A happy little boy, youthfully sprightful, the bright and serene soul visible through his skin.

The photograph comes from the eighteen sixties, and now I, in my old age, join that child at his play.

By a familiar lake into which he is now throwing pebbles, under ash trees that were to find their way into my poems.

The Kunats were ranked with the Calvinist gentry, which I snobbishly note down, since in our Lithuania Calvinists were counted among the most enlightened.

The family changed their denomination to Roman Catholic late, around 1800, yet I have not preserved any image of my grandfather in a pew at Swientobrosc.

He never spoke evil of priests though, nor departed in anything from accepted norms of behavior.

A student at the Main School in Warsaw, he danced at balls and studied the books of the epoch of positivism.

He took seriously calls for "organic work" and for that reason established in Szetejnie a workshop for the manufacture of cloth, which is why I used to play in rooms full of presses for fulling.

He was exquisitely polite to everyone, great and small, rich and poor, and had the gift of listening with attention to everyone.

Oscar Milosz, who met him in Kaunas in 1922, called him "un gentilhomme français du dixhuitieme siecle," a French gentleman of the eighteenth century.

The external polish did not tell the whole story, underneath he was hiding wisdom and genuine goodness.

Meditating on my hereditary flaws, I have moments of relief any time I think of my grandfather; I had to have taken something from him, so I cannot be completely worthless.

He was called a "Lithuanizer" and did he not build a school in Legmedis and pay for a Lithuanian teacher?

Everyone liked him, Poles, Lithuanians and Jews, he was held in esteem by neighboring villages?

Those villages which were, a few years after his death, deported to Siberia, so that now in their place there is only an empty plain.

Among all books he liked best the memoirs of Jakub Gieysztor, for they described in detail our valley of Niewiaza between Kiejdany and Krakinowo.

They did not interest me in my youth; all my attention was directed toward the future.

Now I read those memoirs avidly, for I have learned the value of the names of localities, turns in the road, hills, and ferries on the river.

How much one must appreciate the province, the home and dates and traces of bygone people.

A Californian wanderer, I have kept a talisman: a photograph of the hill in Swientobrosc where, under the oaks, my grandfather Kunat is buried, and my great grandfather Szymon Syruc, and his wife Eufrozyna.

Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass