Miłosz American alphabet

This article presents a selection of Czesław Miłosz comments on American culture, economy and politics during his diplomatic service in the United States in the years 1946-1950. They were formulated in his postwar correspondence as well as in a series of articles “Life in USA”, which he published under a pseudonym of Jan M. Nowak in Odrodzenie from 1946 to 1947

MIŁOSZ’S (NON)EXISTING BOOK ABOUT THE AMERICA OF THE 1940s
This paper sketches Miłosz’s (non)-existing book on America which consists of his numerous articles and columns written during his fi rst stay in the United States from 1946 to 1950. They were published in the Polish literary press, often under a pen name (such as “Jan M. Nowak” or “Żagarysta”). The book is a signifi cant record of the period: political transformations at the beginning of the Cold War and Anti-Americanism, popular among the European intellectuals in the late 1940s.

A FLY TRAPPED IN AMBER. ON CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ’S AMERICA AND IMAGINATION
This article examines selected historical contexts of Miłosz’s encounters with America. It demonstrates the confl icts, paradoxes and contrasts in the poet’s attitude towards the country where he spent many years of his adult and creative life. Miłosz’s early readings and passions for discovering the laws and secrets of nature as well as Romantic and modern literary traditions signifi cantly infl uenced his perception of American landscapes and culture. They shaped his new internal landscapes. The speaker’s changes, a result of Miłosz’s experiences in the New World, allow us to understand how his characteristic spatial imagination developed. Moreover, the article outlines Miłosz’s pursuit of a remedy for his disintegrated imagination, and its religious dimension in particular.

Biology lesson

Over the years A View of San Francisco Bay (1969) has proven itself essential both to Miłosz’s life and to his writings. It was here that he formulated, for the fi rst time with such a force, the theses that would later regularly reappear in his essays and poetry. One vital aspect of the intellectual construction outlined in A View of San Francisco Bay was the concept of Nature. Miłosz proposed a “presentistic” approach arguing for the concept of Nature, which he expounded, as an indispensible element of contemporary thought. His refl ections are restricted to selected motifs closely linked with his theses about Nature: Nature and beauty, human/animal relations, and the theory of evolution.
 

I HAD NO RIGHT TO TALK OF YOU THAT WAY, ROBERT. CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ AND AMERICAN POETS
In 1946 Czesław Miłosz started his diplomatic service in the USA, which allowed him a more serious encounter with American culture, particularly with American poetry. He would observe it closely and participate in it till the end of his life. This article discusses the cultural shock experienced by Miłosz, who arrived in safe and affluent America from a Europe devastated by the war. It also talks about the poet’s distance towards American culture and about his interest, sometimes bordering on ambiguous fascination, in such authors as Walt Whitman or Robinson Jeffers. In the 1960s and 70s, as a resident of California, Miłosz argued with contemporary American poetry, Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg among others. His argument focused on two fundamental issues: poets’ concentration on their own experiences or their need to capture the greatest possible part of the world external to them and different understandings of nihilism. Frequently accusing confessional poets of feeling sorry for themselves, of dazzling readers with their own “I”, only towards the end of his life did Miłosz start to reveal, in such poems as This or To Allen Ginsberg, his own doubts and despairs that he had kept secret for private reasons and as part of his artistic strategy

WHITMAN AND MIŁOSZ’S AMERICA
This paper investigates the ambiguous process of Czesław Miłosz’s integration with America (both its nature and culture) in the context of his literary commitments and “private obligations” to American poetry. It was a long and painful process, a constant struggle with the condition of exile, feelings of homelessness and uprootedness that finally revealed to the poet a “new identity” of the modern man, bound to recognize his unstable, shaky position in space and time. According to Miłosz, America was the testing ground for all mankind, and the very core of American literature had always been the question: “Who am I?”. Thus, Miłosz’s serious involvement in American history and culture gave him a new perspective on global civilization; it helped to recreate his own identity and to achieve a balance between homelessness and belonging.

MIŁOSZ: ON CIRCUIT
This paper undertakes a critical examination of Czesław Miłosz’s negative responses to contemporary art in general, and American modernist poetry in particular. It focuses on Miłosz’s interpretations of Cézanne’s statements and Wallace Stevens’s poems, and concludes that the Polish poet’s inability and unwillingness to appreciate contemporary art results from his recognition and approval of mimetic representation as the only strategy which guarantees rationality, certainty, a sense of metaphysical hierarchy and which is informed by them. Quoted are Miłosz’s somewhat angry reactions to the concepts of abstract, non-fi gurative art as well as his words of admiration for the representational moment apparently inherent in both poetry and painting. Parenthetically, the paper points to Miłosz’s repressed feelings of existential and epistemological ambivalence, arguably the most valuable aspect of his work.

MIŁOSZ AND AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE: FROM POUND TO ASHBERY
Miłosz was an avant-garde poet who systematically realized his program of rejuvenating mid-twentieth-century Polish poetry: he chose the most appropriate methods and strategies to cure the maladies of Romantic and nationalistic discourses, whose extension seemed urgent in the post-war reality. Although finally he became very critical of avant-garde poetics, such as Ezra Pound’s, his initial, restoring impulse came from the Poundian source: the need to “make it new.” Miłosz’s poetry of the 1970s developed Pound’s formal inventions, particularly the “ideogrammatic method,” generating meanings by contrasting the poem’s fragments. Although the Polish poet often commented critically on the achievements of the American avant-garde of the mid-twentieth century, in fact he admired their artistic freedom. However, he realized that he himself could not contradict the “poetics of salvation” he had been following for years. The world presented in Miłosz’s late poems is not obvious. Its most astonishing feature is the perspective from which the narrator addresses the reader: the almost mystical space, timeless and unspeakable, where the dead meet the living, has nothing to do with a picture of the world based on mimesis. Miłosz’s “second space” has a lot in common with the “real reality” designed by the surrealists, which John Ashbery evokes
in his recent poems. Both poets reach a similar mystical point, where the word touches on the mystery.

A DISCARDED TIRE BY THE ROAD. OR MIŁOSZ SETTLES UP WITH GINSBERG

The article discusses Czesław Milosz’ ambiguous relationship with American beat and confessional poetry, and with the counterculture of the sixties, focusing on one of his late poems dedicated to Allen Ginsberg published in Facing the River in 1994. The poem, though ostensibly about Ginsberg, is in fact one of the most confessional poems Milosz has ever written, presenting his own life as failure, “a discarded tire by the road”, and setting up Ginsberg as an exemplary wiser poet, “who persisting in folly attained wisdom”. Seemingly, it is hard to think of two more different personalities than Miłosz and Ginsberg. On the other hand, however, Ginsberg was to Miłosz the true heir to Whitman, whom Miłosz has always admired. It is argued here that in the poem discussed, Ginsberg served Miłosz as his antithesis, a Yeatsian mask, or a Jungian shadow, representing everything that Miłosz, with his admitted contempt for any trace of weakness and mental instability, has never been or valued.

SONGS OF ECSTATIC DESPAIR. MIŁOSZ AND COUNTERCULTURE
This article discusses the relationship between American counterculture of the 1960s and Miłosz’s poetry created during that time in Berkeley. The poet observes the student revolt through the prism of his own experience with history, including his leftist sympathies. He is critical both of the naïve hippie postulates and Herbert Marcuse’s new version of Marxism. However, he treats counterculture as a symptomatic response to vital problems of the Western civilization of the second half of the twentieth century. He considers the infl uence of art on power, totalitarian as well as democratic. He sees the necessity of commitment, though he asks about its form and effects. Countercultural experiments coincide also with Miłosz’s own search for “a more capacious form” and with the epiphanies described in his poems.

HOW MUCH CAN ONE SAY? CONFESSIONAL POETRY AND CONFESSIONALISM OF POETRY
This essay probes Miłosz’s attitude to confessional poetry, or rather it examines his stance on confessionalism as a seemingly irremovable element of any poetic utterance. By means of such terms as decorum, the referentiality of poetic language and its usefulness, it demonstrates why Miłosz himself refrained from overtly confessional modes of poetic utterance, drawing too heavily on the poet’s own experiences, which may in turn result in blurred distinctions between biography and literature. One of the reasons why the poet so intensely disliked excessive confessionalism is its intention to describe the speaker’s emotions, while according to the Polish poet, the main task of poetry is to celebrate the dazzling beauty of the outside world, whose existence transcends and surpasses the insignifi cantly small inner world of a troubled psyche. Last but not least, the usefulness of poetry, as Miłosz understood it, is that which enables poems written in diverse countries and epochs to intensify the contemporary reader’s sense of belonging to the large family of the human race.

FOR HERE HAVE WE NO CONTINUING CITY, BUT WE SEEK ONE TO COME. FRIENDS UNITED BY EXILE: ON THE CORRESPONDENCE OF CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ AND THOMAS MERTON
This article considers the decade-long correspondence of Czesław Miłosz and Thomas Merton, published first in a Polish translation in 1991, and only later, in 1997, in the original English. Though Merton offered to write in French, a language that Miłosz at the time knew much better than English, Miłosz chose to use the latter. The article concentrates on Miłosz’s side of the correspondence, comparing the impression of struggle and incomplete command that his letters evoke in the original version with the linguistic elegance and control implied by the Polish translation. Miłosz’s slightly
foreign English seems a reflection of the theme implied by the English title of the correspondence, Striving Towards Being. The article also suggests that writing in English, despite the constraints that it imposed, enabled the Polish poet to discover a childlike freedom of expression and to meet his “correspondent”, a fellow-sufferer from spiritual homelessness, in sympathetic understanding, though the external experience of the two was very different. Each partner, searching for someone who “spoke the same language”, found his interlocutor, paradoxically, in a person who, in the literal sense, did not.

MIŁOSZ – MERTON: A BINARY SYSTEM
During his life in America Czesław Miłosz met numerous people, but few were more important to him than a man whom he saw only twice – Thomas Merton. Miłosz and Merton corresponded regularly for almost ten years (1959–1968) and their letters, published in Polish and English, display two great minds involved in a deep and sincere dialogue which reveals their most intimate thoughts as well as hopes and fears. Although close, the two remained independent in their thinking and free from false flatteries. The article presents their exchanges on political issues such as the Cold War,
the Civil Right Movement or the communist Russia as well as the transformations in the Catholic Church initiated by the Second Vatican Council. Intriguing similarities between their biographies are also mentioned.

TRANSLATIONS DECEIT: CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ AND NEGRO SPIRITUALS

This article discusses the politics of translation of eleven negro spirituals, which Czesław Miłosz produced in 1948, while working as a cultural attaché of the Polish embassy in Washington, D.C. Initially, Miłosz intended to publish all of these translations in the Polish literary weekly Nowiny Literackie (Literary News). Although only a small portion of these translations appeared in print at the time, the article proposes that Miłosz’s project played a role in opposing the cultural and political Soviet domination in Poland after World War II. Drawing parallels between research on slavery and Miłosz’s analysis of power structures in post-war Poland described in The Captive Mind, the article argues that Miłosz’s translations were driven by the “ethics of deception” akin to resistance strategies inscribed in the original contexts of production of negro spirituals. The article uses theories of translation developed by deconstruction to question the traditional hierarchies between “translation” and the “original” and, consequently, to complicate Miłosz’s position as a “translator” of spirituals. Since spirituals are improvisational by origin, specific examples of Miłosz’s choices demonstrate that his role in the translation process was participatory and creative rather than imitative. Therefore, the article argues that the translation of spirituals enabled Miłosz both to be and not to be the author of these texts, a subversive move in the Soviet-dominated system, in which direct expressions of longing for freedom (only implicitly voiced in the spirituals) may not have been welcome. This interpretation is consistent with Miłosz’s other early works which outline similarities between Polish post-war and slavery/colonial experiences, and, as such, adds to current debates on the possible convergences between post-Soviet and postcolonial conditions.

CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ’S POLISH SCHOOL OF POETRY IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Examining the ideological underpinnings of Czesław Miłosz’s anthology Postwar Polish Poetry, this paper considers the impact of his translatorial choices on the rise in popularity of Polish poetry in English translation in the 1960s and its infl uence on contemporary American poetry. Postwar Polish Poetry by and large introduced Polish literature to the Anglophone audience. By analyzing the paratext (translator’s preface, author biographies, jacket copy) and translations for the anthology, Miłosz’s translatorial, poetological, historical, and political concerns come to the fore. This paper focuses on delineating the anthology’s role in shaping the historiography of Polish poetry for the Anglophone reader and touches on the political commentary embedded in Miłosz’s poetological choices. The overwhelmingly positive reception of the anthology in turn reveals the needs of American poets during the political upheaval of the 1960s, during which time they often turned to poetry outside their own tradition. Finally, this paper argues that the subtleties of the anthology’s framing of Polish poetry cannot be overlooked, for it continues to exert infl uence on the canon of Polish literature as it develops in English translation.

AMERICA – RUSSIA. MIŁOSZ’S PERSPECTIVE

This article considers Russian themes in Miłosz’s writing, especially in his work created in the U.S.A. The transoceanic perspective allowed the Polish poet acute observation and insight into Russia; his opinions resulted from systematic and thorough studies. Moreover, the article discusses migration, exile and empire – issues central to Miłosz – by contrasting and comparing the Polish Nobel Prize winner and the Russian Joseph Brodsky.

CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ AS A TRANSLATOR OF THE POETICS OF GRAMMAR AND LANGUAGE ASYMMETRIES IN THE WRITINGS OF ZBIGNIEW HERBERT, TADEUSZ RÓŻEWICZ AND WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA

This article discusses Czesław Miłosz as a poet-translator of the poetry of his younger colleagues: Herbert, Różewicz and Szymborska. The comparative analysis focuses on such features largely neglected in translation studies as Polish-English linguistic asymmetries and the poetics of grammar, that is, the functions of definite, indefinite and zero articles, verbs and their aspects, personal pronouns as well as the auxiliary verb jest/is. Whereas some of these items cannot be translated adequately, because they cause an aesthetic loss in any translation, others allow for adequate, sometimes even “optimal,” translation.

Pierwsze polskie wydanie Ziemi Ulro ukazało się we Francji w Maisons Laffi tte w 1977 roku nakładem Instytutu Literackiego. Opatrzone zostało przedmową przez ks. Józefa Sadzika, filozofa z wykształcenia, specjalistę od Heideggera i ówczesnego dyrektora Ośrodka Dialogu pallotynów na ulicy Surcouf w Paryżu. To za jego radą i namową Miłosz, z którym wiązała go długoletnia przyjaźń i obopólny szacunek, zabrał się do tłumaczenia tekstów biblijnych, które Sadzik pieczołowicie publikował w Editions du Dialogue (nota bene, to z odbitkami Księgi Hioba w ręce zmarł nagle na serce w sierpniu 1980 roku, nie doczekawszy się gdańskiego zwycięstwa Solidarności i Nobla swojego przyjaciela).

MIŁOSZ TRANSLATED BY MILOSZ: KUŹNIA AND BLACKSMITH SHOP

This article is a comparative analysis of Czesław Miłosz’s poem Kuźnia and its translation, Blacksmith Shop, by Miłosz himself along with Robert Hass in Berkeley in 1989. In discussing the changes introduced by the Polish poet in his translation, Miłosz’s statements on literary translation are quoted. The differences between Kuźnia and Blacksmith Shop – both formal (graphic divisions) as well as thematic (passivism/ activism) – are discussed.

NEWSREEL ABOUT CHILDHOOD. THE ISSA VALLEY IN SWEDISH AND NORWEGIAN
The Issa Valley by Czesław Miłosz is a childhood chronicle inspired by the author’s own experiences in contemporary Lithuania, which used to be part of Poland in his youth. His narrative is rich in stylistic devices, which render it film-like: the background information is provided in the simple present tense (even when such details are presented in the middle of a paragraph formulated in the past tense); nominal phrases and sentences lack predicates, which makes them similar to stage directions. Miłosz also uses a number of dialectal expressions (the so-called Lithuanian Polish). In the existing Swedish and Norwegian versions of the novel the dialectal elements are not translated adequately. Moreover, most of the stylistic devices are lost: the grammatical tense is changed so as to fi t the rest of the paragraph, nominalizations are presented as verb phrases and predicates are inserted where there were none in the original. Even if readable, the Swedish and Norwegian texts are not as creative as Miłosz’s prose.
 

(Not) new Miłosz in Slovenian

This paper discusses a selection of Czesław Miłosz’s poetry which was published in Slovenia in 2008. First, it briefly describes the Polish Nobel Prize-winner’s artistic works present in Slovenia. Next, it focuses on their most important translations. The evaluation highlights the selection’s multigenerational character: it compiles most of Miłosz’s poetry translations (made by seven translators) which have appeared over the last three decades. The multifarious techniques and approaches adopted by the translators define the poet’s current image in Slovenia. Last but not least, the article presents Jana Unuk’s essay which closes the selection. Unuk perceives Miłosz primarily as a poet of paradoxes and private experience who constantly returns to the questions of God, religion and eroticism. The popularity of the individual and existential dimensions of Miłosz’s works results from the Polish poet’s peculiar sensibility, which is largely generational.

ZAPIS FRAGMENTÓW PANELU, KTÓRY ODBYŁ SIĘ 13 MAJA 2011 W KRAKOWIE W RAMACH II FESTIWALU LITERACKIEGO IM. CZESŁAWA MIŁOSZA
Tytuł panelu, poświęconego obecności dzieł Czesława Miłosza w obiegu międzynarodowym i ich przekładom, nawiązuje do tytułu książki Jana Błońskiego Miłosz jak świat, a zarazem do cyklu wierszy Świat. Poema naiwne, który jest jednym z najczęściej tłumaczonych utworów noblisty. Do dyskusji zaproszeni zostali tłumacze poety na różne języki, osoby zaangażowane w tworzenie jego wizerunku, konfrontujące jego twórczość ze swoimi kulturami i tradycjami oraz z odbiorcami czytającymi jego utwory z perspektywy odmiennych doświadczeń. Wszystkich ich łączy jednak przekonanie o wartości Miłosza dla literatury ich krajów i dla literatury światowej, a także świadomość różnorakich trudności związanych z przekładem jego dzieł. Dyskusja, której fragmenty publikujemy, była zwieńczeniem odbywających się w ramach Festiwalu Literackiego im. Czesława Miłosza międzynarodowych warsztatów tłumaczeniowych. Uczestniczyło w nich ponad dwadzieścia osób z różnych krajów, które przez cztery dni pracowały pod kierunkiem doświadczonych tłumaczy polskiej literatury oraz znawców dzieła Czesława Miłosza.
 

FRAGMENT

Setna rocznica urodzin Czesława Miłosza, świętowana na całym świecie, miała także swój duński epizod. W Królewskiej Bibliotece w Kopenhadze odbyło się sympozjum z udziałem specjalistów z Polski i Litwy. Znamienny jest fakt, że na widowni pojawiło się tylko kilkoro duńskich pisarzy. Gdybym zapytał któregoś z moich kolegów o znaczenie Miłosza dla duńskiej poezji, zapadłaby krępująca cisza. Nie dlatego, że duńscy poeci nie znają jego twórczości, ale dlatego, że na co dzień nie zajmuje on ważnego miejsca w duńskiej świadomości literackiej. Ludzie wiedzą, że ktoś taki jest, i szanują go – dostał Nagrodę Nobla, bez wątpienia jest wielkim poetą. I tyle. Tylko niewielu wymieniłoby Miłosza jako model czy inspirację.

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Niniejszy tekst to fragmenty posłowia do antologii wierszy Czesława Miłosza Drugi prostor: najnovije pjesme – izbor (Wydawnictwo ZORO, Sarajewo – Zagreb 2008, 207 s.). W antologii znalazło się kilka wczesnych utworów Miłosza oraz większy wybór z tomów To, Orfeusz i Eurydyka, Druga przestrzeń, Wiersze ostatnie. Autorka przesłała ten tekst redakcji „Przekładańca” parę tygodni przed swoją śmiercią 22 lutego 2011 roku.

Czesław miłosz’s idea of biblical translations: reconstruction

Czesław Miłosz, known mainly as a poet, translator of poetry and lecturer in Polish literature, was also a Bible translator from original languages. He wanted to create not only a new translation of the Bible, but also a new language: of translation and of Polish poetry. He saw himself as a restorer of Polish culture. In his work this intention was deeply intertwined with an aspiration towards a spiritual renewal of the contemporary man. As a Bible translator, Miłosz wanted to obtain a text as close to its original as possible and, at the same time, poetically successful and beautiful. But his critics claimed that he had missed the goal. Some reproached Miłosz for creating a version much “heavier” in reception, even unnatural; others maintained that the translator had not understood the essence of the sacred text. This article reconstructs Miłosz’s ideas of biblical translation and of poetry. It also points out their similarities and concludes that Miłosz translated the Bible to integrate it with his own poetic vision rather than to produce a text for liturgy.
 

Marta Skwara, „Polski Whitman”. O funkcjonowaniu poety obcego w kulturze narodowej, Kraków: Universitas 2010