Paul Goyette questions the value of memorizing translated poetry. This is an interesting morass, especially given that I tend to agree with T.S. Eliot that "Painting, sculpture, architecture, music, can be enjoyed by all who see or hear. But language, especially the language of poetry, is a different matter. Poetry, it might seem, separates peoples instead of uniting them." The translated poem necessarily bears the hand of the translator, no matter how light his touch tries to be.

That said, my understanding of Czeslaw Milosz is that his English was good enough (if not perfect) that it's fair to attribute his English translations at least in part to him (although this raises the fascinating puzzle of self-translation). And in the end, if "A Confession" is half Milosz's and half Robert Hass's, so be it.

And let's not forget the second half of that T.S. Eliot quote:

But on the other hand we must remember, that while language constitutes a barrier, poetry itself gives us a reason for trying to overcome the barrier. To enjoy poetry belonging to another language, is to enjoy an understanding of the people to whom that language belongs, an understanding we can get in no other way.

Apparently April is National Poetry Month (which I didn't notice until about April 30 last year). I thought, therefore, I would use the month as an excuse to try to memorize a few more poems. At the moment, I am working on a new favorite of mine, Czeslaw Milosz's Confession:

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam

And the dark sweetness of a woman's body.

Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,

Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.

So what kind of prophet am I? ....

[Read more]

The hecticness of moving and a guest, and my reaction to the cayenne pepper that spilled inside one of my boxes meant that I didn't get a chance to post any interesting emails from readers last week. Here's one, from a gentleman with thoughts on Czeslaw Milosz, Warsaw's old town and my Sol Kminkowo Czosnkowa:

... I enjoyed what you wrote about Czeslaw Milosz. I read Milosz pre Nobel prize and in Polish. Milosz also touched something in me. The reasons may or may not be different. I grew up in the Polish émigré community in Chicago. My father was in the Polish army. We were raised very Polish – even though my mother is Irish. In some ways, we (the other kids like me who went to Polish school and scouts on Saturday) did not quite fit in with the kids whom we went to English school with - that is how we divided the world. English school was Monday through Friday. Polish school was only one day but more important. I was in Poland in 1986, traveling around with my cousin Adam who had been locked up during martial law. I wondered if I would have done the “right” thing like he did. Resisted and gotten screwed all my life or sold out and joined the PZPR. I thought a lot about Milosz then.

Amber Taylor’s comments about Warsaw bothered me. “I spent the day in the reconstructed Old Town and Royal Castle. While it's all very pretty, the knowledge that it's fifty years old makes it a little more Disneyland and a little less appealing.” I assume she knows why Nowe Miasto and Stare Miasto were reconstructed. The 60th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising got little attention in the press. Most people confuse it with the Ghetto Uprising of 1943. I had two scout instructors who fought in the uprising when the were about 12-14. They were in the Szare Szeregi, running around Warsaw delivering mail. While the Warsaw Uprising was going on, my father and his comrades were in France, sealing the Falaise pocket. Growing up with all of that made Milosz all the more meaningful for me.

Anyway, getting around to what prompted me to write –

sol – salt (line over the o, feminine noun)

kminek – caraway (seed) – kminkowa is the f. adjective form (kminkowo would be for n., kminkowy would be for m.)

czosnek – garlic – czosnkowa is f. adjective form

So you have salt with garlic and caraway seeds.

UPDATE:

The reader writes in with a modification:

Cumin in Polish is kmin. Not sure if kminkowo refers to kmin or kminek (caraway). I think they would use kminowo if it was cumin - up to your taste buds to decide.

It is kind of a phony construction anyway. I think proper usage would be "sol z czoskiem i kminkiem" - salt with garlic and caraway (or "... i kminem" if it is cumin).

At the risk of turning this blog into all-Milosz-links-all-the-time, I must note that Lit Nobelist Seamus Heaney has a nice piece in TNR about him.

I don't know how I missed, till today, this Ruth Franklin piece about Milosz, in which she declares her particular affection (also mine) for much of Milosz's late work, and includes what I think is the full text of his poem "An Honest Description of Myself With a Glass of Whiskey at an Airport, Let Us Say, In Minneapolis."

In his Nobel Speech, Czeslaw Milosz, who died a little more than a week ago, said:

The days when the League of Nations and the United Nations were founded deserve to be remembered. Unfortunately, those dates lose their significance in comparison with another date which should be invoked every year as a day of mourning, while it is hardly known to younger generations. It is the date of 23 August 1939. Two dictators then concluded an agreement provided with a secret clause by the virtue of which they divided between themselves neighboring countries possessing their own capitals, governments and parliaments. That pact not only unleashed a terrible war; it re-established a colonial principle, according to which nations are not more than cattle, bought, sold, completely dependent upon the will of their instant masters.

One last post on Czeslaw Milosz-- I have always had a strong preference for autobiography over biography, not because people's stories about themselves can necessarily be trusted, but because what they say is still so revealing.

At any rate, Czeslaw Milosz, on himself, from Milosz's ABCs (2001):

Hatred: ...it required a great deal of stupidity to act differently from my colleagues in literary circles and to flee to the West, which was convinced of its own decadence. The dangers of such a flight are described very well in these lines from Hamlet, applied to the Cold War:

'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.

To be despised and triumphant in the course of a single life, to wait for the time when it would become aparent that my enemies who made up disgusting things about me had made terrible things of themselves. What interests me most in all of this is the difference between our image of ourselves and our image in others' eyes. Obviously, we improve upon ourselves, while our opponents seek to strike even imaginary weak spots. I muse over my portrait that emerges from songs of hatred, in verse and prose. A lucky guy. The sort for whom everything goes smoothly. Incredibly crafty. Self-indulgent. Loves money. Not an iota of patriotic feeling. Indifferent to the fatherland, which he has traded in for a suticase. Effete. An aesthete, who cares about art, not people. Venal. Impolitic (he wrote The Captive Mind). Immoral in his personal life (he exploits women). Contemptuous. Arrogant. And so forth.

...What is most striking is that it is the image of a strong, shrewd man, whereas I know my own weakness and I am inclined to consider myself, rather, as a tangle of reflexes, a drunken child in the fog.

If you have Realplayer, you can listen to Milosz read his Nobel Acceptance speech.

N.B.: Though you can read the speech on the site (linked above), it's not quite the same as the speech he delivered. His accent is thick (thick enough that I had to come in here and listen to the speech rather than listening to it echo into the kitchen where I was washing dishes), but it's worth it.

One quote (in both the written, and spoken versions):

Alas, it is enough for him to publish his first volume of poems, to find himself entrapped. For hardly has the print dried, when that work, which seemed to him the most personal, appears to be enmeshed in the style of another. The only way to counter an obscure remorse is to continue searching and to publish a new book, but then everything repeats itself, so there is no end to that chase. And it may happen that leaving books behind as if they were dry snake skins, in a constant escape forward from what has been done in the past, he receives the Nobel Prize.

It is not easy to distinguish reality from illusion, especially when one lives in a period of the great upheaval that begun a couple of centuries ago on a small western peninsula of the Euro-Asiatic continent, only to encompass the whole planet during one man's lifetime with the uniform worship of science and technology. And it was particularly difficult to oppose multiple intellectual temptations in those areas of Europe where degenerate ideas of dominion over men, akin to the ideas of dominion over Nature, led to paroxysms of revolution and war at the expense of millions of human beings destroyed physically or spiritually.

Carried forward, as we are, by the movement of technological change, we realize that the unification of our planet is in the making and we attach importance to the notion of international community. The days when the League of Nations and the United Nations were founded deserve to be remembered. Unfortunately, those dates lose their significance in comparison with another date which should be invoked every year as a day of mourning, while it is hardly known to younger generations. It is the date of 23 August 1939. Two dictators then concluded an agreement provided with a secret clause by the virtue of which they divided between themselves neighboring countries possessing their own capitals, governments and parliaments. That pact not only unleashed a terrible war; it re-established a colonial principle, according to which nations are not more than cattle, bought, sold, completely dependent upon the will of their instant masters.

Leon Wieseltier, on Czeslaw Milosz (writing in TNR in 1983):

[Milosz said:] "The twentieth century has given us a most simple touchstone for reality: physical pain." Pain, too, is immediate--so immediate that contemporary philosophers have worried that it is not possible to know another person's. It, too, is certain.

"But this," exlaimed Ada, "is certain, this is reality, this is pure fact-- this forest, this moss, your hand, the ladybird on my leg, this cannot be taken away, can it? (it will, it was)."

Since Amber Taylor is blogging from Warsaw, and Czeslaw Milosz has made me think about it again, this is probably the right time for two brief observations from Poland.

First, Amber writes:

I spent the day in the reconstructed Old Town and Royal Castle. While it's all very pretty, the knowledge that it's fifty years old makes it a little more Disneyland and a little less appealing.

My guidebook's section on Poland is only sporadically accurate about important things like when museums are open, so ...

Also, Spencer at Mediocrity's Co-pilot has more thoughts on Milosz. He isn't very kind, but at least he is apologetic for that.

Well, not entirely unkind:

Politics? Philosophy? He was the farthest thing from a political scientist or philosopher. He is a poet. To write about him any other way is to celebrate him as an exhibit in the battle of abstract ideas. He deserves better.

11:25 A.M.: This post has been updated.
[Second update: From now on, Milosz posts will be here.]
As I noted below, and Jacob Levy noted earlier, Czeslaw Milosz-- Literature Nobelist, author, poet, bard-- is dead, at 93. The New York Times obituary is here.

Crescat guest Amber Taylor was in Krakow when Milosz died there Saturday; I visited Krakow during a very memorable trip to Poland years ago. I also visited Gdansk, where Milosz's "You Who Wronged a Simple Man" and fragments from his Polish translation of the Bible are inscribed to honor fallen shipyard workers. My ten-year-old eyes were much more interested in Krakow's fire-breathing dragon and the awesome castle Malbork near Gdansk. I hadn't heard of Milosz.

I first did hear of Milosz a few years ago when engaged in a fruitless (unfinished) project to memorize the names and years of all of the Nobel prize winners. I knew nothing about him at the time-- Lit. 1980; Polish; unpronouncable name. I first really encountered Milosz in Jeff Collins's Western Civilization class. He, along with Mill and Bentham, were the only things in the class I truly loved reading (do I speak sacrilege?).

Reading Milosz and Mill that spring (my second year) was the first time I really wondered if I had been wrong to suffer through econometrics and algebra rather than read books like these. And unlike Mill, there was something resonantly historical about Milosz, an interconnection and synergy between what had happened and what he had to say about it. [I can only remember encountering a historical-philosophical synergy like that one other time, when reading Lincoln in Jacob Levy's class last spring. Hobbes's Leviathan and Rousseau's nonsense did not do it for me.]

At any rate: Levy loved Native Realm; Michael Young loved Seizure of Power. Perhaps it is trite or reflects my youth, but for me, nothing of Milosz's that I have read can rival The Captive Mind. (Milosz's ABCs is a close second.) Alas, my books of his poetry, his ABCs, and my copies (I have two) of The Captive Mind are not in D.C. with me.

The Times writes: "Mr. Milosz was often described as a poet of memory and a poet of witness." Indeed he was, not least by himself:

Eyes that have seen should not be shut. Hands that have touched should not forget when they take up a pen.

Pablo Neruda, the great poet of Latin America, comes from Chile. I translated a number of his poems into Polish. Pablo Neruda has been a Communist for some ten years. When he describes the misery of his people, I believe him and I respect his great heart. When writing, he thinks about his brothers and not about himself, and so to him the power of the word was given. But when he paints the joyous, radiant life of people in the Soviet Union, I stop believing him. I am inclined to believe him as long as he speaks about what he knows; I stop believing him when he starts to speak about what I know myself. ... Let Pablo Neruda fight for his people. He is wrong, however, when he believes that all the protesting voices of Central and Eastern Europe are the voices of stubborn nationalisms or the yelps of wronged reaction. Eyes that have seen should not be shut. Hands that have touched should not forget when they take up a pen. Let him allow a few writers from Central and Eastern Europe to discuss problems other than those that haunt him.

In Central and Eastern Europe, the word "poet" has a somewhat different meaning from that which it has in the West. There a poet does not merely arrange words in beautiful order. Tradition demands that he be a "bard," that his songs linger on many lips, that he speak in his poems of subjects of interest to all the citizens.

It makes me extremely uneasy to be turned into a patriot-poet, abroad; somehow I wasn't prepared for that role. It is true, though, that historical circumstances have often wrung literary works out of me in which either I or some persona, usually a persona, spoke as the medium for certain collective feelings. My years in occupied Warsaw produced some poems of that type. I can't say I like those poems

When ... I stand before Zeus ... I will repeat all this that I have written as my defense. Many people spend their entire lives collecting stamps or old coins, or growing tulips. I am sure that Zeus will be merciful toward people who have given themselves entirely to these hobbies, even though they are only amusing and pointless diversions. I shall say to him: "It is not my fault that you made me a poet, and that you gave me the gift of seeing simultaneously what was happening in Omaha and Prague, in the Baltic states and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. I felt that if I did not use that gift my poetry would be tasteless to me and fame detestable. Forgive me." And perhaps Zeus, who does not call stamp-collectors and tulip-growers silly, will forgive.

No duties. I don't have to be profound.
I don't have to be artistically perfect.
Or sublime. Or edifying.
...
Let others take care of it. Time for me to play hooky.
Buona notte. Ciao. Farewell.

Apropos Amber's comment below, Miss Manners covers the same topic today.

Czeslaw Milosz is dead-- alas. Jacob Levy has thoughts.

More on one or both topics to follow later.

Kathleen Moriarty blogs on memorization. Kathleen's basic question--

Memorisation of poetry is something that sort of went out with the druids. In our written world, is memorisation still necessary?

Maybe. For poetry, I think it can be easier to say it from memory rather than reading it. It makes it easier to ge tthe rhythm right when you don't have to think about saying it. "This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper." doesn't work when you read it.

On the other hand, memorisation also encourages the sort of rote reading that you hear so often, people droning on about poems that don't understand. Sometimes reading the poem makes the reader think about it a little more.