The poet Czeslaw Milosz was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. He was born in Lithuania, in 1911, to a family of Polish origin. He experienced at first hand the suffering caused by the Nazi terror and genocide, the war, and later, Stalinist tyranny. His Nobel Prize citation states that he ” with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts”. This example of his poetry, written (I believe) in Poland in 1945, is a particularly powerful example.
1
We, whose lungs fill with the sweetness of day,
Who in May admire trees flowering,
Are better than those who perished.
We, who taste of exotic dishes,
And enjoy fully the delights of love,
Are better than those who were buried.
We, from the fiery furnaces, from behind barbed wires
On which the winds of endless Autumns howled,
We, who remember battles where the wounded air roared in paroxysms of pain,
We, saved by our own cunning and knowledge.
By sending others to the more exposed positions,
Urging them loudly to fight on,
Ourselves withdrawing in certainty of the cause lost.
Having the choice of our own death and that of a friend,
We chose his, coldly thinking: let it be done quickly.
We sealed gas chamber doors, stole bread,
Knowing the next day would be harder to bear than the day before.
As befits human beings, we explored good and evil.
Our malignant wisdom has no like on this planet.
Accept it as proven that we are better than they,
The gullible, hot-blooded weaklings, careless with their lives.
2
Treasure your legacy of skills, child of Europe,
Inheritor of gothic cathedrals, of baroque churches,
Of synagogues filled with the wailing of a wronged people.
Successor of Descartes, Spinoza, inheritor of the word “honor,”
posthumous child of Leonidas,
Treasure the skills acquired in the hour of terror.
You have a clever mind which sees instantly
The good and bad of any situation.
You have an elegant, skeptical mind which enjoys pleasures
Quite unknown to primitive races.
Guided by this mind you cannot fail to see
The soundness of the advice we give you:
Let the sweetness of day fill your lungs.
For this we have strict but wise rules.
3
There can be no question of force triumphant.
We live in the age of victorious justice.
Do not mention force, or you will be accused
Of upholding fallen doctrines in secret.
He who has power, has it by historical logic.
Respectfully bow to that logic.
Let your lips, proposing a hypothesis,
Not know about the hand faking the experiment.
Let your hand, faking the experiment,
Not know about the lips proposing a hypothesis.
Learn to predict a fire with unerring precision.
Then burn the house down to fulfill the prediction.
4
Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.
Do not follow those who lie in contempt of reality.
Let your lie be even more logical than the truth itself,
So the weary travelers may find repose in the lie.
After the Day of the Lie gather in select circles,
Shaking with laughter when our real deeds are mentioned.
Dispensing flattery called: perspicacious thinking.
Dispensing flattery called: a great talent.
We, the last who can still draw joy from cynicism.
We, whose cunning is not unlike despair.
A new, humorless generation is now arising,
It takes in deadly earnest all we received with laughter.
5
Let your words speak not through their meanings,
But through them against whom they are used.
Fashion your weapon from ambiguous words.
Consign clear words to lexical limbo.
Judge no words before the clerks have checked
In their card index by whom they were spoken.
The voice of passion is better that the voice of reason.
The passionless cannot change history.
6
Love no country: countries soon disappear.
Love no city: cities are soon rubble.
Throw away keepsakes, or from your desk
A choking, poisonous fume will exude.
Do not love people: people soon perish.
Or they are wronged and call for your help.
Do not gaze into the pools of the past.
Their corroded surface will mirror
A face different from the one you expected.
7
He who invokes history is always secure.
The dead will not rise to witness against him.
You can accuse them of any deed you like.
Their reply will always be silence.
Their empty faces swim out of the deep dark.
You can fill them with any features desired.
Proud of dominion over people long vanished,
Change the past into your own, better likeness.
8
The laughter born of the love of truth
Is now the laughter of the enemies of the people.
Gone is the age of satire. We no longer need mock
The senile tyrant with false courtly phrases.
Stern as befits the servants of a cause,
We will permit ourselves only sycophantic humor.
Tight-lipped, guided by reasons only,
Cautiously let us step into the era of the unchained fire.
by Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004).
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