Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz, edited by Cynthia Haven
An engaging picture of enigmatic Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz emerges from a series of brief, carefully edited memoirs by people who knew him well. Cynthia Haven, a widely published journalist, writes on cultural topics...
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Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz, edited by Cynthia Haven
An engaging picture of enigmatic Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz emerges from a series of brief, carefully edited memoirs by people who knew him well. Cynthia Haven, a widely published journalist, writes on cultural topics for the online Stanford Report and blogs almost daily for "The Book Haven." A former student of Joseph Brodksy, she has become an expert on the role of poetry and literature in exile. The Czeslaw Milosz story has an unexpectedly fairytale-happy ending. He was vindicated after decades of ostracism and sustained slander. He defected in disgrace from communist Poland, and found refuge on the faculty of UC Berkeley, a uniquely hospitable home for displaced Slavs. In the 1960s he was not just between chairs, but rather in an abyss: politically anathema in Poland as a defector, and politically suspect in the U.S. as a former communist official. As a poet, his vocation was far from essential in the American context. And as a poet who wrote in Polish, his work was banned in the country where there were people who could actually read it. In an effort to establish an audience, he wrote an English language textbook history of Polish literature, and it was picked up by barely a dozen libraries...at this point his loneliness and isolation were profound. The central image is endurance, holding on to the rope. It is an ambiguous image, ropes could have other uses, but he had luck, skill and history on his side to prevail. He was well aware from the beginning of his exile that he could end up like his brilliant colleague Budberg, who languished consigned to oblivion despite a distinguished career at UC Berkeley. Translation became both the method and the metaphor for his work in exile. One friend reminded him to have his poetry translated into both English and Swedish, with a Nobel Prize in mind. It finally worked. From the intelligentsia at Berkeley, from classes of students, colleagues, conference attendees, he assembled a small army of translators and worked compulsively with them at his now famous Berkeley home on Grizzly Peak, with its stunning view. Many of these colleagues are represented in the collection. The brief portraits sent me back to Milosz's poetry over and over, with greater understanding each time. The long collaborative translation sessions functioned as kind of an American substitute for the intellectual cafe life of Eastern Europe, which he desperately missed. And the translators became his first serious readers, who else reads so closely? His bilingual output transcended the traditional linguistic boundaries, and inadvertently positioned his work in the newly emerging globalized context. Berkeley poet Robert Hass, perhaps the most talented and revered of his translators, evades a question from Cynthia Haven about the effect of all this translation on American poetry. Maybe it's best left for the reader to ponder.
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