an ‘outsider's view’ of the ghetto after it was ‘liquidated’ in mid-May 1943. The poem’s narrator reverses the order of nature as he observes: “Bees build around red liver/Ants build around black bone.” In a time of great distress worldwide over race, religion, migration, war—and fake news—a truth-teller’s voice should be re-heard.

Milosz: A Biography ; Andrzej Franaszek, Edited and translated by Aleksandra and Michael Parker, Harvard University Press, ₹1,359.