Miłosz: A Biography by Andrzej Franaszek, and: New and Collected Poems: 1931–2011 by Czesław Miłosz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Miłosz: A Biography by Andrzej Franaszek, and: New and Collected Poems: 1931–2011 by Czesław Miłosz Piotr Florczyk (bio) Andrzej Franaszek, Miłosz: A Biography, edited and translated from the Polish by Aleksandra and Michael Parker (The Belknap Press, 2017), 553pp. Czesław Miłosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931–2011 (Ecco Press, 2017), 800pp. In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Andrzej Franaszek, the Polish critic and Miłosz biographer, argues that Czesław Miłosz remains relevant [End Page 137] today because of his perceptive writings about the 20th century’s variousisms. Miłosz, who was born in 1911 and died in 2004, had witnessed Communism, Fascism, and the Holocaust personally. The fact that homegrown chauvinism and xenophobia are once again occupying the front pages of newspapers in Europe and elsewhere is a tragedy. Those of us lucky enough to have been born in more peaceful times should keep in mind that the world has been through this already, and that, even in the darkest of times, there are lessons to be gleaned from poetry and prose. This is the silver lining not just in Franaszek’s piece, which argues that Miłosz still matters because “the last decade has demonstrated how the mechanisms of mind control Miłosz exposed continue to be deployed throughout the globe,” but in the poet’s vast oeuvre as well. Exploring Franaszek’s biography alongside the newly reprinted New and Collected Poems makes for a prescient reading indeed. The books singled out by Franaszek as troves of insights, The Captive Mind, which explicates reasons why intellectuals gravitate toward dictatorial regimes, and the more overtly autobiographical Native Realm, are classics of the essay form. However, after reading the op-ed piece, I found myself rereading two of my favorite Miłosz poems. “So Little” can best be characterized as a short lament by a speaker disillusioned with the ways of the world. Harking back to the biblical story of Jonah, the poem is a quintessential example of Miłosz doubting his poetic vocation. “I said so little. / Days were short,” it begins, in translation by Lillian Vallee and the author. The hinted-at urgency soon gives way to a note of despair. Chastising himself for, presumingly, having failed as a poet unmoored on the distant shores of California, Miłosz confesses, “My heart grew weary / From Joy, Despair, Ardor, Hope.” From Franaszek’s biography we learn that the counterculture movement, which Miłosz saw firsthand at Berkeley in the Sixties, where the students donning Mao caps and shirts marched angrily through campus, was a difficult time in his life. Like Jonah, the poet ended up getting swallowed by “The White whale of the world,” and lost track of “What in all that was real.” Miłosz, a philosophical and religious poet first and foremost, “always aspired to a more spacious form,” as he put it in “Ars Poetica?,” that would transgress the specifics of a particular genre, be it poetry or prose, in the service of reaching communion between the reader and the author. That’s why sequences and the long poem were his forte. Unlike so many of Miłosz’s poems, “So Little” stands out in his oeuvre precisely because it derives its power and authenticity from its sparseness. A little over twenty years later, Miłosz would publish another poem that questions what had by then become nearly his entire life’s work. “The Thistle, the Nettle,” translated by the author and Robert Hass, opens with an epigraph by Miłosz’s French-Lithuanian uncle, O. V. De L. Miłosz, then continues for a total of nine lines: [End Page 138] The thistle, the nettle, the burdock, and belladonna Have a future. Theirs are wastelands And rusty railroad tracks, the sky, silence. Who shall I be for men many generations later? When, after the clamor of tongues, the award goes to silence? I was to be redeemed by the gift of arranging words But must be prepared for an earth without grammar, For the thistle, the nettle, the burdock, the belladonna, And a small wind above them, a sleepy cloud, silence...