 |
Kỷ niệm 100 năm sinh của Milosz The wiles
of art Guilt and greatness in the life of
Czeslaw Milosz CLARE CAVANAGH Note:
Bài viết trên TLS, Nov 25, 2011. Clare Cavanagh, chuyên gia tiếng Ba
Lan, giáo
sư Slavic languages tại Đại học North-western University, chuyên dịch
thơ Adam
Zagajewski, Wislawa Szymborska, Czeslaw Milosz. Viết phê bình thơ cũng
bảnh
lắm. Bài viết thật tuyệt, về nhà thơ “bửn”, (1) [wiles of art: mưu ma
chước quỉ
của nghệ thuật] của thế kỷ, và nếu không bửn, chắc gì đã được Nobel văn
chương? (1) Đây
là muốn nhắc tới bài viết ngắn “To Wash” của ông. Ký
tên: HC! Đọc bài viết
là thể nào cũng nghĩ đến những nhà thơ Bắc Kít của chúng ta, và… TCS: Milosz's shame and his strength go hand in hand. As his dates suggest - he was born in a remote comer of the Russian Empire in 1911 and died in post-Communist Cracow in 2004 - he was a survivor. He wrote to survive, and he survived to write. But he came from a part of the world and a tradition where poet-survivors are suspect: oppressed nations fostered on Romantic traditions favor martyrs over Nobel Prize-winning nonagenarians. A wartime acquaintance recalls Milosz insisting that "he didn't intend to fight since he had to survive the war: his task was writing and not battle, his likely death would serve no purpose, while his writing was important for Poland".
The wiles
of art Tội Lỗi và Sự Lớn Lao trong cuộc đời Czeslaw The wiles of
art Guilt and
greatness in the life of Czeslaw Milosz CLARE
CAVANAGH
"I am
Milosz, I must be Milosz, / Being Milosz, I don't want to be Milosz, /
I kill
the Milosz in myself so as / To be more Milosz." Witold Gombrowicz's
lines
describe not only the plight of its famous subject, but the
difficulties facing
his would-be biographers as well. And Gombrowicz didn't know the half
of it.
His comment dates from 1952; Czeslaw Milosz had just broken with the
Polish
Communist government, and was destined to spend what he later called
"the
hardest decade" of a tumultuous life in exile in France. But he still
had
more than five decades of self-contradiction ahead of him with which to
baffle
countrymen and admirers alike. Czeslawa Milosza
autoportret
przekorny
(1994,
Czeslaw Milosz's Perverse Self-Portrait) is the title of a revealing
book
length series of interviews that the scholar Aleksander Fiut conducted
with
Milosz between 1979 and 1990. "How did he get me to tell him so
much?", the poet later complained. Milosz was notoriously averse to
self-revelation. He disdained the confessional strain that dominated so
much
postwar American poetry: a true poet kept his demons to himself, he
insisted.
"Whenever Robert Lowell landed in a clinic I couldn't help thinking
that
if someone would only give him fifteen lashes with a belt on his bare
behind,
he'd recover immediately", he writes in A Year of the Hunter (1994; Rok
mysliwego, 1990). He is more charitable in a late poem. "I had no right
to
talk of you that way / Robert", he confesses. "I used to walk upright
to hide my affliction. / You didn't have to." What was the affliction
that
plagued Milosz? Concealment and self-reproach run through the later
work
particularly. "I know that in me are pride, desire, I and cruelty, and
a
grain of contempt", he writes in an un translated early poem. What
might
seem the youthful clichés of a poète maudit in the making gain weight
through
decades of repetition. "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine",
he seems to admit, with Prospero, in
the title poem of his collection To
(2000, This): "If I could at last
tell you what is in me, / If I could shout: people! I have lied by
pretending
it was not there". But the confession is carefully couched in the
conditional: we never find out exactly what "this" is. "Writing
has been for me a protective strategy/Of erasing traces", he explains
in
the same poem. Friends and admirers have wondered for years: what sins
did he
spend a lifetime trying to erase? Andrzej Franaszek's magnificently
researched
Milosz: Biografia, published earlier this year in Poland, gives as
close to a
definitive answer as we can reasonably hope for. There is no single
secret, no
hidden crime. The affliction goes hand in hand with the artistry, as
"This" suggests: "Only thus was I able to describe your
inflammable cities / Brief loves, games disintegrating into dust". And
the
self-contempt, the "shame of failing to be I What I should have been"
("To Raja Rao", 1969), meets its match in Milosz's deep ambivalence
towards the extraordinary body of work he spent a lifetime expanding,
revisiting and revising. "What is poetry", he famously asks in
"Dedication" (1945): "A connivance with official lies, / A song
of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment, / Readings for
sophomore
girls". The art and
the self were never enough. Enough for what? Yet another of Milosz's
quasi-confessions provides clues: "I think I would fulfill my life /
Only
if I brought myself to make a public confession / Revealing a sham, my
own, and
that of my epoch", he admits in "A Task" (1970). His life and
that of his age: the two conjoined in his mind early on. "Who is a
poet?", Thomas Mann asks, and the answer he provides might be taken
from
Milosz's own writings: "He whose life is symbolic". "Tomorrow at
the latest I'll start working on a great book [dzielo] / In which my
century
will appear as it really was", he promises in "Preparation"
(1986). He had in
fact begun that book - which would span volumes, genres, nations and
decades -
much earlier. "Folly, the absurdity of phenomena, theories, beliefs,
drives. Of these writing is the least ridiculous. Such is the mood of a
young
man perfectly prepared to face History", the twenty-two-year-old writer
tells his early mentor, the poet Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, only
half-ironically.
He directed his aspirations early on to writing the kind of mystical,
heterogeneous book (ksiega) he describes in an early essay (1938) on
his
distant cousin, the French-Lithuanian poet Oscar Milosz: "The Bible ...
the Divine Comedy, Faust .... These are books concealing a wisdom as
complete
as it is possible for a person to attain, books of the initiated".
Oscar
Milosz, an admirer of Shelley and Byron, adhered to the Romantic notion
of the
"poet as a legislator of the collective imagination", and his young
apprentice followed his lead. Even the difficult decades spent a
continent away
from his native Lithuania, he wrote a half-century later, answered the
prayers
of a "boy who read the bards and asked for greatness which means
exile" ("The Wormwood Star", 1977-8). "My
life story is one of the most astonishing I have ever come across",
Milosz
writes in his ABC's (2001; Abecadlo Milosza, 1997-8). This story, as he
tells
and retells it in the work, is both a spiritual pilgrimage and an
extraordinary
picaresque. The 959 pages of Franaszek's biography are scarcely enough
to tell
it. "You can't put it down", friends in Poland told me time and
again, and they were right. Milosz "wants to become the biographer of
his
own talent", a skeptical colleague remarked of the brilliant young poet
in
interwar Vilnius. He became the biographer of much more; one might
follow the
poet's own lead in "making of Milosz's biography a tale of initiation,
whose hero penetrates all the mysteries of the twentieth century",
Franaszek comments. "My
age", "my era", "my epoch", "my century":
the phrases punctuate Milosz's later work particularly. The young poet
who
claimed to be ready for History had no idea. Even the
most abbreviated list of places and names that run through the
biography -
rural Lithuania, the Tran-Siberian Railway, revolutionary Russia,
interwar
Paris, Nazi-occupied Warsaw, the Polish Embassy in post-war Washington,
DC,
Berkeley in 1968, Stockholm in 1980, People's Poland in 1981,
post-Communist
Poland a decade later, W. H. Auden, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Albert
Einstein,
T. S. Eliot, Karl Jaspers, Thomas Merton, Pablo Neruda, Ronald Reagan,
Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Valery, Lech Walesa, Karol Wojtyla - reads like
a Who's
Who, and a Where's Where, of the century just past. And this is to say
nothing
of the less recognizable human histories Milosz carefully preserved
from
anonymity: "Still in my mind [I try] to save Miss Jadwiga", he writes
of one wartime recollection: A
little hunchback, librarian by profession, Who
perished in the shelter of an apartment house That was considered safe
but
toppled down And no one was able to dig through the slabs of wall,
Though
knocking and voices were heard for many days. ("Six Lectures in
Verse", 1985). That
knocking and those voices haunt the poetry and prose alike. Milosz's
shame and his strength go hand in hand. As his dates suggest - he was
born in a
remote comer of the Russian Empire in 1911 and died in post-Communist
Cracow in
2004 - he was a survivor. He wrote to survive, and he survived to
write. But he
came from a part of the world and a tradition where poet-survivors are
suspect:
oppressed nations fostered on Romantic traditions favor martyrs over
Nobel
Prize-winning nonagenarians. A wartime acquaintance recalls Milosz
insisting
that "he didn't intend to fight since he had to survive the war: his
task
was writing and not battle, his likely death would serve no purpose,
while his
writing was important for Poland". His decision to sit out the Warsaw
Uprising against the Nazis another great poet, Krzysztof Kamil
Bacczynski, died
on the barricades at the age of twenty-three - still provoked heated
arguments
at recent centennial events in Poland. His brief affiliation with the
Soviet-backed government after the war - though he never became a Party
member
- haunted him to the end. I remember him agonizing, in 2002, over a
younger
poet's charge that he had spent the post-war years as "Moscow's dancing
bear". His break
with the Party in 1951 was no less controversial. "But you're a
deserter.
/ But you're a traitor": the poet Konstanty Galczynski voiced the party
line in his notorious "Epic for a Traitor" (1953). Milosz became an
official non-person in People's Poland shortly thereafter. The
situation in
Paris was not much better. The émigré community despised the former
sympathizer, while pro-Soviet intellectuals such as Sartre spurned the
apostate. The uprising, the Communist takeover, the break with the
regime, and
an uncertain exile: these traumas initiated a remarkably productive
decade that
saw the making of Milosz's international reputation with the
publication of his
classic Captive Mind (Zniewolony umyst, 1953), as well as essays, two
novels,
his volume Swiatlo dzienne (1953, Daylight) and his Treatise on Poetry
(Traktat
poetycki, 1957). The periodic "Milosz affairs" that punctuated his
life seem to have spurred his already formidable creative energies. In his later
writings, Milosz often casts himself as Foolish Jack, the younger
brother in
the fairy tales who muddles every move, but marries the king's daughter
in the
end. He found an even less likely alter ego in his later years. "You
cannot write my biography!" he told me two years before his death (he
had
already authorized me to do an English-language version). "But it's too
late!" I told him, shocked. "I've already spent the advance!"
"Then you must make it a comedy", he responded. "It's the story
of Forrest Gump." I'd handed him the set-up he'd been waiting for, and
he
roared at his own joke. His life had
been shaped, so he thought, by luck or fate: "Perhaps I was born so
that
the 'Eternal Slaves' might speak through my lips", he intones near the
end
of Captive Mind. For his less forgiving countrymen, at home and abroad,
egotism
and opportunism were common charges. How had he managed to land on his
feet
time and again? International success, a long, complicated life, and an
irresistible impulse to play the gadfly meant that even his triumphal
return to
Poland in his last years met with mixed reactions. Fireworks over
Cracow's
Wawel Castle marked his ninetieth birthday. On a smaller scale, a taxi
driver
gasped when he recognized Milosz's home from the street address I gave
him a
year later. "He hasn't been feeling well, has he?", he asked, and
passed on best wishes from the "cabbie in the red Mercedes". But
Milosz's public support for a local gay rights parade shortly before
his death
led to yet another round of pro-Communist and anti-Catholic charges,
charges
that resurfaced as his family struggled to have him buried in the
Paulinist
Crypt in Cracow. The official government announcement of the current
"Year
of Milosz" sparked further protests. "What are you going to see him
for?" a ticket-taker scornfully asked one recent visitor to the tomb. "How
could he do it? Knowing what we know / About his life, every day aware
/ Of
harm he did to others", Milosz writes in "Biography of an
Artist" (1995). He may have seemed fate's undeserving favorite to many
compatriots, and to himself at times. But a darker model also shaped
his vision
of his life in art. "I have not progressed, in my religion, beyond the
Book of Job, / With the one difference that Job saw himself as
innocent",
he confesses in "A Treatise on Theology" (2002). Job's family was
punished for his righteousness, while Milosz' s family paid the price,
so he
thought, for his dedication to his writing. "A good man will not learn
the
wiles of art": the sentiment recurs throughout the mature work. "I was
essentially a man of short-lived passions, visions and dreams, not fit
material
for a husband and father", Milosz mourns in the "Materials for My
Biography" (undated) that Andrzej Franaszek uncovered among the poet's
voluminous unpublished writings. Milosz's marriage to his brilliant,
acerbic
first wife, Janina Dluska, produced two sons and lasted fifty years,
surviving
the separations, infidelities and physical and mental illnesses that
Franaszek
describes in sympathetic, un-emphatic detail. The family's struggles,
the
isolation, the scant readership on both sides of the Atlantic: these
troubles
took Milosz and his life story in a distinctive direction in the 1970s.
For William
Blake, "every true poet must spend his life making the Bible anew",
Lawrence Lipking comments in The Life of the Poet (1981). Milosz outdid
his
beloved Blake by learning Hebrew and Greek in his sixties. He aspired
to
translate the Bible into Polish for the first time from the original
tongues,
not Latin (he managed only 700 pages). He tackled Job early on, and his
translator’s preface shows how closely he linked the story to his own
fate.
Long suffering, his own and others', exile from his childhood home,
moral
failings, the price for prophecy, the century's hard history: "my
imagination cannot make peace with Job's lament within me", he
comments. The volume
of biblical translations in the Polish Collected Works suggests the
limits of
the Milosz who is so widely admired in the English-speaking world. The
translations that intermingle with original work - though he would have
resisted the distinction - in the Polish collections have vanished from
their
English-language counterparts. More than this: the metrical innovator,
who
absorbed and transmuted forms not just from the Polish, but the French
and
Anglo-American traditions with breathtaking facility, likewise largely
goes
missing. And this is chiefly Milosz's own doing. Unlike his friend and
fellow
émigré Joseph Brodsky, he refused to sacrifice sense for structure in
translation,
and generally left his most intricately structured work un-translated
or
translated it into free verse, as in The Treatise on Poetry. His
exquisite
version, with Robert Pinsky, of the "Song on Porcelain" (1947), gives
hints of the poet who is Milosz at his best for many Polish readers. The Nobel
Prize not only brought him back to life in Poland; the government could
no
longer keep his work from finding its way into print. It also gave him
the
opportunity to rewrite the story of his life for the new audience the
prize had
brought him. And rewrite it he did. To give just one example: perhaps
his
best-known collection, the volume known in English as Rescue (Ocalenie,
1945),
is just about half the length of its Polish counterpart. The tale it
tells of the evolving poet, who discovers too late the "salutary aim"
of "good poetry" is thus oddly - strategically? - truncated in
English. The great poet spends a lifetime rewriting and revising the
great Book
of his story in art, Lipking argues. "The past is never closed down and
receives the meaning we give it by our subsequent acts", Milosz
comments
in a late poem. Few poets have had the chance to re-create their past
in art in
another language for a new public as Milosz did in his last decades.
The disparities
between the tales he tells in English and Polish are revealing in ways
that
remain to be explored. The
complexities of Milosz's Polish-Lithuanian past may elude most
Anglophone
readers. But his forty years in Californian exile remain equally opaque
to his
Polish audience. They received short shrift in the centennial events I
attended
in recent months. My defence of Milosz as, inter alia, an American and
even a
Californian poet took Polish specialists aback. "I thought his America
was
just [Henry] Miller's 'air-conditioned nightmare''', one scholar
commented. But
Milosz's - typically volatile - relationship with American culture far
predates
his first visit to the United States. "I was raised in large part on
American literature", he recalls in A Perverse Self-Portrait. As a
child,
he loved his abridged, one-volume translation of James Fennimore
Cooper's
Leather stocking Tales: little Czeslaw played at Natty Bumppo in the
Lithuanian
woods. When the young poet discovered Walt Whitman some years later,
his reaction
was immediate: "Revelation: to be able to write as he did!". His appetite
for American literature and history continued unabated throughout his
years in
exile. Milosz was an inveterate researcher and often did his homework
on the
road: in one lovely footnote, Franaszek lists the various Volvos,
Dodges, and
Pontiacs the Milosz family wore out. The road trips, the reading and
the
"wondrously quick eyes" Milosz recalls in a late poem combine to make
him an astute interpreter of the West's landscapes and hidden histories
in his
poetry and prose alike. As his friend, the poet Jane Hirshfield
comments,
"he loved California enough to argue with it". "He would like to be one, but he is a self-contradictory multitude", Milosz writes in ''The Separate Notebooks" (1977-9). Pole, Lithuanian, Californian, poet, essayist, novelist, historian, metaphysician, translator, scholar, anti-confessional autobiographer, Job, Gump and Foolish Jack: how can they be reconciled? The short answer is: they can't. The poet of "Song of a Citizen" (1943) imagines his ideal bardic fate from wartime Warsaw: "In my later years, / Like old Goethe to stand before the face of the earth, / And recognize it and reconcile it / With my work built up, a forest citadel/on a river of shifting lights and brief shadows". The lights and shadows mingle throughout the life's work Milosz built up, in multiple languages and genres, over the course of his century. But his is no citadel. The work, like the life, is both overwhelming and endlessly approachable, since this master of self-contradiction resisted final systems even as he struggled to create them. "Why do I still have so many doubts at my age?", he asked in a late conversation. We are lucky to have had a doubter of such prodigious gifts in our midst. |
