WEBVTT

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But anyway we're back to--

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I was quite surprised to--

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so he's in New York.

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He's learning to be a
diplomat, cultural attache.

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And he wrote this
poem, which is very

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much in the style of
his earliest poems

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which were influenced by French
poetry by Mallarmé and Valerie.

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Symbolic landscapes,
I don't completely

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understand this poem.

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And when you're doing
this kind of translating

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not with him, there-- but
with a scholar friend,

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we just shrug and just try
to translate it literally.

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Tell you as exactly as
we can, what we can.

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Two Men in Rome--

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the other thing I
should say is he

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had translated
Eliot's Burnt Norton.

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The first of the four
quartets in which

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in the middle of that violence,
the bombing of London, Eliot

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writes about the still
point of the turning world.

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The meditative
place, if it exists,

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in which you can
step outside time.

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Milosz was in those years was
a sort of Hegelian Marxist,

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not inclined to think that you
could step outside of time.

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But he repeats Eliot's
phrase in this poem.

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And the Cardinal in this poem
is a prince of the church, not

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an American bird.

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Darkness and-- Milosz
had been in Rome once

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for a couple of weeks, in 1937.

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So this is a guy at a desk
in New York writing a poem.

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Darkness begins at
Castle San Angelo,

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at the globe's still point,
where the Tiber unravels time.

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The fading earth, touched by
wind, breathes among the ashes.

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One can hear the
rustling of a lizard,

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the scurrying of a mouse,
and the weeping of the world.

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As long as the blood
flows in the human body

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and is alive with the
love of other bodies,

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it's possible to live
in joy or despair.

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But when the abstract
void of the Earth

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appears, and the time
of farewell draws near,

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the smell of leaves, the
shape of clouds, mean nothing.

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My coat of royal purple
won't save my wrinkled hand.

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The pulse of time
beats slowly in me now,

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and the quick and the
dead give their one speech

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now, and for all time to come.

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I've heard the
demand to feel pity,

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but I can't summon
the pity required.

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In our small lives, it's
no more than a five-minute

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walk from a child's
cradle to the grave.

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So why should I feel pity
for those who perish?

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Carry those small lives
tenderly in the palm of my hand?

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In the great twilight,
bent over the first cause,

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I quelled the pain in me and
extinguished the delight.

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At the globe's still point,
where nothing changes,

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there is a different compassion
of a humankind, begun there

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where the power of memory
ends in the great shining

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quiet of the still point.

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And then there's a set
of stanzas in italics.

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The clatter of
sandals in the dark,

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one striking on a mandolin,
lengthening and fading.

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Song of a soldier dreaming of
Brooklyn, and the smell of mold

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from the river.

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Let's go under the
shadow of the colonnade,

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where the fountain repeats
its ancient motion.

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Where on the stones in the
weak moonlight, shapes of earth

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appear having been summoned.

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An invisible theater floating
in the air and a lively song

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gathered from the summer night.

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Ta ta a da ta da.

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A Cardinal, looking
on, pinches his ring.

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Beside him stands his
shadow in cape and cowl.

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They are solitary
onlookers in the darkness

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and the live rise and fall
of song and back to Roman

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type for this set of stanzas.

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A poet of this epoch
can't bear his face

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because the creases drawn
by terror would be revealed.

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And in the moonlight, he
cut the clenched teeth.

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The sneer, the
intricate music of words

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does not serve him
as it served poets

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who aim to express ecstasy.

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He thinks coldly, he calculates
the distance to a clearing.

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His dwelling has an echo in
the mold of old fountains.

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In intermittent sighs,
in rust, in a useless

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pen, and everything is both
simultaneous and stopped.

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A second can open in him a
spewing wound, his century,

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the sound of his shell
at the bottom of the sea.

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Caught between contradiction
and contradiction,

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he produces a new choice.

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And what he chooses is never
what it should have been.

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Thunder in one's hand,
and in the valley

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the roar of the
forest, a man falling

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into his cemetery in
the rocks and nothing

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remains or something,
and always too little.

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A memory postponed to the
last hour, an unnamed memory.

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Forbidden to himself.

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Pearls of childish tears
in an avenue of maples,

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at dawn on the shores
of lake smoking

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rushes and deeds,
our sad human deeds.

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Then back to the italics,
and there's the dancing girl,

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ta da ta da ta da.

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From the mirrors of the
night a timid foot emerges,

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and bending down her toes
take the first step slowly.

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She draws up her knee, and
her dark sex is visible.

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The mark distinguishing
the human dead

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from inanimate matter, through
the by-gone possibility

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of procreation.

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It's masked by threads
of beads that sway.

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She throws her hands
upward, and her breasts

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with the dark marks
from which we sucked,

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where we nestled with
our deceased mothers,

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precede her flight
to an invisible star.

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Shaggy and sunken faces
look at her, motionless.

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Millions on millions,
chewing on bread crusts

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found in the corners
of the barracks.

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And she soars, fluttering, while
suddenly screaming, casting

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her arms down, she
falls head first

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in a quiet burst like
a burst of magnesium

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onto the stony edge
of a disused fountain.

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And back to the
Roman type, I hear

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how laughter and crying
rise in that night that

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hasn't either beginning or end.

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Accursed cardinal,
let go of my hand.

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Do you want me to stand
forever with the memory killed

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by that lunatic
song, ready to be

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embalmed in gilded dust in
the smoke of burning aloe?

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I know that one pays
for that mute staring.

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When I was a boy chanting
Ovid and dreaming

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of laurels on my
brow, I was already

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swimming out on one of
those somber waters,

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where a crowd of sad figures
is rushing to the incantation.

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Yes, I was a witness.

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But I was never reconciled.

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No one living will tear
a scent from my lips.

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Any one faithful
won't be reconciled.

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If your Vatican lies
broken, I will keep going,

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to bear the windstorm, the
aurea aetas, the golden age

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from heart to heart.

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And at the end,
back to the italics.

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The clatter of
stilts, festive sound,

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when the procession
of ragged overcoats.

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And the whites of eyes, unmoving
like the eyes of marble.

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When women tied their falling
stockings with string,

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and bundles were carried by
a strap across the forehead.

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When old people mourn
their final love,

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mourned their final
love for a wooden doll

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or a packet of letters.

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And under that, it says
New York City, 1946.

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