Witness to a Century
Witness to a Century
Miłosz: A Biography
By Andrzej Franaszek (Edited & translated by Aleksandra & Michael Parker)
Harvard University Press 526pp £30 order from our bookshop
Any
single decade of Czesław Miłosz’s life was eventful enough to provide
ample material for a volume of biography on its own. He lived to the age
of ninety-three and his collected poems form a volume of 1,400 pages,
so this 500-page study of his life and work is a miracle of compression.
Only the physical strength of a bear and the patience of St Simeon
Stylites, plus a degree of luck, could have enabled Miłosz to survive
the many catastrophes and disappointments he experienced before finally
receiving, aged almost seventy, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980.
His childhood was scarred by the
devastation wrought on his native land, the Lithuanian-, Polish- and
Jewish-populated area around Vilnius (then Wilno), during the First
World War by the German and Russian armies, a period when his family had
to flee to survive. This conflict was followed by the Polish–Soviet War
and skirmishes between Poland and Lithuania. Miłosz’s turbulent student
days in Vilnius required him to negotiate a way between fiercely
antagonistic groups of left-wing radicals and Polish reactionaries, to
whom, as a Lithuanian, he was a figure of suspicion. As an adult living
in Poland he endured both the German and the Soviet invasions of that
country. He spent much of the Second World War in Warsaw, one of
Europe’s most devastated cities, and was a witness to the Warsaw
Ghetto’s uprising and its suppression. He bravely aided the resistance
and helped to maintain, against all the odds, Polish cultural life,
saving the university’s library from the Germans and even publishing
books using almost unobtainable paper and machinery.
Following the communist takeover, Miłosz
tried to reconcile his hatred of living under totalitarianism with his
desire to continue battling for cultural freedom. He accepted an
appointment to the Polish embassy in Washington, DC, soon becoming
cultural attaché. Recalled to Warsaw in 1950 by the communist regime,
which had grown alarmed at his pronouncements, he was subsequently sent
to France, ostensibly as a diplomat, but in fact to allow him to defect
in a manner that would not cause the Polish government to lose face. His
wife stayed in the USA, too afraid of abduction to return to Europe;
Miłosz, slandered by Polish émigrés in the USA and feared by
McCarthyites to be a communist tool, was stuck in France. In this
miserable state he produced his finest prose and poems. In the 1960s,
after finally emigrating to the USA, he became the doyen of Slavic
studies there and it was in 1980, after receiving the Nobel Prize his
wife had been predicting for forty years, that he emerged onto the
international stage. In the 1980s, together with Pope John Paul II and
Lech Wałęsa, Miłosz
forced the Polish regime to pay attention to demands for reform, in the
process helping to initiate the collapse of communism in eastern Europe.
Miłosz’s poetry is never loud or formally
innovative, and rarely indignant. When it is intimate, the reader is
politely shut out from the details of that intimacy. He recalls moving
or horrifying scenes in tranquillity and spurns verbal fireworks,
preferring a subtle build-up of images and sound. Sometimes he reminds
one of Job, but a Job who is polite to his comforters and grateful to
God for the replacement camels and daughters. Miłosz conceded that if
God is all-powerful, then he cannot be good, and that if he is good,
then he cannot be all-powerful, but was prepared to live with that
paradox. Hell on earth, to which he bore witness, seemed to prove to him
the existence of heaven also. The nightmare of Warsaw under the Nazis
and the Soviets is described with the chilling detachment of a gallery
curator explaining a series of Bosch paintings. It may be that the
Polish language, with its light and fixed stress, and its requirement
that consonant clusters be enunciated distinctly favours poets who
underplay their material. Miłosz’s verse, particularly when it turns to
philosophical matters, like the mills of God, grinds the reader’s mind
slowly, but exceeding small.
Miłosz was a good man, but, like the
heroes of the novels of Albert Camus (whom he admired and resembled), he
was no saint. A number of affairs sustained him during his marriage,
and he was absent for much of the upbringing of his sons (one of whom
became seriously mentally ill). With his Lithuanian and Polish
background, and his fluency in many languages (along with Lithuanian and
Polish we must add Russian, French and an English competent enough for
him to be his own translator), he was immune to any strong national or
ideological pressures: he had left-wing sympathies but loathed
dictatorship; a freethinker, he came gradually to see belief in a
Christian God as indispensable to a sense of freedom and purpose. His
progress somewhat resembles that of T S Eliot, but Eliot’s hell was
private and Miłosz’s was public. Miłosz admired Eliot’s poetry, but
understandably despised the self-indulgence of The Cocktail Party.
If anyone influenced Miłosz, it was
Joseph Conrad, and one of the many merits of Andrzej Franaszek’s
biography is that it reminds us of Conrad’s importance as a Polish
essayist and as a guide to how men of goodwill can act in an evil world.
Miłosz did not hate Russia with Conrad’s single-mindedness (as in Under Western Eyes),
but he saw tsarist and Soviet Russia in the same light as him. Conrad
also taught Miłosz, as someone who had likewise experienced the Heart of
Darkness, to see life as an honourable defeat. Perhaps it would have
been helpful if Franaszek had also considered Miłosz’s status as the
senior figure in a trio of poets – the others being the Lithuanian Tomas
Venclova (still alive today) and the Russian Joseph Brodsky – who
emerged as defectors from communist Europe to achieve even greater
success in American exile and who interacted with one another in a way
rarely seen among poets in the 20th century. Miłosz’s sibilant Polish,
Catholic background and Polish romanticism may seem far removed from
Venclova’s highly accented but mellifluous Lithuanian and obsession with
Greek mythology, and from Joseph Brodsky’s frivolous paradoxes and
wildly inventive, often song-like Russian, but these three poets had
much in common. They all made the best of exile, and of the USA and its
universities in particular, with gratitude, eschewing the scorn shown by
Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn. They all revered W H Auden and, like him,
persisted with poetry, even though they realised it doesn’t make
anything happen. In that hopeless fight, they are the three musketeers
of verse.
It took Franaszek
ten years to compose this life of Miłosz, and Aleksandra and Michael
Parker another six to translate it. The result is a classic of the
genre: a biography based on interviews and exhaustive documentary
research. It is tolerant, perceptive, beautifully written and utterly
objective. It is also an effective critical study, containing generous
excerpts of Miłosz’s writing that make it almost an anthology of his
poetry and essays (Miłosz’s fiction is perhaps of a lower order). To
achieve greatness in Polish verse is no mean feat: the language lacks
the strong beat of English and Russian and the subtle vowels of French.
It suffers, even more than English, from awkward consonant clusters; its
peculiarity is a monstrous proliferation of sibilants and chuintantes
that can make a poem sound like a scratched wax recording. The poet
must achieve, like the French with alexandrines, rhythmic effects by
subtly breaking up the line and avoiding inflectional rhymes. Miłosz was
such a fine observer of the world and recollector of experience that
his imagery alone qualifies as poetry. His syntax is so clear that the
most profound thoughts are immediately perceptible, so that he is less
at the mercy of translation than other poets.
In the poetry quoted, nevertheless, there
is sometimes the problem that afflicts almost any biography of a poet
writing in a foreign tongue: banalities of translation belie the
biographer’s assertion of the poet’s greatness. In this instance, fine
passages from Miłosz’s masterpiece of 1947, the long poem ‘A Treatise on
Morality’, lose their authoritative rhymes and laconic nine-syllable
lines. Lawina bieg od tego zmienia,/Po jakich toczy się kamieniach
turns into unrhythmic verbiage: ‘An avalanche changes its
course/Depending on the stones it encounters as it forces its way
through.’ The poem ‘Flight’ suffers a similar fate: rhyme is lost, and
thirteen syllables (‘Idźmy’. A miecz płomieni otwierał nam ziemię)
become sixteen (‘“Let us go” – and the earth was opened for us by a
sword of flames’). Otherwise, however, the Parkers’ translation is not
only elegant, but also generally faithful to the original, the only
error being the rendering of Miłosz’s I wiedziałem (‘And I knew’) as ‘I did not know’.
No doubt commercial realities forced the
publisher and translators to reduce the thousand pages of Franaszek’s
original work in Polish by half. On the whole, this has been done
cleverly. Translation into English naturally shrinks any Slavonic text
by 10 per cent; Franaszek’s two hundred pages of notes have been
omitted; almost every paragraph and every quotation has been condensed,
without important points or material being discarded. Nevertheless, some
things are lost, including Franaszek’s afterword, with its long excerpt
from Miłosz’s late masterpiece Daemons. In compensation, the
translators provide a new introduction and a helpful chronology to
orientate the English-language reader. Miłosz’s poetry is, on its own,
sufficient inducement to learn Polish, and so is this magnificent and,
on the whole, sensitively translated biography of a very great poet.
Note The Mit version will be available very soon
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