One of my favorite poets, Czeslaw Milosz, died yesterday at 93. He was a Polish Nobel Laureate, and professor at UC Berkeley. My friend Brent and I used to send his poems back and forth to one another in college. Sometimes ending a letter with a poem in longhand, other times merely sending a poem via email. He was for us an honest voice in a sea of misdirection. He had an abiding faith in God, but often questioned God's goodness and control, which seemed to Brent and I to smack of the reality that we were experiencing at the time. He also had a great sense of the irony of things but still maintained a healthy amount of wonder. He was Thoreau, except he'd seen dead bodies floating in the river that flowed near his boyhood home.
I guess I could say a lot of things about what he meant to me, but mostly I love him for his language. Even translated into English (thank you Robert Hass) his prose has a fine tuned athleticism and honesty that's so good it makes you want to cry. He was your favorite Grandpa parroting T.S. Eliot. He was a master, and I will miss his work.
Yes, the saddness.. . .the clear-eyed saddness of the man. No mournful "woe-is-me" saddness, but a brave "this too is part of the beauty" saddness.
ReplyDelete"To whom should I turn
With that affair so dark
Of pain and also guilt
In the structure of the world,
If either here below
Or over there on high
No power can abolish
The cause and effect?
Don't think, don't remember
The death on the cross
Though everyday He dies,
The only one, all-loving,
Who without any need
Consented and allowed
To exist all that is,
Including nails of torture."
-----Czeslaw Milosz, excerpt from "A Poem for the End of the Century"
I should have given the final stanza as well
ReplyDelete"Totally enigmatic.
Impossibly intricate.
Better to stop speech here.
This language is not for people.
Blessed be jubilation.
Vintages and havests.
Even if not everyone
Is granted serenity."