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Kỷ niệm 100 năm sinh của Milosz

The wiles of art
Mưu ma chước quỉ của nghệ thuật

Guilt and greatness in the life of Czeslaw Milosz
Tội Lỗi và Sự Lớn Lao trong cuộc đời Czeslaw Milosz

CLARE CAVANAGH

Note: Bài viết trên TLS, Nov 25, 2011. Clare Cavanagh, chuyên gia tiếng Ba Lan, giáo sư Slavic languages tại Đại học North-western University, chuyên dịch thơ Adam Zagajewski, Wislawa Szymborska, Czeslaw Milosz. Viết phê bình thơ cũng bảnh lắm. Bài viết thật tuyệt, về nhà thơ “bửn”, (1) [wiles of art: mưu ma chước quỉ của nghệ thuật] của thế kỷ, và nếu không bửn, chắc gì đã được Nobel văn chương?
TV sẽ giới thiệu, tiếp theo bài về Brodsky The Gift

(1)

Đây là muốn nhắc tới bài viết ngắn “To Wash” của ông.
Hay những dòng thơ sau đây, trong "A Task" (1970):
"I think I would fulfill my life / Only if I brought myself to make a public confession / Revealing a sham, my own, and that of my epoch"
Tôi nghĩ tôi sẽ làm trọn đời mình/Chỉ bằng cách ra giữa Ba Đình/Làm 1 cú tự kiểm trước nhân dân/ Nói lên cái nhục nhã của riêng tôi, của thời của tôi, của đám sĩ phu Bắc Kít chúng tôi.

Ký tên: HC!

Đọc bài viết là thể nào cũng nghĩ đến những nhà thơ Bắc Kít của chúng ta, và… TCS:
Với Milosz, nhục nhã và sức mạnh đi sóng đôi. Như những nơi chốn và ngày tháng cho thấy – ông sinh ra ở 1 góc xa xôi của Đế Quốc Nga vào năm 1911, và chết ở 1 Cracow-hậu CS, vào năm 2004 – ông là 1 kẻ sống sót. Ông viết để sống sót, và sống sót để viết, nhưng ông tới từ 1 phần của thế giới ở đó có truyền thống coi nhà thơ- kẻ sống sót thì rất đáng ngờ, nếu không muốn nói, đáng tởm: Những quốc gia bị áp bức nuôi dưỡng truyền thống Lãng Mạn thích “xoa đầu” kẻ tuẫn nạn hơn là 1 anh già 90 được Nobel văn chương!
Một đấng bạn thời chiến nhớ lại, Milosz đã từng nằng nặc phán, “tớ đếch muốn [lên rừng theo VC], chiến đấu, kể từ khi mà tớ phải sống sót cuộc chiến: nhiệm vụ của tớ là viết [làm nhạc phản chiến], chứ không phải là chiến trận, cái chết của tớ thì vô ích, trong khi cái viết của tớ thì quan trọng cho Ba Lan”.

Milosz's shame and his strength go hand in hand. As his dates suggest - he was born in a remote comer of the Russian Empire in 1911 and died in post-Communist Cracow in 2004 - he was a survivor. He wrote to survive, and he survived to write. But he came from a part of the world and a tradition where poet-survivors are suspect: oppressed nations fostered on Romantic traditions favor martyrs over Nobel Prize-winning nonagenarians. A wartime acquaintance recalls Milosz insisting that "he didn't intend to fight since he had to survive the war: his task was writing and not battle, his likely death would serve no purpose, while his writing was important for Poland".

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The wiles of art
Mưu ma chước quỉ của nghệ thuật

Guilt and greatness in the life of Czeslaw Milosz
Tội Lỗi và Sự Lớn Lao trong cuộc đời Czeslaw

The wiles of art

Guilt and greatness in the life of Czeslaw Milosz

CLARE CAVANAGH

 

"I am Milosz, I must be Milosz, / Being Milosz, I don't want to be Milosz, / I kill the Milosz in myself so as / To be more Milosz." Witold Gombrowicz's lines describe not only the plight of its famous subject, but the difficulties facing his would-be biographers as well. And Gombrowicz didn't know the half of it. His comment dates from 1952; Czeslaw Milosz had just broken with the Polish Communist government, and was destined to spend what he later called "the hardest decade" of a tumultuous life in exile in France. But he still had more than five decades of self-contradiction ahead of him with which to baffle countrymen and admirers alike.

Czeslawa Milosza autoportret przekorny (1994, Czeslaw Milosz's Perverse Self-Portrait) is the title of a revealing book length series of interviews that the scholar Aleksander Fiut conducted with Milosz between 1979 and 1990. "How did he get me to tell him so much?", the poet later complained. Milosz was notoriously averse to self-revelation. He disdained the confessional strain that dominated so much postwar American poetry: a true poet kept his demons to himself, he insisted. "Whenever Robert Lowell landed in a clinic I couldn't help thinking that if someone would only give him fifteen lashes with a belt on his bare behind, he'd recover immediately", he writes in A Year of the Hunter (1994; Rok mysliwego, 1990). He is more charitable in a late poem. "I had no right to talk of you that way / Robert", he confesses. "I used to walk upright to hide my affliction. / You didn't have to." What was the affliction that plagued Milosz? Concealment and self-reproach run through the later work particularly. "I know that in me are pride, desire, I and cruelty, and a grain of contempt", he writes in an un translated early poem. What might seem the youthful clichés of a poète maudit in the making gain weight through decades of repetition. "This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine", he seems to admit, with Prospero, in the title poem of his collection To (2000, This): "If I could at last tell you what is in me, / If I could shout: people! I have lied by pretending it was not there". But the confession is carefully couched in the conditional: we never find out exactly what "this" is.

"Writing has been for me a protective strategy/Of erasing traces", he explains in the same poem. Friends and admirers have wondered for years: what sins did he spend a lifetime trying to erase? Andrzej Franaszek's magnificently researched Milosz: Biografia, published earlier this year in Poland, gives as close to a definitive answer as we can reasonably hope for. There is no single secret, no hidden crime. The affliction goes hand in hand with the artistry, as "This" suggests: "Only thus was I able to describe your inflammable cities / Brief loves, games disintegrating into dust". And the self-contempt, the "shame of failing to be I What I should have been" ("To Raja Rao", 1969), meets its match in Milosz's deep ambivalence towards the extraordinary body of work he spent a lifetime expanding, revisiting and revising. "What is poetry", he famously asks in "Dedication" (1945): "A connivance with official lies, / A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment, / Readings for sophomore girls".

The art and the self were never enough. Enough for what? Yet another of Milosz's quasi-confessions provides clues: "I think I would fulfill my life / Only if I brought myself to make a public confession / Revealing a sham, my own, and that of my epoch", he admits in "A Task" (1970). His life and that of his age: the two conjoined in his mind early on. "Who is a poet?", Thomas Mann asks, and the answer he provides might be taken from Milosz's own writings: "He whose life is symbolic". "Tomorrow at the latest I'll start working on a great book [dzielo] / In which my century will appear as it really was", he promises in "Preparation" (1986). 

He had in fact begun that book - which would span volumes, genres, nations and decades - much earlier. "Folly, the absurdity of phenomena, theories, beliefs, drives. Of these writing is the least ridiculous. Such is the mood of a young man perfectly prepared to face History", the twenty-two-year-old writer tells his early mentor, the poet Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, only half-ironically. He directed his aspirations early on to writing the kind of mystical, heterogeneous book (ksiega) he describes in an early essay (1938) on his distant cousin, the French-Lithuanian poet Oscar Milosz: "The Bible ... the Divine Comedy, Faust .... These are books concealing a wisdom as complete as it is possible for a person to attain, books of the initiated". Oscar Milosz, an admirer of Shelley and Byron, adhered to the Romantic notion of the "poet as a legislator of the collective imagination", and his young apprentice followed his lead. Even the difficult decades spent a continent away from his native Lithuania, he wrote a half-century later, answered the prayers of a "boy who read the bards and asked for greatness which means exile" ("The Wormwood Star", 1977-8). 

"My life story is one of the most astonishing I have ever come across", Milosz writes in his ABC's (2001; Abecadlo Milosza, 1997-8). This story, as he tells and retells it in the work, is both a spiritual pilgrimage and an extraordinary picaresque. The 959 pages of Franaszek's biography are scarcely enough to tell it. "You can't put it down", friends in Poland told me time and again, and they were right. Milosz "wants to become the biographer of his own talent", a skeptical colleague remarked of the brilliant young poet in interwar Vilnius. He became the biographer of much more; one might follow the poet's own lead in "making of Milosz's biography a tale of initiation, whose hero penetrates all the mysteries of the twentieth century", Franaszek comments.

"My age", "my era", "my epoch", "my century": the phrases punctuate Milosz's later work particularly. The young poet who claimed to be ready for History had no idea.

Even the most abbreviated list of places and names that run through the biography - rural Lithuania, the Tran-Siberian Railway, revolutionary Russia, interwar Paris, Nazi-occupied Warsaw, the Polish Embassy in post-war Washington, DC, Berkeley in 1968, Stockholm in 1980, People's Poland in 1981, post-Communist Poland a decade later, W. H. Auden, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Albert Einstein, T. S. Eliot, Karl Jaspers, Thomas Merton, Pablo Neruda, Ronald Reagan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Valery, Lech Walesa, Karol Wojtyla - reads like a Who's Who, and a Where's Where, of the century just past. And this is to say nothing of the less recognizable human histories Milosz carefully preserved from anonymity: "Still in my mind [I try] to save Miss Jadwiga", he writes of one wartime recollection:

A little hunchback, librarian by profession, Who perished in the shelter of an apartment house That was considered safe but toppled down And no one was able to dig through the slabs of wall, Though knocking and voices were heard for many days. ("Six Lectures in Verse", 1985).

That knocking and those voices haunt the poetry and prose alike.

Milosz's shame and his strength go hand in hand. As his dates suggest - he was born in a remote comer of the Russian Empire in 1911 and died in post-Communist Cracow in 2004 - he was a survivor. He wrote to survive, and he survived to write. But he came from a part of the world and a tradition where poet-survivors are suspect: oppressed nations fostered on Romantic traditions favor martyrs over Nobel Prize-winning nonagenarians. A wartime acquaintance recalls Milosz insisting that "he didn't intend to fight since he had to survive the war: his task was writing and not battle, his likely death would serve no purpose, while his writing was important for Poland". His decision to sit out the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis another great poet, Krzysztof Kamil Bacczynski, died on the barricades at the age of twenty-three - still provoked heated arguments at recent centennial events in Poland. His brief affiliation with the Soviet-backed government after the war - though he never became a Party member - haunted him to the end. I remember him agonizing, in 2002, over a younger poet's charge that he had spent the post-war years as "Moscow's dancing bear".

His break with the Party in 1951 was no less controversial. "But you're a deserter. / But you're a traitor": the poet Konstanty Galczynski voiced the party line in his notorious "Epic for a Traitor" (1953). Milosz became an official non-person in People's Poland shortly thereafter. The situation in Paris was not much better. The émigré community despised the former sympathizer, while pro-Soviet intellectuals such as Sartre spurned the apostate. The uprising, the Communist takeover, the break with the regime, and an uncertain exile: these traumas initiated a remarkably productive decade that saw the making of Milosz's international reputation with the publication of his classic Captive Mind (Zniewolony umyst, 1953), as well as essays, two novels, his volume Swiatlo dzienne (1953, Daylight) and his Treatise on Poetry (Traktat poetycki, 1957). The periodic "Milosz affairs" that punctuated his life seem to have spurred his already formidable creative energies.

In his later writings, Milosz often casts himself as Foolish Jack, the younger brother in the fairy tales who muddles every move, but marries the king's daughter in the end. He found an even less likely alter ego in his later years. "You cannot write my biography!" he told me two years before his death (he had already authorized me to do an English-language version). "But it's too late!" I told him, shocked. "I've already spent the advance!" "Then you must make it a comedy", he responded. "It's the story of Forrest Gump." I'd handed him the set-up he'd been waiting for, and he roared at his own joke. 

His life had been shaped, so he thought, by luck or fate: "Perhaps I was born so that the 'Eternal Slaves' might speak through my lips", he intones near the end of Captive Mind. For his less forgiving countrymen, at home and abroad, egotism and opportunism were common charges. How had he managed to land on his feet time and again? International success, a long, complicated life, and an irresistible impulse to play the gadfly meant that even his triumphal return to Poland in his last years met with mixed reactions. Fireworks over Cracow's Wawel Castle marked his ninetieth birthday. On a smaller scale, a taxi driver gasped when he recognized Milosz's home from the street address I gave him a year later. "He hasn't been feeling well, has he?", he asked, and passed on best wishes from the "cabbie in the red Mercedes". But Milosz's public support for a local gay rights parade shortly before his death led to yet another round of pro-Communist and anti-Catholic charges, charges that resurfaced as his family struggled to have him buried in the Paulinist Crypt in Cracow. The official government announcement of the current "Year of Milosz" sparked further protests. "What are you going to see him for?" a ticket-taker scornfully asked one recent visitor to the tomb.

"How could he do it? Knowing what we know / About his life, every day aware / Of harm he did to others", Milosz writes in "Biography of an Artist" (1995). He may have seemed fate's undeserving favorite to many compatriots, and to himself at times. But a darker model also shaped his vision of his life in art. "I have not progressed, in my religion, beyond the Book of Job, / With the one difference that Job saw himself as innocent", he confesses in "A Treatise on Theology" (2002). Job's family was punished for his righteousness, while Milosz' s family paid the price, so he thought, for his dedication to his writing. "A good man will not learn the wiles of art": the sentiment recurs throughout the mature work.

"I was essentially a man of short-lived passions, visions and dreams, not fit material for a husband and father", Milosz mourns in the "Materials for My Biography" (undated) that Andrzej Franaszek uncovered among the poet's voluminous unpublished writings. Milosz's marriage to his brilliant, acerbic first wife, Janina Dluska, produced two sons and lasted fifty years, surviving the separations, infidelities and physical and mental illnesses that Franaszek describes in sympathetic, un-emphatic detail. The family's struggles, the isolation, the scant readership on both sides of the Atlantic: these troubles took Milosz and his life story in a distinctive direction in the 1970s.

For William Blake, "every true poet must spend his life making the Bible anew", Lawrence Lipking comments in The Life of the Poet (1981). Milosz outdid his beloved Blake by learning Hebrew and Greek in his sixties. He aspired to translate the Bible into Polish for the first time from the original tongues, not Latin (he managed only 700 pages). He tackled Job early on, and his translator’s preface shows how closely he linked the story to his own fate. Long suffering, his own and others', exile from his childhood home, moral failings, the price for prophecy, the century's hard history: "my imagination cannot make peace with Job's lament within me", he comments.

The volume of biblical translations in the Polish Collected Works suggests the limits of the Milosz who is so widely admired in the English-speaking world. The translations that intermingle with original work - though he would have resisted the distinction - in the Polish collections have vanished from their English-language counterparts. More than this: the metrical innovator, who absorbed and transmuted forms not just from the Polish, but the French and Anglo-American traditions with breathtaking facility, likewise largely goes missing. And this is chiefly Milosz's own doing. Unlike his friend and fellow émigré Joseph Brodsky, he refused to sacrifice sense for structure in translation, and generally left his most intricately structured work un-translated or translated it into free verse, as in The Treatise on Poetry. His exquisite version, with Robert Pinsky, of the "Song on Porcelain" (1947), gives hints of the poet who is Milosz at his best for many Polish readers.

The Nobel Prize not only brought him back to life in Poland; the government could no longer keep his work from finding its way into print. It also gave him the opportunity to rewrite the story of his life for the new audience the prize had brought him. And rewrite it he did. To give just one example: perhaps his best-known collection, the volume known in English as Rescue (Ocalenie, 1945), is just about half the length of its Polish counterpart. 

The tale it tells of the evolving poet, who discovers too late the "salutary aim" of "good poetry" is thus oddly - strategically? - truncated in English. The great poet spends a lifetime rewriting and revising the great Book of his story in art, Lipking argues. "The past is never closed down and receives the meaning we give it by our subsequent acts", Milosz comments in a late poem. Few poets have had the chance to re-create their past in art in another language for a new public as Milosz did in his last decades. The disparities between the tales he tells in English and Polish are revealing in ways that remain to be explored.

The complexities of Milosz's Polish-Lithuanian past may elude most Anglophone readers. But his forty years in Californian exile remain equally opaque to his Polish audience. They received short shrift in the centennial events I attended in recent months. My defence of Milosz as, inter alia, an American and even a Californian poet took Polish specialists aback. "I thought his America was just [Henry] Miller's 'air-conditioned nightmare''', one scholar commented. But Milosz's - typically volatile - relationship with American culture far predates his first visit to the United States. "I was raised in large part on American literature", he recalls in A Perverse Self-Portrait. As a child, he loved his abridged, one-volume translation of James Fennimore Cooper's Leather stocking Tales: little Czeslaw played at Natty Bumppo in the Lithuanian woods. When the young poet discovered Walt Whitman some years later, his reaction was immediate: "Revelation: to be able to write as he did!".

His appetite for American literature and history continued unabated throughout his years in exile. Milosz was an inveterate researcher and often did his homework on the road: in one lovely footnote, Franaszek lists the various Volvos, Dodges, and Pontiacs the Milosz family wore out. The road trips, the reading and the "wondrously quick eyes" Milosz recalls in a late poem combine to make him an astute interpreter of the West's landscapes and hidden histories in his poetry and prose alike. As his friend, the poet Jane Hirshfield comments, "he loved California enough to argue with it".

"He would like to be one, but he is a self-contradictory multitude", Milosz writes in ''The Separate Notebooks" (1977-9). Pole, Lithuanian, Californian, poet, essayist, novelist, historian, metaphysician, translator, scholar, anti-confessional autobiographer, Job, Gump and Foolish Jack: how can they be reconciled? The short answer is: they can't. The poet of "Song of a Citizen" (1943) imagines his ideal bardic fate from wartime Warsaw: "In my later years, / Like old Goethe to stand before the face of the earth, / And recognize it and reconcile it / With my work built up, a forest citadel/on a river of shifting lights and brief shadows". The lights and shadows mingle throughout the life's work Milosz built up, in multiple languages and genres, over the course of his century. But his is no citadel. The work, like the life, is both overwhelming and endlessly approachable, since this master of self-contradiction resisted final systems even as he struggled to create them. "Why do I still have so many doubts at my age?", he asked in a late conversation. We are lucky to have had a doubter of such prodigious gifts in our midst.