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player ready...MILOSZ’S ABC’s
By Czeslaw Milosz
Translated from the Polish by Madeline G. Levine
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 313 pages, $24
Any work by Poland’s most famous living poet excites anticipation. The 1980 Nobel laureate has produced not only stunningly beautiful verse but also a perceptive study of the spiritual life of human beings under communism in “The Captive Mind” (1953).
He has also been a generous promoter of other people’s works, particularly those by younger Eastern European poets.
Unlike earlier, organic works, “Milosz’s ABC’s” is a rearrangement of the poet’s philosophical and literary notebooks according to a strict alphabetical order, with relatively short entries running from A through Z. The work includes observations on locations and people in Milosz’s past, and his literary, philosophical and historical observations. The translation is highly readable.
Unfortunately, there is no selection process that weeds out trivia. Too many entries are a paragraph or two about people or places many readers cannot know. Like names heard once at a party, they quickly disappear from memory.
Other sections fall prey to Milosz’s embarrassing self-promotion or egocentricity. Thus the entry on Albert Camus tells us virtually nothing about Camus the writer, focusing rather on Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s political attack on Camus, which “coincided with my break with Warsaw in 1951,” and on Milosz’s relations with Camus’ publishing house, Gallimard.
Despite such difficulties, the book provides insight into the author’s early background, the careers of his fellow Polish intellectuals, his emigre life in Europe, his break with communist Poland in 1951 and from 1960 his life in the United States, where he has been a professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley.
Milosz often proves remarkably astute in assessing the work of others, such as in his sections on the West Coast poet Robinson Jeffers or Arthur Koestler, the author of “Darkness at Noon.”
If the reader can provide his or her own frameworks for Milosz’s jottings, the book can prove valuable.