Beginning with My Streets: Essays and Recollections.

BEGINNING WITH MY STREETS

Essays and Recollections

Czeslaw Milosz translated by Madeline G. Levine

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30, 288 pp.

This fall, Ecco Press reissues one of the essential books of our time, The Collected Poems of 1980 Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz. Born in Lithuania in 1911, educated in Wilno (Vilnius), a city with overlapping Polish and Lithuanian identities, Milosz has written in Polish while living in France, Poland, and, since 1961, California. He does not regret the decision to write in the language in which he is the best poet, nor should he, for his translators convey his vivid particularity and his range of tones with such success that I must remind myself to think of what I'm missing. Despite the loss of the Polish sounds, rhythms, formal structures, and idiomatic and cultural resonances, Milosz's poetry in translation is the real thing.

The poet Robert Hass has frequently collaborated with Milosz in translating himself, most recently in Provinces: Poems 1987-1991. From that volume, the poem "The Thistle, the Nettle" demonstrates how superbly these poets make English poetry from Milosz's original:

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 a grammar,

For the thistle, the nettle, the burdock, the belladonna,

And a small wind above them, asleepy cloud, silence.

The desolate music of the lines defies the "earth without grammar" that the aging poet faces. The poet reanimates his cousin Oscar Milosz's catalog of weeds, quoted in the epigraph to the poem, making continuity out of arranged words even as he disbelieves in the efficacy of poetry's claim on the future. My own experience of vacant lots and the accidental meadows of the postindustrial landscape, not to mention the prospect of the end of the poet's vocation, is whipped into shape by this rigorous lyric.

Writing of his own translations of Robinson Jeffers in an essay collected in the new volume, Beginning with My Streets, Milosz concludes that "the translator sees a sort of 'empty space' in his own home, in his home of sounds and intonations that he has known since childhood, and desires that it not remain empty." It is our good fortune to have not only the works that reveal and occupy this space in excellent English versions, but also Milosz's own guide to his personal and intellectual geography. A collection of essays, interviews, reviews, and addresses, Beginning with My Streets makes a fascinating companion to The Collected Poems and to Provinces.

Milosz's poetry draws our attention to the amnesia of recent history regarding Central Eastern Europe, although most of the poems are invested with a piercing personal vision that is not always obviously political. The meditations on places. people, and concepts in Beginning with My Streets paradoxically awaken us to the knowledge lost to the world during the half century of Milosz's experience as a writer. Always painfully aware of the partiality and incompleteness of an individual witness's account, Milosz nonetheless invests these diverse writings with a compassionate and encompassing spirit. In his Nobel Lecture, which closes Beginning with My Streets, Milosz asks his audience's forgiveness for "laying bare a memory like a wound." Of his responsibility to reveal the "hidden reality" that drives and eludes human reckoning, he writes, "There are moments when it seems to me that I decipher the meaning of afflictions which befell the nations of the 'other Europe,' and that meaning is to make them the bearers of memory--at the time when Europe, without an adjective, and America possess it less and less with every generation." The poet's characteristic irony tings through a statement in another essay, "On Nationalism": "It is difficult to forget what happened in Catholic Croatia during the last war, when crimes of genocide were committed in the name of religion as the only distinctive mark separating the Croats from the Orthodox Serbs." The empty space lies exposed; it was all too easy for us to forget, until we were recently reminded.

The opening essay takes off from the twelfth section of the poem "City without a Name," reprinted in its entirety in the Collected Poems. In the essay, Milosz compiles details of architecture, geography, and persons in a digressive map of his original territory, the city Wilno. The dialogue with Tomas Venclova brings home the importance of such remembering, for Venclova's Vilnius, "having experienced the twentieth century" is Wilno no more. The contesting claims of Poland and Lithuania and, of course, the former Soviet Union to this city result in a double or triple naming that threatens to obliterate meaning. In the poetic sequence "From the Rising of the Sun," Milosz writes, "Everything would be fine if language did not deceive us by finding different names for the same thing in different times and places." The failure of the Platonic ideal to exist immanently in all objects threatens poetry, as well:

A word should be contained in every single thing

But it is not. So what then of my vocation?

A permanent sense of being rooted in a specific point on the globe governs and legitimates Milosz's vocation: "Even if I were gathering images of the earth from many countries on two continents, my imagination could cope with them only by assigning them to positions to the south, north, east, or west of the trees and hills of one district."

The phrase, "a sense of place," so often applied to poetry, takes on new meaning in Milosz's moral geography. In an essay on Stanislaw Vincenz's On the Side of Memory, Milosz concurs with the author's polemic: "The godless man can travel for many hundreds or thousands of kilometers in a single day without noticing anything that might move him, and just as space loses the value of the particular to him, so, too, does time lose value; for him, the past is obscured by a cloud of gray dust, it is reduced to vectors of motion, 'lines of development'; no inn, in which it would be pleasant to stop and rest, attracts him." Yet Milosz insists on addressing the hazards of creating, in imagination and poetry. a substitute world out of the particularities noticed by the alert person. In "The Costs of Zealousness," Milosz describes the poet's reaction to life: "Then the substitute world, which originally was a separate island, occupies more and more territory within us and the zealousness that it exacts...generates a further skewing of our day-to-day obligations toward people."

An intriguing essay called "Saligia" reveals more of the poet' s self-examination, arranged around the meanings in Latin and in Polish, in youth and in adulthood, of the seven deadly sins. Here as elsewhere in Milosz's essays, he scrutinizes himself: "It is easy to understand the anger of the oppressed, the anger of slaves," he writes in the section on ire, "particularly if you yourself have lived for several years inside the skin of a subhuman. In my century, however, the anger of the privileged who are ashamed of their privilege was even louder. I am fairly well acquainted with this anger." Therein lies the sin of the successful, he warns, as "well-fed, rosychecked people have often gotten entangled in duplicity when they pretended they were suffering."

A reader unfamiliar with Milosz's lively, tender, wry, self-deprecating, and often hilarious poetry might come away with a false impression of the poet from this brief description of Beginning with My Streets, or indeed from the volume itself. For this reason I recommend that a reading of the essays accompany an excursion into the poems, which are luckily available in both The Collected Poems and in Provinces. Here we find the work of the poet who both soars above the earth and sees it in every detail, as in these lines from "Creating the World":

To invent length, width, height,

Two times two and the force of gravity

Would be quite enough, but on top of it, panties 

With lace, a hippopotamus, the beak

of a toucan,

A chastity belt with its terrible teeth,

A hammerhead shark, a visored helmet,

Plus time, that is, a division into was and will be.

SUZANNE KEEN is an assistant professor of English at Yale University.