Czeslaw Milosz, "Campo de' Fiori" (1943)

The Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz

A friend we toured with in Rome a couple of years ago sent us this poem, "Campo de' Fiori."  We were unfamiliar with the poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and with this poem, which is one of his better known pieces.  Milosz was born in Lithuania (1911) but lived in Poland and wrote poems and prose in Polish (the poem is translated). He spent World War II in Warsaw, then under a Nazi-imposed government.  Strongly anti-Communist, Milosz defected to the West in 1951 and became a U.S. citizen in 1970.  He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.

As Milosz has explained, the poem was not written inside the Warsaw ghetto, but it was written in Warsaw in 1943, not long before the 1944 uprising against the Nazis and the subsequent deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to extermination camps.

In this poem, Milosz describes a moment in the history of the Campo de' Fiori in order to understand the horrific events in wartime Warsaw.  The heretic mathematician and astronomer Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo de' Fiori in 1600, the victim of the Catholic Church and a "mob" mentality, but in Milosz's poem it's as if the event barely happened: "Before the flames had died the taverns were full again," he writes. Something similar--something that reminds us of our inhumanity--he suggests, happened to Warsaw's Jews, who went to their deaths as "the crowds were laughing on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday."

 Bill

      Campo de' Fiori

                 By Czeslaw Milosz

                 Translated by Louis Iribarne

In Rome on the Campo de' Fiori

baskets of olives and lemons,

cobbles spattered with wine

and the wreckage of flowers.

Vendors cover the trestles

Statue of Giordano Bruno, Campo de' Fiori

with rose-pink fish;

armfuls of dark grapes

heaped on peach-down.

On this same square

they burned Giordano Bruno.

Henchmen kindled the pyre

close-pressed by the mob.

Before the flames had died                                

the taverns were full again,

baskets of olives and lemons

again on the vendors' shoulders.                          

I thought of the Campo de' Fiori

in Warsaw by the sky-carousel

one clear spring evening

to the strains of a carnival tune.

The bright melody drowned

the salvos from the ghetto wall,

and couples were flying

high in the cloudless sky.

At times wind from the burning

would drift dark kites along

and riders on the carousel

caught petals in midair.

That same hot wind

blew open the skirts of the girls

and the crowds were laughing

on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

Someone will read as moral

that the people of Rome or Warsaw

haggle, laugh, make love

as they pass by the martyrs' pyres.



Someone else will read

of the passing of things human,                                    

of the oblivion

born before the flames have died.

But that day I thought only

of the loneliness of the dying,

of how, when Giordano

climbed to his burning

he could not find

in any human tongue

words for mankind,

mankind who live on.

Already they were back at their wine

or peddled their white starfish,

baskets of olives and lemons

they had shouldered to the fair,

and he already distanced

as if centuries had passed

while they paused just a moment

for his flying in the fire.

Those dying here, the lonely

forgotten by the world,

our tongue becomes for them

the language of an ancient planet.

Until, when all is legend

and many years have passed,

on a new Campo de' Fiori

rage will kindle at a poet's word.