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City Without a Name: Postscript 1986
| Article
# : |
11618 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
3,482 Words |
| Author
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Lillian Vallee
Lillian Vallee is a well-known translator of Polish
literature. Most recently, she has worked on several volumes
of Witold Gombrowicz's Diary and Adam Zagajewski's Solidarity,
Solitude. She teaches literature at Merced College. |
I.
I praise the words
that link us stronger than chains.
- Siamanto
In June 1977, after spending the academic year in Poland, I found myself aboard a train laboring through the Polish countryside and over the eastern border in the direction of the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. It is difficult to doubt the power of a poetry that impels one halfway around the world as surely as if the word were a bowstring. One of the more apparent reasons for the trip to modern-day Vilnius (known to Poles as Wilno, to Jews as Vil'na) was the compelling presence of this city in the slim volumes of poetry entitled The Separate Notebooks and Bells in Winter. In the latter, in Czeslaw Milosz's opus "From the Rising of the Sun," the poet describes
My city, in a valley among wooded hills
Under a fortified castle at the meeting of two rivers,
which
Was famous for its ornate temples:
Churches, Catholic and Orthodox, synagogues and mosques.
The old capital of the grand duchy of Lithuania, the city was a cultural crossroads between East and West, a home to Poles, Lithuanians, Byelorussians, Jews,
... (1994 of 19605 Characters)
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