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ROBERT PINSKY: With armed conflict and suffering and evidence of atrocity
in the news this April, which is also poetry month, an old question
emerges again: What use or relevance does poetry have in the face of
large-scale political disaster or evil? The Polish poet, Ceslav Milos,
who survived the Nazi occupation of Poland, has said that in those days
even the most tinted person by carrying in a pocket some poetry in the
Polish language could register a small, stubborn particle of resistance.
And in his poem "Incantation" Milos gives a bold, resonating
answer to the question of poetry's significance. As the title "Incantation"
suggests, the poem is a kind of prayer, less a description of the world
as it is at any moment than the world as it will be or as it is at some
ultimate core. Here is the poem in an English version that I made with
the author.
INCANTATION
(Czeslaw Milosz)
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
It is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo,
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit,
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
--Czeslaw Milosz, trans. Robert Pinsky & the author
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