A new voice softly spoke

[No sólo ocurre en literatura: vistas en retrospectiva, las crisis que no nos mataron se ven desde lejos como momentos de tranformación. Los grilletes más fuertes están en la mente]

Pity, sympathy and anger gave that poetry directness. Despite the circumstances, and despite the images of ruins and destructions taken from my surroundings, it was a triumphal poetry. It celebrated the holiday of my coming into health, for the first time in my life. A recovery from that powerlessness when everything, both in the world and in us, is so obscure and tied up in knots that we lack the courage to be sharp, like a diamond cutting glass. I had written poems on 'social' themes and had been bothered by their artificiality. I had practised 'pure' poetry and had been no less irritated. Only now had the contradiction vanished. Now even the most personal poem translated a human situation and contained a streak of irony that made it objective. Something had gone on inside me after I admitte a brutal truth to myself: Poland's prewar society, which had shackled me with its subtle collective censorship, meant absolutely nothing to me, and I was indiferent to its latests pathetic and messianic embodiment. Virtue had gagged me up to then; one had to throw it off and proclaim that what appeared to be the end was not the end of either tradition or literature or art. I knew I had wasted years thrashing about blindly in some sort of quagmire. But finally I had worked myself out of it. To track down and root out of oneself all the vestiges of the past - what disruption and what temptation to regret! But also what purity of air, what nakedness, what readiness to face the future!

[Cezslaw MILOSZ 2010 Proud to be a Mammal. London: Penguin. Pg. 71]

[Foto del poeta en 1980, en el departamente de Berckley para el trabajó muchos años]