The most exalted moment I know in 20th-century literature took place in a conversation between two displaced Polish poets in Berkeley in 1967. The speaker is Aleksander Wat; the interlocutor, Czeslaw Milosz. In My Century, his posthumously published interview-transcript-as-memoir, Wat describes his time in Stalin’s Lubyanka prison:
“…the books I read in Lubyanka made for one of the greatest experiences of my life. Not because they allowed me an escape but because, to a certain extent, they transformed me, influenced and shaped me greatly. It was the way I read those books; I came at them from a completely new angle. And from then on I had a completely new understanding, not only of literature, but of everything.
“Literature is insight and synthesis, which means that poetry, ultimately, is heroic.”
Wat was reading Proust and Machiavelli in Lubyanka, not inspirational fluff. One can hardly imagine words more at odds with our age’s prevailing fashions of thought. The idea that books can sustain and transform lives, once tacitly assumed, now is scorned as naïve. As a young man, Wat became a Communist. After fleeing the Nazi invasion he was arrested by the Soviets and spent more than two years in various jails and prisons in Poland and the Soviet Union. A Jew, Wat converted to Catholicism. While in prison, he “trained [himself] in hatred and disgust for politics.” He earned his enlightenment honestly.
Not long ago I read online an interview with an academic who had forgiving, even admiring things to say about communism. Normally, such sentiments are expressed in easily decrypted code – “progressive,” “bourgeoisie,” “collective” – but this guy was perfectly forthright and self-congratulatory about the nature of his abhorrent politics. Mercifully I forgot about him until I picked up R.S. Thomas’ Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 again and read, among others, the final, untitled poem in the volume, published posthumously:
“The greatest language
the world has experienced,
and it is as though
tongue-tied before the challenge
of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot.
The adjectives are tired,
the verbs indecisive, only the facts
remain fresh, sprouting out of the ground
manured by victims.
Vocabulary is no longer the ladder
angels descend and ascend
on. It is flashed at us
too rapidly for us to cherish.
It is thrown away
when it no longer earns its keep
as an advertiser. Sex
is a word too short
to answer the requirements
of the literature of love.
The aircraft soar into
the upper air but have no odes
dedicated to them as to blithe spirits.”
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During my last visit to Leonard Nathan a few months before he slipped into deep aphasia and then died, he scolded me for not knowing the poetry of Aleksander Wat. His wife Carol went off to look for a copy of WITH THE SKIN: POEMS OF ALEKSANDER WAT (Ecco, 1989) that Leonard and Milosz had translated together. Milosz wrote the introduction. But Carol couldn't locate their copy, so Leonard recited his and Milosz's version of "From Persian Parables":
By great, swift waters
on a stony bank
a human skull lay shouting:
ALLAH LA ILAH.
And in that shout such horror
and such supplication
so great was its despair
that I asked the helmsman:
What is there left to cry for? Why is it still afraid?
What divine judgment could strike it again?
Suddenly a rising wave
took hold of the skull
and tossing it about
smashed it against the bank.
Nothing is ever over
-- the helmsman's voice was hollow --
and there is no bottom to evil.
After reading your essay and the poem , I was reminded of Shakespeare's,"Sonnet 66":
SONNET 66
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
and from Eliot's "Four Quartets," the words,
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.
Joe(New York)
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