I.
I praise the words
that link us stronger than chains.
- Siamanto
In June 1977, after spending the academic year in Poland, I found myself aboard a train laboring through the Polish countryside and over the eastern border in the direction of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. It is difficult to doubt the power of a poetry that impels one halfway around the world as surely as if the word were a bowstring. One of the more apparent reasons for the trip to modern-day Vilnius (known to Poles as Wilno, to Jews as Vil'na) was the compelling presence of this city in the slim volumes of poetry entitled The Separate Notebooks and Bells in Winter. In the latter, in Czeslaw Milosz's opus "From the Rising of the Sun," the poet describes
My city, in a valley among wooded hills
Under a fortified castle at the meeting of two rivers,
which
Was famous for its ornate temples:
Churches, Catholic and Orthodox, synagogues and mosques.
The old capital of the grand duchy of Lithuania, the city was a cultural crossroads between East and West, a home to Poles, Lithuanians, Byelorussians, Jews, Karaites, Muslims, and Tartars. The architecture of the city reflected the coexistence of many ethnic groups and diverse religions.
Whenever Wilno appears in Milosz's poetry, his word seems quickened by shifts in rhythm, tone, a sudden stirring vibrato, muted chords of reined despair, gentle humor; the poetic voice moves and catalogues in anguished lament, open affection, and unbounded amazement. With its profound resonance of attachment and helplessness ("Who will honor the city without a name"), the voice resurrects the city, its streets shops, and inhabitants in contours made sharp by irretrievable loss:
It stands before me, ready, not even the smoke from one chimney is lacking, not one echo, when I step across the rivers that separate us.
In his Nobel lecture, Milosz expresses gratitude for "certain things which protect people from internal disintegration and from yielding to tyranny.” Among the network of positive formative influences was the city of Wilno itself, where Milosz spent his boyhood and early adulthood:
It is good in childhood to hear words of Latin liturgy, to translate Ovid in high school, to receive good training in Roman Catholic dogmatic and apologetics. It is blessing if one receives from fate school and university studies in such a city as Wilno. A bizarre city of baroque architecture transplanted to northern forests and of history fixed in every stone, a city of forty Roman Catholic churches and of numerous synagogues. In those days the Jews called it the Jerusalem of the North. Only when teaching in America did I fully realize how much I had absorbed from the thick
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