BOOKS
145
What should I say about life) That it's long and abhors transparence.
Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though , makes me vomit.
Yer unril hnlwn clay has heen crammed down my larynx,
only gratitude will be gushing from it.
STANISLAW BARANCZAK
HAPPY AS A DOG'S TAIL. By Anna Swir. Translated by Czeslaw
Milosz with Leonard Nathan. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $ 15.95.
TREMOR: SELECTED POEMS. By Adam Zagajewski. Translated
by Renata Gorczynski. With a preface by Czeslaw Milosz. Farrar,
Straus
&
Giroux. $12.95.
UNATTAINABLE EARTH. By Czeslaw Milosz. Translated by the
author and Robert Hass. The Ecco Press. $17.95.
Contemporary Polish literature is known in America for its ab–
surdist as well as its highly intellectual currents. Available translations reveal
an obsession with the grotesque ironies of history that Polish letters share
with the other Central European literatures. But there is also a sensual and
erotic side
to
Polish literature that can be seen in the poetry of Anna Swir,
Adam Zagajewski, and Czeslaw Milosz.
Of the three poets, only Czeslaw Milosz is well known to American
readers. Milosz's translation of
Happy
as a Dog's Tail
introduces Anna Swir
as a feminist poet. Zagajewski 's
Tremor ,
splendidly translated by Renata
Gorczynski, also appears under Milosz's patronage. I suspect that Milosz was
attracted to these very difTerent poets because their poetry echoes two im–
portant aspects of Milosz's own writing that he continues to explore in his
latest work.
Unattainable Earth
is not a book of poems. Rather, it is a carefully as–
sembled collection of poems, prose fragments, quotations from major Euro–
Jl'!an writers that has the appearance of a writer's notebook. It also includes
three poems by D.H. Lawrence and twelve by Walt Whitman, whose ec–
static proclamation that "every hour of the light and dark is a miracle" res–
onates in Milosz's poems of <lffirmation.
Unallainable Earth
records Milosz's
thoughts during the four years after he received the Nobel Prize for Litera–
ture. The eternal questions, eternally unanswerable, which Milosz wrestled
with in his earlier writings are raised once more , as the poet struggles to un–
derstand the mysteries enfolded in his personal destiny.
Unattainable Earth
