Robert Hass is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley and collaborated for many years on the translation of poems by his Berkeley colleague Czesław Miłosz. Hass has received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his poems, the National Book Critics Circle Award for his essays, and with Czesław Miłosz, a PEN Center Award in translation. His most recent book of poems is Summer Snow (Ecco Press).
Hass and I first met for this interview on March 17, 2024, at his home in Berkeley. I had emailed him in February to see if he might be available to talk with me during my yearly trip to San Francisco to visit my daughter. He replied, “Yes, let’s go for a walk.” I arrived at his house at 1:00 p.m. near the peak of a Berkeley hill where he greeted me most hospitably and then invited me in. “I was just weeding my books,” he said. Since it was cold and rainy, instead of going for a walk we made ourselves comfortable in his living room, which looks out onto San Francisco and the bay below. We talked for over three hours before my wife arrived at the door to pick me up. We discussed a number of subjects, both literary and personal: his poetry, his childhood, his long professional as well as personal relationship with Czesław Miłosz, and his work translating the body of Miłosz’s poetry written during his time in Washington, D.C., collected for the first time in English translation as Poet in the New World: Poems, 1946–1953, among numerous other subjects.
deNiord: Good morning. I would like to start with a discussion of your most recent project, a translation of Czesław Miłosz’s post–World War II book of poems titled Poet in the New World: Poems, 1946–1953. You collaborated on this book with your Berkeley colleague, David Frick, who tragically passed away not long before you completed it. How and when did this book come to light, and were you even aware of this manuscript?
Hass: I was aware of these poems. I have the Collected Poems in Polish and knew that there were at least three dozen untranslated poems from this period and I knew that Czesław was not happy with the way his poems from this period had been collected in 1953. I also knew that one of the poems—“Traktat Moralny,” “Treatise on Morals” or “Treatise on Morality”—was considered a tour de force by Polish readers and had gotten him in some trouble with his employers. It is a poem in rhymed couplets some twelve pages long. He and I had a go at rhyming it years ago and gave up. There are two later poems called “Treatise on Poetry” and “Treatise on Theology” and from time to time I would get queries from people about “Traktat Moralny.” Why had it not been published in an English translation? I also knew, looking at the table of contents of the Polish Collected that there was a poem entitled “Central Park,” one called “Ode to a Bird on the Shore of the Potomac,” and one called “Hiroshima.” I was curious. I could read them laboriously with a dictionary but it would have been a labor. At Czesław’s funeral, David Frick, a Polish scholar in Czesław’s department at UC Berkeley, proposed we translate the “Traktat.” It took us several years to get to the task. David had retired and wanted a project. I got to satisfy my curiosity about this time—a dramatic time—in Czesław’s life, so we proceeded.
deNiord: What did you make of it on first reading in light of all the other translations you’ve done of Miłosz’s work?
Hass: I was too busy with the technical problems—rhyme, no rhyme, literal or not, what level of diction—what English rhythm was near the Polish rhythm—and how much to untangle the sometimes convoluted syntax of the Polish which was very playful—to have a distinct impression on first reading. As we decided to go beyond the “Traktat” and do all the poems from this period, I was surprised in a couple of ways. All of the poems but one are rhymed and metrical. Czesław’s later work, partly influenced by English and American poetry, was occasionally metrical but mostly written in free verse. When I asked Polish friends about it, they spoke of the rhythmic mastery of his early work. It was easier to render poems of his that sounded like D. H. Lawrence or Walt Whitman than poems that sounded like Yeats. And I was surprised and moved by the richness of this body of work he had mostly skipped over.
deNiord: What do you feel this book adds to the already invaluable body of Miłosz’s work?
Hass: Czesław did great work as a young poet during the war, the work like “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” and “The World” and “Dedication” that was published in the volume Rescue in 1946, and “Treatise on Poetry,” published in 1957 or 1958, is master work. This work, full of negotiations with the violence of the war, with survivor guilt, with a kind of weightlessness he experienced as the American condition, with the swings in his thinking about a kind of historical determinism he had acquired in the 1930s-40s intellectual milieu; it was fascinating to see the way it was all playing out.
deNiord: When exactly did you and David Frick get together to translate this book?
Hass: David proposed the task. It took a few years to get to it. Actually, he’s had some back surgery and retired and called me and said he didn’t want to get addicted to pain pills and needed a task. I had just gotten an inquiry from an American Miłosz scholar about the Tratktat and was feeling footloose, so we got together and dug in. We hadn’t worked together before. David was meticulous, a scholar of 17th century Protestant movements in eastern Europe, which seemed to me a very unlikely subject. He could teach Czech and Old Church Slavonic and Ukrainian literature and was fluent in German. He was exacting, and witty at the same time. So, the work was entertaining. He also had a very curious and energetic young Jack Russell Terrier, who was determined to distract us, that I got attached to.
deNiord: After reading your introduction to Poet in the New World, in which you recount Miłosz’s heroic struggle not only to survive during and after WWII in Warsaw, which suffered horrific devastation—the loss of eighty percent of its buildings from Nazi bombardment and approximately 200,000 civilian deaths—you provide a memorably incisive account of Miłosz’s transcendent genius as a poet, survivor, and witness in the midst of the unspeakable horror of WWII. I’m curious about why this personal history has never been summarized as succinctly as you and Frick have done in your introduction to Poet in the New World, and also why the poems haven’t been translated or published before, since they witness so brilliantly to the urban decimation of Warsaw, along with its ensuing post-war oppression at the hand of the Soviets.
Hass: One of the things I came to understand about Czesław during this period was that he was allergic to the idea of heroism, particularly the distinctly Polish combination of nationalism and martyrdom. He speaks about it in his poem “In Warsaw” where he says that he had vowed “not to touch / the deep wounds of my nation / so you would not make them holy.” In The Captive Mind he writes about literary gatherings during the German occupation at which he and his friend the novelist Jerzy Andrzejewski were very careful not to encourage their younger audience into suicidal acts of resistance. One young Pole was shot placing a wreath on a statue of Copernicus. Both Germans and Poles claimed Copernicus, so the statue was a site for honoring the deep wound. Czesław never actively joined the Home Army, the Polish underground resistance, which included communists, socialists, and old, aristocratic reactionaries. He edited a collection of poems of resistance, translated a French pamphlet by Jacques Maritain about how to practice non-cooperation with the occupiers, attended underground theater and underground readings, but really all social life was underground, and for the entire war Warsaw was under a nine o’clock curfew which meant that people had to bed down in place if the party was just getting started. It gave me the impression that, in the midst of the terror and the danger, the Nazi occupation enforced a kind of permanent adolescence in the Polish population, which ended in the bloodbath of the Warsaw Rising. They had years in which to debate whether their obligation was to resist and risk death or survive and bear witness. He was very clear that he thought it was his job as a writer to survive, which doesn’t mean he was able to take that stance without guilt or ambivalence. That’s the subject of “Dedication,” the great poem that ends his book of wartime poems. But you were asking about the publication of the poems. They were published after his defection in a volume called Light of Day, in 1953. But he was unhappy with the book as a book and struggled with how to organize the poems. Asked about it in the 1980s he just said that “because of his personal circumstances” he wrote the book off as a loss. He did publish a few English translations from those years. He had a try, we had a try at “Traktat Moralny,” “Treatise on Morals,” but it’s written in almost four hundred lines of rhymed couplets—and a jazzy, insistent rhythm and we couldn’t make it work in English and still be faithful to the tone or the literal meanings of the Polish.
deNiord: What do you think Miłosz himself thought of the poems in Poet in the New World?
Hass: Well, I don’t know. Except that they troubled him. I think he was philosophically unsettled. That generation was saturated in Hegel. They thought—he thought or sometimes thought—that there was some providential purpose being worked out in history and it was on that basis that, as a person of the left, he could join the new Polish government. Another part of him thought that history, as an inexorable force, was monstrous. As a kid he had loved the natural world, imagined being some kind of naturalist, but his was also the generation that had to absorb Darwin and an inexorable will in nature to reproduce that was ravenous and directionless. He worked with, I wouldn’t say worked out this issue, after this book, in his “Treatise on Poetry.” In this period he was just trying to figure out where to stand in his relation to the violence he’d just witnessed and the narrative about it that the Soviets were imposing in Poland. In “Treatise on Morals,” he anticipates what he’d have to say in The Captive Mind about ideology and mental reservation. Also, what ethical stances the postwar was developing—it is from this distance amusing that the three subjects he addresses are existentialism, phenomenology, and vodka.
deNiord: The poems in Poet in the New World, unlike his prose in The Captive Mind, contain thinly veiled philippics against Stalin, as in these unminced lines from his poem “Antigone”:
This is no time to shed tears on ourselves.
There is no time. Let an immense catastrophe
Sweep across the entire pitiless Earth.
As for those laughing now at our despair,
Let them witness their own towns razed to dust.
Creon’s law! Creon’s rule! Who in the world
Is Creon when our world itself is crumbling?
Is their inclusion in Poet in the New World, along with several other similar poems of witness in this manuscript, the first time these poems came to light in English translation?
Hass: His “Antigone” was first translated into English by a Hungarian scholar George Gomori and an English poet Richard Burns and published in an English language journal of Hungarian studies. People read it as a response to the Hungarian Uprising in 1954 and Soviet imperialism. Here’s George Gomori’s commentary—here are the details of “Antigone”; it was published, as I said, in The Hungarian Quarterly (Budapest) vol. 42, Winter 2001, pp. 64-67—:
It was introduced by my [George Gomori’s] short essay “Czesław Miłosz’s ‘Antigone’ and the 1956 Revolution,” pp. 61-63. The essay was necessary because Miłosz in his letter, which gave us permission to translate, stipulated that I should stress the fact that he had written it much earlier, i.e. around 1949, as a commemoration of the Warsaw Uprising and the attitude of the Communist authorities to its victims.
deNiord: In his poem “In Warsaw” that appears near the beginning of Poet in the New World, Miłosz concludes with these lines that could serve as a valiant credo for Miłosz’s stalwart insistence on maintaining joy amidst ruin:
It is madness to live without joy
And to repeat to the dead
Whose part was to be gladness
Of action in thought and in the flesh, singing feasts,
Only the two salvaged words:
Truth and justice
Did you feel Miłosz’s bonhomie, as well as his moral rectitude, rubbed off on you in any way during your collaborative venture in translating this manuscript.
Hass: He was a pleasure to work with. We laughed a lot. Hard to say what rubbed off or to generalize about either American poetry or American politics. Young poets, of course, look for models and what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine and in Gaza does seem to make the young poet Miłosz of the 1940s suddenly relevant.
deNiord: I’m curious about your interest in Slavic languages. Did you major in any of the Slavic languages in college or were you an English major?
Hass: I went to St. Mary’s, which had the St. John’s curriculum. So, four years of great books. In my junior year I learned calculus in Leibniz’s notation. Every once in a while, I meet somebody else who’s read the conics of Apollonius of Perga. So, you know I had that peculiar education. At Stanford I did a PhD in English, but I audited Russian courses. I studied German when I started at Saint Mary’s, intending to be a marine biologist. I also had four years of Latin in high school. And at Stanford I had to pass a course in Anglo-Saxon, which I resisted at the time though I survived it. I wish now I had worked at it.
deNiord: You must have been pretty good at languages.
Hass: I’m not good at languages. I’ve never become fluent or an easy reader in another language.
deNiord: Did Czesław want you to learn Polish?
Hass: He had no interest in helping me with Polish.
deNiord: He didn’t care?
Hass: When I would stop to ask questions, he was very patient, but we were mainly addressing the task at hand. We both had other work to do. And at the outset we had no notion that we’d be working together for years. I did eventually buy tapes and acquire a first-year grammar. But when we started working I was also taking conversational Japanese at adult night school and I had no idea that I would be immersed in Polish poetry. I also met Adam Zagajewski through Czesław and got interested in helping to translate his poems as well. I did acquire tapes. I learned upper class Polish pronunciation. When I got to Kraków the first time it was like if you could set an Englishman down in New Jersey kind of thing. You know, over the years I can tell now if a poem is about clouds or rivers. I could get through a newspaper with a dictionary.
deNiord: How fortunate, especially to meet Adam Zagajewski, as well as to get to know him at the same time you were translating Miłosz. I love his definition of poetry as “a dream written in the presence of reason.”
Hass: Yeah, Adam was amazing but I had been working on Czesław’s poems for a while before I met Adam. In 1980 we were working on what was to be a Miłosz issue of the literary magazine Ironwood. I was just trying to get a sense of his work when Czesław won the Nobel Prize, and the mail started pouring into the house in those big canvas mail bags.
deNiord: How did you even begin to sort through it all?
Hass: I was only an interested observer. Renata Gorczynska, who had been a jazz DJ in Warsaw before she defected, wrote at Stony Brook where she had come for a conference on broadcasting. She wrote to Czesław, “You must be overwhelmed. If you need a secretary, I can come.” She had interviewed Miłosz for a Polish language newspaper in New York City. So, Renata showed up and I got to talk to someone who spoke Polish about what we were up to.
deNiord: David Frick must have been fluent in Polish, correct?
Hass: More than fluent. David taught Old Church Slavonic and Czech as well as Ukrainian literature. And he was fluent in German.
deNiord: It must have been such a shock when he passed while you were translating Poet in the New World, but somehow you carried on.
Hass: It was a shock and I felt under some obligation to finish the work we had done. He had done at least a rough translation of everything and had begun doing the annotations. I called my friend in the Slavic language department and said, “We’re almost there.” She said, “I’ve the perfect solution for you: Karol Berger is a professor of music at Stanford who writes books on aesthetics. He has a book called Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow, and he’s a reader of Miłosz. So I called him and he agreed to look over what we’d done. Karol, as it turned out, knew Czesław’s work quite well and he has an exquisitely refined intelligence. So that was great luck.
deNiord: Sounds like he was perhaps as good as David.
Hass: It was really a pleasure to work with him. And an education. David was a friend and fun to work with and it was lovely to see how these two intelligences responded to the “Traktat,” particularly, because it was rich in Polish language play and philosophically complicated and written with an eye on the censor. Much of which it was impossible to render, so the main task was not to get the main meanings wrong.
deNiord: Now this was the first time you had worked without Miłosz on one of his books.
Hass: Or at least the first time without him making the final call. At the outset in 1979 and 1980 I worked with Robert [Pinsky] and Renata on the poems that became The Separate Notebooks and Czesław reviewed the results and, of course, had veto power. Then, for years, he and I would meet for a few hours a week, when we were both in town, and work from his first translation, sometimes on old poems, more often on new ones. The exception was “Treatise on Poetry,” which is complicated, a book length poem with embedded lyrics, and really great. In that case Czesław made a first literal translation—I assume it was a literal translation—of the whole thing, and I took it away for a summer and made a version and then we got back together in the fall and finalized it.
deNiord: You must have felt so curious, from the beginning on, about how you were going to proceed?
Hass: When I first started working on the poems, I was fascinated. I wanted to learn as much as I could about the prosody, to hear how they sounded. And then Renata arrived, someone, you know, who could teach me enough to enable me to know what was going on. The technical problems were especially interesting to me. There is an early poem in several voices. One of them is the voice of the earth. It’s written in the meter that you would translate the Iliad into. So, I could think, OK Richmond Lattimore. Another voice is slightly rhymed with irregular line lengths. I think it is a very early example of his free verse and it’s a woman’s voice, or the voice of the soul talking back to the earth. It’s lyrical and plaintive, and I thought: James Wright for irregular line length and musicality. That was my first way in, trying to find clues to what would be a comparable idiom in English. Later, I had more feel for his various voices and the work went quicker. We got more efficient about my making sometimes slight suggestions about his first translations.
deNiord: So many of them appeared in The New Yorker.
Hass: He was like a little kid. Or a young poet, which amounts to the same thing. He’d been in this country for so long as an observer of the literary scene, so he was delighted to be publishing everywhere.
deNiord: Was that pressure to you both also?
Hass: Not really. His attitude toward translation was that the translation is not the poem. It doesn’t have to be perfect. If it’s pretty good. It’s good enough.
deNiord: That must have been helpful—to not have to worry so much about perfection.
Hass: Yes and no. Translation is a worrier’s art. Occasionally, if I was taken by a poem, I would be stuck over a line or a stanza out of some maddening impulse to get it right, and Czesław had moved on.
deNiord: You were also working with Robert Pinsky early on. When did he start to collaborate with you?
Hass: Robert was teaching in the Berkeley English department. That would have been the late 70’s. I was particularly curious about the poem of Czesław’s called “The World: A Naive Poem.” I’d read about it in World Literature Today in an essay about the status of physical objects in the European poetry of World War II. When I got to know Czesław, I asked him about it. And he said that it was a rhymed poem, and really couldn’t be translated. I asked if we could have a go at it, and he gave me a trot and I recruited Robert to sign on.
deNiord: How did you get to know Czesław?
Hass: I was certainly aware of him, and he seemed a rather forbidding figure. I knew he had written The Captive Mind and was this hawklike figure living in the Berkeley hills. There had been a first English translation of his poems, with an introduction by Kenneth Rexroth and I wasn’t taken by it. It included a lot of poems from the 1950s, they seemed to me a little abstract. Anyway, I didn’t get them, but reading about “The World,” I was curious and I heard that there was another book of his poems in English translation and that he couldn’t find a publisher, I had just had my second book Praise taken by Dan Halpern at Ecco Press. So, I wrote to Dan and said this guy is supposed to be a great poet and he’s got a book and that maybe you should take a look at it. It was one he had translated with Lillian Vallee, who was a graduate student assistant. I hadn’t read it yet. It’s beautiful work. Oh, and they’re great poems. Dan read it and published it.
deNiord: So, that was the beginning of your long collaboration?
Hass: Yes, Dan came out to Berkeley and he introduced me to Czesław.
deNiord: But did you guys hit it off right away?
Hass: Well, Miłosz invited me to join him at a reading. He said, “I’m giving a reading at an International Festival in San Francisco. I feel awkward reading my poems in English. Would you mind reading them?” And I said, “Sure, I’m honored to read them.” So, we made an appointment. I didn’t know many things. I didn’t know his wife’s condition.
Hass: I said, “Shall I come to you?” and he said, “I’ll come to you.”
deNiord: What year was that?
Hass: 1978. Maybe ’79. And it was summer, it was hot, and I thought, “What kind of beer?” So, I went down to the liquor store and said, “What’s the best European beer?” “Pilsner Urquell. No question,” he said. It was very expensive. I bet it was $6 a bottle. And I bought a six pack of Pilsner Urquell. And Czesław came over and I said casually, “Maybe you would like a beer?” And he said, “That would be nice.”
deNiord: So, that was the beginning.
Hass: Right. And then he said, “Pilsner? You are a man of distinction.”
deNiord: And then you were off.
Hass: And then we were off. We were looking at what I was to read, and he startled me by saying, “You don’t say what you think of the poems.” And I said, “Well, these are translations and the translations are, you know, you can tell they’re by a really intelligent person with a very interesting mind.” He said, “So, you don’t like the poems?” And I said, “Well, I mean, I don’t know what’s going on in the Polish, what the level of diction is.” I think I picked a line and said, “You know, I wouldn’t say it just this way; it feels a little formal.”
deNiord: Do you recall what book this was?
Hass: It might have been the Rexroth Selected. I think I said something like, “There are three ways of saying this. You can say, “I can’t stand it. I can’t tolerate it. I cannot tolerate it. They each have a slightly different register. The most forceful and most idiomatic is, “I can’t stand it.” And he said, “That’s good. Let’s go with that.” So, that was our start. A week later we were in San Francisco for the poetry reading and one of the other guests was Isaac Bashevis Singer and they had never met and they fell on each other and started speaking in Polish. Czesław said to him, “I only saw your work in the window of a bookstore when I got to the United States. We lived blocks apart in New York.” And then Ferlinghetti came up and the three of them fell into conversation. Pretty cool.
deNiord: Very cool. So, you said you weren’t a big fan initially of the early work of Miłosz. But looking now at this new book you’ve just helped translate, which contains poems from 1946 to 1953, do you feel any differently about Miłosz’s poems from that time?
Hass: The poems I had read were from that first Selected. The translations in some cases were a little stiff. And the book was trying to represent, I see now, the stages of his development. There were a number of poems from his early 20s that seemed to me cloudy and symbolic. I didn’t get what he was doing. And poems from the 1950s and early 1960s that took a philosophical turn. There were also really powerful poems from the 40s, from the years of the Nazi occupation. And there were some poems from the postwar period, from his time in America, but I didn’t register them. There are three or four poems in Poet in the New World that were in that very first book and they made no impression on me because I didn’t get their context.
deNiord: When did you get the context?
Hass: Gradually over time. So, when he arrived, we had started to work on “The World,” which is an amazing poem, but it was a rhymed poem and metrical. In fact, much of this early work was running to metrical. And I had no idea. So, at that point, Robert Pinsky was here. Robert and I were seeing if we could make a translation of “The World” that he would like, which was a comic experience.
deNiord: Did it work?
Hass: “The World” is a fascinating poem, or set of poems. In the middle of the war and the Nazi occupation, Czesław has a job as a teamster in the library. He’s in his 20s and he’s teaching himself English by reading Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The social situation involved underground poetry readings, people reading poems of bitter irony or heroic resistance, and Czesław, partly under the influence of Blake, came in and read poems in the language of a child’s primer about children coming home from school, about what’s in their little wooden pencil box—crumbs from lunch, a penny for the cuckoo. We were given a literal trot by Lillian Vallee and set about seeing what we could do with them. Robert did a version of one of the poems deploying some clever slant rhymes. Czesław read it and said, “Where is the rhyme?” Robert said, “Oh, well, it’s off-rhyme,” and Czesław said, “I see. Modern rhyme.” One of the poems is called “Parable of a Poppy Seed.” In the sequence it is perhaps spoken to the children as a bedtime story. It begins something like, “On a seed of poppy, there is a tiny house and inside it are people and a cat.” I’ll read to you what I did with it:
On a seed of poppy is a tiny house.
Inside it are people, a cat, and a mouse.
Outside in the yard a dog barks at the moon
And then, in his one world, sleeps until noon
The earth is a poppy seed, and nothing more.
And that seed’s a planet, and that seed’s a star,
And even if there were a hundred thousand,
Each would contain a house and a garden.
All in a poppy head. They grow taller than hay.
The children run through, and the poppy plants sway.
And in the night when the moon is aloft,
You hear the dog’s barking, first loud, then soft.
deNiord: That’s lovely.
Hass: I thought it was pretty good. Czesław read it and said, “Mouse? There is no mouse in my poem. And does one need to be told that hay is taller than poppies?”
He absolutely didn’t want his poem defined by a mouse. Maybe it will be amusing for you to hear the version he approved for the Collected Poems:
On a poppy seed is a tiny house,
Dogs bark at the poppy-seed moon,
And never, never do those poppy-seed dogs
Imagine that somewhere there is a world much larger.
The earth is a seed—and really no more,
While other seeds are planets and stars.
And even if there were a hundred thousand,
Each might have a house and a garden.
All in a poppy head. The poppy grows tall.
The children run by and the poppy sways.
And in the evening under the rising moon
Dogs bark somewhere, now loudly, now softly.
Metrical, rhymed abab in the Polish, and in the spirit of Blake a rebellion of radical innocence against the violence of the war.
deNiord: So, you were discovering these early poems.
Hass: That was about when Renata arrived. We said, “We’re trying to make headway with this amazing poem,” and she said, “Have you seen the poems this guy is writing now?” Now, of course, was forty years later, poems written after thirty years of exile, and she started doing a sight translation of the opening of The Separate Notebooks, which goes: “Now there is nothing to lose, my cautious, my cunning, my hyper-selfish cat / Now we can make confession without fear that it will be used by mighty enemies. / We are an echo that runs”—and here she paused, said, “Oh, this is difficult. It’s an adverb, tupotem. It’s very onomatopoetic.” And she explained that tupotce was a typical name for a pet hedgehog in Lithuania. Maybe “tippy-toe,” she said, would be a good translation for the sound a hedgehog makes running on a hardwood floor. I think we eventually came up with “skittering.” And there was another difficulty. The whole line read: “We are an echo that runs skittering through a train of rooms.” I asked about “train.” The Polish word was amfiladę, and when we checked the dictionary, the English translation was “amfilade.” It’s a French architectural term for a series of rooms opening into each other through French doors. And at that point we were just feeling our way, do you say “train” which makes it sound like trailing rooms or maybe a series of cars in a train, which wouldn’t be bad but wasn’t quite accurate, and if you just said “amfilade,” for most English readers, it would feel like you weren’t doing your job. But the line is haunting: “We are an echo that runs, skittering, through a train of rooms.” She kept translating. The next line went “Seasons flare and fade, but as if in a garden we do not enter anymore.” Anyway, we had this brilliant early poem, “The World,” written against the military occupation and then suddenly these remarkable poems of isolation and exile, and the problems of trying to help with translation from a language we didn’t know, it was baffling but fascinating.
deNiord: So you had to work through that.
Hass: Well, yeah, as best I could. But working this way was like making love with gloves on. There’s a gorgeous early poem that I was working on a little later that illustrates the problem. The poem is called “Song” in English. He was 23 when he wrote it. It’s the one in two voices, the voice of the earth and the voice of the mortal soul, and it ends with something called “The last voices.” It foreshadows so many of his themes and I didn’t know who to talk to about how amazing it seemed to me. So when I met Adam Zagajewski, I could finally ask a Polish poet about it, maybe a great Polish poet. So I said to him, “You know the early poem ‘Song,’ is it as amazing as I think it is?” and Adam said, “Oh, you’re right. It’s completely great, and you’d never know how young he was, except for that gauche rhyme in the last two lines.” And I realized that, even if I learned Polish, I’d never know it the way a poet knows it, or a native speaker, anyway. I think I can tell a false line in English, you know, the pitch? the rhetoric? It helped to get through Renata some feel for the sound of the poems and their prosody.
deNiord: OK, so he was primarily a formal poet in Polish, and so here he is working with you, primarily a free verse poet with a different sensibility about form.
Hass: But it turns out, starting in the 1950s, he was reading American poetry—Stevens, Whitman, Eliot—and French poetry, particularly Saint-John Perse. When he got to Berkeley—this is a thing I didn’t understand at the time—he was writing almost always in free verse in Polish, and deploying it in a lot of different ways.
deNiord: Which was novel for him, right?
Hass: I don’t know. I don’t know enough about what other Polish poets, especially the younger generation, was doing, and, of course, Czesław was reading them intensely and translating them into free verse, in Post-War Polish Poetry and especially in his versions of Zbigniew Herbert who, I think, was a free verse poet from the outset, but I am out of my depth here. This is work for Polish-reading scholars.
deNiord: What’s an example of spotting a false line in your own language?
Hass: Well, let’s see. Frost, for example, can be intolerably cute. Do you know what I mean?
deNiord: I do.
deNiord and Hass (together): “Earth’s the right place for love. / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”
Hass: People love those lines. Anyway, doing this work I was aware of my limitations.
deNiord: Did you come to feel your translations were your own poems?
Hass: No, I never did. I understood that it was a service and also that, when we had different ideas about how something should sound, he was the one who had to read it in public. So, he always won.
deNiord: So you let him win? Of course. He was old enough to be a mentor to you. Is that the right word?
Hass: We didn’t really talk about my poems. He translated a few of them for an anthology.
deNiord: In Polish?
Hass: And of course he was translating younger Polish poets into free verse in English. The one poem that’s in purely free verse in that ’46 to ’50 period is an homage to Tadeuz Rózewicz, who wrote in the minimalist free verse we’ve come to associate with Eastern European poetry. The nearest thing in English might be William Carlos Williams, or later Charles Simic. Droll, minimalist.
deNiord: Sounds like he might actually have wanted to be American in a way.
Hass: I think that his work in translation must have opened up subject matter for him in this way. And this is a subject that my Polish informants aren’t so great on.
deNiord: We were saying that you tried to make him sound like Yeats in the early work and in the later parts like Whitman.
Hass: Well, we laid down the first pattern for how it should sound. Polish syllabotonics—they’re called—allow for a lot more unaccented syllables than in English meter. There are a few inset poems in “Treatise on Poetry” where he suddenly shifts from free verse, or a loose Polish equivalent of blank verse into rhyme and meter. I did the best I could, but I thought this would be a job for Richard Wilbur. The Polish poet, Stanisław Barańczak, a wonderful poet who did what people say are genius translations of Emily Dickinson into Polish, would have also been good. I could make the lines rhyme and feel polished, but only if I had freedom with the Polish text which is what Czesław quite understandably really did not want. He didn’t want us paraphrasing his poem into English. I asked Robert to help at the outset because…
deNiord: Because he’s pretty formal.
Hass: It’s one of his idioms. As it was one of Czesław’s. He was quite aware of the status of Polish. It was not, like English or Spanish or Mandarin, a world language and, in relation to Russian, it was a language of colonial resistance. I did find a rhyme for one poem in which he describes his situation:
In one of the obscure African languages he fashioned his verses.
A tribe is no tribe once the tribe disperses.
deNiord: He was certainly old enough to be a mentor to you. Is that the right word?
Hass: He was my father’s age and I was learning a lot, but it didn’t feel like a mentoring relationship. More like two craftpersons doing a job.
deNiord: He was more collegial?
Hass: Yes, and at the same time he was going through a lot in those years. His wife died. In her last years she had needed some nursing. His life, when I was first working with him, felt a little penitential. And then the world opened to him. Because of Solidarity and because of the Polish Pope, the Nobel Prize seemed like an international event. He went from a quiet life in exile to having his portrait on postage stamps. Meanwhile his son had mental health issues. His friendship with Renata and his meeting Carol opened up his life, but also troubled it. That story gets told in the poems in Unattainable Earth. So, it was an intense time in which our relationship became a clearing. We fell into a rhythm of meeting Monday mornings and he would have a couple of poems in rough translation and we would go over them and then he would send them off to a magazine or we’d work on a book of his earlier poems and it just got to be a routine.
deNiord: You both must have felt so fortunate to have found each other so serendipitously.
Hass: Yes. We were fond of each other.
deNiord: Did you go to Poland with him?
Hass: No, but after he had moved back, I visited him there. I’ve been several times to Kraków. Early on, Ed Hirsch hosted an annual summer symposium through the University of Houston.
deNiord: Adam Zagajewski also was there in Houston then. Did he help set that up?
Hass: I don’t think he did the organizing. But his presence was certainly a motive for the gathering. This is also around the time when, let’s see what year, it was in the 90s that Szymborska won the Nobel Prize. Czesław was still pretty vigorous. And very happy to be back in a Polish milieu. I got to see that, and then I got to visit after he died. Put flowers on his crypt. I guess I was there four or five times.
deNiord: Following Miłosz’s death you must have gained a profound perspective on him as both a heroic figure and literary giant.
Hass: The time before the last, when I was teaching at the Free University in Berlin, Brenda and I went to visit him in Kraków. In this beautiful high-ceilinged apartment just off the main square. Have you ever been Kraków?
deNiord: No.
Hass: It has the most spectacular public square in Europe, I think, not counting Venice, and he lived just around the corner. Carol had moved back to Kraków with him, of course. She was a little like Ruth in the alien corn. She was just lovely to him and with him. She had acquired enough Polish to carry on a conversation. But it wasn’t easy for her, she was somewhat isolated. And then she had some kind of diagnosis with cancer. She had gone back to San Francisco for tests when we visited Czesław. And he knew we were going back. His brother had died, so most of his generation was gone. He was 92. When we said, “How are you doing?” He said, “I survive by incantation.”
deNiord: Meaning?
Hass: Carol was back in San Francisco, consulting doctors. He had a helper who would come in and he would dictate the last poems. I imagine he then eventually wrote them down. And he’d been doing this. When we got home, I immediately went to the hospital to see how Carol was doing. It was clear she was dying and that they had not told Czesław that she was dying. I think his son Tony was worried that he’d insist on returning and that the trip would kill him and he was wrestling with what to do, so Brenda said, “If anybody gets to make that choice for themselves, he does.” And Tony said, yes, that was what he was thinking, too, and so he called him and said, “Dad, you better come.” Somehow, they arranged for a cardiologist, a young professor of cardiology at the medical school, to come with him, and he arrived. And was taken to the hospital—the university hospital in San Francisco on a very bleak day, foggy and windy. He wrote a poem about them as Orpheus and Eurydice. They spent three or four days together and she died. He stayed for a memorial service and we did a little work together, but he was very intent on returning to Kraków, and Tony saw to it that he got back, though it was going back without her. It was hard to watch. She was twenty or more years younger than he. We all thought that she would take care of him. So, it was cruel. I wasn’t there when he died, so the next time I was there was for his funeral.
deNiord: Do you remember the last time you saw him?
Hass: Well, the last time I saw him would have been when we left Kraków to come to San Francisco to visit Carol. He stayed with his son for her funereal and we were able to do a little work on what became the last poems. The next time I went back to Kraków was to march with Adam and Seamus at Miłosz’s funeral. The right-wing commentators on Polish television had objected because the Cardinal was going to preside at the funeral and in response the Pope had released a letter that he had written to Czesław at some point about Czesław saying, “I’m not much of a Catholic.” And the Pope said, “But you were a good man.” That was the headline in the newspapers when I arrived.
deNiord: So, he’s buried in Kraków?
Hass: He’s buried in Kraków in a crypt of Polish notables in the basement of the Church of Saint Peter of the Rock. I have a couple of lines in a poem about how much I hate his being buried there. But the last time I went to visit, I didn’t feel so bad about it. And a lot of the other people felt like that. That was the second most honorable place that you could be buried. And he wasn’t buried in the first most honorable place because the Polish equivalent of Fox News was still going after him. As we were marching down the narrow street from Saint Mary’s Cathedral, where the funeral was and where I met the Secretary of State. There were a lot of higher ups, and I said to him something like, “Well, you’ve certainly produced an amazing collection of poets.” And he said, “Yes, we’re good at poets. We need engineers.” As we marched down the street, there were two sour looking elderly women standing on the corner watching this huge procession go by of people and they were commenting back and forth to each other and I asked Adam, “What are they saying?” “One of them said, ‘They say he wasn’t even a good Catholic.’ And then the other said, ‘Yes, but the Pope said he was a good man.’”
deNiord: You have a wonderful long poem about this titled “An Argument about Poetics Imagined at Squaw Valley after a Night Walk under the Mountain.” Here is a passage from that poem that recounts moving details of his funeral:
Czesław was buried in a crypt – in the Krakovian church
Of St. Peter of the Rock – among other Polish notables.
I hated the idea of it and still do, that his particular body
Is lying there in a cellar of cold marble and old bones
Under the weight of two thousand years of the Catholic Church.
(Thinking about this still years later, imagining this dialogue
In the Sierra dark under the shadowy mass of the mountain
And the glittering stars.) Not liking the fact that it is,
Perhaps, what he would have wanted. You should
Have been buried – I’m still talking to him – on a grassy hillside
Open to the sun (the Lithuanian sun the peasants
Carved on crosses in the churchyard in your childhood)
And what you called in one poem “the frail light of birches.”
And he might have said no. He might have said,
I choose marble and the Catholic Church because
They say no to natural beauty that lures us and kills us.
deNiord (cont.): Did you and David feel any particular desire or impetus to continue translating Miłosz?
Hass: I don’t know if any of this is repeating myself. The short answer would be no, not really. At the time I thought I was through with Czesław’s poems. And then we were just going to do this one poem as a one off. I thought I’d put enough time into this project. But it was hard to resist completing the task.
deNiord: I’m curious to know about your early days—your childhood and first memories that influenced your poetry later on either directly or indirectly.
Hass: I was born in 1941. The war in the Pacific was being conducted from the Presidio in San Francisco. My dad had inherited his father’s house. There was a housing crunch in San Francisco. They had turned the downstairs into an apartment. There was a guy who was working at the Lawrence Lab, turns out he was working with Oppenheimer on the bomb, living in the downstairs. There was a general next door. We saw his limo pull up to take him down into the Presidio. My uncle was a fighter pilot in the Pacific. He was my aunt’s fiancé at the time. So, some of my earliest memories are of being taken to the post to watch movies. The neighborhood I grew up in was Presidio Heights. The war is one of the early things in my imagination and for me, maybe for you. The movies we grew up on were war hero movies. The comedies were Abbott and Costello comedies about the Army and musicals about the Navy. By the time I was old enough to form ideas about the world, they were informed by the war and by the story of the Holocaust and the German people. Our moral formation was—we wouldn’t do that. I mean, we ourselves wouldn’t. But also it felt like it couldn’t happen again. That must have been among the young the impetus for the movement against the war in Vietnam. But even with Korea and Vietnam and the war in Iraq, it felt like that was old mistaken colonialist politics. It seemed so unlikely that Europe could revisit the twentieth century wars that killed millions of people. So, it’s incredibly shocking what’s been happening in Ukraine. So that was at least vaguely in the background of my attraction to revisiting the century through the body of Czesław’s work.
deNiord: So, there was more than just a poetic ambition in your taking up this last project.
Hass: The actual work was so technical, in some cases with these poems which belong to a kind of transition.
deNiord: When you say these poems?
Hass: The poems from 1946 to 1951 or so. Sometimes it was hard to just tell what the hell was going on.
deNiord: Just post World War II, very close.
Hass: There’s a description in a poem called “Central Park.” David did a first sight translation of it. And I said, “I don’t have the faintest idea what this is about.” He said, “Neither do I.” And I said, “Well, let’s go slowly through it.” And as it turns out, it’s a description of the light from an outdoor movie projector hitting the trees in Central Park and the spires along 5th Ave. And it’s written in what Czesław once called, “Polish syntax,” which is like ivy. It sprawls all over the place. It’s partly the inflected language. You can put things anywhere. So, figuring it out with David, I would say, “Well, here’s how I would do this.” And he would say, “That’s completely different from the syntax of the poem.” And I said, “If we do the syntax of the poem, it’s going to be unintelligible.” I could get the example and show you, but anyway, so that was the level of concern. You can lose track of the intensity of what the poems are about. I mean, when I was working with Czesław on his poems sometimes, he’d be describing a Sunday in Warsaw, “You can hear guns crackling on the other side of the ghetto wall and hear, is it a carousel? What do you call this thing? You know, it has chains to chairs. It goes in a circle like that, whirls around?” And I said, “Well, it’s not a carousel. Is it a merry-go-round? Is it actually? It’s not a merry-go-round. I’m sure it has a name, but I don’t know what the name is.” And he gets down a dictionary, a picture dictionary for people learning English. And there’s a picture of an amusement park. And there it is, and it’s called a whirligig. We can’t say whirligig because nobody has the faintest idea of what that is. Is it OK if we just say it’s a merry-go-round? No, he said, it’s not a merry-go-round. So, the work involved that level of questioning. Sometimes we’d find ourselves laughing, and then we’d realize what we were laughing at.
Hass (cont.): So, yes. Translation is a meddler’s and a finagler’s craft.
deNiord: You’ve spent an enormous amount of time translating, and as well writing your own poems. Did you ever feel that the time you spent translating was taking you away from your own writing?
Hass: Sure. Once we decided to do the Collected Poems, there was kind of no going back. There were times when I thought, what have you gotten yourself into? But at that point it was an aspect of a friendship. Also, in the later poems, which were not as urgent and amazing to me as the earlier work, my feeling about getting them into the best possible version relaxed a bit, but, and then you know, it had become part of my work-life.
deNiord: As a mission you had no idea or initial interest in pursuing. When did you gain some sense of its literary import and relevance?
Hass: Three hours every Monday we worked on translating, except for the “Treatise on Poetry,” which was another matter, turning out a book length poem. The short answer, no. I was too absorbed by the technical task and pleasures of translation to be worried about whether it was relevant or not.
deNiord: Your decades-long project of working with Miłosz and then with David must have given you great satisfaction in knowing you were undertaking an invaluable cultural service bringing Miłosz’s poetry to the English-speaking world. Was there another aspect of this project that didn’t involve poetry?
Hass: There was his work in prose. I was not involved in that, except for the prose poems and short prose pieces in Road-side Dog, and we worked together on the English version of The Book of Luminous Things which he thought of as a kind of aesthetic summing up.
deNiord: And am I right in thinking there was a reluctant return to—
Hass: Catholic orthodoxy?
deNiord: Yes? Something like that?
Hass: Well, I think in the 30s he was like everybody in this generation, a more or less secular socialist. He felt like he wanted nothing to do with the Church, which for him was associated with reactionary old Poland. And then there was the fact that Roman Catholicism defined Polish culture, as against Orthodoxy and Russian culture and Russian imperialism.
deNiord: But at the same time, he never lost his religious conviction.
Hass: Well, I think he never lost his religious questions. How could your good God let this happen? Isn’t this the problem of monotheism? So, there’s a period when he just said he was a Marxist or socialist or some kind of Polish socialist or something like that, and he wanted nothing to do with the organs which he associated with antisemitism, Polish landlord feudalism. I have the impression that Poland was like England but worse as far as class is concerned. And he came from that old gentry class.
deNiord: He practiced this cover in his attitude toward both Stalinism and Catholicism.
Hass: I think in one of the letters to the Pope, which are going to be published at some point, he said, “Did I need an order in the universe? I needed an order in the universe. Could I write a Catholic poem? I would have no audience if I wrote a Catholic poem.”
deNiord: Reminds me of the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s public subterfuge toward Hitler. During Hitler’s rallies if one didn’t salute Hitler, they would be arrested. So, Bonhoeffer would salute Hitler. His closest friend, Eberhard Bethge, once attempted to pull his arm down during such an occasion at which Bonhoeffer turned to him and said, “This isn’t worth dying for.”
Hass: And that’s what Czesław thought Poland was doing in the postwar—functioning on prudent mental reservation—and he could no longer do it. It wasn’t a theological issue at that point. Later, at Berkeley, with the history of the violence of the war to digest, he started by teaching courses in Gnosticism. My friend Linda Gregg, the poet, audited Czesław’s Gnosticism class. I think this was before we started working together, and it seemed an interestingly eccentric thing to be doing. This would have been as the 60s were turning into the 70s, when it might have seemed to him that a world described as the creation of a good God was problematic. So he looked at the Gnostics and thought to interest young Californians in their tie-dyed t-shirts in the proposition that the material universe was conceived by a diabolic power, as William Blake proposed. But whatever he thought this wasn’t what was troubling him in the poems of the late 1940s, I don’t think. Religion isn’t an issue in “Treatise on Morals.” I was surprised to find in it an elegy for his mother that evokes the Polish landscape and ends with a kind of prayer: “Let the wind from the Vistula flow like an ocean. / You who wished to grant me the gift of life, / May you be greeted in the name of God. Amen.” I asked David if he thought this was a profession of faith, and he said I think it’s a profession of honoring his mother. There was a turning point for him, I think, in the 1950s. He was living in Paris and he attended a series of lectures by Etienne Gilson in medieval philosophy. One of the lectures apparently had to do with a theological school that defined God as Being. God is existence and that which exists is God. God is the only eternal. Something like that. The interesting thing about this, interesting to me about this, is that at the time that he was attending these lectures, Thomas Merton was feeling like a lost soul at Columbia University, and looked at a bookstore window and saw Gilson’s history of medieval philosophy and opened it to the chapter on the theology of Being and suddenly got interested in maybe becoming a Christian. Oh, that’s what led him eventually to the Trappist monastery in Kentucky. When Czesław arrived in the States, one of the things he did was initiate a correspondence with Thomas Merton. Anyway, I’ve taken this as a clue to his thinking during this period. It’s in a prose poem he wrote in Paris in 1954 called “Esse.” It’s about a two-minute erotic relationship with a beautiful woman on the Paris Metro. He translated it with Robert Pinsky. He looks at the woman and falls in love with the fact that she exists. Hence the title “Esse.” The poem ends: “She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.” That’s the beginning of his coming back to something like religion. He needed a theology that made moral judgments. You couldn’t be an atheist and think that there was an objective basis for moral judgments. But he would only put it that way almost fifty years later in “Treatise on Theology.”
deNiord: Well, I was going to ask you about that in light of all the hardships he went through during and after the war in Warsaw, Kraków, wandering the Polish countryside, sleeping in barns, and then somehow escaping to London and ultimately New York where he secured a job at the Polish consulate, holding on all the while somehow to his faith.
Hass: Yes, maybe a little bit he held on to. There are parts of this I don’t understand, especially the way Catholicism is entangled with Polish nationalism. During that period. If as a young poet imitating French models, there would have been a way for him to be a Catholic poet. There was the example of Paul Claudel and he wasn’t interested in that. I imagine that he had set aside the whole apparatus, God, Heaven, Hell. He wasn’t yet presented with the question of what to hang on to. He just set it aside, as is the way of most poets in the twentieth century when they discovered poetry. They didn’t need anything else for a while.
deNiord: And then what happens?
Hass: And then it’s after the war. His struggles in the 1950s, after his defection, and after writing The Captive Mind, when he’s trying to figure out what he thinks—both in his poems and his prose—are in the last chapter of his book called Native Realm and also in his long poem, “Treatise on Poetry.” So, he could not be a Marxist entirely because for him Marx and Darwin were indistinguishable. He’s witnessed a Soviet Union where every cruelty is justified in the name of historical inevitability which is going to eventually produce perfect justice. It was no different for him from survival of the fittest. But if he doesn’t get on that train, where is he? That’s what he takes up in the history section of “Treatise on Poetry,” where poetry, whatever it is, is the opposite, maybe a weak opposite, to the inevitable violence of history.
deNiord: He took a heroic stand in maintaining that, as weak as it was.
Hass: Yes. He was working in the service of the servants of the inevitability of history, and there are things he can’t say out loud, but then he sort of does.
deNiord: Where?
Hass: Well, in the “Treatise on Morals.” He basically says that he doesn’t believe anybody’s explanation of anything right now. We’ll see what’s coming. Maybe he’s still thinking in Hegelian/Marxist terms. Maybe. He says in a place in that poem, that in five or six generations from now, some young guy is going to be reading a book that will open up the world of justice that we long for.
deNiord: Maybe…
Hass: Yeah. But for now…
deNiord: But for now he’s living in the midst of it.
Hass: So now, hedge your bets.
deNiord: And in the process of hedging your bets he’s writing up a storm, which in itself seems to be keeping him alive, spiritually, morally, even though he’s raising all sorts of questions about doubt while at the same time behaving heroically as a Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith in the midst of his “dark night of the soul.”
Hass: Perhaps. This is sort of where I came in. He’d arrived in Berkeley in 1960. He’d been for twenty years writing a poetry of exile, saturated in the memory of his childhood in Lithuania, of the war years, of the present he found himself in, partly from an impulse to recover the world in his memory, partly to protest the fact that he could only possess it imperfectly, troubling himself with the nature of evil, with what being is in words, interrogating himself fairly remorselessly. So that was when in 1980 Renata said to me, “Have you read the poems that this guy is writing now?” I said, “No. What’s there?” And she quoted to me—I hadn’t read “From the Risings of the Sun” at that point—but let me get the book, Chard. So, OK, this is the translation Czesław did with Lillian Vallee:
And so, one morning. In biting frost,
All is cold and gray. And in that sleepy haze
A span of air suffused with carmine light.
Banks of snow, roadways made slippery by sleighs
Grow rosy. As do wisps of smoke, puffs of vapor.
Bells jingle nearby, then further away, shaggy horses
Covered with hoarfrost, every air distinct.
And the the pealing of bells. At St. John’s
And the Bernadines’, at St. Casimir’s
And the Cathedral, at the Missionaries’
And St George’s, at the Dominicans’
And St Nicholas’s, at St Jacob’s.
Many many bells. As if the hand pulling the ropes
Were building a huge edifice over the city.
So, I was sort of amazed; it’s like a sonic version of a nineteenth century genre painting, vivid down to the horse’s frozen hair. And written, obviously out of homesickness of a metaphysical intensity on a California hillside. It goes on:
So that Lisabeth wrapped up in her cape could go to morning Mass.
I have thought for a long time about Lisabeth’s life.
I could count the years. But I prefer not to.
What are years, if I see the snow and her shoes,
Funny, pointed, buttoned on the side…
Hass (cont.): I had to take the quality of the language in Polish on faith. I asked Renata what the Polish felt like, and she said, “Like the sound of a clear bell.” And she read a passage that brought us back to California:
What year is this? It’s easy to remember.
This is a year when eucalyptus forests froze in our hills.
And everyone could provide himself with free wood for his fireplace
In preparation for the rains and storms from the sea.
In the morning we were cutting logs with a chainsaw
And it is a strong, fierce dwarf crackling and rushing in the smell of combustion,
Below the bay, the playful sun,
And the towers of San Francisco seen through rusty fog.
And always the same consciousness unwilling to forgive.
Perhaps only my reverence will save me.
If not for it. I wouldn’t dare pronounce, the words of the prophets:
“Whatever could be created can be annihilated. Forms cannot.
The Oak is cut down by the axe. The lamb falls by the knife,
But their forms eternal exists forever. Amen. Hallelujah!
And if the city there below was consumed by fire
Together with all the continents,
I would not say with my mouth of ashes that it was unjust.
For we lived under the judgment unaware
Which judgment began in the year one hundred seven hundred fifty-seven.”
Though not for certain, perhaps in some other year,
It shall come to completion in the sixth millennium, or next Tuesday.
The demiurge’s workshop will suddenly be stilled. Unimaginable silence.
And the form of every single grain will be restored in glory.
I was judged for my despair because I was unable to understand this.
deNiord: Hearing you read this makes me wonder what a young person in his 20s would make of it.
Hass: I found myself often wondering. He walks right up to belief and presents it passionately and then pulls back.
deNiord: But he never disappears.
Hass: That’s where his power lies. In that way he had a realist idiom, his brilliant evocations of the world, but a symbolist aesthetic—the poems reaching toward an absolute they can’t quite get to. And he protested against the place where it left him. In a poem called “Meaning,” written in the 1990s when he’s in his 80s, he wrote:
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on a branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
– Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.
My first concern would be whether to say, “revolving galaxies,” or “the revolving galaxies,” but I might sometimes say, “What’s wrong with a thrush on a branch. Seems miracle enough to me.” And he might say, “The theologians believed eternal forms exist, by definition, probably because it’s unbearable to think that everything simply perishes,” or more accurately, “I didn’t say that they exist, I said I will scream into eternity if they don’t.” He was working this out in the prose book The Land of Ulro. His uncle, the French/Lithuanian poet Oscar Miłosz, was a kind of Swedenborgian, Blakean mystic. Czesław liked to talk about him and in those years. When he did, Carol would say, “Czesław, it’s dinner time. We’re not going to talk about your uncle Oscar.”
deNiord: She’d heard enough.
Hass: And somewhere in all this is something else, his distrust of sexuality.
deNiord: How’s that?
Hass: In those years people would sometimes ask me if I would ask Czesław to participate in readings. I forget what year it was that they were proposing to put a nuclear power plant down on the earthquake fault, and someone organized a big reading, big protest, at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. I said, “If you’re just going to do one thing this year, this would be it.” And he said, “I just don’t like anti-nukes.” And I said, “What? You don’t like anti-nukes?” And he said, “One minute, a beautiful, young woman. Next minute, a bent over old woman with blue hair. No one protests.”
deNiord: So, when you say his distrust of—
Hass: Sexuality, of nature as such. No one was picketing about aging and dying. Another time I asked him about an environmental event, and he said, “Of course, nature to me is pure horror.” And I said, “You were just talking about being up in the Napa Valley with Carol. The hot tub, the moon, the vineyards changing color?” And he said, “Beauty. Different story.”
deNiord: Could he reconcile the two?
Hass (picks up the Collected Poems): Well, look at this from “From the Risings of the Sun”:
The lament of a slaughtered hare fills the forest.
It fills the forest and disturbs nothing there.
For the dying of a particular being is its own private business
And everyone has to cope with it in whatever way he can.
Our Forest and its Inhabitants. Our, of our village,
Fenced in with a wire. Sucking, munching, digesting,
Growing, and being annihilated. A callous mother.
If the wax in our ears could melt, a moth on pine needles,
A beetle half-eaten by a bird, a wounded lizard
Would all lie at the center of the expanding circles
Of their vibrating agony. That piercing sound
Would drone out the loud shots of bursting seeds and buds,
And our child who gathers strawberries in a basket.
Would not hear the trilling, nice after all, of the thrush.
deNiord: What was it like translating that?
Hass: Thrilling, I imagine. It’s Lilian Vallee’s translation done with Czesław.
deNiord: Do you know where it comes from? What is it about this language that is transcendent?
Hass: I suppose you could say, it’s people who have lived through the experiences that his whole generation lived through that gives a kind of authority to his framing of questions that everyone has. In that passage you can feel the force of the feeling in the syntax. For me there is a gorgeous opening up in it. I think of the beginning of the poem “Late Ripeness”:
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.
One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.
He had found this kind of semi-dithyrambic free verse. He got it from D.H. Lawrence and from Whitman.
deNiord: He must have loved both of them, but came to them later.
Hass: Especially in Unattainable Earth, which includes in the Polish edition poems by Whitman and Lawrence in Polish. This was essentially the book of his falling in love after his wife’s death. It’s very conflicted work, in which he loves life and rebukes himself for loving life. One poem begins, “No, it won’t do, my sweet theologians.”
deNiord: “Theodicy!”
Hass: Yes!
Desire will not save the morality of God.
If he created beings able to choose between good and evil,
And they chose, and the world lies in iniquity,
Nevertheless, there is pain, and the undeserved torture of creatures,
Which would find its explanation only by assuming
The existence of an archetypal Paradise
And a pre-human downfall so grave
That the world of matter received its shape from diabolic power.
deNiord: Amazing.
Hass: I mean, there is that lesson for us, makes the case for saying the thing plainly and directly.
deNiord: But also in language that is so beautifully economical and profound at the same time.
Hass:
You ask me to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
and walking it, we are aloft as on a springboard
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
deNiord: Did he ever write about Job?
Hass: It doesn’t come to mind.
deNiord: Interesting, because he reminds me so much of Job’s wife, who tells him to curse God and die.
Hass: When you were in divinity school, did you consider ordination? What’s your relation to that theology now?
deNiord: Well, you know, a little like Miłosz, it hasn’t left me. But I didn’t find the church or the ministry satisfying as a vocation in the end, even though I worked as a seminarian at an Episcopal Church, and then as a psychotherapist, which I felt was a kind of secular ministry. I experienced a persistent spiritual gaucherie for the religious formality of the priesthood. I was writing more and more, finding sermon-writing hugely taxing on my poetry-writing.
Hass: I was hearing Emerson in your book In My Unknowing.
deNiord: Yes, well, he’s there both consciously and unconsciously. So, now I’m at a point where writing has become my essential spiritual enterprise, as I’m sure it has for you, as well.
Hass: Brenda’s dad was raised, grew up, by schoolteachers and subsistence farmers in Mississippi. Her mom comes from Baptist missionaries in Brazil. And her dad became a very eminent economist. He migrated to the Anglican Church. She describes herself as Episco-pagan.
deNiord: That’s funny in a way some Episcopalians would find offensive and others not.
Hass: It basically says about doctrine, “I like all religions.” My relation to Christianity: I tried to write about this some years ago and I’m in a slightly different place today. I had fifteen years of Catholic education and in college started reading modernist literature and that became my religion. Sometime in those years I read Philip Whalen’s poem, “To the Xtians,” (which I just looked for and couldn’t find). The last line was “Keep your blood off the crotch of my tree.” That, in my early twenties, and an ill-digested mix of Buddhism and existentialism, gave me enough to float into writing poetry. At the same time my first wife’s family were salt of the earth, working class San Francisco, Italian Catholic, Irish Catholic. And my kids loved their grandparents, their aunts and uncles. So, when they were ready to be baptized, we baptized them and because they grew up in Berkeley where there were a lot of Jewish kids who were being bar- and bah-mitzvahed, they wanted to be confirmed, so there was that expression “cultural Catholics.” Not unlike the way some secular Jews are culturally Jewish, but not interested in Judaism as a religious practice. I was aware—not so much of not believing in some version of that story—which I didn’t believe—but of wanting to give my kids a language—while I figured out mine. There were things in the church I was attached to, the relation of the liturgy to the seasons, the ways in which the Catholicism of the Italian American nuns who taught us felt like a Mediterranean earth religion, the way you could assimilate the young man Jesus on the cross to a sort of Ezra Pound polytheism—I think I wrote at the time about needing a sorrow god to go with the gods of carnality and laughter. Buddhism, though I never had the discipline for practice, seemed a more plausible point of departure because, I thought, it took the scientific description of the cosmos—came from nowhere, going nowhere discernable—to mean: wake up! And that felt like it rhymed with existentialist ideas of the absurd. It was a place in which to vacillate between the absurd and the sacred. That was more or less my state of mind when I began working with Czesław. I was working at the aesthetic of it by trying to translate Bashō.
deNiord: Well, Miłosz is a rarity because of what he held onto and at the same time wrote about so profoundly and frankly.
Hass: “I was condemned for my despair because I was unable to understand this.”
deNiord: That is the last line of his poem “From the Risings of the Sun.”
deNiord (cont.): At the end of the poem “Capri,” he talks about events he calls “particular.” What is that about?
Hass: I’m not quite sure what to make of that. He’s looking at the gorgeous people on the beaches in Capri and thinking that they don’t need “Heaven and Hell, and the labyrinths of philosophy.” The last lines:
If I accomplished anything, it was only when I,
a pious boy, chased after the disguises of the lost Reality.
After the real presence of divinity in our flesh and blood
which are at the same time bread and wine,
Hearing the immense call of the Particular, despite
the earthly law that sentences memory to extinction.
What I remember about this is that I asked him if he was sure he wanted to capitalize Reality and Particular, and he shrugged and said that they were capitalized in the Polish, as if he were handing off the choice to the other guy who wrote the poem in Polish. He was in his early 80s when he wrote this, deploying the Catholic theology of the eucharist—of the real presence of the dead and resurrected Jesus in the bread and wine—to argue, I guess, for the way language, representation, divinizes—is that the right word?—the things it describes. In another place, he says the particular is always annihilated, so you should believe in their eternal forms.
deNiord: Yes. So, what do you make of that?
Hass: “I am large. I contain multitudes.” Well, and another way of thinking about it would be Wallace Stevens: “Death is the mother of beauty.” That is, we can conceive of the eternal because we know we’re mortal. So to be human is to sit down in the middle of a contradiction. When he was 90, in “Treatise on Theology,” he embraces the contradiction and ends the poem—with how much irony, it’s hard to say—with the children’s apparition of the Virgin Mary, of a beautiful lady who represents goodness.
deNiord: So Miłosz maintains this dialectic throughout his career in which doubt and faith co-exist as bedfellows. It’s both mystifying and a bit disturbing.
Hass: Would you like more tea?