A Song on Porcelain

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In many responses to the first days of the second Trump Presidency—expressions of an outrage denied the refuge of surprise—a historical analogy recurs: Is this how it felt to be a progressive liberal in Weimar Germany on January 30, 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor?

No analogy is perfect, but a different historical moment feels, to me, more immediate and more challenging as a reference point.

Czesław Miłosz’s prose book “The Captive Mind,” first published in 1953 (in a translation by Jane Zielonko), still in print and as authoritative as ever, is a clinically observed, intimately first-person account of how Polish poets and novelists—people who had lived through the Nazi occupation—dealt with the Stalinist regime that began after the Allied victory in the Second World War.

Some of those writers and intellectuals allowed themselves to become agents of the regime, not despite their gifts but because of them. Under the ordinary pressures of daily life in bad circumstances, imagination and an informed sense of history can become tools for rationalization. In Poland, the capricious degrees and forms of oppression, reflecting Stalin’s murderous personality, fostered a vacillating, self-deceptive kind of surrender by the captive mind, imprisoned not by bars or walls but by its own failures of conviction.

It’s unlikely that many American writers and academics will soon become servants of a right-wing bureaucracy. But, in a dispirited time, can we maintain our best values in publishing and academic life without self-justification and temporizing? And, just as important, can the very act of resistance enfeeble the imagination? Miłosz’s clarity about such questions is inspiring, all the more so because his situation in the Poland of 1947 was so extreme. For us, the immediate menace, as we face horrible possibilities in the realms of media and education, may be not captivity but discouragement, a word that may seem too mild, but whose root meaning is heart-lacking—and that, I think, describes this literally dreadful moment.

In those early years after the war, the heart went out of many Polish writers. The national culture that had nurtured them, a tradition they had worked to extend and embody, seemed to have contained the seeds of its own violent catastrophe. In a central example, Polish society had harbored a binary distinction—Jew and not Jew—that had been resisted but never defeated, and, of course, it turned out to be lethal beyond imagining. Antisemitism had broken all bounds in the historical, suicidal derangement of European culture. The Stalinism that defines the world of “The Captive Mind” was, indeed, cause for discouragement or heart failure.

In those years, Czesław Miłosz did not know what he was doing, either in his tentative, uneasy writing or in his life. He was still, unhappily, a cultural attaché at the Polish Embassy in Washington. There were reasons for him to continue his life in his country under the puppet government, and there were reasons to choose exile. In 1947, in this period of self-doubt and uncertainty, he wrote “Song on Porcelain,” a poem about the postwar landscape. An actual, physical landscape in this poem represents the postwar cultural terrain, where what was once finest had destroyed itself by surrendering to brutality. Whereas “The Captive Mind” reflects on the failings of individual gifted people, this poem dares to reflect, indirectly, on Europe itself, and the traditional goods of its culture.

In the nineteen-eighties, when Miłosz and I were friends and colleagues at Berkeley, I wrote this English version, based on a quick prose translation he gave me:

Song on Porcelain

Rosecolored cup and saucer,
Flowery demitasses:
You lie beside the river
Where an armored column passes.
Winds from across the meadow
Sprinkle the banks with down;
A torn apple tree’s shadow
Falls on the muddy path;
The ground everywhere is strewn
With bits of brittle froth—
Of all things broken and lost
Porcelain troubles me most.

Before the first red tones
Begin to warm the sky
The earth wakes up, and moans
At the small sad cry
Of cups and saucers cracking,
The masters’ precious dream
Of roses, of mowers raking
And shepherds on the lawn.
The black underground stream
Swallows the frozen swan.
This morning, as I walked past
The porcelain troubled me most.

The blackened plain spreads out
To where the horizon blurs
In a litter of handle and spout,
A lifelike pulp that stirs
And crunches under my feet.
Pretty, useless foam:
Your stained colors are sweet,
Spattered in dirty waves
Flecking the fresh black loam
In the mounds of these new graves.
In sorrow and pain and cost,
Sir, porcelain troubles me most.

The graves, the armored column, the delicate colors in the exquisite, fragile substance of porcelain—the “masters’ precious dream” of a civilization, the ancient, elegant fantasy of the pastoral—all descend like the “frozen swan” into the “black underground stream.” The tanks going about their business pass a deadening scene of memory and oblivion, loss and recurrence. (As to recurrence, the former K.G.B. man Vladimir Putin and the former Young Communist Viktor Orbán, both Trump allies, would have been familiar types to Miłosz.) The porcelain, stained and shattered nearly beyond recognition, embodies Miłosz’s native culture, and, by implication, the language in which his poetry lives: Can he, or should he, turn away from it?

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