A Song on Porcelain
Second ReadCzesław Miłosz lost his homeland to a Stalinist regime. What have we Americans valued in our own cultural past that might now feel lost or troubling?By Robert PinskyJanuary 30, 2025Photograph by Dan Saelinger / Trunk ArchiveIn 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.The Best Books of 2024Discover the year’s essential reads in fiction and nonfiction.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 PorcelainRosecolored cup and saucer,Flowery demitasses:You lie beside the riverWhere an armored column passes.Winds from across the meadowSprinkle the banks with down;A torn apple tree’s shadowFalls on the muddy path;The ground everywhere is strewnWith bits of brittle froth—Of all things broken and lostPorcelain troubles me most.Before the first red tonesBegin to warm the skyThe earth wakes up, and moansAt the small sad cryOf cups and saucers cracking,The masters’ precious dreamOf roses, of mowers rakingAnd shepherds on the lawn.The black underground streamSwallows the frozen swan.This morning, as I walked pastThe porcelain troubled me most.The blackened plain spreads outTo where the horizon blursIn a litter of handle and spout,A lifelike pulp that stirsAnd crunches under my feet.Pretty, useless foam:Your stained colors are sweet,Spattered in dirty wavesFlecking the fresh black loamIn the mounds of these new graves.In sorrow and pain and cost,Sir, porcelain troubles me most.The graves, the armored column, t
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.
Discover the year’s essential reads in fiction and nonfiction.
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:
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?
The ambivalence of the troubled poet watching an armored column pass over fresh graves is illustrated by a later, lighter anecdote. Driving to New York from Washington, where he was still attached to the Embassy of the People’s Republic, Miłosz stopped en route to seek advice from the smartest man in the world. In Princeton, New Jersey, he presented his quandary to Albert Einstein: to stay in Poland, enduring the oppressive Russian-dictated regime, or to become an exile?
Einstein, demonstrating how even the most sophisticated, original minds reflect their own experience—Einstein, who had been subject to forced expulsion from his own native culture—told Miłosz that one must avoid losing one’s homeland. The poet did not follow the great thinker’s advice. In “The Captive Mind,” he treats his decision to leave the People’s Republic for the West (first Paris, then Berkeley) not as heroic but as an instinctive action of survival and sacrifice.
In his introduction, Miłosz writes of socialist realism that “it forbids what in every age has been the writer’s essential task—to look at the world from his own independent viewpoint, to tell the truth as he sees it, and so to keep watch and ward in the interest of society as a whole.” Of his own choice, he notes,
Imagination, in other words, is a capacity both visceral and rational. Its gaze is not always lofty—it may feel right, and make sense, to look down at the mud. Among many things broken and lost, imagination’s “independent viewpoint,” with its mission to “watch and ward in the interest of society,” may be most “troubled” by a foam of porcelain in the muddy wake of a tank.
Czesław Miłosz found in himself the heart to give up the terrain of his mother tongue, and to keep writing poems in Polish. For many years, his work was unavailable in Poland, his name not even mentioned in official reference books. He found the stubborn courage to confront that sort of erasure, personal and national. The self-confidence of that European culture at its best was now tragically “broken and lost.”
I ask myself, at this bad political moment, what have we Americans confidently valued in our own cultural past that might now feel broken or lost or troubling? Not the social harmony evoked by pastoral images of happy shepherds and leisure-class courtship, elegantly depicted in the cultivated, breakable medium of porcelain. But maybe a different dream of harmony, a literal-minded, utilitarian righteousness, an easy, almost evangelical can-do determination to make everything right? A debased form of Whitmanian optimism?
Decades ago, when my English rendering of “Song on Porcelain” was new, I read it aloud at a bookstore event in Berkeley. With the customary expressiveness of Bay Area audiences, somebody hissed at the poem. That person, I’ll guess, would have preferred Miłosz to say in his poem that what troubled him most was mass murder, or antisemitism, or the bombing of Dresden, Warsaw, Hiroshima. Fair enough, and a good or great poem might do that. I object not to the judgment in that reflexive hiss but to its mere righteousness, that unreflecting, almost totalitarian quality of innocence—so naïvely high-minded, so confidently habitual as a cultural gesture, that it doesn’t know it is dictatorial.
I don’t remember whether Miłosz was present to hear his poem hissed. He may have been. Beyond any doubt, his response would have been laughter—not surprise. He had been banned and exiled and he had lived through two powerful dictatorships, and his heart was in the work ahead of him: troubled but undiscouraged. ♦
