Poet as Mediator: Milosz and Local Memory
Czeslaw Milosz perceived the loss of local belonging, displacement and uprootedness as one of the crucial problems and experiences of a modern individual. He many times underlined his own attachment to the obscure and far-away native provinces, his lost places of origin as a necessary cure to the futility of modern imagination, and stated that the full emancipation of an individual from the concrete place leads to artistic and intellectual mimicry (The Roadside Dog). However, the symbolic return to the sense of place is a very complicated act for a modern self, especially in the situation of exile, and in Milosz‘s texts this effort turned into constant search for a specific formula of mediation between the individual identity and the identity of place. In his own biography and writing the problem of return to a concrete locality was largely connected with the ongoing attempts to revisit his native country – first in literary work, especially in the famous novel The Issa Valley and the long poems City Without a Name and The Rising of the Sun; after 1990, in the late period of life, Milosz’s return to Lithuania also took place in reality, resulting in late poetical cycles and essays about the experience of re-entering one’s original place. These texts attest to the specific understanding of poet’s or narrator’s position: the dialogical mediation between his own personal memory and the deeply perceived personality of the place. Because of that attitude, in twentieth-century European poetry Milosz imparted original meaning to the concept of human geography that is increasingly important for the humanities at present.
