Honoring a Pole Apart

Nobel Prize goes to emigre Poet Czeslaw Milosz

He is familiar to serious students of poetry. Otherwise he is little known outside Poland and the Slavic language department of the University of California at Berkeley. Yet last week Czeslaw Milosz (pronounced Chess-wahf Mee-wash), 69, an emigre poet-scholar and naturalized American citizen, won the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature.

In announcing the award, worth $212,000, the Swedish Academy cited Milosz's "uncompromising clear-sightedness" in a world thick with moral and intellectual conflicts. This is the familiar yet urgent condition of the modernist tradition into which Milosz was thrust by history. As he wrote in Mid-Twentieth-Century Portrait (1945): "Keeping one hand on Marx's writings, he reads the Bible in private./ His mocking eye on processions leaving burnt-out churches./ His backdrop: a horseflesh-colored city in ruins."

Irony, pathos and wistful disenchantment color the writer's prose. Reflecting on World War II and the Nazi occupation that shaped his outlook, Milosz observed: "The act of writing a poem is an act of faith; yet if the screams of the tortured are audible in the poet's room, is not his activity an offense to human suffering? And if the next hour may bring his death and the destruction of his manuscript, should the poet engage in such a pastime?"

This tension between private vision and public violence unified a group of Polish wartime writers. Milosz went underground in Warsaw where he battled the Germans with a clandestine press, firing the spirit of resistance with articles and anti-Nazi poetry. From 1946 to 1950, he served in Washington and Paris as a member of Warsaw's diplomatic corps. He translated T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg and wrote articles for the Polish press. But all was not well between the private and public man. Having escaped Hitler's oppression, Milosz now felt hemmed in by the Stalinist monolith. In 1951 he broke with the regime and became an exile in Paris. The reasons for his defection became clear two years later with the appearance of The Captive Mind: "The immediate cause of my break with the Polish People's Democracy was socialist realism. It would be wrong to judge that this official theory of art, imposed by Moscow, forces the writer and artist to renounce certain aesthetic likings. It forces him to renounce something more: truth."

In 1960 Milosz, his wife and two sons moved to Berkeley, where the poet joined the faculty of the University of California. Reminiscent of another emigre professor, Vladimir Nabokov, the new laureate has a reputation as a dazzling lecturer.

In addition to The Captive Mind, Milosz's prose available in English includes The Seizure of Power, a novel of wartime Poland; Native Realm, an autobiography; The History of Polish Literature; and Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision, a collection of essays.

It is Milosz the poet, however, who has been suddenly thrust before the world. Works such as Selected Poems (Seabury Press, New York) and Bells in Winter (Ecco Press, New York) have long attracted glowing attention from other writers and poets, especially those who share Milosz's state of spiritual and political exile. Says fellow Pole Jerzy Kosinski: "He remains very Slavic in his idiom and main obsession: What is the essence of life? Why are we here? It is not how to live, but why, for the sake of what?" Emigre Poet Joseph Brodsky adds: "What this poet preaches is an awfully sober version of Stoicism which does not ignore reality, however absurd and horrendous."

Milosz himself is more diffident. Asked at a hastily arranged press conference to explain the meaning of his work, he replied: "If I could say it in a few words, I wouldn't have to write poetry."

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