THE FIRST TIME I SAW THE NAME OSCAR MILOSZ, IT WAS over the title of his November Symphony, translated into Czech and published a few months after World War II in an avantgarde journal I used to read assiduously at the age of seventeen. How thoroughly that poetry had entranced me I understood some thirty years later in France, where for the first time I was able to open the volume of Milosz’s poetry in its original French. I quickly looked up November Symphony, and as I read it I heard in memory the whole (superb) Czech translation of this poem, not one word of which have I forgotten. In that Czech version Milosz’s poem marked me perhaps more profoundly than other poetry I was devouring at that same period, that of Apollinaire or Rimbaud or Desnos or Vitezslav Nezval. Beyond a doubt these poets had amazed me not only with the beauty of their verses but also by the myth surrounding their sacred names, which served as passwords to get myself recognized among my own people, the moderns, the initiated. But there was no myth around Milosz: his totally unknown name said nothing to me, and nothing to anyone around me. In his case I was entranced not by a myth but by a beauty acting on its own, alone, naked, with no outside support. Let’s be honest: that rarely happens.
BUT WHY THIS POEM IN PARTICULAR? THE ESSENTIAL REASON, I think, lay in the discovery of something I had never encountered anywhere else: I discovered the archetype of a form of nostalgia that is expressed, grammatically, not by the past but by the future: the grammatical future of nostalgia. The grammatical form that projects a lamented past into a distant future, that transforms the melancholy evocation of a thing that no longer exists into the heartbreaking sorrow of a promise that can never be realized.
You will be all in pale violet, beautiful grief
And the flowers on your hat will be sad and small
I REMEMBER A PERFORMANCE OF RACINE AT THE COMÉDIE-FRANÇAISE. To make the lines sound natural, the actors recited them as if they were prose, systematically suppressing the pause at the end of the lines; impossible to recognize the alexandrine rhythm or hear the rhymes. Perhaps they thought they were behaving according to the spirit of modern poetry, which has long since abandoned meter and rhyme. But free verse, at its birth, was not trying to make poetry into prose! It was trying to rid poetry of the armorplate of meter and discover a different musicality, a richer and more natural one. My ears will always retain the singing voices of the great Surrealist poets (Czech as well as French) reciting their own verses! Like an alexandrine, a free-verse line was also an uninterrupted musical unit, ending in a pause. The pause must be made audible, in free verse as well as in an alexandrine line, even if that seems to contradict the grammatical logic of the sentence. That pause breaking the syntax is the heart of the melodic refinement (the melodic provocation) of the enjambment. The doleful melody of Milosz’s Symphonies is grounded in the sequence of enjambments. An enjambment in Milosz is a brief startled silence before the word that will come at the start of the next line:
And the murky path will be there, all damp
With an echo of cascades. And I shall speak to you
Of the city on the water and of the Bacharach Rabbi
And of Florentine Nights. There will be as well …
IN 1949 ANDRÉ GIDE EDITED AN ANTHOLOGY OF FRENCH poetry for Gallimard Publishers. In the preface he wrote, “X complains that I put in nothing by Milosz. Was that by oversight? Not at all. It is because I found nothing that seemed to me especially worth including. I repeat: my selection was not intended to be historical; I select by quality alone.” There was an element of good sense in Gide’s arrogance: Oscar Milosz had no business in that anthology; his poetry is not French; retaining all his Polish Lithuanian roots, he took refuge in the language of the French people as if in a Carthusian monastery. So we may consider Gide’s rejection a noble way of protecting the untouchable solitude of a foreigner; of a Stranger.