Posts Tagged ‘Cynthia L. Haven’

From J. Elliot’s August substack newsletter: an excellent paragraph of praise for Czesław Miłosz: A California Life:

Cynthia L. Haven, Czesław Miłosz: A California Life. Having already read Andrzej Franaszek’s excellent Miłosz biography, the broad outlines of the poet’s time at U.C. Berkeley—where he lived for four decades before returning to Poland in his final years—were familiar to me. But Haven argues, persuasively, that Miłosz’s conflicted but deeply fertile relationship with the United States, and the landscape and culture of California in particular, has not been fully appreciated. There, he saw his original naive view of the American continent as a realm of pure natura, in contrast with the Sisyphean nightmare of Europe trapped in History, slowly unravel as he grappled with his adopted home’s complexities and contradictions. Seemingly providentially, the Californian anti-humanist poet Robinson Jeffers appeared then as a near-perfect interlocutor and foil for Miłosz’s particular fixations: his constant wrestling with the source of evil in the world and in himself; his alternating worship of and suspicion of Nature; his ambivalence over the redeemability of humanity; his hunger to locate a synthesis of change and eternity in art; and his exile from his native tongue and the political struggles of his homeland, which all at once isolated him, filled him with resentment and shame, challenged and deepened his spirituality, and ultimately elevated his work to the world stage.

The Man Who Brought Brodsky into English: Conversations with George L. Kline is finally in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement. We’d seen the online version, but there’s nothing like viewing the printed page – so here it is for you. In the words of reviewer Stephanie Sandler: “[George] Kline emerges as human, warm and vividly idiosyncratic in the pages of [Cynthia] Haven’s volume …” Also reviewed, the Selected Poems 1968-1996, edited by Ann Kjellberg, and Joseph Brodsky and Collaborative Self-Translation, by Natasha Rulyova.

From Ann Kjellberg’s introduction to the new Selected, which was published in English in The New York Review of Books and in Russia’s Colta: “We now live in a time of which Brodsky was an advance scout – a time when any writers operate beyond their original borders and outside their mother tongues, often, like Brodsky, bearing witness to violence and disruption, often answering, through art, to those experiences, in language refracted, by necessity, through other language. In Brodsky’s moment there was a cluster of poets, some from the margins of empire, some, like Brodsky, severed from their roots – Walcott, Heaney, Paz, Milosz, to name a few – who brought with them commanding traditions, as well as the imprint of history’s dislocations. We would do well now to attend to their song, standing as they did in our doorway between a broken past and the language’s future.”

And read the whole story of Brodsky’s “rich, complicated legacy” in the TLS here.