Translation as Talking to Oneself: Miłosz Makes Whitman Speak

In this paper, the author examines Czesław Miłosz’s poetic dialogue with Walt Whitman on the ambivalent status of the natural world and material existence. By translating Whitman’s poems and interspersing them among his own verses in the collection Unattainable Earth (Nieobjęta ziemia, 1984), Miłosz practices a peculiar form of poetic commentary or criticism, drawing attention to certain tensions within the work of his American predecessor. This tendentious form of dialogue between poets simultaneously intertwines with a conflict within Miłosz’s own poetics – as the Polish poet effectively argues with himself by proxy. The author plays close attention to Miłosz’s translation of Whitman’s “As I Ebb’d With the Ocean of Life,” pointing to several crucial distortions of its original meaning and context. This analysis opens the broader question of whether Miłosz’s poetry is truly hospitable to other voices or whether the dominant voice of the Miłoszean poetic subject inevitably subjugates or perverts them.