318
STEPHEN MILLER:
If
poetry
often suffers at the hands of
translators, poets themselves
sometimes suffer when they are
"translated" to a foreign culture;
the old audience dwindles away
and a new audience proves diffi–
cult
to
acquire. Czeslaw Milosz,
the Polish poet, may be a case in
point. I don't know how Milosz,
who is also an excellent essay–
ist, autobiographer, and literary
critic, fares in his native Poland,
but in the United States,where
he has lived for the past twenty–
five years, he does not seem to be
much read. Yet his
Selocted Po–
ems
(Seabury Press, 1973) mark
him as one of the best poets now
appearing in English. I say "ap–
pearing" advisedly, for Milosz
writes most of his poems in
Polish. But he a lso does most of
the translating himself, so he is
really a strange breed of cat: a
Polish-English poet. However
we label him, Milosz is very
much a poet in the modernist
mainstream, his expansive and
ruminative verse recalls Whit–
man and Eliot. Though the
form Milosz's poems often take
seems American, the mind at
work in the poems seems thor–
oughly European: preoccupied
with the devastations and dislo–
cations of history, suspicious of
paeans to nature or hymns
to
the
imagination. Tinged
wi~h
sur–
realism, Milosz's best poems are
wildly imaginative yet also
inCIsIve, astringent, moving;
they rival the best of Yeats, Mon–
tale, and Mandelstam.
PARTISAN REVIEW
THE
REA80N
FOR
DEMOCRACY
by Kalman H. Silvert
.. A lucid and penetrating
statement on the condition of
American democracy today,
and an eloquent plea for
understanding and renewal
of the meaning of democracy."
- Publishers Weekly
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