“Reading Miłosz: The Short Course”
Six winter 2022 Thursdays to consider the poetry of Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004), Lithuanian-born poet, novelist, lawyer, diplomat, Berkeley professor of Slavic languages, and Nobelist.
Guide: Robert Hass, poet, teacher, Poet Laureate of the United States (1995-1997), and one of the translators of Miłosz’s poetry into English.
Host: Jesse Nathan, poet, Berkeley lecturer in English, and interlocutor for Robert Hass’s Paris Review interview (“The Art of Poetry” 108, Issue 233, Summer 2020).
Class I: Thursday, 20 January
Nearly two hundred impressively well-read souls, from locations as far-flung as Taiwan, Oaxaca, and Australia, signed up to take this unusual online course: A survey of English translations for a single poet, the native Polish speaker Czesław Miłosz (one of the world’s most revered poets of the twentieth century) under the tutelage of Robert Hass, a Bay-Area neighbor and friend of Miłosz’s who eventually served his fellow poet as a translator. The Community of Writers developed the course and administers it
It was a coup to enlist Bob Hass as the class's Virgil, because it was Bob, himself a brilliant poet, who may have done more than anyone else to make Milosz's poetry accessible to English-speaking readers. Working closely with Milosz, Hass translated the verse of the older poet despite his own lack of Polish beyond a battered copy of McLaughlin’s Polish-English dictionary, excursions into Google, and occasional Mayday calls to Polish-speaking colleagues. Periodically humbled by Miłosz’s ironclad preferences for a different approach, the American poet's ego had to muster its capacity for resilience.
Czesław Miłosz: New and Collected Poems 1931—2001 (Ecco) is the course's point of departure for extended reports of such disputes as over whether the narrating I is waiting “peacefully” or “quietly,” disputes that, in Bob’s accounts of them, sound as if they were never less than courteous yet also never less than everything. As Robert Pinsky, working on one of the translations with Bob, put it, the problem with the translation at hand was that, in English, “cabbage” and “grass” don’t rhyme.
Since most of the students would not be able to read the poems in the original Polish, the subjects of discussion are the poems of Czesław Miłosz as filtered through the voices of Hass, Pinsky, and other translators, as well as the English voice of Miłosz. Bob provides personal backstories and he and Jesse Nathan fill in aspects of Miłosz’s biography and of Polish history. Along the way, Bob drops hints as to the formal elements of the poems in Polish: Are the stanzas rhymed? Metered? Are the three-liners related to Dante’s terza rima? Apparently, Miłosz took a dim view of analyzing poetry for its inherited forms. As Bob puts it, “He says form in poetry is like refrigeration—meant to preserve bad meat.” I suppose the fact that a poet with this attitude toward form still managed to produce poetry that never sounds disorganized is part of the proof of his innate magic. And I suppose the fact that the odd Miłosz line can strike some as “Sexist!" just goes to show that even the steeds of Apollo can stumble sometimes. The line in question is the last of this stanza, from “Dedication,” a poem written in the winter of 1945. The stanza is introduced by two of the most cherished lines in the Miłosz treasury, lines that elevated him on the Starlight Express directly to Olympus:
“What is poetry which does not save
Nations or people?
A connivance with official lies,
A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment,
Readings for sophomore girls.”
Before anyone gets hot under the collar about the sophomore girls, you might want to secure a hazmat suit to read the little cantata “The Song,” written in 1934, when Miłosz was barely twenty-three. “The Song” dramatizes humanity, represented by a figure called “Woman,” as remembering her lesbian “Nights of love” with the Earth, her “tranquil sister,” whose “burning touch” can still be felt, and from whose “greedy mouth” the Woman cries to God to “have mercy. . .deliver me, / cleanse me of her untrue songs.”
If you detect a religious note here (and I am among those who do), it might be helpful to know that, as Bob observed, both he and Miłosz were imbued from childhood with the catechism of the Catholic Church, in which they were reared. As a Jew, I probably miss a lot of nuance in their poetry; still, I associate the catechism with an adherent’s pursuit of spiritual perfection and, at times, a sense of great sadness, even, perhaps, guilt, when perfection cannot be found in one’s being. I feel the search—and the lament—quite strongly in the poems of Miłosz. Here, in “The Song,” it is an abstract quality: “Oh, if there were in me one seed without rust, / no more than one grain that could perdure / I could sleep in the cradle leaning by turns/ now into darkness, now into the break of day.”
In a poem from Warsaw, in 1943—when, as Bob related, Miłosz and his friends stood on a balcony, in a beautiful, sweet-scented night, when flowering plants made it feel good to be alive, yet when the air was rent and seared by the screams of thousands of Jews being slaughtered in the ghetto by the Nazis—the poet creates “a guardian mole [who] makes his way, / With a small red lamp fastened to his forehead.” He goes on to make an aristocratic inventory of the unnameable:
“He touches buried bodies, counts them, pushes on,
He distinguishes human ashes by their luminous vapor,
The ashes of each man by a different part of the spectrum. . . .”
The poem concludes with a lament worthy of Jeremiah:
“What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament,
Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus?
My broken body will deliver me to his sight
And he will count me among the helpers of death:
The uncircumcised.”
Miłosz liked to compare his upbringing among the landed gentry of a rural place to the characters in the novels of Thomas Hardy. I’m not familiar with any comparison he made between the melancholy, even desolation in those characters and the burden that history thrust into the poet’s being, eventuating in a tone of existential despair and a vision continually rippling with premonitions that frequently turned out to be accurate. Yet the search for a perfection, a holistic innocence, that can be found only in early childhood, seems to me to ghost these early poems and, in certain attitudes of reading, to render them sacred.
*
The Community of Writers, a California institution that is based in a valley in the Sierras renowned for its skiing, brings like-minded individuals together to discuss the whys and wherefores of various genres of writing, among them the usual suspects (poetry, fiction, playwriting) and a few exotics (The Art of the Wild, Writing the Medical Experience). In a triumph of Nature worship at its most imaginative, the Community ordinarily puts on its annual omnium-gatherum of programs in this famous ice palace of the Wild during the summer. In 2022, because of the pandemic, the wordsmiths were finally able to celebrate their somewhat delayed half century of bonding over baseball games, lakeside dips, and impassioned debate by going rogue, with a program that is, if you’ll excuse the expression in this context, literally virtual -- as well as virtuous.
–Mindy Aloff
I would have loved this course, but alas, Thursday evenings don't work this season. Hail to Bob Hass's wonderful work with Miłosz! <3
Posted by: Carolyne Wright | February 18, 2022 at 03:39 AM