I cut onions and squeeze lemons: I behold the spectacle of the world.
“A Poetic State” by Czesław Miłosz, translated from Polish to English by the author and Robert Hass, is a wonder to behold. It was published in the eighth issue of Columbia Journal in 1983.
In the aftermath of the trauma, how does the passage of time affect the experience as it appears in our memories? Is it like sitting down in an airplane and watching your homeland shrink, as everything you knew in the world—the people, the streets, and the trees—grows smaller and smaller? Or do they become condensed, concentrated snippets of memory? Can the experience be both smaller and more distinct in one’s mind?
These are the questions asked by Miłosz in “A Poetic State,” which can also be read as a kind of ars poetica. The speaker is no longer who he was: impatient and easily irritated by trifles, sick and tortured by the fear of what could happen next. The speaker is in a secure space now, in good health, and he no longer feels a strong need to communicate things that were once difficult for him in writing.
The poet who places the speaker in his poems is struck by a different sort of affliction. The poet is torn because, to reach a secure space, he has had to turn his back to the sea and not look down. Decades later, that indifferent contemplation in the performance of the self (an “I” that is not “I”) bothers the poet in his own writing as well as in contemporary literature. To survive trauma is to behold the miracle of the everyday. How can he—or anyone—write of that trauma that has turned into comedy, as comedy is all that is left in the tragedy of war and immense loss?
As he writes, “Every minute the spectacle of the world astonishes [the speaker]” as we imagine him fussing over cutting onions with a teary eye, squeezing lemon into its bitter juice, and preparing various types of sauces. I love how the speaker sees these trifles as worthy of our touch and gaze.
A Poetic State
Czeslaw Milosz
Translated by the author & Robert Hass
As if I were given a reversed telescope instead of eyes, the world
moves away and everything grows smaller, people, streets, trees,
but they do not lose their distinctness, are condensed.
In the past I had such moments writing poems, so I know distance,
disinterested contemplation, putting on an 'I,' which is not 'I,' but
now it is like that constantly and I ask myself what it means,
whether I have entered a permanent poetic state.
Things once difficult are easy, but I feel no strong need to com-
municate them in writing.
Now I am in good health, where before I was sick because time
galloped and I was tortured by fear of what would happen next.
Every minute the spectacle of the world astonishes me; it is so
comic that I cannot understand how literature could expect to cope
with it.
Sensing affliction every minute, in my flesh, by my touch, I tame it
and do not ask God to avert it, for why should He avert it from me
if He does not avert it from others?
I dreamt that I found myself on a narrow ledge over the water
where large sea fish were moving. I was afraid I would fall if I looked
down, so I turned, gripped with my fingers at the roughness of the
stone wall, and moving slowly, with my back to the sea, I reached
a safe place.
I was impatient and easily irritated by time lost on trifles among
which I ranked cleaning and cooking. Now, attentively, I cut
onions, squeeze lemons and prepare various kinds of sauces.
Berkeley, 1977
