Poet Leonard Nathan, who
eventually became one of Milosz's translators, once told me of his
first real conversation with Milosz, in the stacks of Berkeley's main
library in the late 1970s. "I have one problem with your work," Nathan
told the older poet. "Although I'm a nonbeliever, I have trouble with
your heavy investment in the Manicheans." Milosz replied with
characteristic puckishness, "You think you have trouble? How do you
think I -- a churchgoer -- feel?"
Milosz's Catholicism has always been problematic. He
has often concluded, like the heretical Manichees, that the world is a
diabolical creation and life "a devil's vaudeville." (The pope himself
sent a message for Milosz's nationally televised state funeral in
Krakow, placating protesters who claimed the poet was anti-Catholic.)
For Milosz, the cruelty of the world is insupportable, mysterious; he
had seen more than his share of it. Lithuanian-born, working with the
resistance in Nazi-occupied Poland, Milosz witnessed the destruction of
the Warsaw ghetto. He later served as a diplomat for communist Poland
before defecting during Stalin's era. In a letter to Thomas Merton, he
confided, "my guilt is shapeless, all-embracing, when I try to express
it, I distort."
"Wandering on the
outskirts of heresy is about right for me," he admits in Second Space.
In one poem, a priest asks: "Can I tell them: there is no Hell,/ When
they learn on earth what Hell is?"
Walt Whitman was the English-language poet he admired
the most; Milosz appreciated his "omnivorousness." It is fitting,
perhaps, that Milosz's end volume so resembles the work of America's
heretical bard, who wrote of old age and death, who also produced a
trail of "final poems," and who wrote, "With ray of light, steady,
ineffable . . . For that O God, be it my latest word, here on my
knees,/Old, poor, and paralyzed, I thank Thee."
Milosz's poetry, like Whitman's, has long, long lines.
Though the language in some poems can seem bland and undistinguished,
lapsing into prose, at least some of the prose-iness is deceptive in
translation. For example, the epigrammatic snatches of "Notebook" may
seem scrappy and aimless; in Polish, however, the snippets are peppered
with rhyme.
Other pitfalls: The extended poem for Paris poet and
Milosz kinsman, Oscar Milosz -- "Apprentice" -- is so loaded with
footnotes that it pretty much capsizes the whole. Throughout his
writing life, Milosz wanted to recollect and document everything before
it disappeared into oblivion. That constant obsession -- of rescuing
memory from the abyss -- underpins his final poem in Second Space,
"Orpheus and Eurydice," a moving evocation of the poet's wife, Carol,
who died last year.
Milosz's meditations seem to meld easily with
translator Robert Hass's conversational, California style. One could
argue that Milosz was influenced by the former U.S. poet laureate --
that, during their quarter-century of harmonious collaboration, Milosz
simplified his style and language, becoming more clear, more
accessible, more American. Appearances deceive, however. In Polish, the
elevated syntax of Second Space is redolent of the Psalms and lends the
book an insistent biblical echo. It's no coincidence that Milosz taught
himself Hebrew so that he could translate the Psalms and the Book of
Job into Polish, eventually translating Ruth, Esther, Ecclesiastes,
Lamentations, Song of Songs, and even, from the Greek, the Gospel
According to Saint Mark -- a critical influence on his poetry and
thinking.
Second Space is no easy-listening channel. It may be
fashionable to play the Doubting Thomas and take facile potshots, but
not when the underlying struggle for faith is an agonizing ordeal --
like the apostle's. Milosz's spiritual struggles are not likely to be
comprehended by those who haven't resisted the erosion of their faith:
"The louts grimaced sarcastically
As they discussed my pious, childish superstitions."
"When the heart stops, my contemporaries say,
Shrugging their shoulders, that's it."
"We complain that the earth is hell's antechamber: it
might have been hell complete, without beauty, without goodness, not a
ray."
And from that torment comes the roses:
"my gaze is fixed on one bright point,
That grows large and takes me in."
Those who have followed Milosz's
trajectory will marvel that he came up with his own poetic brand of a
happy ending, that his lifelong ambivalences finally resolve into the
grace and gravitas of this book. •Cynthia Haven writes for the San
Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, and the Times Literary
Supplement of London. Her "Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations" will be
published in 2006.
