Czesław Miłosz 시 "Cafe"

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Edward Hirsch, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart 에서 (10)

 

Many of Miłosz's friends and fellow poets died during the Nazi occupation, especially the Warsaw Uprising. an extensive though ultimately unsuccessful attepmt waged by the Polish underground resistance to liberate Warsaw from the Germans in the summer of 1944. All his early war and post-war poems are haunted by survivor's guilt.

 

Cafe (첫째 연과 마지막 넷째 연)

By Czesław Miłosz

 

Of those at the table in the cafe

where on winter noons a garden of frost glittered on windowpanes

I alone survived.

I could go in there if I wanted to

and drumming my fingers in a chilly void

convoke shadows.

 

Sometimes when the evening aurora paints the roofs in a poor street

and I contemplate the sky, I see in the white clouds

a table wobbling. The waiter whirls with his tray

and they look at me with a burst of laughter

for I still don't know what it is to die at the hand of man,

they know -- they know it well.

Warsaw, 1944

 

 

Czesław Miłosz