Język, cierpienie, milczenie. Czesław Miłosz a poezja Geoffreya Hilla

Language, Suffering, Silence. Czesław Miłosz and the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill’s prose writings contain one or two references to Czeslaw Miłosz, in which the Polish poet is heavily and unfairly criticized. Hill bases his criticism on a short fragment, taken out of context, from Jane Zielonko’s translation of The Captive Mind. No reference is made to any other of Miłosz’s writings, although a considerable number of them are available in English. This article considers how some signifi cant departures from the original in Zielonko’s translation combine with a most surprising disregard on Hill’s part not only for the “contexture” of Miłosz’s huge oeuvre, but also even for The Captive Mind as a whole, to lead to an unjust and distorted understanding of Miłosz’s moral and poetic outlook. The misunderstanding is all the more remarkable given the very many similarities between the two poets, especially in regard to the question of the “immorality of art” and to what Donald Davie describes as “the insuffi ciency of lyric”. The article compares Hill’s attitude to the translated text and to Miłosz’s oeuvre unfavourably with that of Davie, who is much more cautious in his judgments.