A POET REMEMBERS, FRUITFULLY.

Milosz's ABCs
By Czeslaw Milosz
Translated by Madeline Levine
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $24, 312 pp.

This little book, by the Nobel Prize-winning poet, is a remarkable testament to the place of memory in the definition of a conscious self. Set in abecedarian form, this collection of precis, short essays, observations, and close descriptions of the minutiae of cataclysmic change is arranged by the totally arbitrary place that a keyword gives each entry on an alphabetical string.

Czelsaw Milosz was born in 1911 in Polish Lithuania, then subject to Russia. Several years later, at the outbreak of World War I, his family moved to Wilno, where Milosz lived until 1936, when he moved to Warsaw. Though born a Lithuanian, maybe even a Russian, Milosz has always considered himself Polish.

The first entry is for a fellow Lithuanian Pole, Ludwik Abramowicz, who from the early years of the twentieth century published, as a labor of love for Polish-speaking Lithuanians, a small journal, the Wilno Review. The concluding entry is for Tomasz Zan, a prominent figure in the city where Milosz spent his childhood and youth. Beyond the use of these two figures as a kind of envelope, there is little or no structural arrangement to the entries apart from the simple fact that they are an assortment of recollections of one life. Yet, in reading through the book, it becomes obvious that the Wilno Review of Ludwik Abramowicz and the library named to commemorate the generosity of Tomasz Zan were both major formative influences in Milosz's early years, providing him with a community of intellectual comfort in truly desperate times.

Between these two entries is a cornucopia of persons and places, some trivial, some well-known, some so tangential as to be mystifying except for their importance to the author's life. How can a reader possibly be engaged by such seemingly parochial considerations? The answers are multiple.

First, while some people chronicled here do not loom large on the contemporary horizon, they are representative of the human spirit in the context of its mingled aspirations, frustrations, and grubby reality. Second, there is the writer's view of the dead and of memory. Following the last alphabetical entry is an envoi reflecting on the place of memory and its persistence as it relates to Milosz's conviction about how life continues after death, and that the spirits of the dead retain an interest in the affairs of those still alive. For Milosz, the world is inhabited by all these people who suffered and struggled to survive in times that were deeply and profoundly troubled. Like the literary and heroic characters of Orpheus, Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante before him, Milosz has realized that there is no understanding the present until one makes a perilous descent into an underworld of memory, first to placate and then to query those gone before.

Milosz's recollection of selected details of the last bloody century is anything but the charming reminiscence of an old man or the indulgence of a regressive nostalgia. In his Nobel lecture, seventy years after his birth, Milosz said: "Those who are alive receive a mandate from those who are silent forever. They can fulfill their duties only by trying to reconstruct precisely things as they were and by wrestling the past from fictions and legends."

At the same time, Milosz is careful to note the treachery of memory and he hesitates to regard his own memory as definitive. But what he remembers is, now, all that he has.

It is interesting to notice that of the people he knew as friends, and those he knew only by reading their work, the amount of space given to each can be disproportionate to the roles they played in his life. For example, he mentions Thomas Merton but only in passing while discussing the achievement of Jacques Maritain. Though he may have met Maritain while still in Poland, it was with Merton that he corresponded regularly and at some length through the last decade of Merton's life.

On the other hand, he devotes a large entry to Denise Levertov whom he met at a very delightful dinner in Greenwich Village. Later they became close friends, corresponding extensively by letter and telephone, as well as the occasional visit, until her death.

Like Odysseus gone down to Hades seeking news of home, Milosz has put himself at risk of considerable pain in remembering and recounting his own experience and the experience of those gone before him. Thus these shadowy figures are given a share of his life and they come, now, bearing a saving history that becomes the lifeblood of a man approaching the end of his own life. He will never be free of the past just as the past now will never be free of him. In this book, the events of history become experience and, finally, art as Milosz turns the memory of experience back to elucidate the event.

In crafting this work, as the two brief entries "truth" and "time" eloquently suggest, a life shaped by the terror of political instability and institutionalized brutality relentlessly goes on seeking that order which is the natural desire of every human mind.

Harold Isbell is the translator of Ovid: Heroides (Penguin).