But anyway we're back to--
I was quite surprised to--
so he's in New York.
He's learning to be a diplomat, cultural attache.
And he wrote this poem, which is very
much in the style of his earliest poems
which were influenced by French poetry by Mallarmé and Valerie.
Symbolic landscapes, I don't completely
understand this poem.
And when you're doing this kind of translating
not with him, there-- but with a scholar friend,
we just shrug and just try to translate it literally.
Tell you as exactly as we can, what we can.
Two Men in Rome--
the other thing I should say is he
had translated Eliot's Burnt Norton.
The first of the four quartets in which
in the middle of that violence, the bombing of London, Eliot
writes about the still point of the turning world.
The meditative place, if it exists,
in which you can step outside time.
Milosz was in those years was a sort of Hegelian Marxist,
not inclined to think that you could step outside of time.
But he repeats Eliot's phrase in this poem.
And the Cardinal in this poem is a prince of the church, not
an American bird.
Darkness and-- Milosz had been in Rome once
for a couple of weeks, in 1937.
So this is a guy at a desk in New York writing a poem.
Darkness begins at Castle San Angelo,
at the globe's still point, where the Tiber unravels time.
The fading earth, touched by wind, breathes among the ashes.
One can hear the rustling of a lizard,
the scurrying of a mouse, and the weeping of the world.
As long as the blood flows in the human body
and is alive with the love of other bodies,
it's possible to live in joy or despair.
But when the abstract void of the Earth
appears, and the time of farewell draws near,
the smell of leaves, the shape of clouds, mean nothing.
My coat of royal purple won't save my wrinkled hand.
The pulse of time beats slowly in me now,
and the quick and the dead give their one speech
now, and for all time to come.
I've heard the demand to feel pity,
but I can't summon the pity required.
In our small lives, it's no more than a five-minute
walk from a child's cradle to the grave.
So why should I feel pity for those who perish?
Carry those small lives tenderly in the palm of my hand?
In the great twilight, bent over the first cause,
I quelled the pain in me and extinguished the delight.
At the globe's still point, where nothing changes,
there is a different compassion of a humankind, begun there
where the power of memory ends in the great shining
quiet of the still point.
And then there's a set of stanzas in italics.
The clatter of sandals in the dark,
one striking on a mandolin, lengthening and fading.
Song of a soldier dreaming of Brooklyn, and the smell of mold
from the river.
Let's go under the shadow of the colonnade,
where the fountain repeats its ancient motion.
Where on the stones in the weak moonlight, shapes of earth
appear having been summoned.
An invisible theater floating in the air and a lively song
gathered from the summer night.
Ta ta a da ta da.
A Cardinal, looking on, pinches his ring.
Beside him stands his shadow in cape and cowl.
They are solitary onlookers in the darkness
and the live rise and fall of song and back to Roman
type for this set of stanzas.
A poet of this epoch can't bear his face
because the creases drawn by terror would be revealed.
And in the moonlight, he cut the clenched teeth.
The sneer, the intricate music of words
does not serve him as it served poets
who aim to express ecstasy.
He thinks coldly, he calculates the distance to a clearing.
His dwelling has an echo in the mold of old fountains.
In intermittent sighs, in rust, in a useless
pen, and everything is both simultaneous and stopped.
A second can open in him a spewing wound, his century,
the sound of his shell at the bottom of the sea.
Caught between contradiction and contradiction,
he produces a new choice.
And what he chooses is never what it should have been.
Thunder in one's hand, and in the valley
the roar of the forest, a man falling
into his cemetery in the rocks and nothing
remains or something, and always too little.
A memory postponed to the last hour, an unnamed memory.
Forbidden to himself.
Pearls of childish tears in an avenue of maples,
at dawn on the shores of lake smoking
rushes and deeds, our sad human deeds.
Then back to the italics, and there's the dancing girl,
ta da ta da ta da.
From the mirrors of the night a timid foot emerges,
and bending down her toes take the first step slowly.
She draws up her knee, and her dark sex is visible.
The mark distinguishing the human dead
from inanimate matter, through the by-gone possibility
of procreation.
It's masked by threads of beads that sway.
She throws her hands upward, and her breasts
with the dark marks from which we sucked,
where we nestled with our deceased mothers,
precede her flight to an invisible star.
Shaggy and sunken faces look at her, motionless.
Millions on millions, chewing on bread crusts
found in the corners of the barracks.
And she soars, fluttering, while suddenly screaming, casting
her arms down, she falls head first
in a quiet burst like a burst of magnesium
onto the stony edge of a disused fountain.
And back to the Roman type, I hear
how laughter and crying rise in that night that
hasn't either beginning or end.
Accursed cardinal, let go of my hand.
Do you want me to stand forever with the memory killed
by that lunatic song, ready to be
embalmed in gilded dust in the smoke of burning aloe?
I know that one pays for that mute staring.
When I was a boy chanting Ovid and dreaming
of laurels on my brow, I was already
swimming out on one of those somber waters,
where a crowd of sad figures is rushing to the incantation.
Yes, I was a witness.
But I was never reconciled.
No one living will tear a scent from my lips.
Any one faithful won't be reconciled.
If your Vatican lies broken, I will keep going,
to bear the windstorm, the aurea aetas, the golden age
from heart to heart.
And at the end, back to the italics.
The clatter of stilts, festive sound,
when the procession of ragged overcoats.
And the whites of eyes, unmoving like the eyes of marble.
When women tied their falling stockings with string,
and bundles were carried by a strap across the forehead.
When old people mourn their final love,
mourned their final love for a wooden doll
or a packet of letters.
And under that, it says New York City, 1946.