Nie traktat, a traktat wierszem...

Natalia Gorbaniewska, an acclaimed translator of Polish literature into Russian, remembers her first meeting with Miłosz in Paris, and the reading of Traktat poetycki [Treatise on Poetry], which for her became a real translator’s challenge. The memory, in this case, becomes a pretext for a discussion of the genre characteristic of the Treatise, and of the melody of Miłosz’s language and the literary tradition, which makes it possible to understand his poems.