My place on the corner by the green awning

A graceful and thoughtful post (as always) from Patrick Kurp over at Anecdotal Evidence on An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz – it’s called “You Have to Have Some Basis in Being.” Also, a long review from last week’s Przeglad Polski, which I will post as soon as the translation is finished;  I edited it in an odd little cafe called “Freedom,” filled with shelves and shelves of tatty old paperbacks and pungent with the remnants of cigarette smoke – how retro!  I’m told that smoking is verboten in the cafe, but years of heavy-duty smoking has left its indelible traces.

The flames: lost in translation

At Freedom, I had my first-ever flaming coffee drink, called “The Fiery Philosopher.” That’s me.  The fiery philosopher. I couldn’t resist, really.  This photo doesn’t quite capture the effects of the roaring flames in the coffee cup, but I tell you, it did put some cheer into my afternoon. Especially since not all the alcohol was burned off.

Meanwhile, brief pause in my posts from Kraków, as I adjust to my new digs in Wolnica Square after nine days at the Miłosz conference’s hotel, which was able to provide the luxuries Westerners have come to believe they are entitled to.

Brick Gothic

In Wolnica Square, I am literally living under the shadow of Corpus Christi Church, which is right next door, and on the marketplace that, in 14th century Kazimierz, rivaled Kraków’s main square for size and bustle.  The original Kazimierz City hall across the square was built in the 14th century, burned down, and was rebuilt in the 16th and 17th century.  The church, founded in 1342 by King Kazimierz the Great, is Gothic, with the usual baroque era additions.  Hard to get used to medieval cathedrals of brick rather than stone.

Nowadays, the square is filled with shops and delis and boutiques and fresh fruit and vegetables.

Why the area is renowned today is that it is the old Jewish quarter, and synagogues, temples, and Jewish landmarks abound.

Meanwhile, among the joys of Kraków are the street vendors selling little bunches of lilies of the valley – virtually unseen in California, where the climate and soil aren’t hospitable to the delicate and fragrant beauties.  I have missed them – they were the favorite flowers of my childhood – and I have enjoyed  seeing the vendors’ barrels filled with them.  Lilacs, too.

Postscript:  Dave Lull just sent me a link for a Guardian blog piece about the Miłosz centenary – it’s here, though the writer James Hopkin gives no evidence he actually attended the event he is writing about.

Aleksander Fiut in foreground, Michnik in striped shirt, Vendler in back (Photo by my Droid)

Jane Hirshfield recalls that Czesław Miłosz lived in a “storybook” cottage on Grizzly Peak in the hills of Berkeley.  But to describe the fairy tale that took place within the cottage, you’d need a new character, a new story – “The Wolf Who Ate Books,” she suggested.

In the elegant and newly revamped Szczepanski Square, the Miłosz Pavilion – a strange, science fiction-y formation of hemispherical  tents and tunnels – hosted a range of activities during the Czesław Miłosz centenary festival. One spotlighted reminiscences with, as well as Jane, scholar Aleksander Fiut, Gazeta Wyborcza editor Adam Michnik, poet Tomas Venclova, leading critic Helen Vendler, and poet Adam Zagajewski. As with so many of the events, Znak publisher Jerzy Illg hosted.  Here are a few of their memories:

Michnik recalled Miłosz trying to meet him at a very particular Bulgarian restaurant in Paris, where Miłosz spent the lonely, tormented decade following his lonely defection from Communist Poland.  “Then Miłosz said a sentence I would remember for the rest of my life:  ‘I wanted to meet you here, because here, in the 1950s, very often I kept feeling I would commit suicide,'” he confided to his friend.  Michnik recalled his famous essay of the time, “Nie” [No], where he explained his defection to the world.  It opened: “What I’m going to tell now could well be called a story of a suicide…”

He also remembered Miłosz’s triumphant return to Poland in 1981, with the heady rise of Solidarity.  “It was a time of euphoria, carnival – it was our victory,” he said.

Miłosz was more cautious.  He told Michnik, “The atmosphere feels like just before the Warsaw Uprising. Please be careful.” Tanks rolled into Warsaw and martial law was declared a few months later.

Tomas Venclova recalled when Stanisław Lem was rumored to be up for the Nobel prize.  “I don’t care about the Nobel prize,” Miłosz told him, “but if any other writer gets it, I wouldn’t be too happy.”

A 21st century monster of hemispheres and tunnels (from my Droid)

Aleksander Fiut traveled with Miłosz to Stockholm for the 1980 Nobel.  On the way to the event, in a chauffeur-driven limousine, Miłosz was hungry.  Where did they stop?  He told the chauffeur to pull into McDonald’s.  “Her facial muscles didn’t even move,” Fiut recalled.

Jerzy Illg recalls the poet at 90, looking deeply into a vodka and a piece of herring – two of his favorite things.  “Happiness is accessible,” he declared finally. Illg had him write that down and sign it. “It’s a valuable security paper I hold,” Jerzy reflected.

Jane met both Carol and Czesław at a Bay Area picnic, where the hostess urged her beforehand to chat with the Miłoszes, since many were too intimidated to be social.  So, unfortunately, was Jane.  It was as if, she said, she had been told, “Please go talk to Yeats.  Please go talk to Shakespeare.”

Jane also recalled the death of Miłosz’s much-younger wife Carol, in 2002.  At the memorial service in Berkeley, she remembers Miłosz sitting erect, “evidence of decades of unbearable loss being carried.” She spoke to him afterward, and “for three seconds he completely broke down.”

“I never held a grief that large in my arms,” she said.

Zagajewski seated at far left, Lyszeha third from left, Venclova in red, and Chukhontsev second from right. (Photo: My Droid)

An impressive reading tonight in Kraków’s Temple Synagogue – at least, the parts I understood. I count it as one of the highpoints of the Czesław Miłosz Centenary Festival, a celebration not short of highpoints.

The idea behind tonight’s reading was “The Grand Duchy of Poetry,” including major poets from Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarusia, represented respectively by Adam Zagajewski, Tomas Venclova, Oleg Chukhontsev, Oleh Lysheha, Andrej Chadnowicz.

The setting was the city’s neo-Romanesque temple from 1862, with its richly decorated interior and ornate, gilded ‘Moorish’ woodwork, the style hammered out some time between Art Nouveau and Art Deco, during the revival of folk art themes, I suppose.

The men were suitably donning yarmulkes, except for Tomas Venclova, who wore a sort of newsboy cap.

Alas, the English translations of the poems read tended to disappear quickly from the festival table, and I was left to make do with what was left. No simultaneous translations tonight.

The Belarus poet Chadnowicz was youngest, in his 40s, and had a theatrical, energetic performance – tapping the microphone like a drum, at one point. The word “Belarusia” kept surfacing in his poems. I can only guess what he was saying – no handout. No handout for Ukrainian Lysheha, either.

I’d never heard of 73-year-old Oleg Chukhontsev, and I don’t know if his work exists in English, but it should.  The handouts showed a single translation by the eminent Russian scholar and translator G.S. Smith – if it’s any indication, this is an undiscovered nugget of gold.

Adam is clearly a poet at the top of his form, with many years ahead of him.  His poem, “Impossible,” translated by Clare Cavanagh, wasn’t my favorite (I preferred “Improvisation”), but it its closing was a great personal signature as the mind-boggling Milosz Festival winds to a close:

Sometimes I envy the dead poets,
they no longer have “bad days,” they don’t know
“ennui,” they’ve parted ways with “vacancy,”
“rhetoric,” rain, low pressure zones,
they’ve stopped following the “astute reviews,”
yet still keep speaking to us.
Their doubts vanished with them,
their rapture lives.

I’ve only recently discovered Tomas Venclova’s quietly luminous poems – like Adam, Venclova’s name appears annually in the Nobel shortlist. But it’s surprising how little has been written or said about the brilliant fruits from his steady labor, even though he’s hardly invisible – he’s on the faculty at Yale. Take this, the last two verses for his poem for Susan Sontag, “Landscape, Summer 2001”:

A loudspeaker by the open window
broadcasts the roar of the archangel’s trumpet,
and God, upon waking, reduces
the square to a pinch of love and ashes.

The sun comes up above the ruined city.
Light gropes for the desk and quickly finds it,
and empty time is severed by a sentence
which contradicts the night that has just ended.

Please, Nobel Committee, Tomas Venclova in 2011. It’s time.

Hey, I thought that was my chair!

A couple days ago, I described the overwhelming sense of intimidation when delivering a paper in the rooms where Copernicus, John Paul II, and others once walked.  I could have mentioned other notable alums – 16th century poet Jan Kochanowski, for example; 15th century theologian and saint John Cantius; the hero of the Battle of Vienna, John III Sobieski; writer Stanisław Lem; or Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska.

My friend David A. Goldfarb did not think I was intimidated enough.  So he sent me this photo.

That’s right. Czesław Miłosz speaking from the very same chair I sat in, before I went to the podium for the Czesław Miłosz Centenary Festival’s academic conference. David took the picture himself.

“If you can imagine, there were students watching Miłosz in the corridors of Collegium Novum on video monitors set up for the occasion in 1989,” he gloated.  “The hall was only open to University officials, officers of the student Solidarność organization, and staff of the Instytut Filologii Polskiej.”

“I was a stażysta, which was fairly unusual at the time, so they couldn’t decide if I was staff or a student, and they gave me the benefit of the doubt, so I was able to stand at the back of the hall near the center.”

This would have been Miłosz’s second euphoric homecoming, after the fall of Communist rule and the triumph of Solidarity.

(His first euphoric return had been in June 1981, when the poet, then a banned writer, saw his books published for the first time since 1945 – that, however, proved to be a false dawn, and the Communist leaders crushed Poland and instituted martial law in December.)

Lady in a glass box (Magda Skoć at right)

At the back of the Aula of the Collegium Maius of Jagiellonian University, there was a glass box with prisoners inside.

Those were the translators.  Pity them.  Each of the 75  sessions, 20 minutes each (some 30 minutes, actually, or 40), were translated simultaneously into either Polish or English.  All of the speakers were told to submit papers by April 27, but  I doubt many of us met the deadline – in any case, we were tinkering and revising till the last minute.  Moreover, there were lots of unscripted questions and discussion after each session.

Those who listened carefully during the week-long academic conferences during the Czesław Miłosz Centenary Festival … well, actually you didn’t have to listen that carefully … would have noticed  that the translators working with the Polish-to-English portions of the program were still talking as the applause for the speakers began to die down.

Jagiellonian's famous arches

There’s a reason, translator Piotr Krasnowolski told me.  English is a very compact language.  The Polish renditions are substantially longer.

I think that’s one reason W.H. Auden said: “I love Italian, it’s the most beautiful language to write in, but terribly hard for writers because you can’t tell when you have written nonsense. In English you know right away.”

Another way

Ever try translating French poetry?  When I tried my admittedly amateur hand, I usually wound up needing a handful of extra syllables to stuff out the line by the time I’d expressed the French thought.  Polish even more so.

Piotr said there’s lots of English turns of phrase that have no Polish equivalents.

He cited a simple example he recalled from some translation for a software company.  Counter-clockwise.  Simple enough in English, but here’s the Polish version:

w kierunku przeciwnym do ruchu wskazówek zegara

Right again

At least, that what I can make out of the words Piotr scrawled on a napkin for me.  That’s the literal translation for:  “In the direction opposite to the movement of the hands of the clock,” he said. A mouthful.

He solved the problem with an illustration instead (he also made a diagram on my napkin with a fountain pen): “That was my translation,” he said.  Piotr and his sidekick Magda Skoć were unflaggingly courteous, though their patience must have been sorely tried, throughout the week-long ordeal.  Magda’s impeccably accented upper-crust English was a joy to listen to, even when the papers were not.  And Piotr is, among other things, an honorary citizen of Nebraska. (Long story.)

Don’t drop the headset, Piotr warned me as I walked away, fumbling with my device – though they’re made for endurance, replacing them is 500 dollars a pop.  Or maybe it was złotys.  A lot of money, in any case.

Postscript on May 31:  After rummaging around in his storage, Piotr just sent me proof of his citizenship of Nebraska, for all those doubters out there.  See right.

So you can be a citizen of a state without being a citizen of the U.S.  Who knew?

The hotseat

The big day:  I spoke at the Collegium Novum of Jagiellonian University yesterday at the Czesław Miłosz Centenary Festival.

If you have to say anything at all, this is about the most intimidating setting that can be imagined to say it in.  Queen (and Saint) Jadwiga looked down on me from above, Pope John Paul II (an alum) gazed at me compassionately from a large portrait to my right, and farther down the hall, a young Copernicus (another alum) gazed up in astonishment at the night sky in a huge painting.  And then there was Humble Moi, in the prorector’s chair.

Nothing to do except take a deep breath, stand up, and imagine that everyone’s head is a cabbage.  Just me and Copernicus.

It’s humbling in other ways.  You roll your eyes at how boring some of the talks were – and then you get the opportunity to bore people yourself.  At least I kept mine beneath the requested 20 minutes.

Queen Jadwiga...not amused

It was nevertheless an honor to speak here.  A picture of the intimidating prorector’s chair I occupied is at right – the very first Book Haven photo from my brand new Droid.

Two years ago I fell in love with the university, one of the oldest in Europe, and Kraków as well, after a moonlight introduction to the city after a glass of wine with Adam Zagajewski. The city is charming at night, alive with lights and people and cafes against the dark backdrop of the trees in the Planty.  That impromptu tour, which included the famous, shadowlit arches of the Collegium Maius, helped me persevere in what sometimes seemed like a daunting,  Rupelstiltskin-type research task during my Milena Jesenská Fellowship with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen.

I told many stories from the podium at Jagiellonian, but one of my favorites is another kind of Rumpelstiltskin-type odyssey explained by Clare Cavanagh, Miłosz’s American biographer, as she describes her relationship with the curmudgeonly Miłosz:

Green Queen

“Sometimes the doubts ran deeper—his life, his poetry, his soul. And sometimes the doubts were about me: ‘You will produce not my life, but only some facsimile,’ he said with a scowl in the summer of 2003. He spent several weeks that summer putting me through the biographer’s equivalent of boot camp. … every day he gave the same response: ‘Takie oszywiste pytania,’ ‘(Such obvious questions).’ Then he’d would invite me for another session the next day, when yet another set of questions would be dismissed and after an excruciating hour or two, I’d would be sent home to think up some ‘questions no one’s asked me yet.’ …

Finally, after a sleepless night spent reading and rereading the then-untranslated Second Space, I went in and asked about the poems, and about religion. Those were the questions he wanted. And that was what I’d wanted to talk about, too, but I’d thought biographers were supposed to do something different. We talked about ‘Father Seweryn’ and ‘The Treatise on Theology’—I said I’d been surprised by the Virgin at the end, and he laughed and said, ‘I was, too.’

Clare, of course, is here in Kraków, too.  And still wearing her green jacket, her green glasses, and (I’ve learned in Kraków) she has a green backpack to match.  Daughter of Eire.

***

Today I got more swag.  After a seminar on translation with Agnieszka Kosińska, another of my contributors (the session was in Polish, but I went just for Agnieszka), we made a trek to the Book Institute off Kraków’s main square. The Book Institute is a wonderful organization in Kraków – funded by the Ministry of Culture, I think – that promotes Polish literature.

The books they gave me will tip the scales at the next airport.  Andrzej Franaszek‘s new 1,000-page biography of Miłosz, and a 1,400-page collected poems – both published by Znak. Clare told me that about a third of Miłosz’s poems have not been translated yet, to my best recollection of the size of the English-language Collected, that sounds about right.

During a visit with octogenarian poet and author Marek Skwarnicki (another contributor) way on the outskirts of Kraków this afternoon, he said the biography is a bit of a wonder in Kraków.  Andrew has spent 10 years working on the book, and is now only about 40.  Such a thick book from such a young man is not commonplace in Poland, Marek said.

Now.  All I have to be able to do is get on the airplane with all this.

Oh, oh, oh … I haven’t told you about the Miłosz pavilion yet.  And the reading with Adonis and Ryszard Krynicki and Ed Hirsch and Jane Hirshfield tonight. There’s more to come.