Straszne obłoki. O dwóch wierszach Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza i Czesława Miłosza
Dreadful Clouds. On Two Poems by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Czesław Miłosz

Summary/Abstract: During the early 1930s Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, entangled in a thick web of friendly and amorous relationships designated both by his wife and Karol Szymanowski, Józef Rajnfeld or Czesław Miłosz, created Lato 1932 (Summer 1932), a multi-hued portrait of human existence plotted on pages of poems and stories. Here not only assorted spaces merge, but various forms of being overlap, and even the division into the sacred and the profane becomes invalidated.Harmony with Iwaszkiewicz’s poetry is discernible most vividly in two poems by Czesław Miłosz: Posąg małżonków (Statue of a Couple) and Obłoki (Clouds), written in the autumn or winter of 1935, when Miłosz returned from Paris (where he was on a scholarship) to Wilno to confront an unsolved love affair. Just as in Lato 1932 two dearest persons become separated by an impassable distance created by misunderstanding, and resemble the banks of a still, lifeless stream shrouded by night time and doomed to never meet again. We come across a genuine, direct dialogue with Iwaszkiewicz predominantly in Obłoki, a poem which Marian Stala described exactly a quarter of a century ago: “Without those thirteen verses the oeuvre of the author of Trzy zimy (Three Winters) would have been poorer due to the absence of an essential albeit elusive tone. I cannot envisage Milosz’s poetry without Obłoki – just as I am incapable of imagining the poetry of Mickiewicz with his poem: Nad wodą wielką i czystą (Above Water Vast and Pure)”.

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