|
| ||
|
Milosz at 90 Two new collections show why many call him the greatest living poet Reviewed by Cynthia L. Haven |
Sunday, October 28, 2001
|
|
|
| ||
New and Collected Poems 1931-2001 By Czeslaw Milosz ECCO; 774 PAGES; $45To Begin Where I Am Selected Essays By Czeslaw Milosz, edited and with an introduction by Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX; 454 PAGES; $25Czeslaw Milosz's "New and Collected Poems" and "To Begin Where I Am," a collection of his previously published essays, could not have hit the bookstores at a better time. Perhaps now, more than ever, we can appreciate Milosz's penetrating sense of the transience of butterflies, books, trees, people, civilizations. A Weltanschauung that only a few months ago would have seemed absurdly remote and exotic to the American experience -- vanished cities and empires; criminal mass destruction and the psychic demolition it entails -- is suddenly urgent and palpable. But, almost incredible as it is to say, that would be selling him short: What for others would be the focus of an entire oeuvre -- "Atrocity has always lurked just below the surface of our daily hustle and bustle, our habits, social organizations, phrases, smiles" -- is, for this extraordinary Nobel laureate, only one movement of a lifetime symphony, for Milosz seeks spiritual ends behind the rubble we know as history. The 90-year-old Polish poet, in his most recent poems, looks at us from the other end of a long and profound life, where "Old age clings to my feet like dense pitch" and "Every day I, myself a shadow, enter more deeply among shadows"; he's "like someone in a window who draws aside a curtain/ To look at a feast he does not comprehend." It's a little-traveled road (poetic production notoriously dwindles with age), and there are few precedents. Whitman's "Sands at Seventy" comes to mind; Whitman, like his Lithuanian-born counterpart, might have confessed humbly at life's end that he was "Saved by his amazement, eternal and divine." Reading page after page of the remarkable new poems in "New and Collected," one gets the impression that Milosz the Magician, at an astonishingly late point in his life, is presenting us with yet another stupendous feat of prestidigitation. "Wherever I am, at whatever place on earth," he writes, "I hide from people the conviction that I'm not from here. It's as if I'd been sent, to extract as many colors, tastes, sounds, smells, to experience everything that is a man's share, to transpose what was felt into a magical register and carry it there, from whence I came." But then, Milosz has always lacked precedents. As a young poet, he escaped to Krakow after the failed Warsaw Uprising and joined the socialist resistance to the Nazis, then became a diplomat until Poland became "Stalinized." He defected in 1951 -- first to Paris, then to the United States, where he became a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Derek Walcott, yielding his own candidate, fellow Caribbean writer and Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, to champion Milosz for a prestigious Neustadt International Literary Prize in 1978, explained to fellow poet Joseph Brodsky, "The matter is not Eastern Europe, Nazism, the Holocaust, and so on . . . I like it when behind what I read, in poetry or in prose -- I hear a certain rumble. The rumble of the spheres, one may say. And in Naipaul I don't feel it, while in Milosz I do. " "New and Collected Poems" is rather a marvel, if not a miracle; it's nearly 250 pages longer than the "Collected" of 1988. "This," the 80-page capstone collection published in Poland last year, is luminous with life and living, a stunning, unforgettable series of poems and reflections, threaded with poems you will reread till the pages fall out. Take for one example, from his 1995 collection "Facing the River," a poem titled "To Mrs. Professor in Defense of My Cat's Honor and Not Only," in which Milosz decides, "Yes, undoubtedly they are innocent,/ Spiders, mantises, sharks, pythons,/ We are the only ones who say: cruelty." He concludes that, if God is in any way kindred to us, "He takes pity/ On every mauled mouse, every wounded bird./ Then the universe for him is like a Crucifixion." For Milosz, evil is the inevitable risk of consciousness; the end of man would mean "evil disappears from the world/ and consciousness with it . . ." The translations are seamless, comfortable, easy to read, sometimes even chatty. In fact, they sound rather like Robert Hass, the translator of most of the poems. This is not necessarily the overlay of translator on poet, but perhaps the influence of both on each other. They have been engaged in successful collaboration for 20 years, and Milosz has been unstinting in the praise of his translators, particularly Hass. Still, one wishes for an introduction that might have provided a compass to Milosz's prosody and perhaps the prosody of Polish poetry in general. The essays of "To Begin Where I Am" are a different kind of miracle; they are not to be read all at once, and they are not to be read once. They, too, form a remarkable body of work -- "a literature of witness" is the contemporary cliche. Unlike the limpid poetic translations of Robert Hass & Co. , however, the prose in translation is often obscure, the referents and references foggy. Much of Milosz's thinking here is a slap in the face to Western liberal thought, but one could take the bracing whack more effectively if the prose were clearer. But persistence is rewarded, and there is much in these pages to startle and provoke. In "Saligia," for example, Milosz gives a modern take on the deadly sin of "ira": "our own, familiar, twentieth-century anger turns simultaneously against institutions and against, once suspects, the very existence of anything at all." Milosz's discussion of Pasternak's much- maligned novel "Doctor Zhivago" is enlightening, and other essays provide underpinning on his masterwork, "Treatise on Poetry." The influence of Shestov, Weil, Jeffers and others on his thinking becomes more transparent. Elucidating notes on the essays are scant, and both notes and dates of publication are confusingly buried at the back of the book. Some essays cry out for the context of a brief introduction rather than glancing footnotes, such as when Milosz discusses Polish contemporaries. (Certainly the hints are intriguing: "It seems to me that there is a search for the line beyond which only a zone of silence exists, and that on the borderline we encounter Polish poetry.") "Extraordinary," "stunning," "remarkable." So often superlatives are the contagious hyperbole of dust-jacket copy. However, in this case, we are talking about the man who has been called the greatest living poet, and perhaps the greatest poet of our era. Well, here's another, to raise the stakes: In Milosz, we have a mahatma, although an unlikely one, in the face of his own admissions of sensuality, weakness, greed, even gluttony. Perhaps his very vices make him a sort of transcendent everyman. In any case, it is a blessing to be guided by someone who knows the territory ahead, a latter-day Virgil, in the disguise, perhaps, of a Sancho Panza. It's ridiculous to speak of this long-standing Nobel winner as a poet whose time has come. After all, every possible honor has been heaped on him, and yet it never has been more his time, even as his own, personal time draws to a close. Stanford writer Cynthia Haven reviews poetry for the Book Review. |
|