Our language, their language. Still on the variants of “Campo di Fiori”

Abstract

The article concerns a famous poem written in 1943 by Czesław Miłosz, dedicated to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The Campo di Fiori was published in many different versions. The article delivers a list of variants as well as an interpretation of alterations made by the poet. The alterations relate in the first place to the fragments in which there is found a language motive in connection with, fundamental to the whole poem, enstrangement motive. It is the interpretations of particular versions of the work by various critics that the article evokes in order to present consequences, which particular variants have for the total meaning of the poem. The article’s author persuades that Miłosz hesitated until the end as far as the wording of a fundamental verse from the end of the work: „Język nasz stał się im obcy”/ „Język nasz stał się im obcy” [translations by Louise Iribarne and David Brooks do not provide a precise rendering of those versions] is concerned. That hesitation reflects the difficulties the poet had in finding the means of expressing position instability of the Holocaust witness, whose attempts of suppressing the distance between himself and the dying are doomed to fail.