“How Difficult It Is to Remain Just One Person”
Czeslaw Milosz’s long wait in exile ended in a triumphant homecoming—but not before cleaving his life, and self, in two.
By Atar Hadari
* title from “Ars Poetica” by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Czelsaw Milosz and Lillian Vallee
Poet, translator, and political philosopher Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) led two lives—one in California, and another in his native Poland. That doubleness expressed itself in many ways beyond those suggested by dual—and duelling—recent biographies. Milosz was born on a country estate in Lithuania, and for the rest of his life, that deeply religious, rural childhood became an inner space to which he could retreat, no matter his external circumstances. As his school friend of ten described him to biographer Andrzej Franaszek: “I see him always as a tomcat, constantly tense and grumpy. A tomcat, even when stroked and purring, conceals its strength and identity.” So while Milosz was shaped by this childhood milieu, especially in its religious aspects, he was always noted for a certain independence—if not for being inflexible, then at least for knowing his own mind. Milosz’s bucolic childhood would give way to a series of internal and external exiles, but his friend’s characterisation of him applied throughout: whether he was being stroked or scalded, Milosz was remarkably resilient and remarkably resistant to both praise and punishment.
It is the character of this particular poet, the prerequisite of his massive lifetime achievement, that while he was not averse to having his talent affirmed, he was highly sceptical of the motives of those offering praise. And, too, when he was being subjected to considerable opprobrium for defecting to the West, he was both torn up inside and also defiant in his rejection of the mindset of his contemporaries. Yet when he was finally welcomed home to Poland in triumph after being awarded the Nobel Prize, he met his rapturous reception with icy politeness. Franaszek records an observer’s comment that Milosz, after receiving the Prize, during a speech at the church in Saint Pierre du Gros Cailou in Paris—the same Paris where, after his defection, he lived on a carton of cigarettes and a rapidly diminishing supply of cash notes in the editorial offices of his Polish magazine publisher—did not appear at all triumphant:
I was shocked then, as were other younger émigrés present in the large basement of the church… by the cold irony, almost fury, with which he treated the overflowing public. “Today you are proud of me,” he was saying, “but when I needed your help, you accused me of being a communist and you informed on me at the U.S. Embassy.”
Franaszek’s Polish biography, simply titled Milosz: A Biography, has been beautifully translated and edited into a slimmed down but still substantial 400 pages, and it treats all those periods in considerable depth, with a light touch and plenty of nuance. Cynthia Haven’s biography, Milosz: A California Life, lives up to its title as it treats only the period when the poet lived in California and allows you to hear the conversations and voices of the people he knew there (not least his American-raised children). Haven’s is very much a book about California. At times, I felt I was reading a book about Californian geography in which Milosz was a supporting character. This is a not unusual passage:
This forest is a world away from its distant cousin in Lithuania and Poland. The difference as Richard Powers once observed, is like an OED is to a pocket dictionary… Milosz knew of the power and perils of these trees first hand, for his Grizzly Peak Boulevard home was cradled among the enormous sequoia pines and redwoods. Mark Danner, who stayed in the house while the Miloszes were in Krakow toward the end of their lives, recalled, “If a storm is big enough, as several have been this year, you can hear this enormous creaking, wailing sound as the trees flop overhead over the house.”
It is a beguiling but somewhat limited view—one distrusts it. It is as if you were to write the biography of Samuel Beckett as a guidebook to Paris, or that of Joseph Brodsky as a guidebook to Massachusetts.
He may well have felt a long way away from the heart of things in Poland, but to his fellow countrymen, he was not so far from the heart of things.
While it is indisputable that Milosz would not have won the Nobel Prize without the years of English self-translation he undertook during his thirty-year exile (“no exile, no Nobel,” as Haven remarks), it is also undeniable that you cannot understand Milosz without seeing everything that happened in California as a postscript and prelude to Europe. Sam Beckett in Paris is an Irishman writing in French. Milosz is a Polish poet, deeply frustrated by the fact that there was hardly a word in English written about him between his defection in 1951 and his Nobel Prize in 1980, but nevertheless a creature whose mind reverberates to the cathedrals of Poland and Paris, not to the redwoods. To some extent Haven notes that Milosz actually chose to exaggerate the extent of his isolation and relative obscurity in California. When he writes of himself among a group of obscure Berkeley professors, Haven notes that the people Milosz chose to depict himself among might not have seen themselves as so obscure. He may well have felt a long way away from the heart of things in Poland, but to his fellow countrymen, he was not so far from the heart of things. So while he may have seen himself as obscure, and though he was no Robert Lowell, he was never entirely unknown. For one thing, his Polish publishers were preparing his nomination for the Nobel Prize for decades. He was frustrated by the lack of English press, but he was never forgotten.
Nevertheless, you learn things from Haven that Franaszek does not necessarily leave out, but which he is not conversant enough with Milosz’s American colleagues to hear. Milosz compared himself, for instance, to Robert Frost, America’s most famous poet whom he met in his first visit to the U.S. as a Polish diplomat in the 1940s, and Franaszek quotes his essay on him:
To think at one and the same time about that poetry and the biography concealed behind it is to descend into a bottomless well. No one will learn about Frost’s own wounds and tragedies by reading his poetry: he left no clues. An appalling chain of misfortunes, numerous deaths in the family, madness, suicides, and silence about this… It is impossible to grasp who he really was, aside from his unswerving striving towards his goal of fame in order to exact revenge for his own defeats in life.
The defeats in Milosz’s life were, aside from the repudiation of his youthful colleagues and much of the Polish literary establishment in response to his defection, a debilitating disease that left him cooking and caring for his paralysed wife and a son who descended into paranoia and mental illness. All this you get from Franaszek’s wide angle but only in Haven’s Californian closeup do you hear this from the other son:
Peter’s brother Anthony remembers another cause for Peter’s mental disintegration, besides the unreal conditions of Alaska [where he worked for several years]. He remembers the decade of Cold War surveillance that left its mark on the whole family, but especially on Peter as an impressionable child. Spies and spying were twisted through their lives then, and preyed upon their fears. “His paranoia had an element of this spying,” Anthony told me. “It’s fair to say it drove him to insanity.”
What Haven is also very good on, however, is the business of making a translation, and that is what made Milosz his reputation. Haven talked to Peter Dale Scott, a diplomat and English professor who produced his own book length study of Milosz and described their working practice when he translated Milosz:
I would meet regularly with Milosz for long evenings, sometimes lasting well past midnight. We would exchange initial drafts of translations which each of us had prepared separately—far more of these coming from him than from me. Then we would go over drafts we had exchanged earlier, very carefully—line by line, word by word, with the help of dictionaries in both Polish and English. Usually we could finally agree on the final text. But I was distinctly the junior translator, and on those relatively few occasions when we disagreed, Milosz always prevailed.
It is that last line that indicates to me why Milosz is not more famous and ubiquitous than he actually became. His translations are limited by his own ear, which was not that of a native speaker. When I read his translations of his own verse, I do not hear a native voice.
If you want safe passage in another language, you must entrust your cargo to another vessel.
Because he retained control of his own translations, Milosz first excluded anybody else’s voice from entering his translation but also stifled any English Milosz voice coming into existence. His translators included distinguished poets such as Robert Hass, who described himself as “apprenticing” himself to Milosz’s poetry, and Haven notes that generations of translators, writers, poets, and astute readers passed through Milosz’s classroom door. “Not all took the medicine, but it’s not entirely fanciful to imagine that enough of them did to tip the aesthetic balance in his adopted land,” she writes. But did Milosz let them tip the aesthetic balance in him, as much as he tipped the balance around them? I suspect not. And that is why unlike Beckett, whose self-translations from French into his native English were fluid and fluent and entered the English language, aside from that phrase “poet of witness” you will struggle to find a line of Milosz on an English poet’s lips. If you want safe passage in another language, you must entrust your cargo to another vessel. Speaking as a poet whose career has been entirely involved in translating poems from my native Hebrew into English, I would not dream of translating my own English poems into Hebrew. I would not presume, nor would I delude myself that exerting such control over another person’s translation would allow me to get the best out of their ear.
Finally, what these two biographies of the same poet tell you is that winning late may well be better than winning early, but it comes at a cost. The one who wins late is a long-distance runner and has often relied on others to support their race. Those others may not be there when the laurels are handed out, and the runner may feel guilty, looking back, at what they did to help the winning of the race. At key moments in their early married life, Milosz’s wife Jancka shouted at bureaucrats or other apparatchiks, “You’ll regret it because he’s going to win the Nobel!”—which Milosz was not quite skeptical about, but sounds mildly bemused in recounting. But she did believe in it, and she was dead when the Nobel came around. The woman who enjoyed it was his second, American Midwesterner, wife Carol. Then, startlingly, Carol the younger wife died before he did, and Milosz found himself living out his twilight alone, back in the Krackow of his youth, but without either of the wives who had contributed to his triumph. Events conspired to make Milosz’s long wait in exile a triumph worth waiting for. It is unquestionable that he wrote a rhetorically beautiful and morally engaged body of work that presented a perfect armoury for the resistance movement of Poland to draw on, and that he therefore became an official voice of Poland when that resistance movement became the new government. But it was sheer luck that the Catholic Church should have chosen its first Polish Pope ever just at the right moment to make Polish literature interesting and net him the Nobel.
He does not seem to have been a bad father, nor an inattentive husband (though a philanderer), but the long race is not for the faint of heart, and while the poet may have a heart deep and rocky enough to resist the pressures of a hostile world, not every child of a poet can withstand the crush. Milosz’s is an instructive life, about the costs of art and the costs of waiting, as well as the temptations of exerting too much control over one’s translations that a poet should resist. He has been well served by both these biographers. Haven lets us eavesdrop on his California life, and Franaszek gives us a sense of those cold, quiet cathedrals where his soul was always headed and where finally, due to some poems he wrote about a regime that was overthrown, the tomcat was finally laid to rest.
Atar Hadari trained as an actor before studying playwrighting. His plays won awards from the BBC, Arts Council of England, National Foundation of Jewish Culture (New York), European Association of Jewish Culture (Brussels) and the RSC, where he was Young Writer in Residence. His Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of H. N. Bialik (Syracuse University Press) has become the standard translation, and his previous collection Rembrandt’s Bible published by Indigo Dreams. His Pen Translates award winning Lives of the Dead: Collected Poems of Hanoch Levin appeared from Arc in 2018. The University of Manchester commissioned the sequence “Gethsemane Suite” in response to a fragment of the Gospel of John in the John Rylance Library, the expanded sequence became the collection Gethsemane recently published by Shearsman.
