A Prayer
Incantation
By Czeslaw Milosz
Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Pinsky
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
Berkeley, 1968
Silence, having nothing more to say is what is merited here. The poem is a cry of resistance and I can add nothing to its majesty. But you may ask who is Czeslaw Milosz.
Czeslaw Milosz ranks among the most respected figures in 20th-century Polish literature, as well as one of the most respected contemporary poets in the world: he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. Born in Lithuania, where his parents moved temporarily to escape the political upheaval in their native Poland, he left Poland as an adult due to the oppressive Communist regime that came to power following World War II and lived in the United States from 1960 until his death in 2004.
In exile from a world which no longer exists, a witness to the Nazi devastation of Poland and the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe, Milosz deals in his poetry with the central issues of our time: the impact of history upon moral being, the search for ways to survive spiritual ruin in a ruined world.
“I have rejected the new faith because the practice of the lie is one of its principal commandments and socialist realism is nothing more than a different name for a lie.” — Milosz in a speech before the Congress for Cultural Freedom, quoted by James Atlas of the New York Times.
— taken from the Poetry Foundation website
The times have changed but human nature has not. The same can be said of the Trump administration, the Republican supporters surrounding him, making common cause in the litany of lies, conspiracy theories, shamelessly seeking collaboration with foreign powers to indefinitely consolidate power.
I have highlighted the phrases of the poem that in particular speak to me.
One thought on “A Prayer”
Mr. Milosz was a professor at UC Berkeley while I was attending high school in the same town. My first photographic experience was in documenting the protests that engulfed Berkeley during the late 1960s and early 70s. My observation was that many of the “protestors” had no interest in the ethics of the US involvement in the Vietnam war, but were more interested in anarchy and acting out. Over and over I witnessed bad behavior for no other reason than the people throwing rocks and breaking windows could “get away” with such things (though there were also many who were committed to the process of changing the US policies in Southeast Asia).
An so I was intrigued to read about his time in Berkeley on the Wikipedia page dedicated to his life that he had similar observations. Here is a bit from that page:
Miłosz’s relationship to student protestors was sometimes antagonistic as when he called them “spoiled children of the bourgeoisie”, and deemed their political zeal naïve. At one campus event in 1970, he mocked protestors who claimed to be demonstrating for peace and love, “Talk to me about love when they come into your cell one morning, line you all up, and say ‘You and you, step forward—it’s your time to die—unless any of your friends love you so much he wants to take your place!'”