1911–2004
a p enguin since 1980
Czesław Miłosz
Rescue
Translated by Czesław Miłosz, Lillian Vallee, Renata Gorczynski, Robert Hass, Louis Iribarne, David Brooks, Anthony Miłosz, John Carpenter, Madeline Levine
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‘Ocalenie’ (‘Rescue’) first published in Polish in 1945 and ‘Traktat poetycki’ (‘A Treatise on Poetry’) in 1957
New and Collected Poems 1931–2001 published in Great Britain by Allen Lane the Penguin Press 2001
This volume published in Penguin Classics 2025 001
Copyright © Czesław Miłosz Royalties Inc., 1988, 1991, 1995, 2002
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ISBN : 978–0–241–75239–5
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Ballad of Levallois
– barracks for the unemployed in Levallois-Perret, 1935
O God, have mercy on Levallois, Look under these chestnut trees poisoned with smoke,
Give a moment of joy to the weak and the drunk, O God, have mercy on Levallois.
All day long they stole and cursed, Now they lie in their bunks and lick their wounds, And while the darkness thickens over Paris They hide their faces in their thieving hands.
O God, have mercy on Levallois.
They followed your commandment every day: They harvested wheat, tore coal from the earth. And often they drenched themselves in their brothers’ blood
Murmuring the names of Jesus and Mary.
Their insane jabber welled from the taverns. That was their song in your praise. They perished in mines, in the snow, in the heat, In mud and the depths of the seas.
It was they who lifted you above themselves, Their hands sculpted your face.
So deign to look on your faithful priests, Give them the joys of table and bed.
Take from them the stigmas of illness and sin. Set them free. Lead them into Sodom. Let them adorn their houses with garlands. Let them learn how to live and die more lightly.
Darkness. Silence. A bridge hums in the distance.
The wind streams through Cain’s trees.
On the void of the earth, on the human tribe
No mercy, no mercy on Levallois.
Wilno, 1936
Encounter
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.
And suddenly a hare ran across the road. One of us pointed to it with his hand.
That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive, Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.
O my love, where are they, where are they going The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.
Wilno, 1936
A Book in the Ruins
A dark building. Crossed boards, nailed up, create A barrier at the entrance, or a gate
When you go in. Here, in the gutted foyer, The ivy snaking down the walls is wire
Dangling. And over there the twisted metal
Columns rising from the undergrowth of rubble Are tattered tree trunks. This could be the brick
Of the library, you don’t know yet, or the sick Grove of dry white aspen where, stalking birds, You met a Lithuanian dusk stirred
From its silence only by the wails of hawks.
Now walk carefully. You see whole blocks
Of ceiling caved in by a recent blast. And above, through jagged tiers of plaster,
A patch of blue. Pages of books lying
Scattered at your feet are like fern-leaves hiding
A moldy skeleton, or else fossils
Whitened by the secrets of Jurassic shells.
A remnant life so ancient and unknown
Compels a scientist, tilting a stone
Into the light, to wonder. He can’t know
Whether it is some dead epoch’s shadow
Or a living form. He looks again
At chalk spirals eroded by the rain,