HAUS FÜR POESIE

Joseph Brodsky considered him simply the greatest poet of our time, and for Seamus Heaney he was at once Orpheus and Teiresias, poet and prophet. Miłosz survived two dictatorships: the German occupation of Poland by the National Socialists and, after the war, the Stalinist dictatorship that transformed his homeland into a totalitarian satellite state of the USSR. Under the reign of terror of the Nazis he worked underground; under the Communists he initially held various posts in diplomatic missions, before receiving political asylum in France in 1951. In his book The Captive Mind, published two years later, Miłosz analyzes the attraction that totalitarian systems exert, especially on intellectuals. From the early 1960s onward he was a professor in Berkeley and in 1970 received American citizenship.

At the beginning of his poetic work, Miłosz was still strongly influenced by the Polish catastrophists. His texts were rhetorical in gesture and mostly linguistically over-orchestrated. There, pairs of birches ring small clouds, and mountains grazing on plains are drawn toward seas that serve them as watering places. Later, the tone noticeably calms, a linguistic sobering sets in. The tempered exuberance brings Miłosz’s true qualities as a poet to the fore. In the lyrical evocation of a seemingly idyllic childhood world, his attention is given to the climbing wild hop, the smoothly worn wooden door handle, and the green of nettle shoots. At the same time, poetry becomes an instrument of precise diagnosis of the times in moral and poetic treatises that stride through Poland’s entangled history in seven-league boots.

Miłosz remains a political poet out of necessity, even though, as he himself confesses, his pen is lighter “als die eines Kolibris,” which elsewhere he describes as a “Kinderkreisel der Lüfte.” He knows: “Was groß war, hat sich als klein erwiesen. / Reiche verblaßten wie verschneites Kupfer.” What moves him is an emphatic belief in the power of poetry (“Denn mehr wiegt eine einzige gute Strophe / Als die Last vieler fleißiger Seiten”); for him it consists in the risk of “Leben neu anzufangen in jeder Sekunde.” In his late work, whose diction increasingly approaches prose, metaphysical and philosophical reflections as well as a longing for the land of origin move to the center: “Wenn es schmerzt, kehren wir zu den Flüssen zurück.”

The event will be interpreted between Polish and German. A joint event by Haus für Poesie and the Polish Institute Berlin.

In reading & conversation with Julia Fiedorczuk, Hatif Janabi, Michael Krüger
Moderation Karolina Golimowska