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This digital document is an article from Letras Libres, published by Editorial Vuelta, S.A. de C.V. on October 1, 2004. The length of the article is 481 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Para Czeslaw, en Cracovia.(Poema)
Author: Robert Hass
Publication: Letras Libres (Magazine/Journal)
Date: October 1, 2004
Publisher: Editorial Vuelta, S.A. de C.V.
Volume: 6Issue: 70Page: 16(1)

Article Type: Poema

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

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The Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz began his remarkable A Treatise on Poetry in the winter of 1955 and finished it in the spring of 1956. It was published originally in parts in the Polish émigré journal Kultura. Now it is available in English for the first time in this expert translation by the award-winning American poet Robert Hass.

A Treatise on Poetry is a great poem about some of the most terrible events in the twentieth century. Divided into four sections, the poem begins at the end of the nineteenth century as a comedy of manners and moves with a devastating momentum through World War I to the horror of World War II. Then it takes on directly and plainly the philosophical abyss into which the European cultures plunged.

Customer Reviews (2)

A great poet's most important work
This long and complex poem poses the explicit against the inexplicit, the aesthetic against the historical, nature against culture and history, history against freedom and human aspiration. The preface prescribes a simple enough formula for poetry: plain language "in the mother tongue," images, rhythm, dreaminess. But it notes that poetry written to this formula "was bypassed by the dry sharp world." That world is Poland of the first half of the twentieth century. The problem posed by this treatise is how poetry can account for reality, specifically the reality of history, and still function aesthetically. The problem occurs not because an allegiance to history is an adequate response to human difficulties-individual memory, freedom, and universal aesthetic ideals are superior to it-but because history represents a necessity that must be adequately acknowledged. The simple answer is that poetry must include the actual world, and not settle for merely recording emotions, as some of the poets of Milosz's youth did. But this is more easily said than done. Talented poets, many of them named in the Treatise, have failed to find adequate ways of accounting for historical reality. Negotiating between aesthetic idealism and coruscating rationalism, uniting "Freedom and Necessity," is the task Milosz sets for himself. The poem is divided into four parts, plus the brief preface. "Beautiful Times," the first section, depicts Krakow, the seat of polish culture, around 1900. The second section, "The Capital," set in Warsaw, assesses poet by poet the state of Polish poetry before the Second World War, and criticizes its inability to account for the massive rush of history that was about to occur. The third and most powerful section, "The Spirit of History," depicts through scenes of the Occupation in Poland the terrible consequence of Nazi and Polish idealism. Both represent the failure of history, culture, and language to form coherent and realistic world-views: Nazi idealism undermined by inhuman brutality, Polish idealism betrayed by incoherent and outdated romanticism. The last section, set in Pennsylvania, considers America as an escape from history and culture into nature, which Milosz finds "hostile to art," and examines the implications for a poet of being in such a place (he would soon return to Europe) after the great failure of poetry and culture embodied in the war.

A reading experience and textual event not to be missed.
Every poet should read this seminal work. And if you're not a poet, you should read "A Treatise" to understand poetry, learn history and tune into your inner self. It is a reading experience and a textual event that should not be missed.Milosz has written one of the great poems of our century. It is a shame that it took half a century to get the full English translation out, which corrects a serious deficit in the cultural terms of trade between Poland and the English-speaking world. It is as if Shakespeare's Hamlet or Othello has only just been translated into Polish. If you're familiar with "The Wasteland" of TS Eliot, you will compare "A Treatise on Poetry" very favourably to to the 1922 modernist classic.Indeed, it is an improvement on Eliot's masterpiece in four crucial respects. First, "A Treatise" maintains an overall structure and form that the amorphous "Wasteland" lacks. The English translation may not have retained the metrical structure of the original, but conveys the sense of form Milosz carefully constructed to carry his theme.Second, although the poem manipulates myth and symbols to register the brutal truths of our century, it does not shy from recording historical events or capturing the drama of individual lives. Despite its wide historical canvas, stories of our innermost being are told and you will enter the skin of real lives long consigned to dust. Third, the poem addresses you at several levels. Its tone ranges from the bright, breezy and hopeful to the elegaic and tragic and downshifts to a deep and quiet understanding.The modulations in mood and voice are exceptionally rendered, making the reading of the poem an experience in itself. Fourth, "A Treatise on Poetry" lives up to its title without ever being ponderous, technical or trite. Reading the detailed notes to illuminate the symbolic shorthand of the verse enhances your reading experience. With an intimate understanding of Polish poetry, its pracititioners and their interaction with the driving forces of the first half-century, Milosz offers a compelling portrait of poetry's potential, its limitations, and its reach. You will come away despairing of humanity, but sanguine about the value and use of poetry. In conclusion, Milosz has written a great work of art that defies easy paraphrase, facile criticism or quick comparisions. It must simply be experienced. I am quite confident that it will be considered one of the greatest poems of our century in the years ahead. ... Read more

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VHS - 1 Hour, 30 Minutes. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Amazing poetry
I first encountered Milosz when a poem of his was printed in Harper's about eight years ago. Stunning stuff, so I've always kept an eye out for his works. About two months ago, I was on a silent retreat in the Berkshires, and a copy of this volume was on the library shelf. A great companion for days of autumn silence and solitude. Milosz considers the big subjects, the essential questions. So it was perfect food for my contemplative brain. At a time when I am steadily losing interest in modern free verse poetry that reads more like dull and fragmentary journalism than anything really beautiful, Milosz in this collection reminds me that the form is not dead but vibrantly alive (though the poet himself is no longer with us.) Great book - highly recommended.

Let the Endgames Begin
PROVINCES finds Polish Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz confronting the quandaries of old age. Milosz has always been a philosophical poet, and he is so in these poems--but often here his philosophizing turns to the topic of philosophy's failures. In poems such as "Conversation with Jeanne" and "December 1," he tells us that the philosophical and theological arguments that impressed him when he was younger do so no longer. Indeed, several poems, such as "Blacksmith Shop" and "In Common," abandon abstract contemplation in favor of celebrating the physical world. This concern with things for their own sake is also embodied in his poem "Linnaeus," which offers a tribute to the inventor of modern taxonomy.

As W.B. Yeats does in his late poems, Milosz writes from the perspective of being a widely admired poet grown old. These poems dramatize his internal conflicts, including his doubts about his life's work: he refers to himself in the first, second, and third persons, and some poems openly take the form of internal conversations. These are powerful poems of old age, as often self-ironizing as self-elegizing.

Reading translated poetry can be a matter of making allowances, but that's not the case here: Milosz's collaboration with translator Robert Hass results in memorable English renderings of the Polish originals. ... Read more

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"This miracle of a book, perhaps the most beautiful group of poetic translations this century has ever produced," (Chicago Tribune) should stand as the definitive English language version.Amazon.com Review
Stephen Mitchell offers what are perhaps the most masterful andintimate translations of Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry to date, infusing itwith all the power, eloquence, rhythm and lightness of its originalvoice. Includes the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets toOrpheus. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (22)

A lovely collection
Stephen Mitchell is by far the best translator of Rilke I've come across. And the selections are so good. Whenever I read Rilke I'm filled with a very bittersweet pleasure. I cannot recommend him enough.

I love this translation
Who couldn't love Rilke's writing? It's about life and the perplexities in it. It's about the little things and the big. Every now and then we all need somebody who has been there and done that to tell us it is normal to question and wonder - that is what these poems do for me.

brilliant
Ethereal and beautiful writing.Rilke deserves his reputation as a premier German poet.The translation is good too.

Mitchell's translations take great liberties
Mitchell's translations are sometimes quite unfaithful to Rilke, and some of his renderings clumsy--even if the poem had been his own English-language creation. However, in some cases, he significantly alters the meanings of lines. A good example of this is in Rilke's famous "Der Schwan" in which Mitchell renders "draws back past him in streams on either side" from "unter ihm zurückziehn, Flut um Flut." "Wave by wave" becomes "on either side" and "beyond him" becomes "past him." The distortions in other places go beyond the aesthetic to alter the content of Rilke's poem, as in the final line of "Der Panther," which Mitchel renders "plunges into the heart and is gone" instead of something like "plunges into his heart to be." "To be," to remain, to exist, is a heckuvaways from "gone." I think Mitchell's translations are a shame, given that it can be so difficult to find bilingual editions. In this case, I'd recommend at least comparing this volume to Hofman's Twentieth Century German Poetry before purchasing. Certainly if you have no German, you'd want accurate translations.

The angel of the word!
Rainer Maria Rilke' s exquisite stylistic sobriety and his thought'sdeepnessmakes of him one of the most absorbing and interesting poets of the second half of the XIX Century. His febrile style contrasts with the delicacy of his verses, loaded of penetrating vision and prolific display of visual images that conveys us with the mythic roots.

The words in Rilke'spoetic have major expression, density and expression; a strong expansiveness and excel significance.

His reading is an absolute must for any hard reader I any corner of the world.
... Read more