Writing of his own translations of Robinson
Jeffers in an essay collected in the new volume,
Beginning with My Streets, Milosz concludes
that ‘‘the translator sees a sort of ‘empty space’
in his own home, in his home of sounds and
intonations that he has known since childhood,
and desires that it not remain empty.’’ It is our
good fortune to have not only the works that
reveal and occupy this space in excellent English
versions, but also Milosz’s own guide to his per-
sonal and intellectual geography. A collection of
essays, interviews, reviews, and addresses,Begin-
ning with My Streetsmakes a fascinating com-
panion toThe Collected Poemsand toProvinces.
Milosz’s poetry draws our attention to the
amnesia of recent history regarding Central East-
ern Europe, although most of the poems are
invested with a piercing personal vision that is
not always obviously political. The meditations
on places, people and concepts inBeginning with
My Streets paradoxically awaken us to the
knowledge lost to the world during the half cen-
tury of Milosz’s experience as a writer. Always
painfully aware of the partiality and incomplete-
ness of an individual witness’s account, Milosz
nonetheless invests these diverse writings with a
compassionate and encompassing spirit. In his
NobelLecture,whichclosesBeginning with My
Streets,Milosz asks his audience’s forgiveness for
‘‘laying bare a memory like a wound.’’ Of his
responsibility to reveal the ‘‘hidden reality’’ that
drives and eludes human reckoning, he writes,
‘‘There are moments when it seems to me that I
decipher the meaning of afflictions which befell
the nations of the ‘other Europe,’ and that mean-
ing is to make them the bearers of memory—at
the time when Europe, without an adjective, and
America possess it less and less with every gener-
ation.’’ The poet’s characteristic irony tings
through a statement in another essay, ‘‘On
Nationalism’’: ‘‘It is difficult to forget what hap-
pened in Catholic Croatia during the last war,
when crimes of genocide were committed in the
name of religion as the only distinctive mark
separating the Croats from the Orthodox
Serbs.’’ The empty space lies exposed; it was all
too easy for us to forget, until we were recently
reminded.
The opening essay takes off from the twelfth
section of the poem ‘‘City without a Name,’’
reprinted in its entirety in theCollected Poems.
In the essay, Milosz compiles details of architec-
ture, geography, and persons in a digressive map
of his original territory, the city Wilno. The dia-
logue with Tomas Venclova brings home the
importance of such remembering, for Venclova’s
Vilnius, ‘‘having experienced the twentieth cen-
tury’’ is Wilno no more. The contesting claims of
Poland and Lithuania and, of course, the former
Soviet Union to this city result in a double or
triple naming that threatens to obliterate mean-
ing. In the poetic sequence ‘‘From the Rising of
the Sun,’’ Milosz writes, ‘‘Everything would be
fine if language did not deceive us by finding
different names for the same thing in different
times and places.’’ The failure of the Platonic
ideal to exist immanently in all objects threatens
poetry, as well:
A word should be contained in every single
thing
But it is not. So what then of my vocation?
A permanent sense of being rooted in a spe-
cific point on the globe governs and legitimates
Milosz’s vocation: ‘‘Even if I were gathering
images of the earth from many countries on
two continents, my imagination could cope
with them only by assigning them to positions
to the south, north, east, or west of the trees and
hills of one district.’’
The phrase, ‘‘a sense of place,’’ so often
applied to poetry, takes on new meaning in
Milosz’s moral geography. In an essay on Stani-
slaw Vincenz’sOn the Side of Memory,Milosz
concurs with the author’s polemic: ‘‘The godless
man can travel for many hundreds or thousands
of kilometers in a single day without noticing
anything that might move him, and just as
space loses the value of the particular to him,
so, too, does time lose value; for him, the past is
obscured by a cloud of gray dust, it is reduced to
vectors of motion, ‘lines of development’; no inn,
in which it would be pleasant to stop and rest,
attracts him.’’ Yet Milosz insists on addressing
the hazards of creating, in imagination and
poetry, a substitute world out of the particular-
ities noticed by the alert person. In ‘‘The Costs of
Zealousness,’’ Milosz describes the poet’s reac-
tion to life: ‘‘Then the substitute world, which
originally was a separate island, occupies more
and more territory within us and the zealousness
that it exacts...generates a further skewing of
our day-to-day obligations toward people.’’
An intriguing essay called ‘‘Saligia’’ reveals
more of the poet’s self-examination, arranged
around the meanings in Latin and in Polish, in
youth and in adulthood, of the seven deadly sins.From the Rising of the Sun