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Czeslaw Milosz: A California Life
Czeslaw Milosz, one of the greatest poets and thinkers of the past hundred years, is not generally considered a Californian. But the Nobel laureate spent four decades in Berkeley--more time than any other single place he lived--and he wrote many of his most enduring works there. This is the first book to look at his life through a California lens. Filled with original research and written with the grace and liveliness of a novel, it is both an essential volume for his most devoted readers and a perfect introduction for newcomers.
Milosz was a premier witness to the sweep of the twentieth century, from the bombing of Warsaw in World War II to the student protests of the sixties and the early days of the high-tech boom. He maintained an open-minded but skeptical view of American life, a perspective shadowed by the terrors he experienced in Europe. In the light of recent political instability and environmental catastrophe, his poems and ideas carry extra weight, and they are ripe for a new generation of readers to discover them. This immersive portrait demonstrates what Milosz learned from the Golden State, and what Californians can learn from him.
Milosz was a premier witness to the sweep of the twentieth century, from the bombing of Warsaw in World War II to the student protests of the sixties and the early days of the high-tech boom. He maintained an open-minded but skeptical view of American life, a perspective shadowed by the terrors he experienced in Europe. In the light of recent political instability and environmental catastrophe, his poems and ideas carry extra weight, and they are ripe for a new generation of readers to discover them. This immersive portrait demonstrates what Milosz learned from the Golden State, and what Californians can learn from him.
256 pages, Hardcover
Published October 19, 2021
About the author
Cynthia L. Haven
14 books19 followersCynthia L. Haven writes regularly for The Times Literary Supplement, and has also contributed to The New York Times, The Nation, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many others. She is also the author of several books, including volumes on Nobel poets Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky.
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December 2, 2021
Recreated in Translation "Cynthia Haven’s Czesław Miłosz: A California Life"
© Elena S. Danielson, December 1, 2021
Cynthia Haven’s portrait of Czesław Miłosz has sent me on a long tour of poetry in exile and poetry in translation. First off, is it even possible to translate the essence of poetic speech? And why does she characterize him as a Californian when we all know he was Polish? Or was he? Why did he insist on writing in Polish, and not switch to English even after 40 years in exile.
Why read this foreign, translated poetry of his, written in awkward circumstances, when I often cringe reading home-made American verse? I guess our English has been so battered and abused by commercial jingles and saleable Hallmark sentiments that I just cannot accept any lofty notions or noble ideas in this poor bruised language of ours. The quasi-biblical rantings of our miseducated, fundraising, evangelical TV preachers have brought down even the magnificent language of the King James Bible. Maybe during a quiet moment, I can enjoy something like “Hope is the thing with feathers,” simply because I know for sure Emily Dickinson never wanted to market her words. But if I did not know she wrote it, and if I did not know she led a life of seclusion, would I still go for that thing with feathers. So I need to know who wrote the stuff that I turn to in revery. And in what original language. It probably shouldn’t matter.
But in fact, it helps to read fine English translations from very obscure languages. Not familiar French or Spanish, but maybe Chinese, Russian, or Polish. This way the sense of nobility is recovered from a world a far distance from ours, preferably with an obscure orthography. And no advertising. Translations of Sung dynasty Chinese poetry will do it for me, especially if I can connect it with the ethereal, jade colored elegance of Sung celadon ceramics. I always assume I am missing crucial nuances when I read translations, but I know they must be there. “A mossy branch decorated with pieces of jade./ A small green bird/spends the night with flowers on this branch.” [“Sparse Shadows,” Jiang Kui ((1155-1211) p. 276, "The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry."] This feathery, jade colored bird brings hope, too.
And Russian works, with all of those inflected endings, the language rhymes whether you want it to or not. The Russian phrase “Pered mayimi glazami” sounds like poetry, although it just means “in front of my eyes.” Puskhin’s Onegin has acoustic pleasures in the original that generate a thrill that doesn’t come through in English, but us English speakers know it is there somewhere. Stanza XLVI is just music: Tatiana tells Onegin she would gladly give up her grand house and fabulous parties for a shelf of books and an overgrown garden. (I am sure there are birds in that garden…) Well, you have to know that it doesn’t merely rhyme in Russian, it flows…but it’s too late, she’s a faithful wife, and Onegin is just out of luck, swooped in the silkiest possible verse. We cannot do this in English. Nabokov’s translation, quite literal, is deliberately hideous. And it smugly lets us know English isn’t up to Pushkin, so we must enjoy it vicariously so to speak.
But then there is Josef Brodsky, a Russian poet who learned to translate his own work into English. And was charismatic enough to recruit talented American poets to help in the project. The best translations of Brodsky are his own, but they rhyme better if you read them with a Russian accent. He got the Nobel Prize, and frankly he deserved it. There was a sense that you could only get the Nobel if your work was available in either Swedish or English. And he wrote English with an exaggerated swoop, and a love of the sound of grand English words, that English speakers could never say with a straight face. He signed a book “For Elena Danielson with Tenderness and Gratitude.” Sounds like a love letter, but he had never even met me before. He just loved using the words Tenderness and Gratitude, which would sound stilted if I used them, but a Russian gets a free pass.
Russian is a famously difficult language, but it pales in comparison with Polish. Just all of those formidable consonants, lined up in almost every word and even in mercifully short names, like Czesław Miłosz. It is easy for Poles to learn Russian, but apparently not the other way around. Writing in Polish created a serious barrier, but also a bridge. Which brings me to Robert Hass, the Berkeley poet who spend endless hours with Miłosz rendering his poetic Polish thoughts into English. The complicated Miłosz story is told, rather gracefully, by Cynthia Haven, who demonstrates how much of a Californian he became, living some 40 years on Grizzly Peak in Berkeley, a tenured Slavic professor by charity, not having all the usual qualifications, Czesław Miłosz: A California Life. He was born not in Poland, but in Lithuania still under tsarist rule, and as a child traveled with his family in the Russian empire. And later, having seen Warsaw go up in flames in 1939, he fled as a young man, getting stranded in New York, Washington, DC., Paris, all hostile places where the émigré Poles thought he was a communist, and the communists thought he was a traitor. Getting hired at Cal gave him his first reliable home, and one with a view of San Francisco Bay. And there he not only wrote Polish poetry compulsively, he recruited and trained English translators. And he even wrote an “Ode to a Bird.”
He wrote in a language that Americans could not read, and the Poles in his homeland were not allowed to read the work of an exiled dissident, although his work circulated in a few hand-typed samizdat pages had a certain cachet…What would you think the chance of success might be when he began teaching at Berkeley in 1960 to support his poetry habit. Persistently working against all odds to publish English translations eventually gave him an audience. It also gave American readers a chance to appreciate delicate language, knowing that it was the recreation of sentiments from an alien lost world. He could get away with writing: “O what daybreak in the window!” And he did in fact have a fabulous view from his desk at home in Berkeley. Well, twenty years after the Slavic Department took a chance on him, Czesław Miłosz, like his friend Brodsky, also won the Nobel Prize in literature, the only Berkeley Nobel in the humanities. Someone’s faith in his talent was vindicated.
Exile is not a new problem. It certainly is a major theme in the Hebrew Bible, not to mention the Aeneid and other classics. Think of Ovid banished from Rome and trying to write beautiful Latin in what is today a remote region on the Black Sea. Or Dante forced to leave his beloved Florence, with its distinct dialect, only to go on and invent a more universally understood Italian language. But the massive scale of displaced populations in our times of war and political turmoil is a striking feature of the modern age, starting perhaps with the Armenian genocide, and the million or millions of Russians forced to flee the terror of the Russian Revolution and resulting famines. In Post War the late Tony Judt identified the huge scale of displaced populations as a sign of modernity: “Between them Stalin and Hitler uprooted, transplanted, expelled, deported and dispersed some 30 million people in the years 1939-43.” And it continues. War, famine, climate change, political turmoil are driving millions of people from their homelands, forcing them to risk their lives in flimsy boats and in desolate deserts. And if they do survive the flight, how do they survive in an alien culture and new language…
Vladimir Nabokov lamented the loss of his homeland his entire life, but like Miłosz, he lived most of his life and all of his productive years abroad. Nabokov himself never got to know Russia very well. In childhood, he was surrounded by private tutors, mostly foreigners, and he was kept in a protective bubble either on his family estate, in their St. Petersburg mansion, or traveling to European spas. He seems not to have spent much time in Moscow, and the St. Petersburg of his childhood was the scene of dangerous rioting, which his family carefully sheltered him from. He left before turning 20, and never returned. His real homeland was Russian poetry. And he abandoned that in exile for English prose. His most vivid and moving language appears in his disjointed but eloquent memoir Speak, Memory. It was a critical success, but it took the appalling Lolita to connect with the American market place and make him rich. The novel’s English is florid and kitschy. Nabokov publicly praised the United States, and fled to a castle like hotel in Switzerland as soon as he cashed in.
In a way Miłosz took a higher road than Nabokov, maintaining his Polish language, staying true to poetry rather than prose, preserving his aesthetics, distancing himself from American kitsch, and yet gaining an audience. He somehow understood the synergy of translation. It was not easy. There were lots of rejection slips from publishers according to his early translator Lillian Vallee. Usually, I wonder what is lost in translation. With Robert Hass’ work recreating poetry by Milosz, I wonder if the translation transcends the original. Hass has his own magic. His romance with a language he does not speak is absolutely genuine. I went to a reading in the elegant Morrison Room of the Berkeley Library to hear Hass read his own poetry from “Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005.” But Hass refused to read more than a minimal bit of his own work, because he wanted to talk about how much fun it was to meet with Milosz on a regular basis to discuss the exact English wording to capture nuances, like the scratchy sound of a hedgehog scampering across wooden boards…in a way this was Hass’s own work as well as Miłosz’s. His contribution as translator was far from minimal. And it enabled Miłosz to take that high road.
At the end of his life Czesław Miłosz did flee, to spend his last days in Poland, not returning to the Lithuania of his childhood or the now ruined Warsaw of his youth, but in Krakow which miraculously retained its ancient buildings and charm when much of central Europe lost its material heritage in wars and political turmoil. Krakow looked more like his envisioned Poland before the conflagration. This was not his real home town, but a recreated homeland. His basic “citizenship” is open for discussion. When did he become an American citizen, a Polish citizen? Some claim to have heard a bit of a Lithuanian lilt in his spoken Polish. With the fall of communism, people could finally, legally read his work in the original language. He was able to enjoy his lasts days in his imagined and remembered homeland. But his best writing was accomplished in exile using a language few around him understood. Writing from the top of Grizzly Peak with a view of sunrise and sunsets over San Francisco Bay:
Unseen, unheard, yet it was
Unexpressed by strings or tongues, yet it will be.
Raspberry ice cream, we melt in the sky
Berkeley 1975
Cynthia Haven captures this dynamic of his California Life and his nostalgia for a recreated world, and a recreated language.
© Elena S. Danielson, December 1, 2021
Cynthia Haven’s portrait of Czesław Miłosz has sent me on a long tour of poetry in exile and poetry in translation. First off, is it even possible to translate the essence of poetic speech? And why does she characterize him as a Californian when we all know he was Polish? Or was he? Why did he insist on writing in Polish, and not switch to English even after 40 years in exile.
Why read this foreign, translated poetry of his, written in awkward circumstances, when I often cringe reading home-made American verse? I guess our English has been so battered and abused by commercial jingles and saleable Hallmark sentiments that I just cannot accept any lofty notions or noble ideas in this poor bruised language of ours. The quasi-biblical rantings of our miseducated, fundraising, evangelical TV preachers have brought down even the magnificent language of the King James Bible. Maybe during a quiet moment, I can enjoy something like “Hope is the thing with feathers,” simply because I know for sure Emily Dickinson never wanted to market her words. But if I did not know she wrote it, and if I did not know she led a life of seclusion, would I still go for that thing with feathers. So I need to know who wrote the stuff that I turn to in revery. And in what original language. It probably shouldn’t matter.
But in fact, it helps to read fine English translations from very obscure languages. Not familiar French or Spanish, but maybe Chinese, Russian, or Polish. This way the sense of nobility is recovered from a world a far distance from ours, preferably with an obscure orthography. And no advertising. Translations of Sung dynasty Chinese poetry will do it for me, especially if I can connect it with the ethereal, jade colored elegance of Sung celadon ceramics. I always assume I am missing crucial nuances when I read translations, but I know they must be there. “A mossy branch decorated with pieces of jade./ A small green bird/spends the night with flowers on this branch.” [“Sparse Shadows,” Jiang Kui ((1155-1211) p. 276, "The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry."] This feathery, jade colored bird brings hope, too.
And Russian works, with all of those inflected endings, the language rhymes whether you want it to or not. The Russian phrase “Pered mayimi glazami” sounds like poetry, although it just means “in front of my eyes.” Puskhin’s Onegin has acoustic pleasures in the original that generate a thrill that doesn’t come through in English, but us English speakers know it is there somewhere. Stanza XLVI is just music: Tatiana tells Onegin she would gladly give up her grand house and fabulous parties for a shelf of books and an overgrown garden. (I am sure there are birds in that garden…) Well, you have to know that it doesn’t merely rhyme in Russian, it flows…but it’s too late, she’s a faithful wife, and Onegin is just out of luck, swooped in the silkiest possible verse. We cannot do this in English. Nabokov’s translation, quite literal, is deliberately hideous. And it smugly lets us know English isn’t up to Pushkin, so we must enjoy it vicariously so to speak.
But then there is Josef Brodsky, a Russian poet who learned to translate his own work into English. And was charismatic enough to recruit talented American poets to help in the project. The best translations of Brodsky are his own, but they rhyme better if you read them with a Russian accent. He got the Nobel Prize, and frankly he deserved it. There was a sense that you could only get the Nobel if your work was available in either Swedish or English. And he wrote English with an exaggerated swoop, and a love of the sound of grand English words, that English speakers could never say with a straight face. He signed a book “For Elena Danielson with Tenderness and Gratitude.” Sounds like a love letter, but he had never even met me before. He just loved using the words Tenderness and Gratitude, which would sound stilted if I used them, but a Russian gets a free pass.
Russian is a famously difficult language, but it pales in comparison with Polish. Just all of those formidable consonants, lined up in almost every word and even in mercifully short names, like Czesław Miłosz. It is easy for Poles to learn Russian, but apparently not the other way around. Writing in Polish created a serious barrier, but also a bridge. Which brings me to Robert Hass, the Berkeley poet who spend endless hours with Miłosz rendering his poetic Polish thoughts into English. The complicated Miłosz story is told, rather gracefully, by Cynthia Haven, who demonstrates how much of a Californian he became, living some 40 years on Grizzly Peak in Berkeley, a tenured Slavic professor by charity, not having all the usual qualifications, Czesław Miłosz: A California Life. He was born not in Poland, but in Lithuania still under tsarist rule, and as a child traveled with his family in the Russian empire. And later, having seen Warsaw go up in flames in 1939, he fled as a young man, getting stranded in New York, Washington, DC., Paris, all hostile places where the émigré Poles thought he was a communist, and the communists thought he was a traitor. Getting hired at Cal gave him his first reliable home, and one with a view of San Francisco Bay. And there he not only wrote Polish poetry compulsively, he recruited and trained English translators. And he even wrote an “Ode to a Bird.”
He wrote in a language that Americans could not read, and the Poles in his homeland were not allowed to read the work of an exiled dissident, although his work circulated in a few hand-typed samizdat pages had a certain cachet…What would you think the chance of success might be when he began teaching at Berkeley in 1960 to support his poetry habit. Persistently working against all odds to publish English translations eventually gave him an audience. It also gave American readers a chance to appreciate delicate language, knowing that it was the recreation of sentiments from an alien lost world. He could get away with writing: “O what daybreak in the window!” And he did in fact have a fabulous view from his desk at home in Berkeley. Well, twenty years after the Slavic Department took a chance on him, Czesław Miłosz, like his friend Brodsky, also won the Nobel Prize in literature, the only Berkeley Nobel in the humanities. Someone’s faith in his talent was vindicated.
Exile is not a new problem. It certainly is a major theme in the Hebrew Bible, not to mention the Aeneid and other classics. Think of Ovid banished from Rome and trying to write beautiful Latin in what is today a remote region on the Black Sea. Or Dante forced to leave his beloved Florence, with its distinct dialect, only to go on and invent a more universally understood Italian language. But the massive scale of displaced populations in our times of war and political turmoil is a striking feature of the modern age, starting perhaps with the Armenian genocide, and the million or millions of Russians forced to flee the terror of the Russian Revolution and resulting famines. In Post War the late Tony Judt identified the huge scale of displaced populations as a sign of modernity: “Between them Stalin and Hitler uprooted, transplanted, expelled, deported and dispersed some 30 million people in the years 1939-43.” And it continues. War, famine, climate change, political turmoil are driving millions of people from their homelands, forcing them to risk their lives in flimsy boats and in desolate deserts. And if they do survive the flight, how do they survive in an alien culture and new language…
Vladimir Nabokov lamented the loss of his homeland his entire life, but like Miłosz, he lived most of his life and all of his productive years abroad. Nabokov himself never got to know Russia very well. In childhood, he was surrounded by private tutors, mostly foreigners, and he was kept in a protective bubble either on his family estate, in their St. Petersburg mansion, or traveling to European spas. He seems not to have spent much time in Moscow, and the St. Petersburg of his childhood was the scene of dangerous rioting, which his family carefully sheltered him from. He left before turning 20, and never returned. His real homeland was Russian poetry. And he abandoned that in exile for English prose. His most vivid and moving language appears in his disjointed but eloquent memoir Speak, Memory. It was a critical success, but it took the appalling Lolita to connect with the American market place and make him rich. The novel’s English is florid and kitschy. Nabokov publicly praised the United States, and fled to a castle like hotel in Switzerland as soon as he cashed in.
In a way Miłosz took a higher road than Nabokov, maintaining his Polish language, staying true to poetry rather than prose, preserving his aesthetics, distancing himself from American kitsch, and yet gaining an audience. He somehow understood the synergy of translation. It was not easy. There were lots of rejection slips from publishers according to his early translator Lillian Vallee. Usually, I wonder what is lost in translation. With Robert Hass’ work recreating poetry by Milosz, I wonder if the translation transcends the original. Hass has his own magic. His romance with a language he does not speak is absolutely genuine. I went to a reading in the elegant Morrison Room of the Berkeley Library to hear Hass read his own poetry from “Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005.” But Hass refused to read more than a minimal bit of his own work, because he wanted to talk about how much fun it was to meet with Milosz on a regular basis to discuss the exact English wording to capture nuances, like the scratchy sound of a hedgehog scampering across wooden boards…in a way this was Hass’s own work as well as Miłosz’s. His contribution as translator was far from minimal. And it enabled Miłosz to take that high road.
At the end of his life Czesław Miłosz did flee, to spend his last days in Poland, not returning to the Lithuania of his childhood or the now ruined Warsaw of his youth, but in Krakow which miraculously retained its ancient buildings and charm when much of central Europe lost its material heritage in wars and political turmoil. Krakow looked more like his envisioned Poland before the conflagration. This was not his real home town, but a recreated homeland. His basic “citizenship” is open for discussion. When did he become an American citizen, a Polish citizen? Some claim to have heard a bit of a Lithuanian lilt in his spoken Polish. With the fall of communism, people could finally, legally read his work in the original language. He was able to enjoy his lasts days in his imagined and remembered homeland. But his best writing was accomplished in exile using a language few around him understood. Writing from the top of Grizzly Peak with a view of sunrise and sunsets over San Francisco Bay:
Unseen, unheard, yet it was
Unexpressed by strings or tongues, yet it will be.
Raspberry ice cream, we melt in the sky
Berkeley 1975
Cynthia Haven captures this dynamic of his California Life and his nostalgia for a recreated world, and a recreated language.
February 8, 2022
Such an amazing book. Yes one learns all about a great Nobel poet but it’s more than that. Fascinating life from a tiny village in Europe to Washington DC to Grizzly Park in California and back to his homeland. You’ll meet such great people along the way, read about how important it is to put history in poems not just lyricism and sadly to watch him fade. But this book will keep him alive. It’s a masterpiece of a story of a life I didn’t want it to end.
September 16, 2021
Cynthia L. Haven, biographer of A California Life: Czesław Miłosz has made a name for herself with this book as an interviewer of and researcher about writers, as well as being a talented writer herself. Poetry is “her game,” as it were, and honorably so, more as a devoted hunter and knowledgeable stalker rather than as a hobbyist for mere amusement.
If the Californicization of Czesław Miłosz (CHZESZ-lhăvf MEE-wōhzsh) is her theme, marketing it for a quick sale to the highest bidder and biggest audience is indeed a typically Californian pursuit. He, as a European driven out of Lithuania, Poland and Paris by Nazi, Stalin’s and Soviet Russia’s cataclysms of secrecy, lies, assassination and destruction during and after World War II, however; knew that he, and the international commonality of poetry, had even broader issues at stake. His gifts as a writer, his friends and several very good strokes of luck had made the difference for him between life and death, obscurity and world reknown. Speed and greed were not a game, either on personal or political platforms, which he presciently saw "as One." As his American publisher Daniel Halpern said, “when reading” him, “You pay attention in a different way.” (p. 2)
My problem with Haven’s A California Life: Czesław Miłosz, then, is that I’m not sure if she’s trying to write a scholarly, academic biography, of which she could be quite capable; or a more salable and salacious popular treatment, ready to be turned into a biopic film or TV series “often with fictionalized scenes.[1]”
Rod Steiger could play Miłosz, if he was still alive; though Christian Bale beefed up considerably to play Dick Cheney. How could any actor and makeup department deal with Miłosz’ mythic, falconesque eyebrows, though!?! I was introduced to him at U Mass Creative Writing when he still had black hair, and those eyebrows were beyond mere drama. Expressive. Seething? Seeming to have a life of their own above those penetrating eyes that seemed to say both “Who are you, really?” and “I have seen too much.”
Haven seems to present examples of California and Americans’ misunderstanding of him and his own gruff, misanthropic and isolated personality traits, rather than the stunning and powerful poetry of a human being “who, always,” she grants, “had his eyes fixed on forever.” (Haven p. 3) She knows California opened him to some things, particularly giving him time, a relatively light tenured teaching position at Cal, personal and political safety to write his profound and prophetic revelatory works, albeit in exile from his native land and tongue.
She does quote him twice – once at the beginning (p. 11-12) and then again later (p. 65 and 66-67, 221), saying “I …simply acknowledge that this continent possesses something like a spirit which malevolently undoes any attempts to subdue it,” “The nature of the California coast, which is far from being gentle…is somewhat demoniac…there is something which seems to mock at and to annihilate our fragile humanity,” and as for America “I learned at last to say: this is my home,/…in a great republic, moderately corrupt,” and as to Americans, especially in the 1960s, “no one had time for long conversations here,…everyone was on his own. You want to give a lecture, fine, give it. You want to write, write; you don’t want to; so don’t. All this creates an impression of indifference, of the individual vanishing into a landscape and masses of people,…This impression may often be mistaken, but it can be depressing.” (p. 75)
As a Midwesterner in California, especially during the pandemic, I empathize with his longing for family and small towns as Miłosz longed for his familial childhood in Lithuania, a common language and way of life, as he suffered acute loneliness in Berkeley on Grizzly Peak, “safe,” but suddenly unknown and dishonored, very far from his spiritual and cultural "home."
Eastern Europe had been overrun, devoured and dreadfully deconstructed, demolished and/or partially reconstructed by two regimes, literally before his eyes, and he was being “rescued” by a country who’d done huge military damage “over there,” yet remained relatively unscathed and uninformed “over here.” He’d defected to save his life, his sanity, his family and his calling: “The paramount duty of a poet…to tell the truth,”[2]which had become progressively more and more impossible in Soviet-dominated Poland, and even abroad. He was indeed generally eclipsed and misunderstood here, but as a student whose rite of passage was the 60s, Civil Rights, Vietnam and the Sexual Revolution; I must say both he, and Haven to some extent, did not or could not really understand what was happening then, and is still happening, here, now.
Haven tends to blow Euro-American division up and rubs it in, comes right out and says things like “Americans are always seeking quirky and idiosyncratic means of “salvation” and personal enlightenment – just look at the hippies, social activists, religious cranks, and nudists who populated Berkeley, then and since,” (p. 114) which unfortunately kind of sounds like a Taliban patriarch pontificating about uppity Afghan girls wanting to go to school. Paris, London, Barcelona, Berlin and Rome weren’t exactly quiet in the 60s. She didn’t see Warsaw destroyed, from what we know about her, but Miłosz did. Are the roots of her philosophies and values really the same as his, or not? Where is she from? She never quite says, but implies over and over that her opinions stem from the same kind of complexity, questioning, experiences and genius as his.
Miłosz also stood between Jews and a mob of Nazi sympathizers in Wilno as a student himself, and plenty of Berkeley and Oakland (think Black Panthers and anti-war demonstrators) idealists and “social activists” got tear-gassed, beaten and thrown in jail – some of them/us for 40 years like Albert Woodfox, and some killed like Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, the students at Kent State and James Rector at People’s Park. Of course it’s not the annihilation of Warsaw, but, in an American way, the forces of fascism, racism, religious prejudice, chaos and anti-intellectualism keep rearing their ugly heads. She didn’t see students being beaten by helmeted cops with billy clubs on American campuses and streets in the 60’s, we did. Miłosz had a right to sneer at us if he wanted to, but it seems to me that Haven does not.
Granted, I’m working from a draft version from Heyday Books that’s been (I hope) carefully reviewed and revised before going to print, but “where she’s coming from” is still confusing when I just look at the book itself. She supports Miłosz’ exile and work here, but carefully chooses which “facts” she’s going to ignore, stress or “blur out” to make sure she, also, “looks good” by standing next to him and rooting for what she assumes are his prejudices about his California Life.
For example, from the first page to the last chapter, it’s hard to discern how many times she actually interviewed/ spent time with Czesław Miłosz face-to-face – was it only once, or “twice?” (p. 7, 199-203) She came to California in 1980, he’d already been here since 1960, “rescued” through the stalwart efforts of his wife, Janina (Janka), who was already in the U.S. with their two sons while he had served as a Polish diplomat; and due to encouragement and support from allies like Albert Camus from France, playwright Thornton Wilder, and Poles and international translators who had known his poetry since the 1940s.
Havens’ constituted his last public media interviews in English, it turns out, two in two months’ time in the year 2000, at his Grizzly Peak home. The first hundred pages or so, however, try to make Haven and Miłosz sound like old buddies, pals in the Slavic Literature Department at Cal Berkeley, but then I realized she was a “visiting writer and scholar at Stanford’s Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures and a Voegelin Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution,”[3] not Cal; taking a wonderful variety of quotes from her various collections of other people’s experiences or interviews with him, edited to support her own views of his “preoccupations, almost obsessions – history, language, civilization, time and truth,” (p. 3) the balance between “être and devenir” (being and becoming) that, of course, all really good, insightful poets use as lodestone and balancing rod on the tightrope of language strung between thought and experience. I felt like she was playing a guessing game of hide and seek with me in her prose, and chapters that seemed to be chronological, but often jumped back and forth.
As a writer of both prose and poetry, I would have preferred more of Miłosz’ own ideas on his uses of “language” and sources of “truth” than Haven’s sometimes tangential opinions, excesses, speculations and projections on “history, …civilization, time….” This nagged at me particularly in what she kept saying “Miłosz thought…” (p. 64) “Miłosz knew…” (p. 65), “must have thought” or “probably felt,” especially towards California landscapes, American poets, poetry, people and their works; and particularly religious, spiritual and philosophical leanings.
If she had supported these more with quotes or images from his own poetry and writing, I would have preferred that to her sometimes rambling descriptions or “conversation” that wandered all around him, coming back again and again to her own internal monologue or multilogue, “interesting” and erudite as it was. I learned a lot of things by looking up solipsism, St. John of Patmos, maps of Eastern Europe and her religious and literary references along the way; but it’s not what I read A California Life: Czesław Miłosz for.
Here is a sampling of my marginalia: p. 68 Ecclesiastical hyperbole, p. 64 Steals Ursula K. LeGuin’s title The Word for World is Forest. Is this a literary “in joke,” however? (needs a reference) She (Haven) also refers to Miłosz p. 72 in another outright steal, unreferenced – as “He contained multitudes,” another unfootnoted reference to “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes)” from Walt Whitman’s The Song of Myself. p. 81 show, don’t tell, p. 82 “mansplaining” again, “quick pan,” (of another “travelogue” section) “wallowing in hyperbole,” p. 84 fluff, p. 88 projections, p. 115 snobbery, p.114 theological errors, et cetera.
To be fair, I also applaud her now and again, saying p. 67 and 85, Truth!
But sometimes, unfortunately, she’s downright wrong, or certainly “out of her depth,” as she was about Emerson, Whitman and Dickinson advocating for Calvinist “Original Sin.” In her fascinating ramble, she leans into either/or dualistic views of what she calls (her and?) Miłosz’ Catholicism, “Manichean” Christianity and view of salvation. (p. 112 – 115) This is not what American deism, pantheism or even Transcendentalism are about; whose “self-reliant” nature she seems to disdain, not as “can-do” self-confidence and ability, but our arrogant ignorance.
Oh yeah? Tell me more…
Yes, poisoning the Natives, kidnapping Africans, Manifest Destiny, Robber Barons and many other American movements, private and government policies were ill-conceived, cruel and destructive; but the values and habits behind a lot of them came from European governments and religions, and people trying to get out of the “Old World” and into something new that wouldn’t cause them/us quite so much suffering, guilt, fear, oppression, poverty and physical and emotional pain. It's not that I totally disagree with all of her and his assessments of us, I just don't care for her tone.
Emerson was a pantheist and son of a Unitarian minister, a junior pastor himself, undoubtedly familiar with Universalism (“All are saved or none,”) even though the two sects had not joined yet, but left even that “antiquated” tradition to be a writer and lecturer traveling the world.[4]
Dickinson “rebelled against the evangelical fervor present at” Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, staying only 10 months, even though “she liked the girls.” Her poems and letters show a naturalistic spirituality and respect for the power of God and redemption, patient resignation and sorrow about the death and illness around her, but I would not say the typical mental anguish, shame, guilt and fear one expresses when expecting eternal damnation in Hell due to Original Sin instead of salvation due to faith, grace and/or intervention of Jesus Christ.
I believe Fred (“Mr.”) Rogers, for example, anguished more than Dickinson did whether he was a “sheep” or a “goat,” perhaps because she was such an avid gardener and lover of the Divine and miraculous in nature herself. Winter -- dire as it was in Massachusetts – was always followed by the flowers of spring. Am I reading my Neopaganism into her poetry as Haven reads her own faith practices and belief systems into Miłosz’? Could be.
There are plenty of “apocalyptic,” tortured evangelicals and suffering Catholic writers and poets wracked between stark divisions of spiritual goodness and physico-material evil in America past and present, (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”) but Walt Whitman certainly wasn’t one of them. On that, I’m pretty clear. Actually, he saw relatively almost as much man-made suffering in Civil War infirmaries as Miłosz did in war-torn and Cold War Europe, lamented people’s folly and violence, but didn’t attribute it to “Original Sin” requiring eternal damnation or redemption. "God, to Whitman, was both immanent and transcendent and the human soul was immortal and in a state of progressive development." (4.5) Critics and clerics aplenty thought Leaves of Grass was sinful, but Whitman did not.
I went back to school in 1986 for a second minor in Religious Studies, Asian through Judaism, OT and NT, including a seminar on the Synoptic Gospels from Pauline scholar Cal Roetzel. Carl Jung says “maturity” is “the ability to hold paradox” in balance, but “both/and” thinking seems to make Haven nervous, and I hear her coming down hard on the conservative, has to be “either/or” values ends. Even about Miłosz, it doesn’t quite wash.
I feel like Haven thinks she can “get away with” these kinds of utterances because her subject matter will be “over the heads” of most of her [American?] readers. We don’t need that kind of tone. Which leads me to “mansplaining.”
Often, oddly enough, with women, including writers and translators, as well as that behemoth “Americans-in-general,” she sees; Haven seems patronizing and dismissive. That really surprised me. Her quotes and anecdotes from interviews with translators about Miłosz are pieced together in a very, very interesting way, especially about the details of the title of Miłosz’ book Ocalenie, translated salvation, survival or rescue in different places and times for different reasons. But when she gets to her colleague, scholar – translator Dr. Lillian Vallee (p. 89-91), and starts right out quoting her with “I was never a lover” and a description of her appearance, I was really taken aback.
I mean, c’mon, girls, we are adults now, are we not? Scholars? Professionals? Year 2021 going on 2022? Oprah did her speech at the Golden Globes, and we are not going that direction any more. That TIME IS UP.
Do we really need to play the “oneupswomanship” game about who gets to sleep with the famous rock star poet? Forward, forward! We are being crushed by a huge backlash of global political recolonization and patriarchy, and you're sounding catty because he chose her as his translator and not you? What gives? We need solidarity, please, not shmear.
You didn’t ask Robert Hass or Peter Dale Scott if they’d ever been his lover, why take the “quick and dirty” interview route and lowball her like that? Haven doesn’t even seem to notice that it’s crass.
Haven had also briefly hinted early on that Miłosz had had lovers in Paris while separated from Janka and his children by the Atlantic Ocean, the McCarthyist anti-communist Red Scare in Washington, the FBI and NKVD Russian surveillance in Paris. Mid-book, she mysteriously mentioned that Janka would die a “shocking” death at the Grizzly Peak house, but I was more shocked later on by the blithe way she introduced Miłosz’ second wife, Carol, in Chapter 12, “Only Her Love Warmed Him,” which I had assumed was to be about Janina/ Janka, who was his partner and wife for 49 years.
A whole lot of facts or details were omitted, as if their relationship had been trivial. Ouch. That one really hurt. The new gal moved in on him, and Haven numbered others, long before wife number one was even dead.
That was California/ American all over – trash the aged and ill “little woman” from “the old country” and get yourself a hip new energizer bunny 33 years your junior to help manage your now professional Nobel-winner calendar and always have a joke or a smile when you’re sad. It just “left a bad taste in my mouth,” or shall I say my eyelashes curled and burned as I read. (More misogyny, plainly put.)
Carol “set her cap for him,” Haven quotes from Robert Hass, Miłosz smiled back and it was all over for invalid Janka, and he has the power and chutzpah to go and justify himself in a poem. Haven says “we are left with a mystery,” but it seems pretty clear to me.
Dare I say it? Cliché? Old, famous, rich, greedy, horny alcoholic outlives spouse; does whatever he wants and feels sorry for himself, self-elegiac to the home-country grave. Am I cynical? Sign of the times? Is that just because I’m an American “sadder-but-wiser girl?” Maybe. Success American-style, then back to nice Polish Catholic town where the people love him anyway and the priest blesses him and hears his confession on the way to an honored national-hero tomb inside a church. Wow.
A complex man and a complex biographer, too.
By doggedly writing, co-translating, teaching and finally winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, even though he wrote all but one of his poems in Polish; I think he turned the tables from “What did California do to him?” to “What has Miłosz done to us?”
His subsequent Harvard Lectures were titled “The Witness of Poetry,” which brought an entire global sub-genre into view, as well as the translation hunger Robert BBly and others sparked by alerting us to the vision and poetry of Pablo Neruda, Antonio Machado, Anna Ahkmatova, Wisława Szymborska, Rumi, Hafez, Li Po and many other writers who are now global.
He inspired dozens of his students, friends, listeners, readers, fellow Poles, Eastern Europeans, sufferers under political oppressions and poets. If Percy Bysshe Shelley was correct, he changed things by bringing us to awareness, because “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
If the Californicization of Czesław Miłosz (CHZESZ-lhăvf MEE-wōhzsh) is her theme, marketing it for a quick sale to the highest bidder and biggest audience is indeed a typically Californian pursuit. He, as a European driven out of Lithuania, Poland and Paris by Nazi, Stalin’s and Soviet Russia’s cataclysms of secrecy, lies, assassination and destruction during and after World War II, however; knew that he, and the international commonality of poetry, had even broader issues at stake. His gifts as a writer, his friends and several very good strokes of luck had made the difference for him between life and death, obscurity and world reknown. Speed and greed were not a game, either on personal or political platforms, which he presciently saw "as One." As his American publisher Daniel Halpern said, “when reading” him, “You pay attention in a different way.” (p. 2)
My problem with Haven’s A California Life: Czesław Miłosz, then, is that I’m not sure if she’s trying to write a scholarly, academic biography, of which she could be quite capable; or a more salable and salacious popular treatment, ready to be turned into a biopic film or TV series “often with fictionalized scenes.[1]”
Rod Steiger could play Miłosz, if he was still alive; though Christian Bale beefed up considerably to play Dick Cheney. How could any actor and makeup department deal with Miłosz’ mythic, falconesque eyebrows, though!?! I was introduced to him at U Mass Creative Writing when he still had black hair, and those eyebrows were beyond mere drama. Expressive. Seething? Seeming to have a life of their own above those penetrating eyes that seemed to say both “Who are you, really?” and “I have seen too much.”
Haven seems to present examples of California and Americans’ misunderstanding of him and his own gruff, misanthropic and isolated personality traits, rather than the stunning and powerful poetry of a human being “who, always,” she grants, “had his eyes fixed on forever.” (Haven p. 3) She knows California opened him to some things, particularly giving him time, a relatively light tenured teaching position at Cal, personal and political safety to write his profound and prophetic revelatory works, albeit in exile from his native land and tongue.
She does quote him twice – once at the beginning (p. 11-12) and then again later (p. 65 and 66-67, 221), saying “I …simply acknowledge that this continent possesses something like a spirit which malevolently undoes any attempts to subdue it,” “The nature of the California coast, which is far from being gentle…is somewhat demoniac…there is something which seems to mock at and to annihilate our fragile humanity,” and as for America “I learned at last to say: this is my home,/…in a great republic, moderately corrupt,” and as to Americans, especially in the 1960s, “no one had time for long conversations here,…everyone was on his own. You want to give a lecture, fine, give it. You want to write, write; you don’t want to; so don’t. All this creates an impression of indifference, of the individual vanishing into a landscape and masses of people,…This impression may often be mistaken, but it can be depressing.” (p. 75)
As a Midwesterner in California, especially during the pandemic, I empathize with his longing for family and small towns as Miłosz longed for his familial childhood in Lithuania, a common language and way of life, as he suffered acute loneliness in Berkeley on Grizzly Peak, “safe,” but suddenly unknown and dishonored, very far from his spiritual and cultural "home."
Eastern Europe had been overrun, devoured and dreadfully deconstructed, demolished and/or partially reconstructed by two regimes, literally before his eyes, and he was being “rescued” by a country who’d done huge military damage “over there,” yet remained relatively unscathed and uninformed “over here.” He’d defected to save his life, his sanity, his family and his calling: “The paramount duty of a poet…to tell the truth,”[2]which had become progressively more and more impossible in Soviet-dominated Poland, and even abroad. He was indeed generally eclipsed and misunderstood here, but as a student whose rite of passage was the 60s, Civil Rights, Vietnam and the Sexual Revolution; I must say both he, and Haven to some extent, did not or could not really understand what was happening then, and is still happening, here, now.
Haven tends to blow Euro-American division up and rubs it in, comes right out and says things like “Americans are always seeking quirky and idiosyncratic means of “salvation” and personal enlightenment – just look at the hippies, social activists, religious cranks, and nudists who populated Berkeley, then and since,” (p. 114) which unfortunately kind of sounds like a Taliban patriarch pontificating about uppity Afghan girls wanting to go to school. Paris, London, Barcelona, Berlin and Rome weren’t exactly quiet in the 60s. She didn’t see Warsaw destroyed, from what we know about her, but Miłosz did. Are the roots of her philosophies and values really the same as his, or not? Where is she from? She never quite says, but implies over and over that her opinions stem from the same kind of complexity, questioning, experiences and genius as his.
Miłosz also stood between Jews and a mob of Nazi sympathizers in Wilno as a student himself, and plenty of Berkeley and Oakland (think Black Panthers and anti-war demonstrators) idealists and “social activists” got tear-gassed, beaten and thrown in jail – some of them/us for 40 years like Albert Woodfox, and some killed like Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, the students at Kent State and James Rector at People’s Park. Of course it’s not the annihilation of Warsaw, but, in an American way, the forces of fascism, racism, religious prejudice, chaos and anti-intellectualism keep rearing their ugly heads. She didn’t see students being beaten by helmeted cops with billy clubs on American campuses and streets in the 60’s, we did. Miłosz had a right to sneer at us if he wanted to, but it seems to me that Haven does not.
Granted, I’m working from a draft version from Heyday Books that’s been (I hope) carefully reviewed and revised before going to print, but “where she’s coming from” is still confusing when I just look at the book itself. She supports Miłosz’ exile and work here, but carefully chooses which “facts” she’s going to ignore, stress or “blur out” to make sure she, also, “looks good” by standing next to him and rooting for what she assumes are his prejudices about his California Life.
For example, from the first page to the last chapter, it’s hard to discern how many times she actually interviewed/ spent time with Czesław Miłosz face-to-face – was it only once, or “twice?” (p. 7, 199-203) She came to California in 1980, he’d already been here since 1960, “rescued” through the stalwart efforts of his wife, Janina (Janka), who was already in the U.S. with their two sons while he had served as a Polish diplomat; and due to encouragement and support from allies like Albert Camus from France, playwright Thornton Wilder, and Poles and international translators who had known his poetry since the 1940s.
Havens’ constituted his last public media interviews in English, it turns out, two in two months’ time in the year 2000, at his Grizzly Peak home. The first hundred pages or so, however, try to make Haven and Miłosz sound like old buddies, pals in the Slavic Literature Department at Cal Berkeley, but then I realized she was a “visiting writer and scholar at Stanford’s Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures and a Voegelin Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution,”[3] not Cal; taking a wonderful variety of quotes from her various collections of other people’s experiences or interviews with him, edited to support her own views of his “preoccupations, almost obsessions – history, language, civilization, time and truth,” (p. 3) the balance between “être and devenir” (being and becoming) that, of course, all really good, insightful poets use as lodestone and balancing rod on the tightrope of language strung between thought and experience. I felt like she was playing a guessing game of hide and seek with me in her prose, and chapters that seemed to be chronological, but often jumped back and forth.
As a writer of both prose and poetry, I would have preferred more of Miłosz’ own ideas on his uses of “language” and sources of “truth” than Haven’s sometimes tangential opinions, excesses, speculations and projections on “history, …civilization, time….” This nagged at me particularly in what she kept saying “Miłosz thought…” (p. 64) “Miłosz knew…” (p. 65), “must have thought” or “probably felt,” especially towards California landscapes, American poets, poetry, people and their works; and particularly religious, spiritual and philosophical leanings.
If she had supported these more with quotes or images from his own poetry and writing, I would have preferred that to her sometimes rambling descriptions or “conversation” that wandered all around him, coming back again and again to her own internal monologue or multilogue, “interesting” and erudite as it was. I learned a lot of things by looking up solipsism, St. John of Patmos, maps of Eastern Europe and her religious and literary references along the way; but it’s not what I read A California Life: Czesław Miłosz for.
Here is a sampling of my marginalia: p. 68 Ecclesiastical hyperbole, p. 64 Steals Ursula K. LeGuin’s title The Word for World is Forest. Is this a literary “in joke,” however? (needs a reference) She (Haven) also refers to Miłosz p. 72 in another outright steal, unreferenced – as “He contained multitudes,” another unfootnoted reference to “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes)” from Walt Whitman’s The Song of Myself. p. 81 show, don’t tell, p. 82 “mansplaining” again, “quick pan,” (of another “travelogue” section) “wallowing in hyperbole,” p. 84 fluff, p. 88 projections, p. 115 snobbery, p.114 theological errors, et cetera.
To be fair, I also applaud her now and again, saying p. 67 and 85, Truth!
But sometimes, unfortunately, she’s downright wrong, or certainly “out of her depth,” as she was about Emerson, Whitman and Dickinson advocating for Calvinist “Original Sin.” In her fascinating ramble, she leans into either/or dualistic views of what she calls (her and?) Miłosz’ Catholicism, “Manichean” Christianity and view of salvation. (p. 112 – 115) This is not what American deism, pantheism or even Transcendentalism are about; whose “self-reliant” nature she seems to disdain, not as “can-do” self-confidence and ability, but our arrogant ignorance.
Oh yeah? Tell me more…
Yes, poisoning the Natives, kidnapping Africans, Manifest Destiny, Robber Barons and many other American movements, private and government policies were ill-conceived, cruel and destructive; but the values and habits behind a lot of them came from European governments and religions, and people trying to get out of the “Old World” and into something new that wouldn’t cause them/us quite so much suffering, guilt, fear, oppression, poverty and physical and emotional pain. It's not that I totally disagree with all of her and his assessments of us, I just don't care for her tone.
Emerson was a pantheist and son of a Unitarian minister, a junior pastor himself, undoubtedly familiar with Universalism (“All are saved or none,”) even though the two sects had not joined yet, but left even that “antiquated” tradition to be a writer and lecturer traveling the world.[4]
Dickinson “rebelled against the evangelical fervor present at” Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, staying only 10 months, even though “she liked the girls.” Her poems and letters show a naturalistic spirituality and respect for the power of God and redemption, patient resignation and sorrow about the death and illness around her, but I would not say the typical mental anguish, shame, guilt and fear one expresses when expecting eternal damnation in Hell due to Original Sin instead of salvation due to faith, grace and/or intervention of Jesus Christ.
I believe Fred (“Mr.”) Rogers, for example, anguished more than Dickinson did whether he was a “sheep” or a “goat,” perhaps because she was such an avid gardener and lover of the Divine and miraculous in nature herself. Winter -- dire as it was in Massachusetts – was always followed by the flowers of spring. Am I reading my Neopaganism into her poetry as Haven reads her own faith practices and belief systems into Miłosz’? Could be.
There are plenty of “apocalyptic,” tortured evangelicals and suffering Catholic writers and poets wracked between stark divisions of spiritual goodness and physico-material evil in America past and present, (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”) but Walt Whitman certainly wasn’t one of them. On that, I’m pretty clear. Actually, he saw relatively almost as much man-made suffering in Civil War infirmaries as Miłosz did in war-torn and Cold War Europe, lamented people’s folly and violence, but didn’t attribute it to “Original Sin” requiring eternal damnation or redemption. "God, to Whitman, was both immanent and transcendent and the human soul was immortal and in a state of progressive development." (4.5) Critics and clerics aplenty thought Leaves of Grass was sinful, but Whitman did not.
I went back to school in 1986 for a second minor in Religious Studies, Asian through Judaism, OT and NT, including a seminar on the Synoptic Gospels from Pauline scholar Cal Roetzel. Carl Jung says “maturity” is “the ability to hold paradox” in balance, but “both/and” thinking seems to make Haven nervous, and I hear her coming down hard on the conservative, has to be “either/or” values ends. Even about Miłosz, it doesn’t quite wash.
I feel like Haven thinks she can “get away with” these kinds of utterances because her subject matter will be “over the heads” of most of her [American?] readers. We don’t need that kind of tone. Which leads me to “mansplaining.”
Often, oddly enough, with women, including writers and translators, as well as that behemoth “Americans-in-general,” she sees; Haven seems patronizing and dismissive. That really surprised me. Her quotes and anecdotes from interviews with translators about Miłosz are pieced together in a very, very interesting way, especially about the details of the title of Miłosz’ book Ocalenie, translated salvation, survival or rescue in different places and times for different reasons. But when she gets to her colleague, scholar – translator Dr. Lillian Vallee (p. 89-91), and starts right out quoting her with “I was never a lover” and a description of her appearance, I was really taken aback.
I mean, c’mon, girls, we are adults now, are we not? Scholars? Professionals? Year 2021 going on 2022? Oprah did her speech at the Golden Globes, and we are not going that direction any more. That TIME IS UP.
Do we really need to play the “oneupswomanship” game about who gets to sleep with the famous rock star poet? Forward, forward! We are being crushed by a huge backlash of global political recolonization and patriarchy, and you're sounding catty because he chose her as his translator and not you? What gives? We need solidarity, please, not shmear.
You didn’t ask Robert Hass or Peter Dale Scott if they’d ever been his lover, why take the “quick and dirty” interview route and lowball her like that? Haven doesn’t even seem to notice that it’s crass.
Haven had also briefly hinted early on that Miłosz had had lovers in Paris while separated from Janka and his children by the Atlantic Ocean, the McCarthyist anti-communist Red Scare in Washington, the FBI and NKVD Russian surveillance in Paris. Mid-book, she mysteriously mentioned that Janka would die a “shocking” death at the Grizzly Peak house, but I was more shocked later on by the blithe way she introduced Miłosz’ second wife, Carol, in Chapter 12, “Only Her Love Warmed Him,” which I had assumed was to be about Janina/ Janka, who was his partner and wife for 49 years.
A whole lot of facts or details were omitted, as if their relationship had been trivial. Ouch. That one really hurt. The new gal moved in on him, and Haven numbered others, long before wife number one was even dead.
That was California/ American all over – trash the aged and ill “little woman” from “the old country” and get yourself a hip new energizer bunny 33 years your junior to help manage your now professional Nobel-winner calendar and always have a joke or a smile when you’re sad. It just “left a bad taste in my mouth,” or shall I say my eyelashes curled and burned as I read. (More misogyny, plainly put.)
Carol “set her cap for him,” Haven quotes from Robert Hass, Miłosz smiled back and it was all over for invalid Janka, and he has the power and chutzpah to go and justify himself in a poem. Haven says “we are left with a mystery,” but it seems pretty clear to me.
Dare I say it? Cliché? Old, famous, rich, greedy, horny alcoholic outlives spouse; does whatever he wants and feels sorry for himself, self-elegiac to the home-country grave. Am I cynical? Sign of the times? Is that just because I’m an American “sadder-but-wiser girl?” Maybe. Success American-style, then back to nice Polish Catholic town where the people love him anyway and the priest blesses him and hears his confession on the way to an honored national-hero tomb inside a church. Wow.
A complex man and a complex biographer, too.
By doggedly writing, co-translating, teaching and finally winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, even though he wrote all but one of his poems in Polish; I think he turned the tables from “What did California do to him?” to “What has Miłosz done to us?”
His subsequent Harvard Lectures were titled “The Witness of Poetry,” which brought an entire global sub-genre into view, as well as the translation hunger Robert BBly and others sparked by alerting us to the vision and poetry of Pablo Neruda, Antonio Machado, Anna Ahkmatova, Wisława Szymborska, Rumi, Hafez, Li Po and many other writers who are now global.
He inspired dozens of his students, friends, listeners, readers, fellow Poles, Eastern Europeans, sufferers under political oppressions and poets. If Percy Bysshe Shelley was correct, he changed things by bringing us to awareness, because “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
January 4, 2025
Miłosz w książce Haven to postać osadzona w kulturze anglosaskiej, zaciekawiony nią poszukująca inspiracji. Kalifornia zaś to miejsce wyzbyte z narodowości; historycznego kontekstu, pozbawione tak bardzo wyraźnych w Europie miejsc tożsamościowych. To przede wszystkim przyroda, trwająca od milionów lat. Dzięki temu jest przestrzenią obiektywną, dającą dystans, poza środowiskiem naturalnym pozbawionym bodźców, skłaniającym do wyciszenie, refleksji, przemyśleń.
Z tego zestawienia jawi się obraz poety, który uwolniony od polskiego, europejskiego kontekstu wznosi się na wyżyny poezji uniwersalnej, tzn. rozumianej bez względu na pochodzenie i miejsce zamieszkania. Z drugiej strony to również obraz człowieka, którego znaczenie w historii literatury polskiej jest przeogromne, a w kalifornijskim kontekście jest tylko niszowym wykładowcą ze słowiańskim akcentem. Jednym z wielu, praktycznie nieznanym poza garstką studentów, fanów i tych co lubią poezję.
Autorka tworząc nielinearna opowieść o Nobliście nie cofa się przed pominięciem tego, co było źródłem nieprzyjemności, cierpienia. Pomija natomiast kontekst polski, europejski. Jest go tylko tyle, by zrozumieć dlaczego znalazł się w Ameryce. Bardziej interesuje ją wpływ Kalifornii, poezji amerykańskiej na zmianę percepcji. Sporo miejsca poświęca też poszukiwaniom tego, co kształtowało jego zmysł obserwacji świata, opisywania go, definiowania.
Podoba mi się to amerykańskie spojrzenie. Zupełnie inne, niepozbawione uwielbienia dla bohatera książki, ale pokazujące inną perspektywę. Miłosza wiele dziwi, budzi niepokój, niesmak, rozczarowanie. Autorka kwituje to stwierdzeniem - taka jest Kalifornia, to jest normalne, typowe. Dysonans wynika z wychowania w innej kulturze, na innym kontynencie i mija wraz z zadomowieniem się w Berkeley.
Kalifornia i Miłosz to równorzędni bohaterowie tej książki, którzy czerpią z siebie i dają sobie to co najlepsze.
Z tego zestawienia jawi się obraz poety, który uwolniony od polskiego, europejskiego kontekstu wznosi się na wyżyny poezji uniwersalnej, tzn. rozumianej bez względu na pochodzenie i miejsce zamieszkania. Z drugiej strony to również obraz człowieka, którego znaczenie w historii literatury polskiej jest przeogromne, a w kalifornijskim kontekście jest tylko niszowym wykładowcą ze słowiańskim akcentem. Jednym z wielu, praktycznie nieznanym poza garstką studentów, fanów i tych co lubią poezję.
Autorka tworząc nielinearna opowieść o Nobliście nie cofa się przed pominięciem tego, co było źródłem nieprzyjemności, cierpienia. Pomija natomiast kontekst polski, europejski. Jest go tylko tyle, by zrozumieć dlaczego znalazł się w Ameryce. Bardziej interesuje ją wpływ Kalifornii, poezji amerykańskiej na zmianę percepcji. Sporo miejsca poświęca też poszukiwaniom tego, co kształtowało jego zmysł obserwacji świata, opisywania go, definiowania.
Podoba mi się to amerykańskie spojrzenie. Zupełnie inne, niepozbawione uwielbienia dla bohatera książki, ale pokazujące inną perspektywę. Miłosza wiele dziwi, budzi niepokój, niesmak, rozczarowanie. Autorka kwituje to stwierdzeniem - taka jest Kalifornia, to jest normalne, typowe. Dysonans wynika z wychowania w innej kulturze, na innym kontynencie i mija wraz z zadomowieniem się w Berkeley.
Kalifornia i Miłosz to równorzędni bohaterowie tej książki, którzy czerpią z siebie i dają sobie to co najlepsze.
August 3, 2025
I met Milosz in Venice Italy in 1992. I worked at the Guggenheim and he asked about the student interns who were mostly art history and fine artists. I said I was a poor poet and he asked me if I’d ever heard of Czeslaw Milosz. As it happened, I had just bought a misprint of Unattainable Earth at the Winter Park Library book sale before relocating and so I said Yes! His eyes twinkled but he turned on his heel.
Poets make the best prose writers so I thoroughly enjoyed this part memoir, part biography. I believe Milosz translated his own poems and Robert Haas helped to refine the English. I also enjoyed the backdrop of California which epitomizes the being and becoming of America.
Poets make the best prose writers so I thoroughly enjoyed this part memoir, part biography. I believe Milosz translated his own poems and Robert Haas helped to refine the English. I also enjoyed the backdrop of California which epitomizes the being and becoming of America.
February 16, 2022
This book, which reads like a tale, if not a novel, is an engrossing journey through Milosz’s 40 years in California, and much more. His states of mind in postwar Poland and France in the 1950s are explored, providing the needed context for his changes to come in the land of Calafia, the Amazonian queen and reputed founder of the land. She seems to attain the stature of yet another goddess in the poet’s life, beginning with the Lithuanian incarnation of Gaia. Haven’s deft descriptions of Californian, American and European locales flesh out the book, adding to its immediacy. Other anecdotal touches are the many portraits and conversations with literary figures, students, and others that populated Milosz’s life, not to mention family members and other friends. And characters that are beyond human: California itself, her cities and, most unsettling of all, the Burning City, well-known to Milosz from prewar Warsaw’s final days, and now, sadly, to Haven and her fellow Californians, as she describes their travails—and, little by little, more familiar to the rest of us on the Earth for that matter. The other element brought to light that startled this reader was the constant, discomfiting surveillance Milosz, his wife and two young sons had to endure from the Polish secret service when they lived in France; an unease that remained with them for a long time. On a more uplifting note the very interesting, and satisfying to me, final chapter takes place higher up than Milosz’s already lofty abode in the Berkeley hills. I envy the newcomers to Milosz who read this fabulous journey through his life and times in a land that did not deter him from his poetic vocation, but in fact made it possible for Milosz, a man with great love for people and the world, a man of extraordinary tenacity and contrariness, to become a great poet.
September 29, 2024
Czesław Miłosz przez większość swojego życia nie mieszkał w jednym miejscu zbyt długo. Czterdzieści lat spędzonych w Kalifornii to czas ogromnej samotności, wypełniony pracą twórczą – to właśnie tutaj powstały najważniejsze dzieła, które przyczyniły się do jego zdobycia Nagrody Nobla oraz uznania za jednego z największych poetów XX wieku. Katedra literatury słowiańskiej na Uniwersytecie Kalifornijskim w Berkeley była dla niego darem od losu, oferując stabilizację i możliwość twórczego rozwoju po trudnych latach spędzonych we Francji.
Rok 2024 to rok Czesława Miłosza. Nie wyobrażam sobie lepszego sposobu na jego uczczenie niż zagłębienie się w historię jego kalifornijskiego okresu. To był najbardziej płodny czas w jego twórczości, który doprowadził go do zdobycia Nagrody Nobla. Śledzenie tych lat życia autora było niezwykle ekscytujące. Połączenie wydarzeń z jego biografii z jego twórczością z tego okresu okazało się fascynujące. Ukazało, jak doświadczenia życiowe wpływały na jego literackie dzieła. Choć jego życie nie było usłane różami, Kalifornia zapewniła mu stabilizację, której tak bardzo potrzebował. Mimo to nadal odczuwał samotność, która paradoksalnie pozwoliła mu skupić się na literaturze. Książka ta to biografia, która wyróżnia się emocjonalnym podejściem do tematu. Choć momentami była monotonna, uważam, że wyniosłam z niej wiele wartościowych treści. Oprócz historii emigracji, autorka przedstawia również relacje Miłosza z innymi osobami, które pojawiły się na jego drodze.
„Miłosz w Kalifornii” pozwoliła mi głębiej zrozumieć życie poety, pełne wzlotów i upadków. Mimo lekkiego znużenia wyciągnęłam z niej dużo dobrego. Jeśli chcecie w jakikolwiek sposób uczcić rok Czesława Miłosza, gorąco polecam tę pozycję.
Rok 2024 to rok Czesława Miłosza. Nie wyobrażam sobie lepszego sposobu na jego uczczenie niż zagłębienie się w historię jego kalifornijskiego okresu. To był najbardziej płodny czas w jego twórczości, który doprowadził go do zdobycia Nagrody Nobla. Śledzenie tych lat życia autora było niezwykle ekscytujące. Połączenie wydarzeń z jego biografii z jego twórczością z tego okresu okazało się fascynujące. Ukazało, jak doświadczenia życiowe wpływały na jego literackie dzieła. Choć jego życie nie było usłane różami, Kalifornia zapewniła mu stabilizację, której tak bardzo potrzebował. Mimo to nadal odczuwał samotność, która paradoksalnie pozwoliła mu skupić się na literaturze. Książka ta to biografia, która wyróżnia się emocjonalnym podejściem do tematu. Choć momentami była monotonna, uważam, że wyniosłam z niej wiele wartościowych treści. Oprócz historii emigracji, autorka przedstawia również relacje Miłosza z innymi osobami, które pojawiły się na jego drodze.
„Miłosz w Kalifornii” pozwoliła mi głębiej zrozumieć życie poety, pełne wzlotów i upadków. Mimo lekkiego znużenia wyciągnęłam z niej dużo dobrego. Jeśli chcecie w jakikolwiek sposób uczcić rok Czesława Miłosza, gorąco polecam tę pozycję.
August 18, 2024
Przeczytałam z przyjemnością i zainteresowaniem. Książka zawiera informacje dotyczące kalifornijskiego życia Miłosza, uwzględnia jego życie prywatne oraz publiczne. W książce zdarzają się powtórzenia, ale wynikają one z tego, że pojawiają się w różnych wątkach i pominięcie ich w jednym z nich dałoby niepełny obraz sytuacji, więc to usprawiedliwia autorkę. Pozycja zawiera wiele szczegółów z życia Czesława Miłosza, ale czytając, nie czułam się zarzucona nadmierną liczbą dat i suchych faktów. Poeta zawdzięczał Kalifornii bardzo dużo, ale i sam dał jej dużo, amerykańscy poeci wiele się od niego nauczyli. Nie miałam pojęcia, że tak bardzo kochał naturę. Autorka przywołuje całą gamę anegdot literackich i fragmenty utworów poety.
Wiele faktów z życia Czesława Miłosza było mi zupełnie obcych. Teraz mam większą świadomość kolei jego losów, a szczególnie tych dotyczących życia prywatnego. Obiecałam sobie, że przeczytam biografię Miłosza, którą napisał Andrzej Franaszek (nawet dorwałam już w bibliotece), bo czuję ogromny głód wiedzy. Autorka poruszyła kilka wątków, które mam nadzieję Franaszek rozwinął.
Naprawdę warto poznać Miłosza w wydaniu Cynthii Haven. Polecam.
Wiele faktów z życia Czesława Miłosza było mi zupełnie obcych. Teraz mam większą świadomość kolei jego losów, a szczególnie tych dotyczących życia prywatnego. Obiecałam sobie, że przeczytam biografię Miłosza, którą napisał Andrzej Franaszek (nawet dorwałam już w bibliotece), bo czuję ogromny głód wiedzy. Autorka poruszyła kilka wątków, które mam nadzieję Franaszek rozwinął.
Naprawdę warto poznać Miłosza w wydaniu Cynthii Haven. Polecam.
December 29, 2023
A genre-bending book--part biography, part memoir, part scholarly reflection--but focused on the question of what California meant to Czeslaw Milosz, the exiled Polish poet and Nobel laureate, and what influence it had on his poetry. (Milosz lived in Berkeley for 40 years before returning to a free Poland in the twilight of his life.) The book may have aspired to the reverse as well--what Milosz meant to American letters, but there it does not succeed, other than broad sweeping generalizations such as Milosz introduced Americans to Polish literature (which may be true but is too large to digest as such).
Still this unique book is beautifully written, especially of nature in the Bay Area. It is meditative and unwilling, thankfully, to reduce or smooth over Milosz's contradictions and less flattering facets. I appreciated Haven's generous and nuanced treatment of the biculturalism inherent in political exile, or one might argue, all immigration.
Still this unique book is beautifully written, especially of nature in the Bay Area. It is meditative and unwilling, thankfully, to reduce or smooth over Milosz's contradictions and less flattering facets. I appreciated Haven's generous and nuanced treatment of the biculturalism inherent in political exile, or one might argue, all immigration.
January 13, 2022
Lovely, contemplative, profound-- what a Milosz biography should be, and it's focused on ideas and experiences of place. Fascinating to compare Poland and California through the person of Czeslaw Milosz.
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