Beginning with My Streets/Provinces: Poems 1987-1991/The Collected Poems 1931-1987
Keen, Suzanne
Hughes, again--unlike most academ- ic critics--is a working writer, and the THE POET'S GEOGRAPHY toughness of that role also informs his read- ing. The "tragic equation"--a phrase he uses maybe...
...I think here of Maritain' s great descrip- tion of Dante's genius: "innocence and luck...
...The poet Robert Hass has frequently col- laborated with Milosz in translating him- self, most recently in Provinces: Poems 1987-1991...
...Hughes, again--unlike most academ- ic critics--is a working writer, and the THE POET'S GEOGRAPHY toughness of that role also informs his reading...
...I can't see how anyone, read- ing this book, can read our most un-avoidable poet the same way ever again...
...He does not regret the decision to write in the language in which he is the best poet, nor should he, for his translators convey his vivid par- ticularity and his range of tones with such success that I must remind myself to think of what I'm missing...
...PROVINCES: POEMS 1987-1991 Czeslaw Milosz translated by the poet and Robert Hass The Ecco Press, $19.95, 72 pp...
...Commonweal BEGINNING WITH MY STREETS Essays and Recollections Czeslaw Milosz translated by Madeline G. Levine Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30, 288 pp...
...It is our good fortune to have not only the works that reveal and occupy this space in excellent English versions, but also Milosz's own guide to his personal and intellectual geography...
...THE COLLECTED POEMS 1931-1987 Czeslaw Milosz The Ecco Press, $14.95,511 pp...
...Despite the loss of the Polish sounds, rhythms, formal struc- tures, and idiomatic and cultural reso-nances, Milosz's poetry in translation is the real thing...
...Suzanne Keen his fall, Ecco Press reissues one of the essential books of our time, The Collected Poems of 1980 Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz...
...Born in Lithuania in 1911, educated in Wilno (Vilnius), a city with overlapping Polish and Lithuanian identities, Milosz has writ- ten in Polish while living in France, Poland, and, since 1961, California...
...Hughes's Shakespeare is finally not yours or mine, nor should it be...
...And that because Shakespeare's moment, the mo- ment of the emerging modem conscious- ness, was the perfect moment for the poet's private concerns to coincide with the public obsessions of his and our day...
...Theirs are wastelands And rusty railroad tracks, the sky, silence...
...But Hughes also understands the central paradox and scandal of Shakespeare: that he was the most sublime of poets, and that he was also a popular entertainer with all the canni- ness of Fred Silverman or Don King...
...So the arcane Equation, Hughes keeps in- sisting, is not just the key to the visionary poet's inner search, but also a hell of an effective gimmick for keeping the plots boiling and the customers paying...
...From that volume, the poem "The Thistle, the Nettle" demonstrates how superbly these poets make English poetry from Milosz's original: The thistle, the nettle, the burdock, and belladonna Have a future...
...Milosz's poetry draws our attention to the amnesia of recent history regarding Central Eastern Europe, although most of the poems are invested with a piercing per6 November 1992:33...
...The desolate music of the lines defies the "earth without grammar" that the aging poet faces...
...I was to be redeemed by the gift of arranging words But must be prepared for an earth without a grammar, For the thistle, the nettle, the bur- dock, the belladonna, And a small wind above them, a sleepy cloud, silence...
...A collection of essays, interviews, reviews, and address- es, Beginning with My Streets makes a fas- cinating companion to The Collected Poems and to Provinces...
...The "tragic equation"--a phrase he uses maybe a little too often--may seem too recondite and mystical...
...And if that is not, to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, the function of criticism at the present or indeed any time--well, then, I can't use it...
...The poet reanimates his cousin Oscar Milosz's catalog of weeds, quoted in the epigraph to the poem, making con- tinuity out of arranged words even as he disbelieves in the efficacy of poetry's claim on the future...
...But it is a brilliant"Shakespeare," and it enters into a profligately generous dialogue with the Shakespeare you and I have to find for ourselves...
...Who shall I be for men many gen- erations later...
...When, after the clamor of tongues, the award goes to silence...
...The Shakespearean primal scene, he writes, is "the Tragedy of Divine Love in the fall- en world of the 'Puritan' ego...
...Writing of his own translations of Robinson Jeffers in an essay collected in the new volume, Beginning with My Streets, Milosz concludes that "the trans- lator sees a sort of 'empty space' in his own home, in his home of sounds and in- tonations that he has known since child- hood, and desires that it not remain empty...
...My own experience of vacant lots and the accidental meadows of the postindustrial landscape, not to mention the prospect of the end of the poet's vocation, is whipped into shape by this rigorous lyric...
...And from Lear to The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, our lad graphed a hopeful (and still unrealized) way of reasserting the van- ishing redemptivism and generosity of the earlier world--a world we are still trying to reenter...
...For the Adonis myth, ending in the death and rebirth of the Male, Hughes as- sociates with the dying Catholicism of Shakespeare's England, and the Lucrece myth, ending in the suppression of the life- giving Goddess, he associates with the Protestantism that, a few years later, would end in regicide and Cromwell...
...As George Steiner hauntingly said of this most re- markable man, the very words with which we seek to do him honor are his...
Vol. 119 • November 1992 • No. 19
