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Given time, some fears
turn legitimate:
mode of dying, for instance,
or living on when

others have skipped town
ahead of schedule.
Seizing joints. Vision
squeezed to a pinprick,

pain and boredom,
all types of blur—
typeface, recollections,
conversational words.

Live long, and you’ll realize
you can never live long enough.

Rita Dove’s most recent books are Playlist for the Apocalypse (W.W. Norton 2021) and Collected Poems 1974-2004 (W.W. Norton 2016). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal, and the Hurst/Wright Legacy Award, among numerous other honors, Dove served as United States Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995. Noted in The Washington Post as “one of the nation’s most distinguished literary figures” and praised in The Boston Globe as “perhaps the best public poet we have,” she is the only poet to have been awarded both the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of Arts. Dove has published eleven collections of poetry, a novel, a collection of short stories, a verse play, and an essay collection, and she has written lyrics and libretti for musical works by several notable composers. I corresponded with Dove about her most recent poetry collection Playlist for the Apocalypse, her views on the evolution of poetry in relation to the internet and social media, her commitment to the challenge of producing work that “is honest and dangerous in all of the right ways,” and her moving final correspondence with critic Helen Vendler. We also discussed the most memorable aspects of her experience as United States Poet Laureate, and the ways in which her Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis has transformed her life both on and off the page, among a range of other subjects.

CD: What are some of your earliest experiences connecting with poetry? Is there a specific poem that grabbed you at a young age and became rooted in your mind and body after you encountered it on the page? If so, what was it about the language that enthralled you, and do you see any direct throughlines from that enchantment to the effects you’ve sought to achieve in your own work?

RD: My earliest memories of poems involve flipping through an anthology on my parents’ bookshelf. I’m not sure if they got it through a mail order book club or in a secondhand bookstore, but it was thick, with a colorful, ostentatious jacket cover, and a title like A Treasury of Best Loved Poems. The table of contents went from what seemed the beginning of time until the 1940s. I was especially struck by William Blake’s “A Poison Tree”—to think that you could be evil in a poem! “A Poison Tree” was certainly on my mind when I wrote “Parsley,” my poem about the Dominican Dictator, General Rafael Trujillo. In a way, Blake gave me permission to enter the mind of that villainous figure.

Another early encounter with poetry, oddly enough, came through Mad Magazine. I loved its satire, and some of the spoofs based on classical texts sent me back to the originals. I recognized passages from Shakespeare, and again Blake (“Tiger, Tiger burning bright / In the ballparks of the night. / Your pitching’s keen, your field adroit; / So why no pennants for Detroit?”), and I relished the intricate and sometimes quite unexpected rhymes. The sardonic manner that was Mad Magazine’s modus operandi extended into the linguistic twists of those spoofs, and it is a way of nuancing that I use in my own work sometimes, like a smile beneath the sadness.

CD: Your most recent collection Playlist for the Apocalypse, which is divided into six sections, contains a sweeping breadth of subject matter. We encounter poems examining the origins of the word “ghetto,” poems written from the viewpoint of a spring cricket, and poems centered on exploring your experience with Multiple Sclerosis, in addition to poems on many other topics. Was there a particular juncture in the manuscript’s development that gave you an “aha!” moment as far as determining the book’s shape and direction?

RD: A good number of the poems in Playlist for the Apocalypse had been languishing without a home for quite some time. The first clutch of ghetto poems was completed in 2016-2017, and some of the spring cricket poems go back even further. The sections just didn’t seem to fit together, though I sensed there was a place waiting for them. Then the pandemic grabbed all of us, and during that period of widespread panic, uncertainty, and tragedy—I was unable to go to my father’s funeral, and his younger sister, the last aunt in the family, succumbed to COVID—I stumbled into the unexpected blessing of free time at home. I didn’t have to think about traveling or presenting myself to the outside world as a capital-P Poet. That’s when I started to understand those poems as companions on a journey rather than solitary individuals with one story to declaim. Taken together, they began to operate much like a DJ’s playlist, or a mixtape compiled for a dear friend. Once the organization of the manuscript as a book took hold, I was able to complete all of the sections, including the more contemporary ghetto poems and the angry odes, while sheltering in place.

CD: Playlist for the Apocalypse contains a variety of poems that explore what it means to be a writer. For example, in “Climacteric,” the speaker relishes “every minute spent jostling syllables” while the rest of the world carries on around her. In “A Sonnet for the Sonnet,” the speaker both bristles against and longs for the “rose-garlanded throne” of literary tradition. How has your writing process evolved over the years, and in what ways, if any, have the expectations and pressures that accompany fame impacted your relationship to the blank page?

RD: My tools of the trade evolved following the trajectory of most baby boomers, from a manual typewriter to an IBM Selectric to the wonder of computers. But my poems always began with pen on paper, lines scribbled with a Bic ballpoint onto college-ruled note paper, the same method I’d used to compose all of my high school essays and fill blue book after blue book for final exams as an undergraduate. Those humble instruments helped me circumnavigate the crushing enormity of my daring—namely, to write great poetry. I began small. Writing by hand also imposed the rigor of not being able to see what form the poem took on the printed page. I had to sound out each poem’s shape, guided by breath and the way the mouth and tongue shape themselves around a word as it rises into utterance, until I could feel the length of a line and the syllabic cadences that pushed it along.

The next stage entailed transferring my handwritten drafts to typescript. Because the transfer from script to print always felt brutal and dismayingly permanent, as soon as I pulled a page from the typewriter, I would grab a pen and begin revising, or messing up the canvas, so to speak. This was my preferred method of composition, my writing ritual, and the advent of personal computers did little to change the basic process. Computers simply sped up the typing stage because I didn’t have to worry as much about typos.

Then a medical complication interfered: multiple sclerosis. I lost the ability to write by hand for extended periods of time. It’s an odd triggering mechanism: I can autograph books, a very repetitive activity, for hours, but as soon as I set out to write a poem, where I forget myself in the excitement of discovery, my hand begins to jerk. First, I lose precision, then my control over the movement wavers, and following that my writing veers into the illegible. I’m still struggling to finetune alternative methods for delaying the visual impact of a draft—for example, I’ll use dictation or print out a draft in different fonts. Both methods help thwart the temptation to judge an enjambment solely by how it looks.

Most writers wrestle with the specter of self-consciousness at some stage during composition, and that became especially acute for me after winning the Pulitzer and serving as Poet Laureate. Suddenly, a wider world was looking over my shoulder. In response, my rituals became a bit more extreme. I’ve always been a night person, but I began writing from midnight to sunrise. It was a quiet time during which both the literary and academic worlds were asleep, or were on hold, at least temporarily.

CD: Another striking poem in Playlist for the Apocalypse that explores the writing life is “Shakespeare Doesn’t Care,” which ends with the following lines:

What does he care
if we all die tomorrow?
He lives in his words. You wrestle,
enraptured, with yours.
What time does with them
next, or ever after,
is someone else’s rodeo.

These lines bring to mind T.S. Eliot’s statement about the relationship between writers and readers: “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” Having no control over “what time does” with one’s work can seem both terrifying and liberating. Would you share some of your thoughts on that?

RD: That the reception of my work is ultimately beyond my control is not a particularly terrifying prospect to me. It is what it is.  I see it as a challenge to make sure that the writing is honest and dangerous in all of the right ways, to imagine—to hope?—that someone stumbling upon a poem of mine—a scrap of paper in a field of rubble somewhere, with no indication of author or provenance—will be moved. Do I sound gruesome? I’m actually a very cheerful person!

CD: Your work has been noted for the artful way that you merge the personal and the historical. How do you navigate the push-and-pull between literal truth and poetic truth when writing poems that explore historical events, and what is the role of research in your process? Also, what are your thoughts on finding a balance between narrative imperatives and lyric impulses when writing poems that engage with the intersection between the personal and the historical?

RD: The way that the personal and historical merge in a poem is different for every writer and every poem, and for every moment in every poem. The personal memories in Thomas and Beulah, for example, meld with the historical trajectory of my grandparents’ generation in a radically different manner from the way in which the personal and the historical interact in Sonata Mulattica. In the latter, the historical incidents punctuating George Bridgewater’s life become a personal chronicle that is mostly imagined by me but is also based on the actual facts of his biography.

To give you a general overview of how I approach incorporating historical material into my work, when it comes to broadening my knowledge on a specific subject, I research the hell out of whatever it is, following every tangent no matter how miniscule or silly (I’ve learned more about the lives of crickets than anyone other than a biologist would ever need to know!). But invariably, I reach a point where I need to put the research aside and actually write. Sometimes it’s for the duration of a single poem, and sometimes I abandon the research for longer, three months or more, waiting for the spark that will free me from the constraints of “just the facts” so that I can fully inhabit the characters and stories with my imagination.

Sonata Mulattica, which began with research, took shape from my desire to have more than a few stark factoids about George Bridgetower. In other instances, the research entered my process much later. Thomas and Beulah started as an act of reimagination, and I turned to research only when I felt that I needed factual support undergirding my depiction of my grandparents’ lives. I’ve also written numerous stand-alone historical poems, each resting on different authentic underpinnings.

My only mantra, if you could call it that, is to avoid forcing a poem into existence based solely on the facts. The poems in the section titled “After Egypt” in my book Playlist for the Apocalypse, for instance, were a result of a residency in Italy sponsored by the University of Venice. The university commissioned me to write poems under the rubric “Reimagining the Ghetto.” For five weeks, I wandered the alleys of that first Jewish enclave, read all I could find on Sarra Copia Sulam, and explored every side canal and hidden courtyard. I took copious notes without writing a single line that would make its way into those poems. Oh, I wrote a few other poems while there, yes, just not those that eventually comprised the ghetto poems in Playlist for the Apocalypse.

CD: The poetry scholar and critic Helen Vendler passed away last April, and it has become a matter of literary legend among poets, critics, and word lovers of all stripes that she wrote an email to you shortly before her passing. After you edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry, which was published in 2011, she wrote a review that criticized the anthology for focusing on “multicultural inclusiveness” above quality, and you penned a response that was published in The New York Review of Books. Both her review and your response sparked an impassioned and continuing debate in the literary world. Would you talk about the experience of receiving a message from Vendler before her death?

RD: Helen’s email arrived while I was in the middle of teaching an undergraduate poetry writing seminar. We had just taken our standard break, fifteen minutes in the middle of a two-and-a-half-hour workshop. I usually don’t check my phone during that time, but for some reason on that spring day, I did. The subject header was “Goodbye from a Great Admirer.” In her message, Helen said that she’d be dead by the time the email reached me.

Of course I was shaken. Who wouldn’t be? But I continued to teach the second half of the class. We were approaching the end of the semester, and the students were presenting revisions of earlier poems. They were talking about the process of reshaping their work, and discussing the snags they had either resolved or were still working on—delicate stuff. I didn’t want to interrupt that fragile balance.

I have no idea how I managed, or what I said. The students didn’t seem to notice anything unusual. As soon as class was over, I rushed to my office and dashed off a reply. I had little expectation that she’d receive it, but I decided not to take her at her word—was I defying Helen Vendler yet again?—in the hopes that my message would reach her in time, giving both of us closure. Although I knew I had acted in good faith when editing the Penguin anthology, and that my fury at her review was righteous, I did mourn the end of our friendship. Her son let me know that he was able to read my words to her and that, as he put it, “she was glad to have heard it,” which meant a great deal to me.

I have nothing new to add to the literary tempest that resulted from the whole affair, now more than a decade ago. I’ll leave it to the readers of the anthology to form their own opinions. But to reconnect with Helen after all of those bitter years, almost too late, while she took her last breath—suffice it to say that I was both profoundly grateful for it and deeply unsettled for days.

CD: It would be interesting to move from the critical discourse about the Penguin anthology to a poem in Playlist for the Apocalypse titled “The Spring Cricket’s Discourse on Critics.” Readers can’t help but find humor in the notion of a spring cricket engaging with the world of literary criticism, and it quickly becomes clear that the humor is part of the poem’s strategy. It also becomes evident right away that the cricket speaker is a canny choice because crickets, much like poets, are song-making creatures. The poem ends with the following stanza:

I’m gonna sit here
awhile and watch the dew
drop: its letting go
so lurid a metaphor for Failure,
I can’t help but take it
out of circulation. Everybody’s
hungry, everybody’s hunkered
in their hedges, hanging on—
in the end nothing’s left
to talk about but Style.

The capitalization of “Failure” and “Style” grabs the reader’s attention, as does the alliteration with those “h” sounds toward the end of the stanza. The latter effect calls purposeful attention to the poet’s “style” just before the spring cricket concludes that “in the end nothing’s left / to talk about but Style.” Would you elaborate for us on your view of the interaction between poetry and literary criticism?

RD: On the one hand, this poem contains all that I care to say about the interaction between poetry and literary criticism. On the other hand, I want to stress how much I value the passionate attention that serious critics give to the work at hand. Their task is not an easy one, and it is, in fact, a rather thankless mission because no artist likes to be criticized. But the cricket has a valid point when he says, “in the end nothing’s left / to talk about but Style.” If a poem has done its job, no other words can encapsulate that poem’s magic. To devote oneself to the challenge of responding to “the best words in the best order” by resorting to more words is a divine fool’s errand. We know it’s impossible, but we’re thankful that someone is attempting to do it. In that sense, writing criticism is sort of like writing poetry, though with wildly different results. The best a critic can do is explain how the magic works by opening the curtain, exposing the strings and hidden trap doors, without deflating our sense of wonder.

CD: Your book Thomas and Beulah, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, contains a semi-fictionalized series of poems exploring your grandparents’ marriage in the context of the Great Migration. In his interview with you for the “Art of Poetry” series in The Paris Review, Kevin Young describes the revelatory experience of discovering Thomas and Beulah as an African American high school student in the 1980s. Many poets over the years, much like Young, have talked about Thomas and Beulah as a book that opened up new possibilities for them. In light of that, it would be interesting to hear you discuss what made Thomas and Beulah take shape as a possibility in your own mind.

RD: Unlikely as it might sound, three white male poets contributed mightily to the creation of Thomas and Beulah. First and foremost, Stanley Plumley. When I was a graduate student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Stanley taught a Forms of Poetry seminar focused on poetic sequences. One of the assigned books was Audubon: A Vision by Robert Penn Warren, the second white male influence. That strange, lyrical, and brutal meditation opened me to the possibilities of delving into the interior life of a character via the unguarded territory of thought. I started a sequence of poems based on slave narratives, some of which appear in my first book The Yellow House on the Corner, and thus I began exploring, thanks to Stanley’s inspiration, the searing intimacy that writing in persona can invite.

The third white male influence on Thomas and Beulah was James Merrill, whose book Divine Comedies came out while I was a graduate student. Divine Comedies contains “The Book of Ephraim,” a long poem introducing readers to Merrill’s long-time communications via Ouija board with the spirit world. Two years later, as soon as it came out, I snapped up Merrill’s Mirabell: Books of Number, and then his Scripts for the Pageant in 1980. Another book that impacted me at the time was Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which gave me the courage to trust that an ordinary black person’s life could resonate with readers of every stripe. As far as individual poems that helped shape Thomas and Beulah, Robert Hayden’s quietly haunting “Those Winter Sundays” has resided in me, like a pacemaker, for as long as I can remember.

Once I realized that it was possible to string third-person persona poems together like lyrical beads to create a narrative necklace, Thomas and Beulah took on new forms, and my mother became the most significant influence. I had told her that I was writing semi-biographical pieces about her parents, yet she never asked to vet the poems. In fact, she shared her memories of her mother and father without questioning my research plan—a good thing, because I had no plan! Every weekend we’d talk on the phone, with my inquiries leading to inexplicable tangents that she willingly followed. Without her, Thomas and Beulah would never have come to fruition.

CD: You served as United States Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, and yours was a historical laureateship because you were both the youngest person and the first African American to ever hold the position. What are some of the most surprising discoveries you made during that time about poetry’s presence in American culture, and have you observed any significant changes in poetry’s cultural presence since then?

RD: The biggest surprise was that people actually paid attention to the idea of a national Poet Laureate. I was amazed by the media awareness that my appointment attracted, which included coverage by NPR and PBS, of course, but also CNN and CBS, not to mention quite a slew of print publications as varied as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and Girl Scouts Magazine. I even traded eights with Big Bird on Sesame Street! This was before the onslaught of social media as we know it today, so there was no such thing as a podcast or vlog. Producing a poetry video in the manner of early MTV music videos was completely new territory.

My laureateship happened to coincide with a phenomenal uptick in the cultural appetite for poetry. Of course, I understood that having achieved several historical firsts made me fodder for the human-interest portion of the news, but what truly astonished me was the outpouring of correspondence from ordinary people—and remember, this happened when letters were still either written by hand or clacked out on typewriters—who wished to share their personal experiences with poetry. I wasn’t getting envelopes stuffed with poems, or pleas for help in getting work published (ok, maybe there were a few), but rather missives written by people from all walks of life—lawyers, teenagers, stay-at-home moms, executives, modern dancers, construction workers. All they wanted was to tell me how poetry had changed their lives. Sometimes I felt a bit like a priest receiving a confessional because so many of the letter-writers were filled with remorse or embarrassment, remorse because they had stopped reading poetry despite loving it when they were younger, and embarrassment because they thought that they didn’t understand poetry. Nearly all of the letters that began with “I don’t know much about poetry” would pivot on the word “but,” at which point the writers would invariably proceed to offer a thoughtful interpretation of a particular poem that moved them, or that they still carried around in their wallet.

Some of the people who wrote to me focused on sharing their first encounters with poetry. I remember one letter from a white man, who had grown up on a farm in Kansas or Nebraska, describing the mobile Public Library that came through the rural community of his childhood. He had to finish his chores before he could sign up for his very first library card. By the time he’d made it there and could fill out the forms, the library bus was about to close, so he grabbed the nearest book and checked it out. After the bus chugged away, he plopped down under the nearest tree, only to discover he was holding a book of poems by someone named Paul Lawrence Dunbar. It was the only book he had, and the library bus wouldn’t be back for a couple of weeks, so he started reading it, and he fell in love with poetry. I teared up at that point: Here was a living testimony that we are all connected, regardless of class, race, or gender, and that poetry can illuminate those connections.

CD: It would be fascinating for our readers to hear about a time when you found yourself stuck on an especially difficult piece of writing, such as a single poem or a series of poems that seemed to resist your efforts. What factors did you struggle with when shaping the work in question, and how would you describe your process in arriving at a breakthrough on the piece? Related to that, what are some of your thoughts about determining when to persist with a piece of writing and when to scrap it?

RD: I can think of two off of the top of my head—but oh, there have been many! That it took me years to finish the poem “Parsley” has been documented in other places, so I won’t go into it here except to say this: I was also working on numerous other poems during that period while re-visiting those failed “Parsley” drafts from time to time, and there were many valuable moments of serendipity and research to offset the toil of rewrites.

The larger struggle came with my book Sonata Mulattica. There were two main obstacles: First, I was dealing with a real person, the Afro-European violinist George Bridgetower, along with the facts surrounding both his rise to fame and his eventual fall from the spotlight. Bridgetower premiered what was arguably Beethoven’s most famous sonata before they had a falling out, just a few days after the premiere, over a girl. As a result, Bridgetower was stripped of the sonata’s dedication. How a mixed-race violinist ended up in the world of classical music in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe struck me as the real mystery, and I realized that my research would need to be extensive and perhaps academic in nature.

The second obstacle materialized one day, in a flash, when I realized that inhabiting Beethoven’s voice would be an especially difficult challenge. It was one thing to write a poem exploring the mindset of a villain like General Trujillo, as I did in “Parsley,” or to channel the testimonies of unnamed enslaved laborers, as I did in the slave narrative poems in my first book, but it was another matter altogether to tackle that marble bust presiding over many a pianist’s mantlepiece.

Once I recognized that Beethoven was another hurdle, I could see that I’d been wrong in my approach to crafting the sequence. I had been trying to concentrate on Bridgetower without appreciating the fact that I had to contend with the Great Master as well. I had to dare to become Beethoven, to slip into his skin so that I could understand his physical and psychological state at the time of his meeting this young, dark-skinned, flamboyant ladies’ man. I began to grapple on the page not just with Beethoven’s jealousy but also his angst over deafness and mortality. From then on, the writing was relatively easy.

I don’t throw away any drafts because I can never say with certainty that a piece of writing has completely failed. There may be a line, a phrase, or even a word waiting to ignite a future fire. I love to leaf through those sheafs of scribblings and old notebooks, piled up like treasure in Ali Baba’s cave.

CD: Some writers and educators view our current moment as an exciting time for poetry, given the art form’s ability to reach a wide online audience, while others fret that the internet has shortened the attention spans of contemporary readers. What are some of your thoughts about digital life in relation to poetry?

RD: If you had asked me this question fifteen years ago, I would have been optimistic about the ways in which social media seemed poised to further the literary arts. After all, the World Wide Web had streamlined the writing process for authors across every genre by making it easier than ever before to conduct research into just about any topic. In addition, platforms like Facebook and Instagram had enabled writers to access and incorporate of-the-moment cultural trends in their work, which made the literary arts feel more “relevant” to many readers and resulted in an ever-growing audience for poetry. Because of social media, a new kind of anonymous intimacy had evolved in the form of virtual communities, where lovers of literature and poetry discovered that they could join in conversation with like-minded strangers.

But quite a few downsides have cropped up in the not-so-many years since social media took over the reins of communication and information dissemination. Of particular note, there has been a marked decrease in attention span among both readers and writers. When it comes to poetry, I’ve noticed that readers demonstrate a vastly diminished willingness to live with a poem for longer than it takes to skim its lines, along with a resistance to investing in a poem’s multiple layers.

Writing poems in the age of social media has become too easy and often overly glib. Autocorrect can be the devil, but it saves a lot of time. Rather than pondering the veracity of a certain occurrence, you can just Google it. If you crave feedback, there’s an audience at your fingertips, and we all want to be loved and feel that our poems are understood. The poet begins to seek attention in the form of clicked likes.

On top of that, of course, we now have the poltergeist of AI, the epitome of all that is dangerous about online life.

CD: In a 2012 interview with “Big Think,” you talk in compelling ways about the difference between drafting and revising. When you sit down to revise a poem, what are some of the factors that guide your decision-making process, and how much does an awareness of audience impact your thinking as you shape a poem into its final form?

RD: When drafting, I try to keep my mind as open as possible to allow for an inrush of ideas, snippets of dialogue, and errant descriptions. Drafting certainly contains elements of self-hypnosis in the sense that utterance is funneled through the pen or the keyboard, to spill onto the page or screen. Nowadays, more and more, this process also takes its path through a microphone before voice recognition software transfers it to text. In a draft, no matter the technique or tools used, mess is good. Revision, by contrast, is more oriented toward the text, whether I’m editing via keyboard or writing by hand.  It’s part cleanup and part wild goose chase, a quest in search of the ineffable, a hunt for the golden thread that will guide me through the labyrinthian pathways of the draft.

I love the revision process. It’s a combination of trimming and expanding the poem-to-be, shaping and reshaping it, with periodic instances where the mind opens up again, which happens most intensely when I find myself pursuing a tangent I might have missed earlier in the draft’s clutter.

I should clarify that there can be many drafts. I might begin a poem several times, then cobble it together from assorted variations. Or I might start refining a draft only to have it break free from formal or aesthetic restrictions and veer off into an entirely different direction—no longer a revision, but a new draft. I relish these squirrely writing moments!

When revising, I often apply what may seem like random filters, technical tweaks such as comparing the left-hand side of a poem to the right-hand side to see where my prepositional phrases have landed, or to gauge how many of the lines are end-stopped or enjambed. I may count how many nouns there are compared to adjectives. Although nouns are often reassuring, they can also become stultifying and weigh the poem down.

Those are a few of the predictable, hands-on techniques that I use. What else happens in terms of craftmanship and beyond—what must happen for a revision to succeed—is more mystical. I look for the music, listen to the sounds the words, lines, and stanzas are making, without considering their meaning. What is the poem trying to say, not in terms of its literal content but in the whispers beneath or behind the utterances? Very often the key to tuning into a confession that’s been muted or hidden lies in the attention paid to the music of the poem’s language.

I rarely consider my audience, for the simple reason that I can’t predict who that audience might be. If I try to second-guess a poem’s potential readers while I’m writing it, I’m shutting myself off from possibility. The best way to think of my audience is to imagine a complete stranger, one I can neither visualize nor categorize, picking up a poem long after I am gone. That’s the standard I set for a poem before allowing it to be published.

CD: In “Parsley,” you write about the racially-driven mass murder of Haitians in the Dominican Republican during the 1930s. “Parsley” makes a striking companion piece to a poem in Playlist for the Apocalypse titled “Keep Your Storied Pomp,” in which you explore the role of language in contemporary politics:

Welcome to the Age of Babble!
Here a twitter, there a tweet; a tiki torch march
back to the Good Ole Times of mayhem and murder.

Both poems probe the connection between the way that humans use language and the real-life political consequences of words spoken and written. George Orwell’s famous assertion comes to mind in this context: “Political chaos is connected with the decay of language.” Would you elaborate for us on your beliefs about the interaction between language and politics, and on your view of the poet’s role in relation to that interaction?

RD: Orwell’s words remind me of Auden’s famous (and oft-misinterpreted) pronouncement that “poetry makes nothing happen,” a line from his eulogy for W.B. Yeats. Auden then asserts that poetry “survives / in the valley of its making … it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.” It’s precisely the ability of artistic expression to persist, despite all efforts to thwart or muffle it, that presents a threat to those perpetrators of political chaos whose aim is dictatorial dominion. The free use of language leads them to strike out against media and libraries, commandeer vocabulary with misleading phrases like “fake news,” and kidnap words such as “terrific” and “tremendous” by overusing them until they’re meaningless, followed by the censoring or outright banning of books from the curricula in our nation’s classrooms.

Poetry’s responsibility to politics? Of course, none at all, but in a free society, politics bears a responsibility toward poetry because poems are a mechanism of protection from censorship and corruption. To adopt the rhetorical tactics of politicians—exhortation, catchy phrasings, exaggerations and lies, clichéd statements instead of truthful creations—is to turn one’s back on the very wellspring of poetry. This doesn’t mean that one can’t write a political poem, merely that the goal, always, should be to write a great poem that reaches beyond the political.

CD: Several poems in Playlist for the Apocalypse are pieces produced on commission, including “Youth Sunday,” which was commissioned by The New York Times Sunday Magazine, “Girls on the Town, 1946,” which was commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and the New York Philharmonic, and the fourteen-poem lyric sequence “A Standing Witness,” which was commissioned by Copland House. How does the process of producing work on commission differ from your usual approach to writing, and do you feel as though generating commissioned poems has led you to make any discoveries on the page that you may not have otherwise made?

RD: I never accept a commission unless the project description stirs the embers inside of me. Even if the proposal speaks to me, I’ll sketch out some ideas or at least a few scattered lines before accepting, just to be sure that initial stirring was truly a creative spark and not mere intellectual fascination. When I was asked to write a poem in honor of women’s suffrage rights, commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and the New York Philharmonic, the photograph of my mother and her girlfriends that inspired “Girls on the Town, 1946” sprang immediately to mind.

I took a bit longer deciding to collaborate with composer Richard Danielpour on “A Standing Witness,” only because the project was so massive. I knew it would take the better part of a year to write a dozen or more poems highlighting about sixty years of contemporary American history. But images and lines kept floating up, resulting in a truncated villanelle to mourn the 1968 assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and an abecedarian for the AIDS crisis, so I dove in headfirst, with trepidations in tow.

Commissions are a one kind of challenge, and collaborations yet another. Collaborations are exciting, a chance to open one’s imagination to other genres. When I was asked to propose poetry to complement the interior architect’s design of twelve marble chairs encircling the lobby of the Sacramento Federal Courthouse, I faced the challenge of not only fitting poems onto the stone backs of those chairs but also imagining those words in concert with the flow of people walking through the lobby. The arrangement of the chairs meant that I would have no control over when the poems might be noticed, and hence no way to indicate where any individual poem began or ended, which led me to explore new conceptual takes on the brief lyrical outburst.

Years later, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., tendered a variation on this idea. The Folger had been undergoing renovations at the time, and I was invited to write a poem to serve as a ribbon of text etched along the marble berm leading visitors from the gardens to the new main entrance. They gave me plenty of time, and I enjoyed my back-and-forth with the Folger people immensely.

Collaborations with composers, however, are my special delight. Because of my musical background, I can readily comprehend how to translate the mood of a baritone versus a mezzo-soprano, or how a phrase can span lines in poetry as well as measures of music. For me, if a commission involves a collaborative process, the collaboration is more likely to lead to discoveries on the page than the commission itself.

CD: “Ode to my Right Knee” in Playlist for the Apocalypse abounds with addictive sonic echoes and an irresistible sense of play. The poem begins with these lines:

Oh, obstreperous one, ornery outside of ordinary
protocols; paramilitary probie par 

excellence: Every evidence
you yield yells.

Readers encounter the following entry about “Ode to my Right Knee” in the “Notes” section of the book: “Challenged by my students to assign myself a poetry exercise as wild as the ones I’d given them, this is what I came up with: Write a poem in which each line is dedicated to a different letter of the alphabet—that is, the line must use only words starting with that letter.” What are some assignments you’ve given your students, involving various forms of constraint, that you have found useful in helping them push their work in new directions?

RD: I call these personalized writing exercises “wild cards,” and I warn my students that their targeted assignment may come to them any time of day and at any point during the semester, just as an event in life can ambush us when we least expect it. I can’t give you specific examples without violating the trust of my students, since each assignment is confidential and can be revealed to others only by the student, should they so desire. The exercises are designed to invade recipients’ comfort zones, to nudge—sometimes shove!—them into unfamiliar or at least different territory. I approach these wild cards as if sending the recipients on a mission or a quest, and along that journey they’ll encounter rules and requirements—so many, in fact, that I fully expect them to throw up their hands in exasperation and mutter, “Oh to hell with it. This is impossible!”

Once the initial self-consciousness has been tossed aside, ideally something opens up inside of the student, leading to either a spectacular failure or a beautiful success, and it doesn’t matter which. Students have generated dioramas, lab experiments, recipes, dialogues involving talking foxes, and poems scratched on a Perrier bottle because that was the one item found in the rubble of the virtual dystopian universe I had asked them to imagine. Some “wild card” assignments have arrived in parts, one envelope per week, and others in a single lumpy package, tied with string. But almost all have surprised and delighted both their student creator and me.

CD: Continuing a discussion of your approach to teaching, you have taught for many years at the University of Virginia, where you are now Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing. What are some of the most common flaws that you observe in the work of beginning poets, and what are some approaches you take as a teacher to help them improve in those areas? Conversely, what are some qualities that tend to jump out at you when you find yourself excited by the work of a beginning poet?

RD: The most common weakness is not understanding or paying attention to the many ways in which the language itself can shape a scene. They’ll opt for the direct confessional mode while expressing little desire to revisit the initial draft. They regard silence—the white space at the end of a line, the unsaid thought expressed by a dash—as something they can ignore.

The remedy depends upon each student’s particular obsession. I usually try to direct them to published poets who grapple with similar, though not identical, topics. It’s rarely productive to confront a heartbroken student with a poem about the same kind of heartbreak. Tit-for-tat responses can make students feel that the subject has been explored already, so they have no hope of doing any better. I also try to get them to dig into the details of an event, without commenting on the event itself. For instance, I may ask: What color exactly was the lover’s shirt? How many buttons did he fasten? Was it creased from the bed or wrinkle-free? If there was a collar, how did he straighten it? I want them to learn how to find solace, and even inspiration, in the deeper details.

What can excite me in the work of a beginning poet is what I call “the spark,” which isn’t expertise at crafting a line, but rather the frisson of a detail that feels totally new and yet absolutely right—for instance, the image of a sunrise yawning over the horizon.

CD: One of the most memorable aspects of Playlist for the Apocalypse is the book’s final section, titled “Little Book of Woe,” in which you explore your experience with physical illness. You were diagnosed with MS a number of years ago, and Playlist for the Apocalypse marks the first time you’ve published poems about the disease’s impact on your life. It is especially striking how well you capture the experience of physical pain, which can be enormously difficult to convey in language. Would you talk about what it has been like to engage with MS in such an intensive way in your poetry, and are there any particular writers or literary works that have acted as guideposts for you when it comes to writing about illness?

RD: When students are dealing with a sensitive subject that may either impact others or change fundamentally the way others see them, I tell them: You have a choice about whether you allow the poem to be seen and read by others. You may, however, have little choice whether you write it in the first place. If some malady, disaster, or emotional turmoil haunts you to the extent that you cannot put it aside, you may have no choice but to tackle it.

This certainly was the choice I faced when diagnosed with MS. After the initial shock and dismay came a helplessness, bordering on panic, as I dealt with my symptoms, which were rough and unpredictable—a fire raging in my left calf that no ice could cool, feet that were warm to the touch but felt to me like frozen clumps, and the experience of coming suddenly to a standstill and failing to will my legs across the room. Even before undergoing pharmaceutical treatment, I began to write down the details of how my body felt, first as a means of describing the various nerve sensations to my doctors, and eventually in an attempt to describe them to myself. Poetry is what I do, a way of illuminating the inexpressible, and the very act of searching for words that could encompass—and hopefully sometimes pinpoint—those scary neurological glitches was a balm.

I didn’t seek out other poets that have dealt with illness in their work, which was a conscious decision. I needed to find my own words, in my own way.

CD: What are some of the topics, literary works, cultural figures, or craft-related matters that are currently obsessing you as a poet, and can you share a bit about what you’re working on right now?

RD: My writing process relies heavily on thwarting my over-active super-ego, so I try to keep myself in the dark. I routinely find myself working on several pieces in the same evening, the hopeless-looking fragments scattered across my desk, with no idea which one, if any, will finally coalesce. I try to maintain some level of non-awareness. All I can confidently say is that at the moment I’m not working on a book-length sequence like Thomas and Beulah or Sonata Mulattica. Individual poems seem to be the soup du jour, and a memoir that’s rapidly becoming a non-memoir. I can’t explain what that is, because I don’t know myself yet, but I look forward to finding out what the Muse, the details, and the language—its singing and its silences—have to say. That’s the way I like it!

CD: Thank you for taking the time to converse with us about your most recent poetry collection Playlist for the Apocalypse, your thoughts on poetry’s changing cultural presence, your experience navigating the writing life following your MS diagnosis, and much more. As you continue generating new poems, we look forward to discovering along with you what the “singing” and “silences” of your language will reveal.

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 Presidio Heights 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 Presidio Heights. 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 Rising 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 Rising 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 Lillian 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 Rising 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?

Poet in the New World: Poems, 1946-1953
by Czesław Miłosz, translated and edited by Robert Hass and David Frick, with a foreword by Robert Hass
(Ecco, 2025, 160 pp., $28.00)

“In Warsaw,” the poem that opens this important collection (and serves as a thematic prologue), finds the poet not in the New World but “on the ruins” of the Old. “What are you doing here, poet,” he asks himself, “on the ruins / Of St. John’s Cathedral this sunny / Day in spring?” It is 1945, and Miłosz, whom luck enabled to escape internment by the Nazis in 1944, has returned to Warsaw, which the Nazi occupiers laid waste ahead of the Red Army’s invasion. Here, “where the wind / Blowing from the Vistula scatters / The red dust of the rubble,” he questions his stance as a poet. The “lament of Antigone / Searching for her brother,” which he hears in his mind, challenges his determination “never to be / A ritual mourner,” a eulogist who sanctifies in verse the “wounds” of his nation. “I want,” he insists, “to sing of festivities, / The greenwood into which Shakespeare / Often took me.” Though Miłosz does, in this collection, memorialize by name “Creatures transformed by death into insects” (“Day and Night”)—and contemplates throughout “The retributions of a malignant fate,” which “the human microcosmos…delivers, serenely, on a daily basis” (“Summer Movies in Central Park”)—still, he cannot believe that “All that is worth remembering is our pain.” So Antigone says to her sister in a dramatic poem apparently occasioned by Hungary’s becoming a one-party “people’s republic” in 1949. In reply Ismene observes that even in winter’s slums, “life greens again” (“Antigone”). Amid the rubble of Warsaw’s St. John’s Cathedral Miłosz asks (with Antigone’s unburied brother in mind, as well as fellow Poles perhaps),

How can I live in this country
Where the foot knocks against
The unburied bones of kin?

At the end of “In Warsaw,” he insists,

It’s 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 […]

words salvaged as it were from a ruined cathedral whose patron saint, John the Baptist, made “straight the way of the Lord,” the Word that incorporates such ideals as Truth and Justice. In his 2017 biography, Andrzej Franaszek observes that Miłosz while at the site “scribbled” this poem “on small pages pulled from a notebook, and at the top of one of them he added and underlined this disturbing sentence: ‘God is just.’” Disturbing it does seem, but here is Miłosz, I think, affirming his faith (which has pantheistic attributes as well as Christian)—though doing so appears to require a physical act of will—that Truth and Justice as ideals endure despite the destruction of cathedrals like St. John’s, despite in general the all but unspeakable horrors of the war in Europe.

Later that year, 1945, Miłosz entered the diplomatic service for the new Soviet-controlled Polish government, which posted him initially to its consulate in New York City, then six months thereafter to the embassy in Washington, D.C. (One of his motivations appears to have been a desire to live in the West, though not necessarily the United States.) There he remained until 1950. Robert Hass in a splendid introduction summarizes Miłosz’s outreach in his capacity as cultural attaché. Suffice it to observe that Miłosz’s New World poems find the poet not only in those two cities but also in San Francisco, where he and a Polish companion eye amusedly “the terrible fish” that look alternately “like a Javanese dancer” and the “haut bourgeois” in Proust (“Untitled”); in Mexico as vividly evoked—he never actually went there—by the “work / Of the People’s Graphic Workshop,” where “Little Jose tinkles in the middle of the room and eyes this with careful wonderment” (“The People’s Graphic Workshop,” a poem in which Miłosz channels Neruda channeling Whitman); in Princeton, where he’s received by Einstein, “with the face / Of a clockmaker from the Jewish neighborhood in Warsaw,” whose “Faith in the light of reason… / Chafes” (“To Albert Einstein”); in Detroit, where the frosty, synthetic, antiseptic-seeming environment of high-rise hotels ironically “frees” their guests from their sensual selves and from the emotions that such hallucinations as

…naked women with daggers in their white necks
Left under slag heaps of scrap iron
In fields where gaunt Negroes
Fan campfires with cardboard boxes

would otherwise arouse (“He Has No Sight”); and in the Pennsylvania Coal Region, where, as seen from a kitchen window, “A dark red forest spills down the mountainside,” below it “a massive gray slag heap / Like the wall of an abandoned fortress,” while an incongruously named Mrs. Baker, whose miner husband, Piekorz, hails from Poland, as did her parents, as likely she does too, advises her daughter not to “tell anyone you come from Eastern Europe” (“Notebook: Pennsylvania”). As often as not, however, disturbing scenes from war-torn Europe, whether witnessed or imagined, vividly intrude—“the clay of the battlefield,” whose whiteness is evoked by the sandy beach where the poet enjoys a seaside holiday, “Where my friend fell, clutching at dry grasses” (“Day and Night”)—or local color from Miłosz’s early life in his culturally ambiguous section of Lithuania, which might arouse nostalgia but whose keenly realistic depiction checks it:

Here the rust of wrecked machines, lashed by rain
Under the black sails of the windmills beyond the dike,
And, boarding the ferry, a small shaggy horse,
With shaft-bow and shafts, skids on the wet planks. (“Marsh”)

“Representing a country that was turned into the province of a totalitarian foreign state was wrong and degrading,” Miłosz later wrote. By 1950, as Franaszek reports, he had become “ideologically…alien” to his superiors, who also found his wife to be “a fierce enemy of the Soviet Union.” It is a complicated story—Franaszek’s account is engrossing—but in 1951 Miłosz defected to the West. With his then-pregnant wife and three-year-old son at home in the States, he sought political asylum in France. According to Hass’s tally, thirty-three months elapsed before a reunion could take place. Poet in the New World concludes with a visionary lyric set in a French village near Lac Léman that commemorates the occasion.

In 1953 Miłosz published his New World poems, including seven written in France after his defection, in the volume Daylight, the same year, amazingly, as saw the publication of The Captive Mind, his now-classic analysis of the accommodations made by intellectuals to communism, and The Seizure of Power, the first of his two novels. (The Old World poem “In Warsaw” was, according to Franaszek, a late addition to Miłosz’s 1945 collection, Rescue.) You can find eleven of these forty-four poems in the two omnium-gatherums, the 1988 Collected Poems and the 2001 New and Collected Poems, and several of them, including two of the best, “Child of Europe” and “Mittelbergheim,” in the 1973 Selected Poems, which introduced Miłosz in English. “Child of Europe,” which Miłosz appears to have written soon after arriving in New York, bitterly satirizes the myriad attitudes that “we” adopt, consciously or not, to preserve our psyches from debilitating pity and guilt, while perhaps preparing to collaborate with the new regime. “Mittelbergheim,” written five years later in France, is a “recovery poem,” as Franaszek describes it, a hopeful response to Miłosz’s “struggle” with an almost madness-inducing threat of nihilism due to his uprootedness: “the fear that the home country, heavenly and earthly, is lost.” “Child of Europe” and “Mittelbergheim” (a longtime personal favorite of mine) are remarkable, convincing poems in English. For the remaining thirty-three poems, their inclusion in Poet in the New World is their first appearance in English, in versions adapted by Hass, Miłosz’s faithful collaborator since the 1980s, from literal translations by the late David Frick, a scholar of Slavic languages and literatures. As Hass relates, Miłosz was dissatisfied by his own arrangement of the poems in Daylight, describing it as “rather haphazard,” even “chaotic.” The poems as now presented in chronological order “tell the story” in a satisfyingly coherent way “of a poet recovering from a war of extraordinary violence, taking his bearings in a new world, and trying to locate and understand his task as a poet.”

That Miłosz wrote all of these poems in “formal measures,” many of them rhyming, may explain the poet’s reluctance to publish English translations. This possibility is more than likely for “Treatise on Morals,” the longest poem (fourteen pages) and a historically important one, “the most outstanding Polish poem written since 1939,” a compatriot in 1947, as quoted by Franaszek, judged it to be: “If anyone wants to find out how Polish writers…defied the gloom and isolation, and discovered within themselves powers of resistance—they will find a key to it in [‘A Treatise on Morals’].” This “tour de force,” as Hass describes it, “was written in a regular eleven-syllable line, with rhymed couplets, and what has been described as the raucous rhythm of a Kraków cabaret song.” It was Miłosz’s view, Hass explains, “that the translation had to rhyme if it was going to convey what the author was up to, and he hated translations of his work that didn’t say in English more or less exactly what the Polish said.” Consequently, their attempt to render it in English went nowhere. Now this translation doesn’t rhyme (except at the very end), nor does the versification follow a pattern. Admittedly, I haven’t scanned each line, but my ear tells me that Hass, in order to convey something of the “dance-hall rhythm” (which is at odds with the poem’s tedious polemical thrust), has used as the basis for his measure a loose (anapestic-sounding) four-beat line, which he allows to contract and expand at will. The result is a jauntiness, sometimes even an archness, of tone: “there ain’t no spring. It’s always December.” In any case, it may be thanks to the distracting tone that “Treatise on Morals” evaded the Communist censors, despite, as Franaszek points out, the presence not far into the poem of the type of revolver used by the Soviet secret police to execute, with a shot to the back of the head, some 21,000 Polish officers in spring 1940. The poem did, as Hass observes, disturb Miłosz’s superiors in the diplomatic service.

“Treatise on Morals,” which Miłosz offers to his Old World audience as a “refuge against despair,” opens with a question to the poet, ostensibly from the audience but just as likely from himself: “Just what, oh poet, do you propose to save?” (A hortatory rendition, as Hass points out, of the question as literally translated: “Where, poet, is rescue?” One appreciates from the get-go the challenge of translating this poem.) Save what, the poem asks, and whence the rescue now that “so-called” peace has dawned—“so called” because with Nazism’s defeat, Soviet Communism like a force majeure is laying Eastern Europe under, its “firmly settled ethical foundation” stressed as if by the “pressure of avalanches.” Some 400 lines on, Miłosz the realist when it comes to images answers:

The wind picks up, and stirs little eddies
Of dried leaves in the grass;
Pigeons soar over the rooftops.
A dog barks, a child runs by,
Somebody signals someone with a handkerchief.
This is your world. It is on the line.

However, seeing “your world,” the “pigments in common objects,” requires “penetrating vision,” whose nurture itself requires “the discipline / Of paring down,” of shunning, among other things, such “theories” as French existentialism and German phenomenology and the company of such characters as “competent madmen” whose schizophrenic alibi is that “it isn’t I but someone else / Performing these deeds of mine”; hypocritical if charismatic politicians, who “Shout: the People, and whisper: dregs”; and blind-as-moles aristocrats—and quitting vodka, which is “akin to the fumes of extermination.” (Impishly, I can’t resist recalling an anecdote from Cynthia Haven about an exchange, relating to Gnosticism, between the poet Brenda Hillman, Hass’s wife, and Miłosz: “‘What is heaven?’ she asked him. ‘What is it like?’ To which the poet replied: ‘Brenda, heaven is the third vodka.’”) The “rescue,” Miłosz insists, “is in you alone. / Perhaps it is simply health / Of mind, a balanced heart”—prophetic lines in view of the suicidal angst, the “madness” that is life “without joy,” that threatened Miłosz himself soon after his defection to Paris. “You are not…helpless,” he argues,

And even if you were a stone in a field,
An avalanche changes its course
Depending on the stones it rolls over.

“Treatise on Morals” concludes emphatically (overly so perhaps) with a rhyming couplet in iambic tetrameter: “I need to say this with some starkness: / Before us lies ‘The Heart of Darkness”—communism, yes, but less specifically the moral void, as personified by Conrad’s Kurtz, whose gravitational force Miłosz, haunted as he remains by the evils of Nazism and besieged by those of Stalinism, is fighting off.

As Hass observes in a note to the most enigmatic—surrealistic, allegorical—of the New World poems, Miłosz’s “mind was still in Europe in 1946.” In “Two Men in Rome” Miłosz adopts, or so I think, the persona of an aged poet, an acolyte of Ovid, who has won his laurels. As with Ovid, his subject is metamorphosis. At “the globe’s still point” (which Hass hears as an allusion to Eliot’s “still point of the turning world” in “Burnt Norton,” which Miłosz has translated), this royally clad persona envisions a moonlit scene as observed by himself and a Cardinal: “Shapes of the earth appear, having been summoned,” by whom the poem doesn’t say, “And there’s the dancing girl,” who personifies, alternately, erotic allure (“she draws up her knees / And the dark sex is visible…masked by threads of beads / That sway”), nurture (her breasts, which “Precede her flight / To an invisible star,” display “the dark marks from which we sucked, / Where we nestled with our deceased mothers”), and destructive force (before their eyes and those of millions of others, she “falls headfirst” from her soaring dance “In a quiet burst like a burst of magnesium,” the type of bomb used by the Germans on Warsaw at the beginning of the war—a perverse exploitation of mineral Mother Earth). What the poet says to the Cardinal at the end recalls to my mind that cathedral, now windswept “rubble,” in Warsaw:

If your Vatican lies broken
I will keep going, to bear in the windstorm
The aurea aetas from heart to heart.

Miłosz’s attitude to his Ovidian persona’s magniloquent assertion about a Golden Age—and about poetry’s capacity to replace religion (as symbolized by the Vatican)—is skeptical, his stance ironic. Fragmentary images of a documentary nature, conveyed in fractured syntax—images of refugees perhaps, displaced by war, that burst as it were of magnesium—conclude this bewildering poem.

In contrast there is “Summer Movies in Central Park,” an outstanding poem, a lucid one whose style is that of the familiar essay, addressed in fact, and offered as “a little drawing,” to Juliusz Kronski, aka Tiger, in Paris. (A Polish compatriot, Tiger is Miłosz’s intellectual sparring partner in the last two chapters of Native Realm.) Here the effect of outdoor movies on trees and buildings—trees “spring[ing],” “skyline shift[ing]”—while couples, uniformed soldiers and their girls, make out on “the trampled grasses,” brings to the poet’s mind a horrifying scene:

…a field where the radiance
Of the burning city colors the dry wormwood
And crickets play, red from the glow,
Through which an army of smoke marches.

And he envisions how “The water rushing along the road flutters / The dress on the corpse of a woman.” Meanwhile, the couples, “trembling,” as if the earth were newly theirs alone as “after the flood,” “enter the quiet groves of sex,” oblivious of the “warning” conveyed by what the onlooker remembers. The sight of an “ambassador’s limousine” amid the traffic prompts him to remember that “duplicitous” statecraft, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, lay behind the invasions of Miłosz and Tiger’s “native realm,” thereby bringing Poland “Under the militarized feet of foreign powers,” Germany and the Soviet Union. With Germany’s defeat “we placed,” while “barely mourn[ing] in our secret hearts,” “old wisdom and bloody cobblestones…on the scales opposite the new faith,” dialectical materialism. (Modern Europe’s cultural inheritance from Ancient Greece, the source of that wisdom, is much on Miłosz’s mind. The civil war in Greece provides the occasion for his 1947 poem “A Reminder.”) As the poem moves to its conclusion, Miłosz returns in memory, with affection and humor, to mid-1930s’ Paris:

I don’t know whether Montaigne’s monument
Still stands, whose white marble lips
A girl, as a joke, has painted blush red,
And run off, lowering her head in laughter.

This gesture, faintly erotic as it is, returns the reader to the seemingly carefree lovers in Central Park at the beginning of the poem. The statue, by the way, would have been new as remembered by Miłosz, whom a scholarship had enabled to spend a year in Paris; repeatedly damaged by student vandals, it was replaced in the late 1980s by the bronze one whose leg-crossed slippered foot offers good luck on exams to students who rub it. Meanwhile, Miłosz has assured both himself and Tiger that “this age of darkness will pass the way winters / Pass when strong sap rises under the brittle bark”—a trope that together with the personal memory implies a parallel between the return of spring, a person’s psychological revival, and a society’s political renovation.

A conventional, romantic trope, though handsomely phrased…Still, it points to a dependable source of hopefulness, even joy for Miłosz, penetrating as his vision is regarding “things of this earth.” As he insists in Native Realm, poetry’s “optimism,” for him an essential feature in the twentieth century, depends on “its sensual avidity.” So it is that “When the magnolias bloom / And the park is a splash of muddy green,” Miłosz can “listen to your lovely tones with joy,” while informing the bird (to whom he addresses this poem) that “I was witness to misfortunes,” even finding “My home of a second” in birdsong. (As Keats aspires to do: “On the Song of a Bird on the Banks of the Potomac” echoes Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” in a remarkable way.) And when Antigone, whose “lament” Miłosz finds (in “In Warsaw”) to be “beyond the power / Of endurance,” reminds her sister that she has seen “Beneath the steps of a destroyed Cathedral” their brother’s corpse

With tufts of light hair wafting from his skull
Like any little boy’s. A crumpled handful
Of bones…

Ismene responds:

Yet even in bleak neighborhoods, life greens again.
Nettle and wormwood creep across the rubble.
…
Believe me, powerful rhythms reassert themselves.
Sobs commingle again with celebration.

By the end of this dialogue Antigone, like Miłosz in “Treatise on Morals” and “Summer Movies in Central Park,” is taking the long view, doubting that her tyrannical uncle can control a country whose every stone is “engrained with memories / Of its own tears of despair, tears of hope” (“Antigone”). And even if “you” happen to be “thinking of the dead” at Hiroshima, you cannot help hearing in “morning fog,” as “Light green pastures / Steam in the sloping fields of Michigan,” “the cry of wild geese, flying north / Over the Great Lakes to the marshes of Labrador”; and if you recall that Japan, which attacked Pearl Harbor, was the “land of the rising sun” and it dawns on you that the test explosion of the atom bomb, as Daniel Cordle reports, “was experienced as a new dawn” by observers—“Sunrise such as the world has never seen,” as one eyewitness described it—still, perhaps, you cannot but rejoice:

Day, day. A red-breasted thrush
Standing straight on a maple branch
Rises from song. Transparent song.
Brilliant song. And the steady drip of dew,
Trickling, chasing itself. Oh light, oh day.
Sun, day. A day of spring.
…………… (“Three Choruses from an Unwritten Drama ‘Hiroshima’”)

With passages like these, which together compose an aubade of sorts, Miłosz is reaffirming an enduring desire, as he puts it in lines already quoted from “In Warsaw,” “to sing of festivities, / The greenwood into which Shakespeare / Often took me.” That greenwood is, of course, a metaphor for comedy, also perhaps a representation of benign, pre-Darwinian nature, neither of which exactly harmonizes with Miłosz’s cast of mind. His attitude to nature is complex. As an adult, he explains in a 1986 interview, “I see Nature as a constant reminder of immutable laws of suffering and devouring,” which govern human nature as well. As a child, however, on his maternal grandparents’ farm in Lithuania, “I was primarily a discoverer of the world, not as suffering but as beauty,” which was for him, as he writes in his 1998 essay “Happiness,” the wellspring of “bliss.” Then, as he points out in Native Realm, “My hero was the brave nineteenth-century naturalist, such an ardent collector of insects that on his wedding day he forgot about his beloved waiting at the church.” (Faithful readers of Miłosz will remember Dr. Catchfly from “Diary of a Naturalist,” the second section of “From the Rising of the Sun,” his greatest poem.) What fueled in boyhood his “passion for nature” and in adulthood his choice of vocation was the determination to preserve “that élan” which grownups, “in their sobriety, disdained”: “In choosing poetry…I remained loyal to the pledge I made to myself: that I would never be like them and succumb to the force of inertia.” When, in “My Mother’s Grave,” Miłosz addresses this plea to his mother (who died in Poland in 1945), he is renewing, at a tragic time in human history, that pledge to himself as a boy:

Help me to create a love eternally alive
From my constant quarrel with the world.
…
Help me, mother. Strengthen in the man
What you knew as the child’s ardors.

“I regret being so little able,” Miłosz tells Einstein in the poem for him, “To help people value the great beauty of the world.” (No wonder; he is living, after all, in an “age,” as he describes it in “My Mother’s Grave,” “set ablaze by human bodies.”) “Everything interested me,” he says to Einstein. Those concluding lines in “My Mother’s Grave,” with their focus on “the child’s ardors,” suggest that the poet by “paring down,” as he advises in “Treatise on Morals,” has tapped his source of bliss.

“Nature has an enormous beauty,” Miłosz acknowledges in that 1986 interview, “and I am very sensitive to it. But there is…a repetition of patterns in Nature,” which he finds monotonous—unless he happens, as in the family reunion poem that ends the book, to envision within that repetition of patterns the “Heraclitian fluidity” that poetry, “through its premonitions of change,” “imitates.” (So he maintains in Native Realm.) As noted, Miłosz defected to the West while in Paris in 1951. Some two and a half years later, his family, which now included a toddler as well as an older boy, was able to travel to France, where the four of them together vacationed in the fall at a village near Lac Léman, Bons-en-Chablais, some fifteen miles northeast of Geneva. Miłosz describes the scene invitingly:

Red beeches, shining poplars
And steep spruce behind October fog.
In the valley the lake steams. There is snow
Already on the hillsides of the other shore.

The serenity invites the vacationer, bedazzled by the noonday sun, to yield to the illusion that here is not merely an evocation of paradise but eternity itself, arrival there being the end goal of life: “this is, / And no capacity, no artfulness / Can reach beyond what is.” Perhaps the presence of his son, who “runs there on the path,” heightens his sense of absence from his culture: “If I forget thee, Jerusalem, / Says the prophet, let my right hand wither,” the poet’s writing hand. Miłosz’s identification of the Psalmist as “the prophet” implies a fear that he will indeed forget. The “Underground tremors” that now “shake what is” seem to be as much a manifestation of psychological recoil as an imagined geological phenomenon. The welcome effect of this vision of flux is the poet’s release from his torpor induced by monotonous-looking “landscapes,” much as the innocent boy’s “passion for nature,” even if it looked when first discovered benignly beautiful, “safeguarded” him against the “inertia” directing the lives of grownups: “Whoever finds order, / Peace, and an eternal moment in what is / Will vanish without a trace,” the poet exclaims. “Artists crave…a communion with the divine promise inside creation,” Miłosz writes in Native Realm. Instead of yielding to “what is,” he resolves to “pluck from movement,” from Heraclitian fluidity, as though his eye can seize, “The eternal moment as a gleam” of that promise “On the current of the black river”—and thereby leave a trace, which becomes the oeuvre to which Poet in the New World: Poems, 1946-1953, an ambitious, polyphonic collection, deep-minded and deeply felt, biting and tender, and avid-eyed, is now a crucial chapter.

I.

Ralph Ellison’s work continues to generate new scholarly work at an impressive clip. Having recently edited a 35-essay collection on him (2021) and co-authored a 23,000-word annotated bibliography (2024, under review), I can attest that Ellison Studies is flourishing; the quantity of impressive scholarship published from 2021-25 is daunting. But the first step toward establishing the contours of his posthumous reputation and orienting its discourse was the recognition of the volume and importance of his writing as a public intellectual and the setting aside of lingering, decades-old questions about being a novelist who published only one novel.^[1] Saul Bellow’s preface to The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (Modern Library, 1995) is a crucial text at this juncture, appearing in the year after Ellison’s death in the first of several high-profile posthumous publications. To be sure, Ellison was a public intellectual since 1937, and the question of having only published one novel sounds today like a dusty, fussy, pseudo-problem that nobody cares about.^[2] But it did not always, and part of the reason the question feels dated today is because of the way Saul Bellow changed the conversation.

It may seem obvious at first glance that Bellow should have written the preface. But it’s anything but obvious. In fact, it is enigmatic. In retrospect, it looks like a perfect fit. But it was far from preordained, and in its moment, it was a bold, counterintuitive decision made by Joe Fox, Ellison’s editor at Random House, of which Modern Library was (and is) a subsidiary. By writing the preface to The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison in 1995, Bellow almost single-handedly buried the stubborn matter of Ellison’s modest novelistic output by addressing it in the manner that he did, clearing the way for the thriving field of Ellison Studies today.^[3]

Albert Erskine, Ellison’s editor at Random House for forty years, died in 1993 and was succeeded by Joe Fox, a wily old pro. After Ellison died in 1994, Fox thought it necessary to bring out an edition of Ellison’s essays as soon as possible and also thought it imperative that Saul Bellow should write the preface.

Bellow was certainly a viable choice, but was one among many, and not necessarily an obvious one. He was at that moment embroiled in a scandal resulting from the reception of a remark (his infamous Papuans and Zulus remark – about which, more later) that he made in an interview (back in 1988), prefiguring the kind of cancellations that would proliferate across the 2010s and early 20s, although the cancellation concept was not entrenched yet and Bellow’s reputation still towered.

Social media did not exist yet, and the idea that someone’s reputation could be sunk by a remark had not yet become commonplace, although it had happened to politicians and media figures, usually for saying something unambiguously offensive on a microphone in public. Nevertheless, a firestorm erupted for Bellow, and if one were writing a history of cancellation, this could get an early chapter. Since he was not an obvious choice for the preface for other reasons, Fox’s invitation remains mysterious and something like a flash of genius.

That is one of the points of origin for this investigation. I said to myself one day, wait, Bellow must have been asked to write this preface shortly after his rhetorical questions blew up – and sure enough, that was the case. It seemed very strange, and I wanted to get to the bottom of it. The other point of origin is a question that nagged me as I’ve re-read the preface over the years: why doesn’t he say anything about the essays themselves? It took me a while to figure out what he was up to; that’s how much the issue had faded.

Bellow had not been close to Ellison for thirty years or so. He had never been a Random House author and so did not owe any favors to the company. He did not seem to know Fox too well, if at all. He addressed him by his complete name in their brief correspondence (“Dear Joe Fox”), which suggests to me that they barely knew each other or perhaps had never met. But he had once been close friends with Ellison, especially during the 1950s when they lived together in a big old house when they taught at Bard College. The similarity of their early 1950s novels, the distinctive American voices of their narrators in those novels, their determination to save and revivify the embattled genre (recently declared dead!), and the way they form complementary angles of a sort in the American literary landscape of the early Cold War has been the subject of a fair amount of scholarship.^[4]

While Bellow and Ellison were good friends from the late 40s through the early 60s, they had long since drifted far apart. The last letter from Ellison in the Bellow archive at the University of Chicago is a 1976 note congratulating Bellow on winning the Nobel Prize. The last letter from Bellow in the Ellison archive is from a few years earlier. They probably last saw each other in 1992 at a series of panel discussions hosted by Partisan Review at Rutgers University on writers and intellectuals in the wake of the collapse of the Eastern bloc. It is unclear when they last saw each other before that. By contrast, in the early days of their friendship, they would visit each other’s apartments and go fishing together in Long Island Sound.

Bellow is inextricable from Ralph Ellison’s fate, and vice-versa. They book-end each other’s careers. Oddly enough, around the time in the 1940s that Ellison dumped Henry Volkening as an agent, Volkening picked up Bellow as a client. Bellow wrote an influential review of Invisible Man (noting some of its flaws), but more importantly, he was on the committee (with Howard Mumford Jones, Irving Howe, and Alfred Kazin) that awarded the National Book Award to Ellison’s novel in 1953, forever changing Ellison’s life and career.

Yet Bellow ultimately was a different sort of writer – the author of fourteen novels, a play, a memoir, many short stories (many more than Ellison), long short stories that are not quite novellas (a Bellow specialty), and plenty of nonfiction. Bellow won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976 (an award that almost certainly would have gone to Ellison at some point had he published even a mediocre follow-up to Invisible Man). With such novelistic volume and range, Bellow was well-positioned to defend Ellison for only having published one novel. Bellow’s novels such as The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog and Humboldt’s Gift were still revered as formidable contemporary classics. Henderson the Rain King and Seize the Day and The Dean’s December were well-respected. Infamous as Mr. Sammler’s Planet was and is, it had just been republished by Penguin Classics with a 6000-word introduction by Stanley Crouch.

Bellow knew that the question of why Ellison’s output lagged behind his (and others) and whether Ellison could really be considered a novelist had to be put to rest. He intuited that Fox had offered him the golden opportunity – perhaps the only opportunity – to do so. Remarkably, if not startlingly, he says nothing about the essays themselves!

Thus, the first posthumously published Ellison book,^[5] The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, opens with Bellow defensively addressing the question of Ellison’s output. Bellow relays a prescient 1953 critique of Ellison – leveled by none other than Georges Simenon (1903-1989), author of 192 novels under his own name and more under other names:

           In 1953 at a Bard College Symposium dinner attended by foreign celebrities, Georges Simenon, who sat at our table, asked Ellison how many novels he had written, and when he learned that there was only one he said, “To be a novelist one must produce many novels. Ergo, you are not a novelist.”

           The author of hundreds of books, writing and speaking at high speed, was not in the habit of pausing to weigh his words. Einstein, a much deeper thinker, had said in a reply to a “sociable” lady’s questions about quantum theory (why, under such and such conditions, was there only one quantum?), “But isn’t one a lot, madam?”^[6]

Thus, the witty opening salvo in the formation of Ellison’s posthumous reputation was fired by a productive novelist defending Ellison’s relatively low output for a writer of his stature.

Indeed, perhaps prompted by The Collected Essays, questions seemed to shift away from strictly literary ones to a broader understanding of Ellison – by the professoriate in aggregate – as a public intellectual. Ronald A. T. Judy writes in his introduction to “Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Years,” a special issue of boundary 2 (Summer 2003) that proved to be a sharp turning point in Ellison Studies, “it is now clear that Ellison was not only the author of one of the most celebrated English-language North American novels of this century but was also one of the major intellectuals of the middle and later twentieth century.”^[7] Undoubtedly, part of this development also had to do with Ross Posnock’s chapter on Ellison (and Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, and Albert Murray) in his landmark 1998 study Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual. Posnock’s book was the first, as far as I can tell, to subject one of Ellison’s essays (“The Little Man at Chehaw Station”) to critical analysis. That same essay would be the object of a fascinating inquiry by Hortense Spillers in that same 2003 issue of boundary 2. Today Ellison’s nonfiction is written about all the time, but that was not happening at all in the early or mid-90s.

 

II.

Somewhere in Bellow’s mind when he accepted the 1995 assignment could have been John W. Aldridge’s rather wound-up 1964 essay “The Price of Being Taken Seriously,” the subhead of which is “the critics may make him a novelist but they cannot make him write” – a very obvious, ungenerous, lengthy, and mean-spirited attack on Ellison – in all but name – in the New York Times.^[8] Aldridge, then a professor at the University of Michigan, was big mad, as the kids say, that someone wasn’t doing what he wanted them to do. Yet his question had an audience. Why did Ellison only publish one novel? And the question circulated and resurfaced for years.

When Ellison gave an interview to the Washington Post in 1982, he was defensive about the issue when asked about it, stating “It would be easy enough to write other fiction, to put out several books. You don’t – I don’t – write to satisfy other people. You do certain things and then you do other things, and you don’t always publish what you write.”^[9] Interviewer Lynn Darling notes that this answer was given with “some irritation.” By 1994, Bellow had apparently had enough of the question that had plagued his friend, and he had the determination – and the credibility – to kill it.

The key figure for understanding how Bellow managed to write the preface for Ellison’s essays is Joe Fox (1926-1995). Fox was one of the great old-time editors, a classic mid-century New York character and eccentric, and a Random House employee of 35 years. Perhaps not as legendary as Albert Erskine, who had edited William Faulkner before he edited Ellison, Fox was no slouch, and had edited Philip Roth, James Salter, Truman Capote, Mavis Gallant, and many other prominent authors before becoming Ellison’s editor in 1993, after Erskine’s death. He attended Harvard after service in the Marine Corps and was a scuba diver. Later in life, according to Samuel S. Vaughan, “[Fox] often went to parties with Fran Liebowitz, sharing her gifts for wit, storytelling, and serial smoking. His office was renowned for being designated – by him – a smoking area…. He sat behind a towering Pisa of old, yellowing copies of the New York Times and its Book Review, defying gravity and anyone to see him behind the smokestack.”^[10] Don’t underestimate the literary intuition of a guy like that. (I wonder if, in that leaning tower of old copies of the New York Times Book Review, was the September 6, 1964 issue with John Aldridge’s essay in it.)

Fox seems to have contacted Bellow out of the blue in 1994. Fox wrote to Fanny Ellison, in the course of a letter in which he explains some basic details about The Collected Essays volume – such as that John F. Callahan will be its editor, “I’m hoping that Saul Bellow will write an introduction to the book.”^[11] Bellow did not seem to know Fox at all, as inferred from Bellow’s addressing him in his submission of the preface as “Dear Joe Fox.”^[12] A handwritten note signed by Fanny Ellison at the bottom of page one tells Bellow (or maybe not, see below), “Joe Fox has died. Fanny would appreciate whatever your inclination to write.”^[13] I do not believe that this note or a version of it was ever sent to Bellow.

Fox died on November 30, 1995, and the book was published three weeks later. That would not have been nearly enough time for this to play out in terms of the pace of publishing, regardless of how it appears in the archive – which is that while Fox has died, go ahead and write whatever you want. This note is on a clean typescript almost identical to the published preface. As such, this instance raises an interesting question about the legibility of an archive without context. It has been suggested to me by an expert on Fanny Ellison that this note was not intended for Bellow but was written by Fanny for posterity, as she was inclined in this period to write such notes. I find this compelling. I would guess that Random House had to have received Bellow’s preface by September, at the latest, for December publication.

 

III.

In March 1994, Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison, whose paths had intertwined for decades, crossed paths again, in a sense. In that month, March ’94, they had very different experiences of being featured in The New Yorker. In the March 7th issue, Bellow took a considerable hit. Here Alfred Kazin dredged up the old, infamous rhetorical questions attributed to Bellow by James Atlas in 1988: “who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? Who is the Proust of the Papuans?” To read these questions as automatically repugnant and racist, I believe, would be disingenuous and obtuse. And yet many were (and are) determined to do just that. Bellow is obviously making a complicated point about bourgeois modernity and forms of novelistic discourse its conditions made possible. From another angle, implicit in the question is the knotty connection between empire and modernity and the novel.^[14] To be clear, Bellow did himself no favors. It was a bad example, as the Russians have no Proust, and neither do the English, but nobody has a Shakespeare, and so on. A glib remark, a point too sophisticated for the general public to be framed in such an offhand way, and phrased so as to be maximally explosive did explode as such. Kazin breathed new life into the 1988 comment, cementing it in cultural consciousness. (Kazin, like Bellow, also connects with Ellison’s early and late career.) A few days after Kazin’s piece appeared in The New Yorker, Bellow published a rebuttal in The New York Times, titled “Papuans and Zulus,” in which he tried to distance himself from the quotation:

I had come under attack in the press and elsewhere for a remark I was alleged to have made about the Zulus and the Papuans. I had been quoted as saying that the Papuans had had no Proust and that the Zulus had not as yet produced a Tolstoy, and this was taken as an insult to Papuans and Zulus, and as a proof that I was at best insensitive and at worst an elitist, a chauvinist, a reactionary and a racist – in a word, a monster. Nowhere in print, under my name, is there a single reference to Papuans or Zulus. The scandal is entirely journalistic in origin, the result of a misunderstanding that occurred (they always do occur) during an interview. I can’t remember who the interviewer was. Always foolishly trying to explain and edify all comers, I was speaking of the distinction between literate and pre literate societies.^[15]

Bellow defended himself with aplomb in this piece, which is smart and interesting for other reasons too.

A week or so after Kazin’s piece and Bellow’s response, Ellison had a very different experience with The New Yorker: in the March 14th issue, David Remnick published a charming, laudatory report on Ellison’s 80th birthday dinner at Le Périgord (1964-2017), one of the classic upper-east side French restaurants, which was attended by a variety of old friends, including Fox. Ellison died six weeks later after the rapid onset of pancreatic cancer, a diagnosis unknown at the time of the party. Remnick’s report was to be the last piece published on Ellison while he was alive.

This completely different experience with The New Yorker – in its very next issue – proves Ellison did not need Bellow’s imprimatur or anything like that. Far from forgotten or in need of a publicity boost or the co-sign of another formidable writer, Ellison had the most prominent young reporter in the U.S. write up his birthday party with elegant panache. Remnick was not yet the editor of The New Yorker, but his career was on a vertical upswing after his widely esteemed coverage of the collapse of the Soviet Union in The Washington Post in preceding years.

Ellison went out on top, so to speak. Bellow on the other hand was far from on top when, a few weeks later, in late April 1994, Fox wrote to Fanny Ellison suggesting Bellow as the introducer for Ellison’s Collected Essays, and she must have assented. Fox ended up catching Bellow at just the right moment – Bellow nearly died a few months later that summer from eating a poisonous fish and had a difficult (if psychiatrically intriguing) rehabilitation.^[16] There does not seem to be a record of Bellow’s reaction to Fox’s request to write the preface, but it must have felt like an affirmation to be asked to write such a prominent statement on behalf of an old (if recently distant) friend at a moment when he himself was in the midst of controversy.

Who would have been a better choice than Bellow? On paper, maybe a dozen writers would have. After all, Bellow is not particularly appreciated as an essayist (although many of his essays are fascinating and a few are masterpieces). His first collection of essays, It All Adds Up: From the Dim Past to the Uncertain Future, had just been published in January 1994 (copyright date 1993). By contrast, Ellison’s first essay collection Shadow and Act was published in 1964 and had a significant cultural impact; it was even published in a drug-store paperback edition by Signet (list price: 95 cents). It seems to me that people thought of (and still think of) Ellison as a non-fiction writer in a way that they still do not think about Bellow. Bellow-as-essayist today seems to my mind a rich field of inquiry, although in 1994, I wonder to what extent people would have thought so. Not especially, I think, as It All Adds Up probably had just introduced people to the idea of Bellow-as-essayist.^[17]

From a marketing angle, it also might have made sense to consider a younger African American writer, such as perhaps Charles Johnson, who had recently won the National Book Award (1990) for fiction, was an accomplished essayist, and had expressed appreciation for Ellison; Stanley Crouch, friend/acolyte of Ellison whose first collection of essays and reviews, Notes of a Hanging Judge, made a substantial impact a few years earlier and who was becoming a frequent television presence; or James Alan McPherson, a superb essayist himself,^[18] whose 1970 interview-essay of/with Ellison, “Indivisible Man,” is included in The Collected Essays. Toni Morrison, whose connection to Ellison is often misunderstood or assumed to be other than it was, would have been a great choice as well. Yet the tenuous, iffy, unlikely Fox-to-Bellow invitation happened, and Bellow delivered, effectively shutting down the question that had nagged Ellison’s reputation.

The 1995 preface and 1998 personal essay on Ellison did basically nothing for Bellow’s reputation, which is still haunted by the rhetorical questions about authorship in pre-modern societies. When Bellow died in 2005, they were dutifully brought to the fore by the cultural commissars. When Slate fielded comments of a paragraph or two from 18 writers of different generations about Bellow in the wake of his death, Hilton Als squandered the opportunity to say something interesting by huffingly-puffingly repeating the rhetorical questions and addressing them in the most obtuse way. Stanley Crouch, the only other African American writer in this same Slate feature, said something much more intriguing, preserving for history a notion for a book that Bellow had – now a shadow book, in the term coined by Kevin Young. Crouch, who wrote the introduction for the Penguin Classics edition of Mr. Sammler’s Planet a decade earlier, wrote for Slate that Bellow

was considering writing a novel based on what he had made of the young James Baldwin in Paris, the masterful and burdened Ralph Ellison in New York, and Harold Washington, who invited him to his office and talked about books with him while mayor of Chicago. Bellow had very pointed observations about each man and felt that, if he could figure out how to give it form, “That would really catch them off guard, wouldn’t it?” he laughed.^[19]

What Bellow would have said about Baldwin and Washington in such a shadow book surely would have been insightful, but what he would have made of a fictional Ellison might have surpassed the brilliance of Abe Ravelstein, Artur Sammler, Charlie Citrine, or Moses Herzog. Incidentally, I think Ellison has a cameo of sorts in Humboldt’s Gift – the African American composer at the Princeton party could allude to Ellison, who after all studied to be a composer under William L. Dawson. Ellison and Bellow used to hang out at the parties following the Gauss Lectures at Princeton in the early 50s.

But my claim about the prospective grandeur of an Ellison character in a novel by Bellow rests on the following intriguing claim by David Mikics, in his 2016 book Bellow’s People: “Bellow thought about Ellison’s work with an intensity he gave to no other of his fellow authors, at a time when he was still figuring out his own path.”^[20] Bellow created memorable characters of figures who intrigued him (such as Alan Bloom/Abe Ravelstein), working their idiosyncrasies through his imagination, but I dare say Ellison might have been too vast to get a handle on.^[21]
Incidentally, the now-standard image of Bellow as a fashion plate could be the result of Ellison’s influence. Mikics also claims that only after – and because of – sharing a house with the sartorially exquisite Ellison, Bellow, who formerly would show up to teach in jeans and a t-shirt (can you imagine?), became the dapper dresser familiar from interviews, photos, and book jackets later in life.

 

IV.

When Bellow submitted his 2000-word preface in late 1995, he wrote, “Dear Joe Fox – You said you wanted me to be brief – if you’d like a little more, let me know.” Why would Fox have wanted Bellow to be brief? Bellow’s essay can be divided roughly into three sections – 1) his refutation of Georges Simenon’s critique of Ellison, 2) his recollection of being housemates with Ellison in Tivoli, New York in the late 1950s (expanded upon in the 1998 essay), and 3) a significant quotation from “Indivisible Man,” James Alan McPherson’s long 1970 interview with Ellison in The Atlantic Monthly – the only piece from The Collected Essays that Bellow quotes from. I would have liked to have known Bellow’s opinions on much else in the book. What did Bellow think of Ellison’s famous duel with Irving Howe (in “The World and the Jug”); his spirited exchange with Stanley Edgar Hyman (in “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”); his perceptive essay on Stephen Crane; his personal essay “An Extravagance of Laughter” (which would have appealed to Bellow’s comic spirit); his finest work as a literary critic, “Society, Morality and the Novel”; or “The Little Man at Chehaw Station,” on the topsy-turviness of unstable American hierarchies? (You know the author of “Looking for Mr. Green” would have understood it.)

The Collected Essays contains 60 pieces by Ellison, and Bellow mentions exactly one (“Indivisible Man,” the hybrid thing he did with James Alan McPherson). But Bellow was like a quarterback spotting an open receiver far down the field when he also has the option to run the ball himself. He could have gotten way into the weeds, commenting on Ellison’s duels with Howe and Hyman and Baraka and all that, or commenting on Ellison’s essays about the Oklahoma City of his youth, or on the topsy-turviness of American hierarchies, but instead he knew what he had to do, and took the long view – that for Ellison, with Invisible Man, one novel, as with Einstein’s quantum, is enough. By ignoring the masterful essays themselves, he somehow foregrounded them and cleared the way for a new appreciation of them by killing the tired old question. After personal recollections, he closes out with e.e. cummings on Buffalo Bill – a poem that reminded him of Ellison.

Incidentally, Bellow was also selected to deliver a memorial statement for Ellison at the autumn meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where members eulogize other members who died in the preceding year. Bellow submitted his preface to Ellison’s Collected Essays to be read in absentia, as he was still recovering from the poison fish. Joseph Mitchell read it for him. (Mitchell would have been an equally good choice to write a memorial oration; he knew Ellison well.) Bellow could have easily said sorry, I can’t do it; I’m recovering from poisoning. Anyone would have understood. But he wanted that elite audience of some of the most prominent writers, artists, and cultural opinion makers to hear his defense of his old friend.

 

Notes

by Rainer Maria Rilke
trans. Donald Mace Williams

Suddenly from all greens of the park
a something, one does not know what, is missing;
one feels it coming closer to the windows
and keeping silence. Urgently and sharp,
the plover’s voice resounds out of the trees,
putting into one’s mind a St. Jerome:
so zeal and solitude together pour
from the one voice to which the storm concedes
a place. The walls of this wide chamber seem
with the hung pictures to have stepped away
as if to hear us talking were taboo.
The tapestries, gone pale now, yet display
the faint, uncertain light of afternoons
like those which fearsomely in childhood gleamed.

 

Vor dem Sommerregen

Auf einmal ist aus allem Grün im Park
man weiss nicht was, ein Etwas, fortgenommen;
man fühlt ihn näher an die Fenster kommen
und schweigsam sein. Inständig nur und stark
ertӧnt aus dem Gehӧlz der Regenpfeifer,
man denkt an einen Hieronymus:
so sehr steigt irgend Einsamkeit und Eifer
aus dieser einen Stimme, die der Guß
erhӧren wird. Des Saales Wände sind
mit ihren Bildern von uns fortgetreten,
als dürften sie nicht hӧren was wir sagen.
Es spiegeln die verblichener Tapeten
das ungewisse Licht von Nachmittagen,
in denen man sich fürchtete als Kind.

Rainer Maria Rilke, born in Prague, wrote hundreds of short lyric poems such as this before and after what many consider his major work, the Duino Elegies (1922). Though most of them are metrical and rhymed, they use an eclectic, informal diction like that of more recent poets.

by George Seferis
trans. A. E. Stallings

“Say it with a ukulele”
whines some gramophone.
Say what to her, Christ’s sake!
I’m used to being alone.

The shabby-genteel poor
give mouth organs a squeeze.
and cry yet again on the angels,
and the angels are the disease.

The angels unfurl their wings,
but below, a stale fog gushes.
Thank God, or else they’d snare
our wretched souls like thrushes!

It’s a cold-fish sort of life.
You live like this? Yes–so?
So many are the drowned
on the sea floor, down below.

The trees seem like coral
from which all colors drain,
and the carts like sunken ships
whose hulls alone remain.

“Say it with a ukulele”
Words, words, words . . . again?
Where is your chapel, Love?
I’m tired of this demesne.

If only life were straight,
then we could live it right.
but fate has got us cornered,
and the corner is too tight.

And just what corner? Who knows.
Lamp lights lamp, a wreath
of mists, and speechless frosts.
We clench our souls in our teeth.

Shall we find consolation?
Day has donned night. We find
all is night. All is night.
We go by feeling, blind.

“Say it with a ukulele”
How the firelight would glance off
the gleam of her red nails.
I remember her, and her cough.

 

 

Fog

Say it with a ukulele

 

«Πες της το μ’ ένα γιουκαλίλι…»
γρινιάζει κάποιος φωνογράφος·
πες μου τί να της πω, Χριστέ μου,
τώρα συνήθισα μονάχος.

Με φυσαρμόνικες που σφίγγουν
φτωχοί μη βρέξει και μη στάξει
όλο και κράζουν τους αγγέλους
κι είναι οι αγγέλοι τους μαράζι.

Κι οι αγγέλοι ανοίξαν τα φτερά τους
μα χάμω χνότισαν ομίχλες
δόξα σοι ο θεός, αλλιώς θα πιάναν
τις φτωχιές μας ψυχές σαν τσίχλες.

Κι είναι η ζωή ψυχρή ψαρίσια
— Έτσι ζεις; — Ναι! Τί θες να κάνω·
τόσοι και τόσοι είναι οι πνιμένοι
κάτω στης θάλασσας τον πάτο.

Τα δέντρα μοιάζουν με κοράλλια
που κάπου ξέχασαν το χρώμα
τα κάρα μοιάζουν με καράβια
που βούλιαξαν και μείναν μόνα…

«Πες της το μ’ ένα γιουκαλίλι…»
Λόγια για λόγια, κι άλλα λόγια;
Αγάπη, πού ’ναι η εκκλησιά σου
βαρέθηκα πια στα μετόχια.

Α! να ’ταν η ζωή μας ίσια
πώς θα την παίρναμε κατόπι
μ’ αλλιώς η μοίρα το βουλήθη
πρέπει να στρίψεις σε μια κόχη.

Και ποιά είν’ η κόχη; Ποιός την ξέρει;
Τα φώτα φέγγουνε τα φώτα
άχνα! δε μας μιλούν οι πάχνες
κι έχουμε την ψυχή στα δόντια.

Τάχα παρηγοριά θα βρούμε;
Η μέρα φόρεσε τη νύχτα
όλα ειναι νύχτα, όλα ειναι νύχτα
κάτι θα βρούμε ζήτα ζήτα…

«Πες της το μ’ ένα γιουκαλίλι…»
Βλέπω τα κόκκινά της νύχια
μπρος στη φωτιά πώς θα γυαλίζουν
και τη θυμάμαι με το βήχα.

 

 

Note:

George Seferis (1900-1971) wrote “Fog” in 1927, during his first visit to London as a young man. The title and the epigraph are in English in the original, as if Greek does not even have a word sufficiently gloomy to describe English fog, which shocked him with its thickness and toxicity. “Say it with a ukelele” was a popular song at the time, playing on every gramophone, and contains, beside the eponymous imperative, such lyrics as “Modern girls are tired of dreary love songs/ you must give them something that is new.” Eliot readers will notice familiar imagery here: the fog, the gramophone, the lighting of the lamps. Some of that is a shared sense of London in time and place. But the Eliotic qualities (Seferis is the most important translator of Eliot in Greek) are probably partly to do with both poets sharing a passion for and influence from French poetry. (See Baudelaire’s yellow fog in “The Seven Old Men,” for instance.)

Editor’s note:

Stallings discusses this poem and Eliot’s influence on Seferis further in her recent lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry, “Mr Eugenides after the Burning of Smyrna: George Seferis and the Waste Land.”

Baumgartner
by Paul Auster
(Grove Press, 2023, 208 pp., $27.00)

Paul Auster spent his literary career asking questions he never answered, weaving and unweaving ideas and memories into ever-changing patterns, and toying with readers’ need for certainty. His work is deceptively simple, fun to read but built on foundations that crackle and shift and challenge while the author winks. He was almost impossibly erudite, and his work, particularly the fiction, incorporates allusions and philosophical concepts in obvious and subtle ways, enticing you to try to figure it out while refusing any easy answers. Reading Auster can be as intense an experience as you want it to be, from enjoying a light read of an interesting, well-written story to getting yourself tangled in questions of existence, identity, and meaning. Baumgartner, Paul Auster’s final novel, was published in November 2023, less than six months before the author’s death, written during his battle with lung cancer and with his full knowledge that it might be the last thing he finished. That it treats subjects dear to Auster’s heart like writing, memory, and grief should be no surprise; that it is his final treatment of those subjects gives it a special gravity to his readers.

Baumgartner is a short novel at just over 200 pages, and, as has been pointed out by several critics, is surprisingly unoriginal in its conceit given Auster’s usual experimental fireworks: it is a novel about a widowed, Jewish, aging academic confronting his mortality. If you just read the synopsis, you might assume it was a late Philip Roth novel you missed, and Auster leans into that in passages. There are several long sections in which our protagonist, Seymour (Sy) Baumgartner, remembers family history from Newark, New Jersey, that read just like Roth. Present, too, are sexual details about Baumgartner’s grief—folding his wife’s underwear obsessively, writing her pornographic letters and mailing them to the house, ordering books just to flirt with the UPS deliverywoman—that feel intensely Rothian. The nod to Roth continues in a sentence late in the novel, which also hints at Auster’s game here: Baumgartner, who is writing a satire, says he has to be careful in the writing, “for one false move will sabotage the deadly serious intentions hidden within the jokes” (186). No reader of Philip Roth—and Auster was one—could use the phrase “deadly serious” without summoning Roth and perhaps his most famous quote about his writing: “Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.”

Roth’s old friends are no doubt at play here; Auster’s final novel both is and isn’t about a widowed academic, both is and isn’t comedy. On the surface, it tells the story of Sy Baumgartner, whose wife Anna, a translator and poet, died ten years ago in a freak accident at the beach. Their marriage was satisfying intellectually, emotionally, and sexually, and our protagonist has been suffering without it. The novel opens as he experiences a series of almost slapstick physical injuries and proceeds as he navigates the possibility and subsequent disappointment of a new love, the strangeness of retirement, the pleasure of new scholarly pursuits, and the excitement of a young doctoral student who plans to write her dissertation on Anna’s work, granting his beloved a sort of immortality. Reading the novel strictly on the level of its plot is entertaining and moving on its own. Auster is a beautiful writer, the character is engaging, and the novel’s subjects are universal. Still, without the deeper dive into those deadly serious and sheerly playful games Auster is crafting, it is a somewhat slight addition to the author’s oeuvre.

The more, however, we dig beneath the surface story of this widow and his only marginally successful attempts to move on from his grief, the more Auster’s usual genius for uncertainty and multiple meanings is revealed. Throughout the novel, Auster mentions several different academic pieces Baumgartner has completed or is working on, and they become keys to the author’s deadly serious games. Baumgartner is a scholar of phenomenology, the philosophical idea that our lived experiences, what we encounter in the world, are the source of meaning. He has worked, for much of his career, on “the phenomenology of reading,” also the title of a 1969 article by Georges Poulet, who describes the act of reading as being almost like being possessed by a ghost as one allows another’s consciousness to take over one’s mind. He goes on to describe the experience of reading as calling a work back into not only existence, but conscious existence, like summoning a ghost.

This relationship between reading and ghosts suggested by Baumgartner’s research subject is one that has been on Paul Auster’s mind for decades, most notably in “Ghosts,” the second novella of his landmark New York Trilogy, in which the writer in the story, Black, explicitly says that writers are ghosts, that “In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there” (209). Baumgartner, though, features consideration of an actual ghost when Sy dreams that he receives a phone call from his late wife Anna, where she explains that she is in “the Great Nowhere, a black space in which nothing is visible” (61). She is no longer embodied and so cannot feel or hear or want. She tells him to “Call her a What, if he likes, or a spirit, or an emanation of the vast, formless surround, or, quite simply, a monad that thinks, and when she thinks it sometimes happens that she can see the things she is imagining” (61). How can a phenomenologist imagine a ghost? As a disembodied spark of ongoing consciousness, perhaps. She goes on:

She can’t be sure of anything, she says, but she suspects that he is the one who is sustaining her through this incomprehensible afterlife, this paradoxical state of conscious non-existence, which must and will come to an end at some point, she feels, but as long as he is alive and still able to think about her, her consciousness will continue to be awakened and reawakened by his thoughts, to such an extent that she can sometimes go into his head and hear those thoughts and see what he is seeing through his eyes. (62)

She goes on to say that “the living and the dead are connected” and that when Baumgartner dies, she expects her consciousness to be “extinguished forever” (62).

Baumgartner finds comfort in this dream, though he does not actually believe that it happened or that Anna exists, even in the strange “conscious non-existence” she described. Just the experience of having heard her voice, having felt confirmation that she is still with him, is enough. Baumgartner considers that the dream held “not a scientific truth, perhaps, not a verifiable truth, but an emotional truth” (64). Anna’s ghost, then, is not real, but the effects of it are. Auster writes: “In the same way that a person can be transformed by the imaginary events recounted in a work of fiction, Baumgartner has been transformed by the story he told himself in the dream” (64). The ghost is just a story, but he needs that story, just as we all need stories. The experience described by Anna almost exactly mirrors the phenomenology of reading explained by Poulet; she sees things through Baumgartner’s eyes, experiences the world through him. Auster, as he did in “Ghosts” (and then again in Travels in the Scriptorium when Mr. Blank laments he has always felt like a ghost, and in In the Country of Last Things when despair is communicated in the language of ghosts, and in Invention of Solitude when he realizes the reciprocity of haunting and being haunted) is discussing the meaning of reading and writing through the metaphor of ghosts. But if Anna is “awakened and reawakened” when her husband thinks of her, doesn’t that make her the work, summoned into existence and awareness of existence when the reader reads her? If Sy is the one whose consciousness is taking over and supplying the story, the writer and thus the ghost, then Anna is the haunted, the reader—and obviously, as the deceased who is constantly on the mind of the living partner, she is also the ghost. Readers and writers are intertwined, Auster suggests, and not so easily distinguished from one another. Auster affirmed as much in a 2005 interview with Jonathan Lethem in The Believer: “The novel is really one of the only places in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. The reader and the writer make the book together. You as a reader enter the consciousness of another person, and in doing so I think you discover something about your own humanity, and it makes you feel more alive.” Sy Baumgartner has lost his other half and so is unmoored; readers and writers need each other to co-create meaning. Together they make meaning and one without the other is a broken thing, partial.

Indeed, this idea of having lost wholeness captivates Baumgartner: phantom limb syndrome gives him the language he needs to develop his theory of grief. Like an amputee still feels pain in the missing limb, the living feel the dead, or where they should be:

He thinks of mothers and fathers mourning their dead children, children mourning their dead parents, women mourning their dead husbands, men mourning their dead wives and how closely their suffering resembles the aftereffects of an amputation, for the missing leg or arm was once attached to a living body, and the missing person was once attached to another living person, and if you are the one who lives on, you will discover that the amputated part of you, the phantom part of you, can still be a source of profound, unholy pain. (55)

Baumgartner doesn’t actually believe in ghosts, but he can feel Anna there the same way your leg might ache and itch even after it is no longer attached. The connection between people who love each other on a certain level—specifically parents and children, spouses—is not really severable, he affirms, for “certain remedies can sometimes alleviate the symptoms, but there is no ultimate cure” (55). Auster, who had lost his granddaughter and his son and who knew he was likely soon to leave his wife a widow, does not try to whitewash grief: it’s real and it’s forever. As he said in a 2023 interview with Nicholas Wroe in The Guardian, “When someone who is central to your life dies, a part of you dies as well. It’s not simple, you never get over it.”

There are other games afoot in Baumgartner. The protagonist’s work on Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms winks at Auster’s famous insistence on including his own name and details about himself, only sometimes factual, in all his books, here present in the form of Sy’s maternal family, the Austers, and his trip to Eastern Europe to learn their Holocaust story—a passage Auster published elsewhere before assigning it to Baumgartner, and one wherein again the fundamental need for fiction is affirmed. Baumgartner’s satirical work is on embodied consciousness and compares the human to an automobile. The novel ends with a car accident from which the character emerges either dead or alive, either proving or disproving his long-held materialist belief; we are never to know which in the space of the novel and we leave Sy, as we leave Auster, on the precipice of finding out.

Still, of all the deadly serious games going on in Baumgartner, it is the relationship between reader and writer suggested by the widower and his wife’s ghost that I cannot shake and that operates most clearly as Auster’s parting message to us, his readers and thus his co-creators. In “Ghosts,” probably the most famous of his works to use the metaphor of the ghost and the haunted to discuss the reader-writer dynamic, there is an ominous tension between the two throughout that erupts into deadly violence. Here, there is only love, grief at the necessity of parting, and hope that the meaning we have made together remains, that as long as the readers are still reading, the writer is not entirely lost. It feels like a confirmation of his life’s work as well as a loving goodbye to his readers, who will not have to wait too long, it turns out, to reconnect with Auster on the page; Siri Hustvedt, Auster’s wife and perennial first reader, is writing a memoir about their marriage appropriately entitled Ghost Stories. Let the haunting continue.

The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse
by Christopher Childers
(Penguin Classics, March 2024, 1008 pp., £45)

The Latin poet Horace, whom you might recognize as the most influential lyric poet of all time, wrote the following lines in the second poem of his fourth book of odes (translation mine):

Pindar: whosoever attempts to ape him,
Julus, counts on wings made of wax—those shaped by
Daedalus—who’s doomed to at once baptize some
hyaline ocean.

Rains that gush in rivulets down a mountain,
washing banks away, ripping through the treeline,
boiling, rushing, deep beyond mark or measure—
aye, that is Pindar.

If you are familiar with Horace, you know this is an ambivalent endorsement. Yet even if these lines partially serve to unfairly caricature Pindar (and parody his style), casting him as a blustering foil to the Roman poet’s Callimichean precision, modesty, and care—easy fodder for an ironic recusatio—the awe and admiration are sincere. Good Horatius was an avid student of Greek verse, and, following the promising Neoteric forays of Catullus, saw it as his mission to fully naturalize Archaic Greek meters in Latin. Horace emulated the techniques of several Greek poets (Alcaeus and Sappho in particular), and would certainly have made close study of Pindar. However, despite the occasional pastiche of the elder poet’s high register (see Ode 4.4.), Pindar is the major Greek lyricist whom the Augustan master (of the ode, no less!) explicitly shrunk from seriously imitating. Pindar, the Theban eagle, soars in air so rarified and perilous that it would be death to anyone else.

Horace’s legendizing but tentative attitude toward Pindar has largely—influenced by Horace himself—been the attitude of posterity: fascination and even veneration, but at a distance. Despite being perennially recommended by classicists, often in fanciful terms which rival Horace’s (a favorite, from F.L. Lucas’s Greek Poetry for Everyman: “Pindar’s power….lies in a splendor of phrase and imagery that suggests the gold and purple of a sunset sky”), Pindar has always been more praised than read, more popular as an idea than as a poet.

Nowhere is this truth more evident than in the goofy Restoration fad, pioneered by Abraham Cowley, for “Pindarique Odes”: irregularly metered and rhymed compositions which supposedly imitated the intuitive, inspired looseness of Pindar himself. As anyone who has read Pindar knows, this perception could not have been further from the truth—while the Boeotian is prone to rapid shifts in thought, his triadic choral form is as consistent, complexly patterned, and disciplined as a Bach fugue (for proof of this, see Elroy Bundy’s seminal Studia Pindarica).

Not everyone was taken in by such unscholarly fantasy, of course. In 1712, Richard Steele wrote dryly in The Spectator:

I saw Pindar walking all alone, no one daring to accost him till Cowley joyn’d himself to him, but, growing weary of one who almost walk’d him out of breath, he left him for Horace and Anacreon, with whom he seemed infinitely delighted.

Even in this playful rebuke, we hear the old Horatian song: “Pindar is untouchable.” And indeed, we may ask, what poet since has managed to capture something of the Pindaric spark? His coeval Aeschylus has a language of comparable strangeness and grandeur, as do Marlowe and Milton, Greek readers both; Classicist D.S. Carne-Ross has argued (in his Pindar) that Hölderlin possessed the true spirit of his idol. On the whole, however, we find that despite his hefty canonical status, Pindar possesses bewilderingly few descendants, contributing little to subsequent poetic practice other than the (now hopelessly inclusive) genre of “Ode.” Perhaps on Horace’s advice, few have dared to scale the eagle’s heights, while those who have dared have mostly embarrassed themselves (need I mention Boris Johnson’s faux-Pindaric recitation at the 2012 Olympics?).

There is no doubt however that the absence of Pindar’s influence can be attributed not so much to intimidation as to alienation. One would think that the figure widely acknowledged as Greece’s greatest lyric poet would be required reading for every schoolchild. Instead, he is, almost uniquely in literature, as unknown as he is prestigious. Why?

Frankly, because he is forbidding. Not only is Pindar’s language dense and adventurous, his thought patterns obscure, his forms byzantine, and his local references overwhelming, but the genre in which he has been by far best preserved—the Epinician, or Victory Ode—is a highly context-dependent, culturally specific genre which was only popular for two generations (Pindar’s Archaic ritualism was already becoming old-fashioned in his own day as Athenian Classicism began to dawn) and has never been revived since. His odes, written for specific parties celebrating specific athletic victories at the panhellenic games, full of arcane personal, regional, and mythological references, deeply pious, and intended, in their final form, to be sung and choreographed, are about as close to the modern understanding of the lyric as a leaf of illuminated plainsong is to a pop song. Sappho, who wrote simple, intensely emotional, angst-filled lyrics of homoerotic desire, is far more readily suited to the contemporary palate. Many people, even serious lovers of poetry, who give Pindar a shot based on his reputation come away feeling bored and bewildered. Contra highly enthused classicists, Voltaire gives us the common man’s view of Pindar: “Stuff everyone’s supposed to praise / and nobody can comprehend.” If only Voltaire had known about John Ashbery!

Those who really know him (i.e. classicists) love Pindar. Those who don’t tend to be put off. The question arises: must one be able to read ancient Greek dialects and be conversant in the history and social mores of 5th century Greece to appreciate this poet? If so, we might as well wash our hands of Pindar immediately and leave him to the scholars. If a poet is not universal, he is not great, and if he is not great, he is only of historical interest. Yet the canon insists: Pindar is great; and not just great—the greatest lyric poet of the greatest and most foundational culture of Western civilization. This claim merits investigation.

Let us admit at once that athletes and athletic games from well over two thousand years ago do not matter much to us. As for the telling of myths (the other principal content of Pindar’s odes), we have heard most of them before elsewhere. If Pindar’s poems are to intrigue us, they must do so on other merits—lyric merits. Firstly, how they are told—what is valuable about the language and the form? Secondly, what they signify—what are the ideas, emotions, and attitudes expressed, and why are they valuable? Let us let these questions ring in our heads while we place them in the background for a moment—in Pindaric fashion, we are shifting gears so that we may return with greater force.

***

In the contemporary world of letters, there are very few accomplishments which can guarantee artistic immortality. If any 21st century poet asserted, with Ovid, that he had written a work which “the corruption of time will not destroy” he would be dismissed as woefully naive. This year, however, Christopher Childers may have produced just such a work. His gargantuan tome of translations, The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse, the Hesperidean fruit of fourteen years of labor, is not only magnificent poetry, but, objectively speaking, a herculean, historically significant achievement. For the first time in English, a vast proportion of extant Classical short poetry has appeared in a single book by a single hand, translated into metrical, rhyming verse.

This would be impressive enough, but let us tread deeper into astonishment—for every single Greco-Roman meter Childers has assigned an English equivalent, and then consistently translated every single poem from its original meter into its determined equivalent. What is dactylic hexameter in Greek appears (with some noted exceptions) as blank verse in English; what is composed in elegiac couplets in Latin appears as heroic couplets in English. And this is just the tip of the iceberg: from Glyconic tercets to Sapphics to Phalaecian hendecasyllables, Childers has assigned an English alter ego for them all.

The result of all this prosodic rigor is a panoramic vista of Classical literature which was once available to classicists alone. From Archilochus to Martial, a period spanning 800 years and two titanic cultures, the reader can now not only track the development and popularity of various poetic forms and genres, but observe how poets have inspired and referenced one another, maintained, revolutionized or subverted conventions, and developed a centuries-long conversation which Childers has likened, beautifully, to a vast Platonic dialogue.

Finally, the fifty-ton cherry on top: Childers provides thorough endnotes for every single poem, and insightful, convivial introductions to every single poet and period discussed. Read cover to cover, The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse offers the reader an unprecedented and shockingly complete grasp of the most influential lyric corpus in the Western world. This is not a book one should simply “check out.” This is a book to own and treasure all one’s life, shelved beside one’s preferred Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Collected Shakespeare. This book is one of the major literary events of this decade.

Of course, the entire effort would be a mortifying failure if Childers was not a brilliant poet and technician in his own right. While his occasional, shamelessly square use of modern lingo or anachronistic phrases can make one wince, one is far more often charmed by the clarity, melodiousness, playfulness, and versatility of his language, which can modulate from Tennysonian dignity to Ginsbergian crassness as needed without breaking a sweat.

That being said, while Childers is a poet for all seasons and a meticulously faithful translator, his own personality cannot help but shine through in places, and one gets the delightful sense that to every ancient voice has been gifted an additional dose of the wry wit, mischievousness, and merriment which is his natural element. As one would expect, then, Childers’s finest translations are of poets who match his own sparkling, impish temperament, like Ovid and Anacreon. I refuse to believe anyone could improve on Childers’s romping rendition of Anacreon 417:

Why so cagey, Thracian filly,
………….glancing at me, all side-eyed?
Why do you insist on running?
………….You don’t think that I can ride?

I could slide the bridle on you
………….easy, take you for a spin,
maneuver you around the turnposts,
………….make you gallop, rein you in.

As it is, you munch the meadows,
………….free and frisky as you please,
lacking anyone to ride you
………….With a jockey’s expertise.

To produce a translation that sounds so good and conveys so well the spirit of the original is a kind of genius. I cannot help but grin ear to ear while reading it. Here is a perfect example of Childers’s technical mastery—the immaculate trochaic tetrameter (the extra beat on “maneuver” is a purposeful sonic joke),  the effortless rhymes, the resonances between words like “cagey” and “filly,” “slide” and “bridle” “frisky” and “jockey,” the double alliteration in the third quatrain—it is all simply a delight for the ear.

Some might argue, however, that it is even more impressive when a translator is able to excel outside of his element. Of all the hundreds of poets in such a wide-spanning collection, there is one who would be the obvious white whale for anyone: Pindar (“Don’t even try it!” heckles Horace). No one is so grand, serious, difficult, or formally complex. No one is so thoroughly un-modern. Like Abraham Cowley, Childers delights in the familiar company of Anacreon and Horace; unlike Cowley, he is also, remarkably, able to hold pace with the mighty Olympian.

Indeed, Pindar has actually been Childers’s intended conquest since the beginning. What ended up turning into this monumental fourteen-year project originally started as an email from Childers to Penguin, asking if they might be interested in a new translation of Pindar. During his labors, Childers wrote a sharp essay for Literary Matters entitled “Translating Pindar,” in which he gives both a thorough explanation of the multifarious difficulties presented by Pindar’s work and a spirited defense of the poetry through a close reading of the seventh Nemean ode. He concludes the essay with the following words, which I believe perfectly articulate the key to both his own interest in this poet and the interest which we should take in him:

Is Pindar’s difficult and aristocratic cosmos, that orderly arrangement which he both buttresses and sings into being through the complicated structures of his odes, worth engaging with on its own terms, precisely because it is different from our own? Those glimpses of cosmic unanimity, as well as the vision of graciousness in which the wheels of necessity and the gears of economy are lubricated with a large-hearted generosity and an impulse toward praise—might this have something to offer our cynical, materialistic age? Even, no, especially, if we don’t believe in his vision and never will, we might still be able to believe it for the duration of an ode, and find in Pindar’s poems a temporary relief from alienation and pessimism. That this vision is so difficult to recover, for reader and translator alike, may ultimately be the best argument for its value to both.

When, as moderns, we begin to read Pindar, we must not falter by mistaking the forest for the trees. We must not feel overwhelmed by the endless parade of names, accomplishments, and mythological anecdotes, but Platonically look past them to the spirit of the thing, the underlying idea, and then work our way back to the concrete particulars once we have become invested. If we do this, we shall learn to see the blazing light which is at the core of all the poems, which illuminates and sanctifies them, and which elevates their mundane subject matter to cosmic significance. Pindar is valuable to us chiefly because of how he sees the world, which is so far superior to how most of us see it. He emanates infinite gratitude, infinite enthusiasm for human beauty and glory, yet also fiercely embraces sorrow, loss, and uncertainty as part of the mortal bargain, and stresses always both the reality and necessity of human limitation. He is, in the most literal and unpatronizing sense, wholesome—the most wholesome poet we have. Beside the brilliant Grecian sunlight of Pindar, beaming with his archaic smile, the boasting, bloviating Whitman is but a pale satellite. The concluding triad of Pythian 8 is Pindar’s most famous passage, as well as the passage which best illustrates his existential thesis. In Childers’s translation, it runs:

Strophe: 
Onto four bodies from above
with violent thoughts you pounced, and strove.
For them, Pytho bestowed
no happy homecoming, no wreath;
no mother’s tears of joy, no welcome laughter flowed
at their return. They slink
down alleyways instead, and shrink
clear of their foes, clamped in disaster’s teeth.

Antistrophe:
But one who gains some new success
on wings of soaring manliness
and splendid hope takes flight
toward future deeds, for he has caught
a passion beyond wealth. In no time, man’s delight
bursts into bloom, but just
as fast collapses in the dust
shaken by a breeze, a shift in thought.

Epode:
One day we live. What is someone? What is no one? A dream
of a shadow, man; no more. But when the heavens shed their gleam,
our life grows sweet and light shines over us.
Dear Mother Aegina, safeguard this city’s
voyage of freedom, with Zeus and with King Aeacus,
and Peleus, and noble Telamon, and with Achilles.

In the strophe, we see that even in an ode commissioned to celebrate a wrestling triumph, Pindar does not neglect to remember the losers and grieve for them. He sings of their suffering not to guilt-trip his client, but to enable him to better appreciate his own victory—but for the grace of the gods, but for the beautiful strength and skill granted him by his illustrious ancestors, his fate could have been like theirs. Their despairing shadow is what gives his own light preciousness and brilliance.

In the antistrophe, Pindar insists that the feeling of victory, which begets hopes for future victories, is a “passion beyond wealth.” Indeed, as he says many times elsewhere, the joy and glory of great achievement is when human beings come closest to the gods. And yet, Pindar warns, this blooming delight may collapse into dust at the slightest provocation. The insight here is not simply that life is precarious and fortune fickle—it is that joy and glory are contingent upon this being the case.

In the epode, which Carne-Ross called “the greatest lines in Greek,” we begin with an utterance which sounds similar to immortal lines from Calderon and Shakespeare, but Pindar is the great original. A man is not so much as a shadow, as Plato might have later argued, he is merely a dream of a shadow—utterly unreal, utterly insignificant. Twenty-five hundred years ago, Pindar stared Nihilism in the face. And yet, he says, and yet: “when the heavens shed their gleam, our life grows sweet and light shines over us.”

Here we are to understand light, just as we are to understand the gods themselves, as being equally figurative and literal. When the gods see fit to illuminate our lives with beauty, glory, and victory, our meaningless existences become not only worth living, but godlike themselves. But also, simply the beauty and warmth of the sun itself shining down on us ought to be enough to convince us that life is worth living. This reminds me of one of my favorite lines of Pindar, the first line of the first Olympian ode: “Of all things, water is best.” The richness of that! You could not come up with a more austere yet life-affirming sentence.

Having himself just attained a great victory over the forces of darkness, Pindar does not drop the mic, but redirects momentum, and closes with a benediction for the victorious athlete’s city and a recitation of the great heroes of Aegina: Aeacus, Peleus, Telamon, Achilles. As in Milton, one has the suspicion that the sensuous thrill of reciting these proper nouns is their principal justification—the greatness we savor of the glorious dead can practically be tasted on the tongue. But Pindar is no mere aesthete. He pronounces the names of the dead not only to inspire the living, but to call up the shades of the underworld to bear witness to their descendant’s glory. Time, for Pindar, is cyclical (not, contra later classical humanism, linear and progressive) and great deeds in one generation beget great deeds in another. The living and the dead are one family, one divine garden in the process of seeding, sprouting, blossoming, dying, and fertilizing, fed by the light of the gods.

If we have now begun to get a sense of Pindar’s content, it remains to investigate his formal qualities. Looking at Childers’s translation above, we notice very little of the serpentine syntax and linguistic compression associated with this difficult poet. Part of that has to do with the passage in question, but largely it has to do with Childers’s conscious efforts to, in his own words, “domesticate” Pindar, sacrificing puzzling details and original stylistic choices in order to make the translation idiomatic and accessible while still maintaining fealty to the text. Given Pindar’s forbidding otherness and persistent unpopularity, this is a completely reasonable decision, but it provides a good case in point for why we must possess (and read) multiple translations of the same poet. If you are principally interested in Pindar’s verbal inventiveness and archaic bizarreness, you will find substantial hints of it in Childers’s renditions, but you will ultimately have to look elsewhere.

On the other hand, if you are interested in getting a sense of what a choral ode actually looks like, Childers is your man. Given the sad fact that Greek meters cannot be replicated in English (because our meters are stress-based rather than duration-based), and given the fact that Ancient Greek poetry does not rhyme, Childers nevertheless does an admirable job of approximating Pindar’s metrical and stanzaic complexity in English, which to my knowledge has never been done before.

Consider the choral triad quoted above. The strophe consists of a polymetrical stanza which runs, line by line: tetrameter, tetrameter, trimeter, tetrameter, hexameter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter. In other words, it has a metrical scheme of 4-4-3-4-6-3-4-5. Then, on top of that, Childers employs a rhyme scheme which runs: AABCBDDC. What is extraordinary about this is that, new rhymes aside, Childers is able to replicate this exact pattern in the next stanza, the antistrophe, just as Pindar would have done, before inventing a brand-new complex stanza for the concluding epode—again, as Pindar would have done. It would be hard enough to compose an original poem of such formal complexity. It would be harder still to maintain this complex triadic pattern five times in a row (a total of fifteen stanzas), which Childers does. The fact that Childers is doing all this while also being faithful to the notoriously difficult Pindaric Greek is nigh-flabbergasting. This is virtuosity played out over several degrees of magnitude.

If Childers had been satisfied to translate a few odes and call it a day, he would already have covered himself with glory and become emblazoned into the history of Pindaric translation. However, one of the very greatest gifts Childers offers the reader is that he also translates some of Pindar’s fragmentary deep cuts—i.e., poems which are not odes to athletic victories. In doing so, he performs a crucial service to Anglophone letters, not only because these fragments are so rarely translated, but because their revelation utterly shatters the distorted image of Pindar as a zealous sports fan, and reveals as never before the dizzying, genre-spanning range and all-encompassing genius of the greatest Greek lyricist. While woefully incomplete, these shards of hymns, dithyrambs, paeans, and dirges provide tantalizing glimpses of a gigantic talent whose equally gigantic oeuvre, like those of the Athenian tragedians, has been mostly lost to oblivion.

We learn from these fragments that Pindar himself anticipated the intimate, poignant charm of Horace, as in Scolia 124:

Dear Thrasybulus, here: I’m sending you this little craft
of lovely song for after you have eaten. May it sweeten
your spirited camaraderie and vivify each draft

of Bacchic grapes and Attic cups, and goad you to keep going.
for when the tedious weight of human pain begins to strain
out of the heart, the seas turn gold and all alike go rowing

easily through abundance to a beach of make believe….

He anticipated the sensuous, pastoral panoramas of Theocritus, as in Threnoi 129:

………….And while night overshadows
the upper world, the sun shines on the lower
………….with its full power,
and there, in red-rose-raddled meadows,
souls of the righteous have their residence
among the cool shade-canopies
of trees loaded with golden fruit, and trees
………….of frankincense;
and there they take their leisure,
some horseback-riding, some in training, some
absorbed in games or dice, while others strum
………….the lyre for their pleasure,
and flourishing takes root and blooms
………….amidst all this,
spreading an unadulterated bliss,
………….and sweet perfumes
suffuse the lovely landscape, for they never tire
………….Of sacrifice,
and mingle every kind of spice
at the gods’ altars while each beaconing fire
………….Kindles still higher.

He dabbles in mystical poetry, as in Threnoi 131b:

for over every mortal frame
indomitable Death has staked his claim;
still, there’s a likeness of our life which keeps
alive, and is the only thing the gods
have given of themselves. It sleeps
while we’re awake, but, when the body nods,
in dream on dream it renders clear
the judgment, harsh or sweet, that’s drawing near.

And he (perhaps unwittingly) perfects the epigram, as in his famous fragment:

What is god?
What isn’t?

A pithier statement of Pantheism has yet to be written. I hope that all of these examples demonstrate not only the value of Pindar, but the loveliness and finesse of Childers’s translations. If Childers had gotten his original wish, and produced a translation of Pindar’s odes, it would have been a must-have for all lovers of poetry. The fact that he has given us more of Pindar than his odes, and, oh yes, that’s right, a panoramic view of all Greco-Roman lyric, is something for which the history of civilization owes him a debt of gratitude. And if I, on an exponentially smaller scale, have accomplished anything here, I hope it is that I have encouraged you to not only purchase Childers’s book, but to look at Pindar specifically with fresh eyes. With any luck, future generations will find that this forgotten master’s poetry, like a draught of cold water in the blazing Theban sun, can nourish and strengthen as few others can—detoxifying us, at least temporarily, of our modern sicknesses, and enabling us to feel for a moment the ferocious beauty and dignity of being human in the world.

I, Divided
by Chelsea Dingman
(LSU Press, 2023, 126 pp., $22.95)

“I’m tempted to say I begin.” This is the line that ends Chelsea Dingman’s 2023 poetry collection, I, Divided. The book is her fourth (preceded by Thaw in 2017, What Bodies I Have Moved (chapbook) in 2018, and Through a Small Ghost in 2020), and as its final line about beginnings signals, there is a cyclicity to the collection. Birth, death, health, trauma, addiction, and familial relationships are considered and reconsidered through poems that attempt to weather the chaos inherent in a life and strike a balance between determination and choice.

Chaos, incidentally, is a defining characteristic of the collection. The epigraphs tell us as much, taken as they are from Christian Oestreicher’s “A History of Chaos Theory” and Edward Norton Lorenz’s theory of the Butterfly Effect. And while the paratextual material primes us to expect chaos in the collection, the poems still manage to surprise in their full embrace of instability, unpredictability, and equivocation. This chaos is not felt formally; many of the poems follow a regular pattern, often in couplets, and only one or two feel fractured on the page. Even so, it is rare to find a poem that offers a safe harbor in the eye of the storm of uncertainty and potential pain into which they have brought the reader. Instead, they ask and ask and ask again—What is a life worth? What makes it worthwhile, and who decides? And what deference do we owe that decision? Despite its insistence on these questions, however, there still is, as Dingman offers in a 2023 interview with John Sibley Williams, an “answerlessness” to the collection. It might suggest, might suppose, but it won’t answer.

But isn’t answerlessness a hallmark of a good poem after all? Language with teeth that bite, roots that clutch, demanding that you unsettle yourself to consider experience anew? The poems in I, Divided certainly prompt us to do so with their emphasis on possibility and their tension between deterministic inevitability and individual agency. This consideration of the possible governs the first and third sections of the collection, titled “I over what might have been” and “I over what can be,” respectively (echoing the division expressed in the title if we read the “over” as a verbal sign of the vinculum in a fraction). The middle section, “I over what was,” still echoes this titular division, but presents itself as more certain than the other sections with its solid simple past tense of known experience. But even this is troubled, however; what “was” is no longer and only exists warped by the fallibility of memory.

To consider Dingman’s poetry itself, then, I want to linger on “How to Live in Holy Matrimony,” the poem that begins both the section and the book itself. Amidst description of a marriage of sweat and “not yets,” of routine love and inevitable death, the poem demands that we “Consider the conditional. What aches to be other than itself?” It doesn’t answer the question directly, but the answer is no real mystery—the reader recognizes this ache, the desire to experience a different iteration of life and loneliness, and make these holy. Dingman uses this same reverence for the possible and the imagined throughout the rest of this first section as her poems take up subjects ranging from brain injury to suicide to marriage, again. She returns often to the image of a hurricane and its devastation (evocative, perhaps, of both the language of Lorenz’s epigraph and Dingman’s own experience with the natural phenomenon from the years she lived in Florida). Many of the poems circle around themselves as they push toward their conclusion, landing in non-answers of repetition that imply a weary, resigned endurance: “If, in case this doesn’t pass, the rain / is just rain is just rain is just rain” (“Principles of Chaos”); “Any god or human who condemns him as missing / Or whomever, already, we miss, & miss, & miss (“At the Brain Injury Research Institute”); “when a flicker is all & all & all” (“Litany of When”); “says he gave everything so how much can he take & take & take & take” (“Suicidology”). The rain and the missing, the flicker and the taking, continue on, leaving the reader with a sense of something unfinished in the same way the poem “Deterministic Chaos” does, with its ending line of “where the future lies, broken;”. By ending with a semicolon rather than a period, Dingman leaves the poem open to the possible, bleak and broken as it may be.

If the possible shapes the first section of I, Divided, it is memory that shapes the second, “I over what was.” The poems here acknowledge the impulse to “make holy the dead in hindsight,” as this Ginsbergian flash in “Stigmata,” the last poem of the section, asserts. Returning again and again to the topics of death, addiction, suicide, and familial pain, Dingman explores what it means to live through and beyond such intimate anguishes. A number of poems address this particular matrix, but I am often drawn back to “Marcescence” in particular. The poem begins with a statement of a question: “What if death wasn’t easy.” There is no question mark to identify this as a genuine inquiry; instead, the period here signals a speaker that is resigned to the fact that the possibility it asks after has not, and will never, be fulfilled. And yet, as the title signifies, taken as it is from the phenomenon of a deciduous tree failing to drop its leaves in the winter, there is something retained that shouldn’t be. Is it hope? Love, even in the face of a person who was difficult to love? A dream that a dying brother could still somehow “stand ungrateful” with the speaker? The poem ends with the line “I have no idea what any of this means,” and, although it refuses to grant readers some clear meaning about what is to be done with this holding on or how to make sense of it, the incomprehensibility and frustration it expresses seem fitting for an exploration of death. Making meaning from death, especially when one is not sure what, if anything, comes after (a topic in this section that “Noli Me Tangere” discusses directly, and other poems in the collection touch on obliquely) makes answering the “so what” or the “why” of suffering nearly impossible. And yet the poems in “I over what was,” do not give up in their attempt to find some clarity about death as they look to the past, to “any bankrupt thing / bearing the marks of life” (“Stigmata”).

I, Divided ends with “I over what can be,” a consideration of the future, and importantly, the future that “can be,” not the future that “might be.” I draw attention to the specific modal helping verb not (merely) for the sake of close reading pedantry, but to note that it sets up a future that seems predicated on some agency or action on the speaker’s behalf—it must be achieved. What a future it is: aging, motherhood, cancer, the loss of a mother, and death are what we have to look forward to. And are these things really possible to achieve, when so many of them come down to mere accident or the inevitable progression of time in the end? As she weighs this question, Dingman constructs a future that is elegiac in nature as it mourns and remembers the life that came before. One such poem is the seven-part sonnet sequence “It’s Possible a Mother’s Body Is Elegy.” In it, Dingman uses variations on the sonnet to create an interconnected and cyclical reflection on womanhood and the loss of a mother. The poem is wracked with grief, even as its speaker explains that she “can’t grieve.” But her abnegation and loneliness shine through regardless in the use of nature images of barrenness and winter, and in the characterization of the lost mother as “a cistern, a sense, a silence.” It too, like other poems in the collection already discussed here, never fully concludes; its final line “I stayed away until your body was—” not only ends with the unclosed em-dash but also is an exact return to the line that began the sequence. The grief and the loss are inescapable, enduring. The reading of this poems is not to imply, of course, that this future-looking final section of Dingman’s collection is entirely cynical. There are small moments of hope throughout—that the lump won’t be cancer, that the child will live safely, that things will be better. But even so, these are qualified hopes, the hopes of a speaker who almost seeks a kind of oblivion in life, who opens a window and “The sky spits. I feel, & I feel nothing. / I anoint myself with sky, & swallow.”

As a whole collection, Chelsea Dingman’s I, Divided manages to engage with the bleak, the troubling, and the painful elements of life without becoming buried by them and without losing itself to deterministic nihilism. There is a resilience, quiet as it may be, to the collection as it takes up its various subjects that keep the poems feeling new, even as they return to similar themes and subjects throughout. The strongest section by far is the first, “I over what might have been.” Dingman’s use of natural imagery and the principles of chaos theory are felt most vividly here and lend the poems a firm foundation and frame for the questions they ask. And while answerlessness may still be the prevailing feeling at the close of the collection, one reads the final poem with the sense that they still have managed to get somewhere, or learn something, or open some new door, and that, at least for Dingman, is enough.

Raft 
by Ted Kooser
(Copper Canyon, 2024, 94 pp., $23.00)

Ted Kooser has that rare ability to maintain, from poem to poem, a voice that is immediately recognizable for its devotion to the truth of simple observation. Throughout his career, he has been steadfast in his commitment to discovery, against backdrops ranging from the quotidian to the otherworldly. In his most recent book, Raft, Kooser’s unabashed use of figurative language strikes readers of contemporary poetry with a familiarity that still fascinates, inviting us to return to the genuine allure of poetry.

Raft evinces Kooser’s uncompromising use of metaphor, as seen, for instance, in the poem “Moon Shadows”: “All night the moon was a lamp held steady….” And he has no reservations about personifying an oak tree “compos[ing] a long letter, thoughtfully forming / each word in the copperplate script / of its shadows.” After wondering who that letter might be addressed to, the speaker awakens to find that the shadows have disappeared and the “sky was gray.” Yet, the tree is still standing, “reaching up into a few scattered snowflakes” if only to “let them slip through, / and there was no letter, whatever its message.” Although the tree has no “letter,” its “message” is clear—it is the tree itself. Such a turn as this is characteristic of Kooser’s work. As he explains in a 2010 interview in the Writer’s Chronicle, “To show my readers something remarkable about an ordinary, ubiquitous thing is part of my calling as a writer.”

Indeed, Raft is replete with poems about the ordinary, whether people or things: the choreography of a boy feeding goldfish, a hotel maid overwhelmed by linens, an older man taking a walk with a younger man. There are also chance encounters, often between strangers, or people reunited after many years, those who were once familiar but who now are strangers. Whether writing about nature or childhood, Kooser captures liminal moments in a manner suggestive of Wordsworth’s “spots of time”—and he sees, as Wordsworth did, the grandeur of the commonplace, where nothing is too mundane to enchant the imagination.

Raft is comprised of three sections in total. In the titular “Raft” of Section One, the speaker and his boyhood friends discover a barn door “at the said to be bottomless pond / at the sandpit,” which some older boys have left behind as a raft, and, seemingly, as a rite of passage. Young and spontaneous, the four boys find themselves “frightened but laughing” while situated atop the precarious door. Trying to balance upon it, they have “not a forethought among us for a pole / to push out with, nor a plank for an oar, / as we trusted that door as it floated / not on but under the surface….” Trust is key here, trust in each other, trust in the raft to hold them up despite its being submerged:

Seventy years later, I still feel that door
sinking under my weight, can still see
the white faces of Larry and Billy
and Danny looking across into mine
as we held our arms wide, as if to keep
some wild, free, invisible creature
there at the center from running away,
and at eighty, I know what that was.

The poem is ambiguous about what, exactly, it is “there at the center,” whether it is balance, or something more ominous. While the reader may assume that this “creature” is what is keeping the boys afloat, this “creature” is also something that is “wild” and “free,” infused, perhaps, with the spontaneity and adventure of childhood. In my view, the “creature” is neither safety nor danger but rather the spirit of the imagination, awakened in childhood, and sustained over the course of one’s life. The speaker did not realize it then, but he recognizes it now, seventy years later. This is not simply a poem nostalgic about adolescence, it is a poem about keeping alive that adventurous spirit within, not to mention the Wordsworthian restoration of memory later in life.

Another poem, “Room Service,” meditates on a hotel maid changing bedsheets:

Through the open door of the room across from mine
I saw a woman unmaking a bed. She looked bone weary

as she hauled in the bleached, empty net of a sheet,
heaping it, rank from the depths, at her feet…

The poem transforms the used bedsheet into a fishing net, and the clean sheets into ocean waves. The guests (who slept on the sheets the night before) have now slipped through “that seine and swum on, and no one / had been there to see those naked creatures, fish-belly white, / / as they rose through layers of dream / to lip at the dark, / to effortlessly fin in and out of the netting / / and then to be gone….” The sheets, as billowing waves, are conflated with hotel guests continuously coming in and going out. For Kooser, repetition in labor is like repetition in the poet’s task; both are disarming, and both are transformative.

“Shepherd of Carts” addresses a man working in a Walmart’s busy parking lot, collecting the empty carts as if they were lost sheep: “A few years ago I wrote a short poem / describing you in your yellow safety vest, / in the rain, pushing a jingling train of carts across / the Walmart parking lot, / and then left you behind….” There is a tinge of regret in these lines, as well as a clever sense of the symbolic. The poet, veering off, seems to abandon the poem, just as the careless shoppers have abandoned their carts without returning them, making the work of shepherding all the more difficult. Spotting the workman’s dayglow vest, the speaker ensures that he has not gone unnoticed. Ethically, for Kooser, recognizing those who ordinarily go unseen is crucial, not only as a poet, but as an empathetic person, the two being synonymous:

I saw you again, collecting your dingy,
belled flock gone astray, not much changed
about you, you with the same dark look
beneath the bill of your cap, and those same
ratty sneakers splayed out in a sort of
duck-walk from all the pushing…

This is vintage Kooser, who, by way of the poetic imagination, goes on to inhabit the subjectivity of the other. It is a Sisyphean task, catching a cart only to have it wander away again, until the last detail is rendered, and the humanity of the shepherd is made visible, if not in life, then at least in poetry:

me trying to fit into your broken-down,
badly run-over shoes, feeling a cart handle
cold in my fingers, the last drops of rain
starry bright on backs of my hands.

Section One closes with one of Kooser’s most exquisite, most understated poems. In “Gauze,” the speaker asks in a manner remarkably devoid of self-pity: “Can a man in his eighties, with cancer, / be happy?” He answers, “[it] seems that he can,” and then he describes scattering “yesterday’s gauze dressing” over the grass for the wrens, who are building their nests after a long winter. Watching the wrens make something of value out of the surgical gauze gives the speaker a cyclical sense of life and death, as well as of happiness, and it brings to mind his building a birdhouse as a boy:

In his birdhouses built with the old boards
that he salvaged in happiness, which he
hammered together in happiness, too.

Building the house gives the child a sense of accomplishment; of course, the image is likewise suggestive of Kooser the poet, who here seems to be reflecting upon the many poems he has built for readers.

Section Two of Raft shifts to poems about the natural world, seen up close, as in the poem “Glint.” “Glint” opens characteristically with a casual observation: “I watched a glint of morning sunlight / climbing a thread of spider’s silk / in a gentle breeze.” The speaker watches it shimmy up from the grass to the branch and leaves, followed by “glint after glint.” From there he sees it synesthetically, in terms of sound: “one clear, shining note / … as if the sun / were tuning the day, then handing it / to me to play.” As exemplified in “Glint,” the visual sense is always primary in Kooser’s poetry.

Poems like “A Place in the Air,” “Fawns,” and “Nocturne” embody the spirit of the lyric, but they also narrate stories, often inspired by the mere presence of ordinary objects. In “Worn Smooth,” for instance, the speaker describes a ladder while imagining a man climbing up and down it:

Not the full width of the rungs
on that ancient oak ladder, but
the centers, where his hands fit
and his sandy boots followed,
up into the loft with its low hills
of dusty, dead hay, the tin roof
a starscape of holes sprinkling
light on a stack of used lumber…

The speaker recalls how the man climbed up and down it, “carrying this or that, burden / or blessing, on a ladder that might / have been too heavy to move but / weighed almost nothing in place.” When it is supporting his weight, and when it is being moved, the ladder is heavy, but at rest it is weightless, reminiscent of poetry itself, both earthbound and light. As with the ladder, even in a whiskbroom something catches the speaker’s eye, the unseen, the unnoticed. Here the broom has swept up “this miniscule blossom, used up but clinging / to what it was meant for, still with some dusty sky in it.” While the fields have been mowed away, a dried flower, that has lost its seeds, comes to “sweeten a broom.”

It is only in the third and final section that Kooser’s cancer diagnosis enters the foreground. Section Three focuses on memory, occasional poems, poems about people lost and found again, and more profoundly, poems about old age, wisdom, regret, and mortality. The volume ends with “Bird,” a poem that makes a statement that is somewhat unusual for Kooser, as it seems to extend the conversation rather than bringing it to a close. This poem, both personal and ambiguous, analogizes death, and the overall arc of the book’s various encounters.

“Bird” recounts a chance encounter in a cemetery between the speaker’s mother and the mother’s schoolmate. Each one is there to lay flowers and decorative items upon the gravesite of a loved one. Each one, after all the decades that have passed since their last meeting, recognizes a feature in the other that renders her suddenly identifiable. What each one sees in the other is their lost childhood, which theme conjures the volume’s opening poem, “Raft”:

“they reached out and took each other’s elbows, and they looked into each other’s eyes, and the woman, whose voice faltered an instant, softly said “Vera,” and my mother, whose voice caught, too, said “Bird.”

One might wonder why Kooser would choose to end Raft with this moment of silent communion. Kooser’s poems typically end in epiphany; however, here the sense of sudden realization is forestalled, at least for us readers, who are not familiar with the person bearing the name “Bird.” Rather than share in this flashbulb moment, we are left to simply ponder the meaning of “Bird,” not as a name but as a word. For readers, then, as for the classmates meeting in the cemetery after all these years, the significance of the chance encounter is a blend of the old and the new—the intimately recognizable and the strangely unfamiliar.

Birds have that unique ability to inhabit both the earth and the sky, and so the image of the woman named “Bird” leaves us with an elusive feeling, one that is as indistinct and fleeting as the sight of an old friend after many decades is precise. The feeling we are left with is but a faint suggestion. It leaves behind only a trace in the mind—I believe this is Kooser’s signature. For he lives out there on the edge of flight, always, before too long, touching down on earth again.

Homer is the world’s first great poet of dogs, but he was not always so. He warms and rises to the subject. Dogs play a persistent, if not pervasive, nimbly metaphorical, seldom literal, role in the Iliad. The Odyssey portrays more vivid and lively dogs, some who are characters in their own right, and collectively these dogs (in fortuitous anagram) rival the gods as sentient beings who, though not human themselves, refine and deepen what it means to be fully human.

 

Dogs in the Iliad

From the opening invocation onward, the Iliad mentions hundreds of dogs, with over eighty variations upon kuōn, almost always in the plural, among other canine terms. And yet these multitudinous dogs play an oddly minor role in the epic. While dogs are frequently mentioned, they are seldom actually seen. They develop no individuality, display no personality, exert no real presence. They are found in formulaic phrases, often paired, either negatively with carrion birds, or more positively (though sometimes it is hard to tell) with human beings. They often figure in similes, but usually as a secondary supporting element, and in terser metaphors, invariably pejorative. They do haunt, though only vaguely, the minds and fears of warriors, including Hektor and Akhilleus, and finally of Priam. But these dogs never actually do anything. Amid so many Homeric animals—dynamic battle horses, birds both scavenging and auguring, lions and boars starring in similes and metaphors, oxen sacrificed in culture-confirming ceremony and eaten with real hunger—dogs play a relatively minor role in the Iliad. Narratively, they are but service animals. Nonetheless, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards Oscars for best supporting role, and to be a secondary or even tertiary motif in Homer is no trivial matter.

The first book of the Iliad gives a representative sampling of Homeric dogs. The celebrated invocation is surprisingly brief, and yet it finds room to include dogs, here in one of its common pairings:

Anger be now your song, immortal one,
Akhilleus’ anger, doomed and ruinous,
that caused the Akhaians loss on bitter loss
and crowded brave souls into the undergloom,
leaving so many dead men—carrion
for dogs and birds; and the will of Zeus was done.^[1]

Homer’s first dogs pair with carrion birds, an association and imprinting impression they will never entirely shake. In contrast with the Muse and Zeus who enjoy song, willful dominance, and eternal life, these scavengers symbolize death and desecration. Hundreds and thousands of lines later, characters pick up this grim coupling and energize it with contempt and rage. Agamemnon threatens any soldier who thinks of shirking battle, “But let me see / one of you willing to drop out . . . he has no chance against the dogs and kites” (2.459-62) after, presumably, Agamemnon has killed him. At the other end of the epic Akhilleus similarly―these bitter rivals have much in common, especially in their darker moods―taunts dying Hector, “Dogs and birds will have you, every last scrap” (22.422). But these are just words. Akhilleus does indeed defy Agamemnon and refuses to fight for much of the story, and dogs and birds never defile him, nor does Hektor’s corpse ever suffer its promised desecration. With no individuality or even physical presence, these scavengers are mere curses. The most realistic thing about this pairing is that the dogs are always mentioned first, suggesting that, on the downward curve of the circle of life, the dogs eat first and then the birds pick at what remains.

Yet dogs in the Iliad are far from being a sure and simple negative. Back in Book One, for instance, less than fifty lines down from their first invidious mention, dogs are no longer instruments of death and desecration but cross over to join humans, explicitly in dying, implicitly in living, as victims who suffer and, perchance, are to be pitied. As Apollo answers Khryses’ prayer against the Danaans, “Pack animals were his target first, and dogs, / but soldiers, too, soon felt transfixing pain / from his hard shots, and pyres burned night and day” (1.58-60). Though not quite spinning with a positive valence, not yet, these dogs are cursed but are not curses themselves. One degree closer than the pack animals, they share a special bond with humanity. Later mentions, especially in the epic similes, will develop the dog-human relationship still more positively and vividly.

But first, Book One broaches dogs one more time, in a logical permutation upon these precedents. If dogs are often awful, and humans are deeply linked to dogs, then humans may be just as wretched as dogs. Amidst a torrent of persiflage, Akhilleus adds this insult to Agamemnon, “Sack of wine, / you with your cur’s eyes [kunos ommat’] and antelope heart” (1.265-66). The metaphor runs both ways. The beastly greed of dogs degrades Agamemnon; the selfish connivance of Agamemnon degrades dogs. Joined in their “shamelessness”—what Fitzgerald and Franco see as the defining canine quality—dogs and men struggle to survive in an ugly hostile world.^[2] Fitzgerald, in fact, on the basis of this association of dogs and shamelessness, adds dozens of “dogs” to sharpen the invectives of his translation despite no kuōn or other explicitly doggish term in the original text.

And yet whole books of the Iliad never mention dogs. Intriguingly, these dogless books, such as Book Three, seem, at first, in their focus more on the gods in their divine realm than mortal men clashing on earth, to suggest a stratification along the great chain of being: beastly dogs link to the lower nature of humans, while gods link to humanity’s better half—until the gods go doggish themselves. Olympians and other divine forces dominate Book Twenty-One, and prove themselves as angry and ugly as Agamemnon and Akhilleus. Ares disparages Athena, “dogfly” (kunamuia) an insult that Hera then spins around to describe Aphrodite, “There that dogfly goes, escorting Ares, / bane of mankind” (21.461, 490-91). Hera then turns on Artemis, “How can you think to face me, shameless bitch” (21.560, kuon addees). Rather than a simple vertical chain, it is something like the more expansive dimensions of a Venn diagram of dogs, humans, and gods, where a significant amount of overlap exists. If humans and human nature are the primary subject of the Iliad, then dogs and gods are two complementary illuminating accessories to that primary subject.

The valence of doggishness in the Iliad is not always a negative, particularly in the nearly two dozen epic similes that include dogs. In these similes dogs can be found only in the secondary subject or “vehicle,” and rarely in the front seat of that vehicle. In one of those rare instances, the primary subject—Hektor in one of his shining moments—is likened to a hunting dog:

. . . Hektor, elated, leading the attack.
You know the way a hunting dog will harry
a wild boar or a lion after a chase,
and try to nip him from behind, to fasten
on flank or rump, alert for an opening
as the quarry turns and turns: darting like that,
Hektor harried the long-haired men of Akhaia,
killing off stragglers one by one . . .     (8.380-87)

This outlier of a simile requires an almost algebraic manipulation to clarify its value and function. The subject is noble Hektor, perhaps the most exemplary warrior of the Iliad, but he is frightfully violent here, wreaking havoc on the Akhaians. The dog helps clarify this ambivalence. As in so many Homeric similes, the metaphor runs both ways. Hektor ennobles the dog, notably just one of two instances of a single dog in this epic, as close as the Iliad comes to granting a dog some semblance of individuality. At the same time the dog justifies Hektor and his violence. Hektor is a domestic dog bravely protecting the farmstead or even the whole civitas from the beastliness of lion or boar or Akhaian. In the uncannily tight karmic and poetic economy of the Iliad, it is Akhilleus, chasing Hektor naturally, who is later also likened to a single dog as the starring vehicle of a simile (22.222-27).

In all the other similitudes, dogs belong not only to the vehicle of the comparison, but they are relegated to minor elements, secondary, or tertiary, and even then often have to share that minor role. Consider Sarpedon in a moment of fury, in one of the longest and most exquisitely paced similes reverberating back and forth between tenor and vehicle until the two converge as one, beginning and ending in spearmen:

Lord Zeus impelled Sarpedon, his own son,
Against the Argives like a lion on cattle.
Circular was the shield he held before him,
hammered out of pure bronze: aye, the smith
had hammered it, and riveted the plates
to thick bull’s hide on golden rods rigged out
to the full circumference. Now gripping this,
hefting a pair of spears, he joined the battle,
formidable as some hill-bred lion, ravenous
for meat after long abstinence. His valor
summons him to attempt homesteads and flocks—
and though he find herdsmen on hand with dogs
and spears to guard the sheep, he will not turn
without a fling at the stockade. One thing
or the other: a mighty leap and a fresh kill,
or he will fall at the spearman’s feet, brought down
by a javelin thrown hard. (12.329-45)

How incidental the dogs seem at first, but they help clarify a profound contradiction in human nature, indeed in the larger Homeric world view. In the tenor of the simile, Sarpedon is a force of beastly violence, while in the vehicle the herdsmen strive to resist that violence. The breadth of the simile spans a divided human nature at war with itself. More strangely, the supreme god “impel[s]” that violence, while the humble dogs join forces with the herdsmen to resist it. The pairing is so simple, andras sun kusi, as dogs align with humanity’s better nature on behalf of life, peace, abundance and community, while the gods inspire man’s more destructive impulses. To borrow Lincoln’s language from another epic war, it is as if the dogs, not the gods, at least here and in the many similes they inhabit, are “the better angels of our nature.”

Dogs play a subtle significant role in the epic similes, where the secondary material in the vehicles evokes and affirms the common life outside the extraordinary circumstances of siege and battle, a shared life that transcends the divisions of Akhaians and Trojans. Tony Hoagland well takes their measure:

Homer’s metaphors are unobtrusive acts of what could be called “culture binding.” Even when describing scenes of violence, destruction, war, or great storms, Homer’s metaphors assert the ultimate unity of Greek culture, its unfragmented wholeness and unity.

Hoagland’s holistic reading of these many similes can be adapted to that other signature exercise of Homeric style, here not multitudinous and pervasive but rather a singular one, though multi-faceted in its own way: the Shield of Akhilleus. The similes and shield play similar roles, and with a few strategic modifications, Hoagland’s assessment of the similes well describes how the shield functions as an

unobtrusive acts of what could be called “culture binding.” Even when describing scenes of violence, destruction, war, or great storms, [especially when describing the tasks and rituals of daily life,] [Akhilleus’/Hephaestus’]/Homer’s metaphors [shield] assert[s] the ultimate unity of Greek culture, its unfragmented wholeness and unity.^[3]

So many elements appear in both the vehicles of the myriad similes and the singular yet multi-faceted shield: herding, ploughing, harvesting, fighting, dancing, stargazing, and much more. And dogs are found here too.

Engraved by Hephaestus upon the shield in gold and tin, inscribed by Homer in lines of dactylic hexameter, the herding scene presents the Iliad’s liveliest dogs, with finely drawn hints of consciousness and agency:

The artisan made next a herd of longhorns,
fashioned in gold and tin: away they shambled,
lowing, from byre to pasture by a stream
that sang in ripples, and by reeds a-sway.
Four cowherds all of gold were plodding after
with nine lithe dogs beside them.
………………………………………………..On the assault,
in two tremendous bounds, a pair of lions
caught in the van a bellowing bull, and off
they dragged him, followed by the dogs and men.
Rending the belly of the bull, the two
gulped down his blood and guts, even as the herdsman
tried to set on their hunting dogs, but failed:
no trading bites with lions for those dogs,
who halted close up, barking, then ran back. (18.661-74)

The content is typical of a Homeric simile, but it is not a simile, and perhaps because the narrative is not constrained to maintain contact with some original tenor, the description is livelier and more detailed. Curiously, the animals are all enumerated—one bull, two lions, nine dogs, as well as four herdsmen—which confers a certain particularity, as if they actually exist, as if. The description then ventures into the minds of the herdsman and, so very briefly yet profoundly, into the minds of the dogs. At the urging of their masters, the lithe brave dogs follow the lions, then vacillate, and fall back. Against these dangerous odds, what’s in it for us? they seem to wonder. And consonant with Akhilleus questioning his own reasons to fight, the dogs, though only inscribed upon a shield, flash a glint of reflective consciousness.

These chasing, barking, hedging dogs, the most vital in the Iliad, do not really exist in the primary story. They are artifacts, created by the craftsman, the crafts-god really, of Hephaestus, doubly beyond the life-and-death struggle on the plains of Troy. The only actual living, breathing, and, for two, no-longer-breathing dogs in the entire epic come a few books later, only briefly remarked. The funeral pyre for Patroklos is (hyperbolically?) enormous, 10,000 square feet in area, then piled high. To the fresh carcasses of “four fine horses” and twelve “noble sons of Troy,” Akhilleus makes a smaller, even modest, addition: “Nine hunting dogs had fed at the lord’s table; / upon the pyre he cut the throats of two” (23.198-202). Like the hunting scene on the god-given shield, the elements are numbered, the dogs in fact identically numbered at nine, creating a resonance between the passages and their dogs, one pack immortalized in gold and art, the other pack grimly real, particularly the dis-chosen two, with cut throats, consuming fire, and a grief that cannot be assuaged. The two dogs who are sacrificed, we shall further see, seem to correspond in their number to the life—and here the death—of a young man.

Dogs are ambivalent creatures, really an ambivalent concept, in the Iliad. Over the final books, as the epic grinds toward its grim conclusion, the negative predominates. Immediately upon the sacrifice of his own dogs upon Patroklos’ pyre, Akhilleus curses Hektor’s corpse with the darker side of dogs, “I will not restore / Hektor to Priam; he shall not be eaten / by fire but by dogs” (23.210-12). Priam instinctively feels the other side of that curse, in mourning for dead Hektor and more viscerally for his barely living self. Priam laments:

……………………..when an old man falls,
and dogs disfigure his grey head and cheek
and genitals, that is most harrowing
of all that men in their hard lives endure. (22.88-91)

Priam repeatedly voices this visceral fear, so degradingly particular, even as it serves as synecdoche for the looming fall of Troy and the tragedy of life itself. But once again these dogs never materialize to consume Hektor’s corpse or Priam alive. The epic ends in the close bond of man and animals—not the gods—but not dogs either. Rather, the final resonant note associates humanity and horses, as the Trojans belatedly perform “the funeral rites of Hektor, breaker of horses” (24.961). With this, the doggishness recedes to the background as the secondary motif that it is.

 

Dogs in the Odyssey

Whatever the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey may be, a question as intriguing as it is irresolvable, whether one poet, or two, or innumerable poets and bards, tradition has called that authorship by the singular name of Homer, a simplicity that still recommends itself to appreciating the two epics together. The Odyssey makes an uncanny sequel to the Iliad, in their continuities and their differences, so that, read together, each epic enriches and enlarges the other. The broad contrasts have been widely observed. The Iliad is a tragedy of war, of nations, of both alienating dislocation and tragic immobility, of the battlefield and the embattled city, ending in death and grief. Sharing the same central matter of Troy, reprising many of the same characters, cameos for some, promotions for others, while developing new characters into prominent roles, the Odyssey is a comedy, in the deepest most serious sense of the word, of post-war, the abiding family, travel then home, rising through righteous vengeance to culminate in reunion, life, and love. Homer is a master of such large themes because he is also a master of details, and the development of dogs over these two epics, so subtle the reader might not notice on the first or even the tenth reading, perfectly accords with, and harmoniously enriches, the distinctive nature of each epic and the larger dyad they combine to make.

More than a century ago, D. B. Monro articulated what has become known as Monro’s Law, namely, that the Odyssey is careful not to repeat the major “incident[s]” of the Iliad, suggesting an alert and attuned sense of sequel, which may be reasonably extended beyond plot to include both major themes and minor motifs.^[4] Monro’s Law holds for the animals as well. Our focus on dogs should not obscure the fact that in the Iliad horses receive five times as many mentions as dogs, and all this with no mention of the Trojan Horse looming just outside the text. The equine presence goes far beyond the numbers. Frothing horses fight and die on the battlefield with their charioteers. Horses star as the vehicle of similes for Akhilleus, Hektor, Paris, and others. More quietly and personally, Akhilleus calls his horses by name, and, empowered by Hera, they answer back, as man and horse confide and confer upon revenge, grief, and doom (17.439-74). And once more we may note that famous final phrase, even more pronounced in English than in Greek, upon which the epic concludes, “Hektor, breaker of horses” (hippodamoio, literally “horse-breaker”).

The Odyssey turns from all this. It has barely a tenth of the horses of the Iliad, and 60% of those are found in Books 3, 4 and 15, which first narrate and then recount Telemakhos’ experiences in Pylos and Sparta. The reduced presence of horses makes perfect sense for an epic set at sea or on the narrow island of Ithaka. As Telemakhos artfully declines Menelaos’ gift of horses, his words signal a larger turn:

As for the gift, now, let it be some keepsake.
Horses I cannot take to Ithaka;
let me bestow them back on you, to serve
your glory here. My lord, you rule wide country,
rolling and rich with clover, galingale
and all the grains: red wheat and hoary barley.
At home we have no level runs or meadows,
but highland, goat land—prettier than plains, though.
Grasses, and pasture land, are hard to come by
upon the islands tilted in the sea,
and Ithaka is the island of them all. (4.641-51)^[5]

These gift horses provide the opportunity for Telemakhos to show his rapidly developing social awareness and for the epic at hand to resituate itself against its predecessor. As Telemakhos declines the offered gift, the Odyssey itself turns away from horses. Dogs, less grand, more agile, well suited to both a rocky island and a family romance, expand to fill the spaces vacated by Homeric horses.

The Odyssey actually mentions far fewer dogs (a little over forty) than the Iliad does, but the dogs are often more developed and less formulaic than those in the Iliad. Part of what gives the dogs of the Odyssey greater presence is that they play off the dogs of the Iliad, essentially subsuming their precursors and then adding their own distinctive contribution. The first mention of dogs in the Odyssey has a weight and spaciousness far beyond what is essentially a single phrase as Telemakhos steps forth into the public space of the family home:

………………………………………………..he entered
spear in hand, with two quick hounds at heel;
Athena lavished on him a sunlit grace
that held the eye of the multitude. Old men
made way for him as he took his father’s chair. (2.10-14)

Homer counts, and these two living hounds recall the two dogs, the only actual dogs with any physical presence in the Iliad, whose throats were cut and bodies thrown on Patroklos’ funeral bier. Those were consumed in fire, in a grisly image of death, waste and inconsolable grief; Telemakhos’ dogs, in harmony with the lavishing god, live and move in a gentler even blessèd light. With both a certain consistency and stark contrast, two dogs seem to stand, respectively, for the death—or life—of a young man. The pairing of these canine details, equidistant from their great divide and really not so far from each other in Iliad 23 and Odyssey 2, lies at the heart of the Homeric dyad. Efficiently, the Odyssey reprises Telemakhos’ dogs twice more, on the other side of the epic, as he has grown and continues to grow into his manhood, “with two swift flickering hounds for company” (17.78-79, 20.162).

The second mention of dogs in the Odyssey reprises a familiar formula from the Iliad. Speaking to Telemakhos of the fate of Agamemnon slain by adulterous Aigisthos, Nestor imagines Menelaos exacting revenge on behalf of his brother, invoking the old curse of “dogs and carrion birds” (3.279) for Aigisthos. Aptly, in this scene bridging the two epics, Nestor goes back to the language and ethos of the Iliad, even of Agamemnon himself. The Odyssey never uses this precise formula again, but it does invoke variations of it, consistent with their new setting. While chatting with Odysseus incognito and ironically lamenting the sure death of the very same man, Eumaios refreshes the old trope for the new context, adding bone-picking fishes to the “wild dogs and carrion birds” (14.161-65). And once in Ithaka, Odysseus hauls the beaten Iros from his own house with another variation attuned to this setting, “Here, take your post. / Sit here to keep the dogs and pigs away” (18.129-30). This is not the wide plains of Troy but the manor house on a small island with a thriving pork industry and perhaps even a few strays, of pigs and dogs and men. Homer, whoever, whatever, he is, knows of what he speaks, integrating theme and setting into the smallest of details.

A significant strand of negative “dogma” carries over from the Iliad into the Odyssey, and the more prominent female presence in the latter leads naturally to more women being called dogs or, essentially, bitches, though Fitzgerald shies away from that term. Kunōpidos, literally “dog-eyed” or “dog-faced,” seems reserved for women of higher status. So, Helen, repentant and reformed, describes her foolish past, freely rendered by Fitzgerald as “wanton that I was” (4.157). Demodokos, through Hephaestus, applies the same term to Aphrodite caught in adultery, Fitzgerald dispersing the pejorative across the phrasing: “damned pigeon, / so lovely and so wanton” (8.334-35). In what seems to be a class distinction, Melantho and the corrupt servants are simply called declensions of kuōn by Odysseus (18.338), Penelope (19.91 and 19.154), and Eurykleia (19.372).^[6] But contra Franco, kuōn is not inherently misogynistic. As we saw back in the Iliad, men regularly insulted each other as dogs, and Odysseus will cast Homer’s final kuōn at the male suitors. More surprisingly, “bitch” in Homer is not, as we shall see, necessarily negative nor even exclusively feminine. Just after the flurry of bitches thrown in Books 18 and 19, Book 20 opens with Odysseus, through simile, embracing his inner bitch as his hackles rise toward revenge.

The Iliad does portray dogs positively in places, and it is here that the Odyssey ingeniously restrategizes. In the Iliad dogs are just one element in one scene of the grand set piece of the Shield of Akhilleus that gathers in one place the representative and harmonious whole of Greek culture, from its primeval elements to its daily customs. What is a sequel to do? Centuries later Virgil found his own original strategy. Book 8 of the Aeneid closely follows with the re-arming of its own hero, including a fantastic shield, in this case writ large: the contents and tone are prophetic, distinctively Roman, and gloriously triumphant. Homer really had left Aeneas little choice, as he himself had already executed a subtler strategy. Consistent with its revisionary strategy, the Odyssey refracts the Shield of Akhilleus into much smaller, even intimate, scenes and artifacts. Remarkably, each of these refractions features dogs. Through the eyes of Odysseus the narration marvels over the palace doors of Phaiakia:

……………………..The doors were golden
guardians of the great room. Shining bronze
plated the wide door sill; golden handles
curved on the doors, and golden, too, and silver
were sculptured hounds, flanking the entrance way,
cast by the skill and ardor of Hephaistos
to guard the prince Alkinoos’s house—
undying dogs that never could grow old. (7.93-101)

Both shield and dogs are fashioned by Hephaistos of precious metals with consummate art, both so vividly that they seem to live and move and have a certain being. Both are guardians of their culture, the shield more demonstratively martial and defensive, the door and dogs a barrier of sorts, but one, as is the case here, that can open and welcome. The shield portrays in two dimensions, or perhaps 2.5, engraved and embossed. The statuary dogs stand forth in a full three dimensions, and they are “undying.” As such, they embody both enduring art and Phaiakia, where life is so very long and death so remote and seemingly painless. Like a prelapsarian Garden of Eden, Phaiakia idealizes the best life could ever be for humans upon this earth. These guarding, guiding dogs sharply contrast with Akhilleus’ shield and doomed Troy, and, as we shall see, they plangently differ as well from the real dogs on the island of Ithaka.

A second refraction of the Shield of Akhilleus is still smaller and more intimate: the crafted brooch that Penelope gave Odysseus the day he left for Troy. The grand shield contains multitudes; the brooch just one little scene, familiar from the many similes and the singular shield, a dog hunting. Hephaestus’ grand shield broadly evokes, gathers and unifies Greek culture. In implicit zeugma the little brooch binds both a cloak and the love of husband and wife. The brooch arises in the most intimate and happily ironic circumstances. Odysseus, still incognito as the wayfaring beggar, meets with Penelope at their hearth to tell his tale, a pure invention, of having met Odysseus twenty years before when he—the real Odysseus—first journeyed toward Troy. Penelope asks for details, practically to confirm veracity, emotionally to revel in the memory. Odysseus knows what she wants and gives it to her, in details that would be transparently preposterous to anyone but Penelope, who is so emotionally famished after twenty years:

Lady, so long a time now lies between,
it is hard to speak of it. Here is the twentieth year
since that man left the island of my father.
But I shall tell what memory calls to mind.
A purple cloak, and fleecy, he had on—
a double thick one. Then he wore a brooch
made of pure gold with twin tubes for the prongs,
and on the face a work of art: a hunting dog
pinning a spotted fawn in agony
between his forepaws—wonderful to see
how being gold, and nothing more, he bit
the golden deer convulsed, with wild hooves flying. (19.263-74)

The brooch has long been lost, if not years ago on the plains of Troy, then certainly at sea (Odysseus landed on Phaiakia with literally nothing), but now it glows in their shared memory and Odysseus’ story that reignites it. The dog may not seem particularly romantic, but it shows Penelope’s understanding of Odysseus—he enjoys hunting—just as Odysseus dwelling on the outfit she made and assembled and its admiration by women shows his understanding of her. He knows exactly what would please her, and he gives it. As first a thing and then a story, the brooch could just as well have read amor vincit omnia, but the hunting dog says as much with more subtlety and art.

At two or three mysterious and largely invisible degrees of separation, the scar of Odysseus functions as yet another refraction of the Shield of Akhilleus. It is, like its predecessor, a physical object that tells a story, in this case a much smaller personal tale of adventure, pain, and affection, inscribed not in precious metals but the still more precious and tender flesh, then transliterated into words. And uncannily, dogs artfully figure once again. In the same Book 19, shortly after Odysseus lovingly conjured the brooch with the hunting dog, Odysseus accepts the offer of a bath from Eurykleia, the loyal old servant. Too late Odysseus recalls the distinctive scar on his thigh that Eurykleia will surely recognize and thereby give away his cover. Eric Auerbach marvels how Homer interrupts these crucially fraught seconds with a lengthy digression upon the scar, not really as background but in the epitome of Homeric style promoted as foreground for 82 lines.^[7] Auerbach published Mimesis in 1946, and we may update this phenomenon to our computer age. Click on the scar as a hyperlink, and the whole story is there. Click again, and it is gone, and we are back in Odysseus’ home, some thirty years later, among firelight and flickering shadows, as Eurykleia drops the wash basin with a clang and she instantly apprehends what took us several minutes to read. We too could marvel at length with Auerbach over Homer’s prescient counter-intuitive style, but what matters to this essay is that once again dogs figure in the inset story.

In variation upon the scenes engraved on Akhilleus’ shield in self-evident ekphrastic verisimilitude, the story of the scar is crudely gashed into Odysseus’ flesh and thereby mutely encoded, inaccessible except to those who hold the key, such as Eurykleia, whose recognition is crucial to the plot, and the narrator, crucial to the readers, who decodes it for us, so that the story implicit in the scar, including its dogs, becomes as vivid and immediate as those on the shield. The familiar formula of “men and dogs” is personalized here, “with hounds questing” and “Odysseus in the lead, behind the dogs.” With the boar waking in the thicket we hear the “patter of hounds’ feet, men’s feet” (19.501-17). Then boy meets boar, death for one, a scar for the other. The long story of how the scar came to be characterizes Odysseus as a brave and passionate hunter, confirming once again how apt and thoughtful was the brooch Penelope gave Odysseus, the object itself beautiful, the thought behind it strong enough to hold them together through a thousand miles and decades of separation. And once again dogs are shown as a natural part of Greek culture, of “men and dogs,” or in this case, a boy and his dogs.

Though not that numerous by line count among the 48 books and nearly 28,000 lines of the dyad, Homer’s dogs project a larger presence by barking forth and back among themselves. The dogs of the Odyssey presume and subsume the dogs of the Iliad, efficiently evoked by just an echo, to which the sequel adds entirely new threads. Solely within the Odyssey, the dog scenes run in packs, such as the cluster of aesthetic dogs intimating an ars poetica—the guardian statues of Phaiakia, the lovers’ brooch, the baying hounds forever young implicit in Odysseus’ aging scar. Complementing these dogs of artifice, the Odyssey also develops real dogs growling, sniffing, stinking, whimpering, dying, arguably the first compelling dogs as characters in world literature, and in Argos, perhaps still the finest dog to ever grace a page.

Eumaios’ dogs at the pig farm on the back side of Ithaka form their own complex cluster in a series of recognition scenes posed and counterposed over several books, the dogs variously alert, vicious, obedient, affectionate, and also uncannily sensitive to the numinous. As Odysseus makes his way from Phorkys Cove to the farm, he is met by four dogs (Homer numbering again), the first mortal creatures (divine Athena aside) to meet him upon his return to his home island after twenty years absence: “The watch dogs, when they caught sight of Odysseus, / faced him, a snarling troop, and pelted out / viciously after him” (14.32-34). Fraught with irony, the scene is at once profoundly literary and yet realistic and practical. The dogs initiate the mounting irony of the latter half of the epic: the Lord of the island returns to his own, and his own do not recognize him, whether dogs, servants, son, wife, father. More practically, Odysseus does not run, which would further inflame the dogs, but rather,

…………………………………like a tricky beggar
he sat down plump, and dropped his stick. No use.
They would have rolled him in the dust and torn him
there by his own steading if the swineherd
had not sprung up and flung his leather down,
making a beeline for the open. Shouting,
throwing stone after stone,
he made them scatter. (14.34-41)

Fortunately, Eumaios is nearby to save the stranger, who is also his lord, as these few lines quickly establish his character. The throwing of stones may seem harsh—but so are the world and its equivalent of junkyard dogs—and Eumaios knows how things work. He knows his dogs, and they know him. These same dogs don’t know Odysseus at all, but quickly learn that if he is accepted by their master, then he is accepted by them.

Book 16 introduces another homecoming, Telemakhos returning from his own small yet necessary, soul-growing adventure, and he returns to the exact place and cast of characters as Odysseus did—the farm, Eumaios, and the dogs. How differently the dogs respond this time: “When Telemakhos came, / the wolvish troop of watchdogs only fawned on him / as he advanced” (16.5-7). How realistic is their response, so typical of dogs to quickly recognize a voice, a scent, or even, as here, a familiar gait. These are the dogs that tellingly do not bark in the night or at noon. Odysseus, ever alert, attunes his awareness to theirs, and notices the dogs noticing:

……………………..Odysseus heard them go
and heard the light crunch of a man’s footfall—
at which he turned quickly to say:
…………………………………………….“Eumaios,
here is one of your crew come back, or maybe
another friend: the dogs are out there snuffling
belly down; not one has even growled.
I can hear footsteps—” (16.7-14)

Before Odysseus can finish, Telemakhos stands before him, and father and son are reunited, almost, but essentially with the dogs between them as one dynamic measure of the stubborn disconnect between them. And it is the loyal servant Eumaios who embraces Telemakhos, who had been gone for a week, while Odysseus, absent for twenty years, must stand back, held in place by the tensing irony.

Within this same tiny cast of characters on the back side of the island—Odysseus, Eumaios, Telemakhos, and the watchful dogs—Athena re-enters the mix for one more recognition scene. We have seen how horses play a much smaller role in the Odyssey than they did in the Iliad, and how dogs expand into the space the horses have vacated. Likewise the gods, even Zeus, all but Athena, play a smaller role with far fewer lines in the Odyssey, making the sequel less mythological and more natural. Here, too, dogs expand into that newly opened space. But the horses and gods do not disappear entirely, and god and dogs actually meet here in the final recognition scene at the farm, introducing a divinity into the humblest circumstances, flexing the irony once more, and sharing an understanding of dogs that is at once uncanny and realistic. Just a hundred some lines further into the same Book 16, Telemakhos sends Eumaios on an errand into town, leaving father (still incognito) and son awkwardly alone. Athena enters upon Eumaios’ departure:

…………………………………………..From the air
she walked, taking the form of a tall woman,
handsome and clever at her craft, and stood
beyond the gate in plain sight of Odysseus,
unseen, though, by Telemakhos, unguessed,
for not to everyone will gods appear. (16.183-88)

Athena manifests like the ghost in Hamlet, raising a host of questions—who sees it? who hears it? who can speak with it? who can’t? Greek divinity similarly moves in mysterious ways. One of the most extraordinary lines in dog lore follows, though so simply predicated it is easily overlooked: “Odysseus noticed her; so did the dogs” (16.189). The sense of the supernatural is exquisite here because it is not sequestered on Olympus but so intimately fitted to the mundane, including dogs. The same dogs that snarled at Odysseus and fawned before Telemakhos now “cowered whimpering away from Athena” (16.190). Who has not seen a dog bark or whimper, running to or from some seemingly nonexistent thing? They hear and smell better than humans and perhaps enjoy other senses that tingle beyond ours. At this intersection of dogs, god, and human, again we see they do not form a linear hierarchical chain of being, but rather splay in a Venn diagram of variously shared as well as independent phenomena, frequencies, and lives. Dogs and men share a special bond, and yet dogs and gods share things that humans do not, at least not some. Telemakhos cannot see Athena, but he is aware of an aura that pervades the moment and seems to settle upon Odysseus as he reveals his identity to his incredulous son. As father and son reunite, Athena quietly fades into a name to be evoked going forward, while the dogs have seemingly retreated to the sure and accustomed task of keeping an eye on the swine.

From farm to manor and then back to Laius’ garden, Odysseus’ disguise generates the irony that is successively tensed and released through the series of recognition scenes. These scenes with Telemakhos, Penelope, Laius and, on the darker side, the suitors, are crucial to the plot and resolution of the Odyssey. The recognition scene of Argos is hardly necessary at all; Homer seems to include it for the sheer love of dogs. A mere 37 lines in the Greek, Argos’ scene could easily be detached and deleted, and yet, though inessential, it does ably serve two purposes: first, to culminate the dog motif; second, to deepen the pathos and make the reader as teary-eyed as Odysseus himself.

In a complex nexus of resonating similarities and clarifying contrasts, Argos completes the dog motif. For all the anonymous dogs of the Iliad onward, finally one has a name, an animal privilege heretofore limited to Akhilleus’ horses. At the palace doors of Phaiakia the statuary dogs, burnished and “undying,” embody their idealized culture. Argos holds the equivalent place here, but aged, sickly, infested, consigned to a stinking dung pile, dying, and, by scene’s end, dead. He too represents his world. The dogs at the farm, all their senses bristling, greet Odysseus with a snarl and near assault, but Argos,

…………………………………when he knew he heard
Odysseus’ voice nearby, he did his best
to wag his tail, nose down, with flattened ears,
having no strength to move nearer his master. (17.389-92)

Unlike the young watch dogs, understandably ignorant, unlike the suitors, viciously blind, unlike even loyal Eumaios, son Telemakhos, wife Penelope, father Laius, each lapsing into their own hopelessness, this Argos is the only mortal being who recognizes Odysseus and welcomes him into his own land and home.

The Argos scene is risky, straining credibility, verging upon the sentimental, but it stands up to scrutiny. The gap of twenty years, demanded by the well-established timeline of the dyad, is problematic, but a dog can indeed live that long. But can a dog really remember that long? Canine psychology and the phenomenon of imprinting, first impressions indelibly stamped into the mind to never be forgotten, as well as the experiences of millions of dogs and their humans, say yes. In fact, a six-month old dog has a much stronger, though selective, long-term memory than a two-year old child, Lorenz observes.^[8] As for the sentiment and sentimentality, the last tail wag, the death, the tears, these too are reasonably realistic within their extraordinary circumstances. Most likely blind, Argos pointedly hears and responds to Odysseus’ voice, and Odysseus, ever alert, gives Argos what a dog relishes, to be praised aloud. (Who’s a good boy?) Then Eumaios, who lacks the awareness of Odysseus but seems to be guided as always by his good heart, joins in that praise. This is exactly how sick, old, beloved dogs are whispered to the threshold of death. The ironies of the moment, both sweet and dangerous, require Odysseus to hide his tears, but apart from the dramatic situation, this is how men, explicitly men, have mourned their dogs for millennia, weeping and yet holding back or hiding those tears in adherence to some unwritten code of manhood. All this sentiment is further grounded in the material world by the dung and flies.

The simplest of names, Argos means hound or dog, making him a universal of sorts, a dog named Dog, as he plangently enacts the commonplaces of dogs dying, many still so prevalent today (and many which apply as well to dying humans). The feces, slop, sores and stench are unavoidable, even with the best care. Against Argos’ present misery, Odysseus and Eumaios fondly recall his better days, his excellencies as a dog, swift, strong, tireless, brave. Just as Odysseus’ scar holographically includes the past, made visible with a just a flick of perspective, a click upon the invisible hyperlink of the linebreak, in this brief scene the whole of Argos’ life is present. Robert Frost taught classics in one chapter of his life, and Argos may well inform his couplet aptly titled “The Span of Life”:

The old dog barks backwards without getting up;
I can remember when he was a pup.^[9]

Argos’ scene similarly spans his life, though Odysseus has missed almost everything between his entrance and his exit. Notice how Frost’s little poem comes back to the I who remembers, the aging dog evoking the passage of years in the narrator’s own life. Though it goes unspoken, Argos, so much of his life missed by Odysseus, suggests the years that Odysseus also missed in his relationship with his wife and, more so, in the life of his son. Family dogs are one measure of a childhood, and Argos and Telemakhos are of an age. When we weep for long-lived dying dogs, those tears are tinged with sorrow for the broader passage of time, the years gone and irrecoverable, the innocence and childhood lost. The Odyssey is a comedy, but it is well acquainted with grief, and Argos casts much of that deepening shadow.

The Argos scene integrates dog fact and lore, human psychology, the grit and stench of this world, weepy but well-earned pathos, a unique twist upon the driving irony, and to all this Homer adds what the legendary Longinus would call the sublime. The nearest analogue to the Argos scene in Western literature is the equally brief scene in the Gospel of Luke when the baby Jesus is first brought to the temple. The aged Simeon, waiting so long and loyally for the Messiah, recognizes Jesus as his Lord, and he is satisfied. Odysseus similarly comes unto his own, and his own do not recognize him—except for Argos. In joy Simeon breaks into song, nunc dimittis, “Master, now I can depart in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation” (2.29-30). Argos recognizes his own Lord’s voice, wags and fawns the best he can, and as Odysseus passes through the door he built into his own hall,

…………..death and darkness in that instant closed
the eyes of Argos, who had seen his master,
Odysseus, after twenty years. (17.420-22)

Luke and Homer, respectively, never mention Simeon and Argos again, but these minor roles befit their beautiful humility. Neither of these willing joyful servants is essential to the looming crises and ultimate triumphs of their Lords, but they have immeasurably enriched the larger stories that go forward without them.

Odysseus knows and loves dogs, and it is only fitting that he become one, if only for one fleeting simile. Late on the eve before the climactic day when the suitors will be avenged and the true lovers finally and fully reunited, Odysseus tosses and turns in the main hall, his disguise becoming unbearable, as he watches the disloyal servants and suitors giggle as they hook-up for one last time in the house he built:

……………………..His heart cried out within him
the way a brach with whelps between her legs
would howl and bristle at a stranger—so
the hackles of his heart rose at that laughter. (20.14-17)

Gilbert Rose faults the Fitzgerald translation for missing the full doggishness of the passage—that the introductory hulaktei from hulakteō might have been better rendered as “Odysseus’ barking heart,” but the simile itself cannot be missed.^[10] It may seem odd at first that the simile is cross-gendered, but this allows Odysseus to feel something close to what Penelope might have long felt. Homer will balance the gesture three books later when Penelope shares the feeling of an exhausted sailor nearly lost at sea, crawling onto shore, just as Odysseus had done multiple times (23.262-70). Fitzgerald’s term brach for kuōn, though sounding somewhat archaic, aptly suggests its linguistic cousin bitch, and then redeems it. The whelps or puppies, for skulakessi, is Homerically unique to the Odyssey—the Iliad never uses it—and, in brief, distinguishes the epics’ respective dogs. The Iliad has no need for dogs cute and vulnerable and especially pathetic when abused. Intriguingly, Odysseus first introduced the term narrating his adventures to the Phaiakians, how Kyklops “clutched at my companions / and caught two in his hands like squirming puppies / to beat their brains out, spattering the floor” (9.313-15). Odysseus himself seems to make that very association as he steadies himself here on the verge of vengeance in his own hall:

“Down; be steady. You’ve seen worse, that time
the Kyklops like a rockslide ate your men
while you looked on. Nobody, only guile,
got you out of that cave alive.” (20.19-22)

While Fitzgerald may have missed the metaphorical lead, he perfectly closes out the passage, as Odysseus’ “rage / held hard in leash, submitted to his mind” (20.22-23).

Argos in real life, the brach within the simile, represent dogs as real and admirable characters. From this remarkable achievement, Homer’s final dogs regress to the invective and violence of the Iliad. Upon shooting an arrow through Antinoos’ throat, Odysseus reveals himself to the suitors in ferocity Ahkilleus would envy:

“You yellow dogs, you thought I’d never make it
home from the land of Troy. You took my house to plunder,
twisted my maids to serve your beds. You dared
bid for my wife while I was still alive.
Contempt was all you had for the gods who rule wide heaven,
contempt for what men say of you hereafter.
Your last hour has come. You die in blood.” (22.37-43)

All their crimes and sins gather in and under the word dogs. The battle is on, and it will end with dogs as well. At the end of all the slaughter, Melanthios, the disloyal goatherd, is hacked to pieces and has his genitals “pulled off . . . to feed the dogs” (23.529), finally fulfilling in the flesh the primal fear that the Iliad only dared to suggest. The grisly image may seem out of tune with the Odyssey’s otherwise happy ending, but it binds the two epics together. Homer never mentions dogs again.

The domestication of dogs is a matter for anthropologists and cynologists, the precise timeline endlessly debatable but certainly well before the matter of Troy. The Iliad brusquely presumes that domestication, even as a remnant of wild dogs remain. The Odyssey shows dogs becoming characters in their own right, as animals, of course, but uniquely contributing to what it means to be human. Beyond domestication, whether hounds on the hunt, watch dogs at the farm, or Argos at the manor, these dogs enrich humanity, even to a degree humanize humanity. Homer does not sentimentalize dogs as humans themselves, but the two are profoundly related, and it is their shared interests and complementary differences that make this relationship so rewarding, in some ways even more so than that between humans and the Homeric gods. The dogs have certainly aged better. Homer’s gods, while at times profoundly human, remain inextricably mythological; above all, they do not die. Homer’s dogs would be right at home in the 21st century. Each species of being—gods, dogs, human—have their own realm and life, overlapping and intersecting with the others, but each also with its own independence, suggesting a breadth of life that extends beyond the epics themselves. That is the Homeric dogma.

 

Notes

It snowed all night on the opening flowers.
I got up early to scrape ice with an umbrella
off the windows, having packed up the winter
prematurely. Why am I this way? I always rush
the happy endings, smush the kids’ feet
into sandals because I think I might die
if I have to hunt down their socks, inside out
like squashed baby mammals, under a loveseat.
Once, when I was their age, my father’s lover
stood on the landing with wet hair. I screamed.
Then she flung herself down the stairs.
In the parlor, the piano preened like a fairytale.
Playtime in paraphrase. Spring
tumbling over all.

I guess it was an emptiness we shared,
me in the back seat of the family car
a window of my own, triangular,
that framed your westing face. I stared and stared.

My staring was the leash I led you by.
You kept our pace along that length of road–
from your sights, a metallic, glinting seam
lit off the moonbeam threaded through my eye.

All true: the sextant, country way, my moon,
but absence present too, a quiet slip,
like when one hand lifts off the piano keys
the other’s left alone to bring the tune.

Now, a hot cloth bathes my sty, the scene returns.
Across my inner lid’s proscenium
drift wandering stars consoled by your cold fire
that spared me what I wasn’t meant to learn–

clear, invisible as mirroring water,
someday I would be nobody’s daughter.

It was already yesterday tomorrow.
All that had happened waited for its chance.
Lovers too young to understand romance
remembered their affair would end in sorrow.
Snow that had fallen later fell too soon
on streets offering them no place to go—
the future had occurred, once, long ago,
lost between midnight and a dream of noon.
And what else could they do, who lay awake
considering old ideas not thought of yet,
the broken promises that each would make
in the days ahead they couldn’t quite forget,
but talk of things that neither go nor stay,
tomorrow asleep in the arms of yesterday?

One night, while the others slept and a strong wind
brushed out the long hair of the river willows,
he rode out on his horse to find the end.
He thought he knew it in those many pillows
he’d risen from, only to sleep again
night after night, or in the consolations
of vanishing in the touch of another’s skin,
in poetry, which defied interpretations,
even in the plain shadow of a stone,
the amber slant of sunlight at the sea—
only to find he was himself alone,
cast in a gospel or a tragedy.
As he rode to the edge of what he knew,
he saw beyond the hill a river, slow,
one minute shining, one a lucid blue.
The sun slept in the red eye of a crow.

“gift is random,
assigned here,
here withheld—almost always
correctly”
—Carl Phillips, from “Aubade: Some Peaches, After Storm”

At this point in the poem, the lines get shorter,
more clipped and economical. The diction
is gilt with artifice: the syntax order,
inverted as in yellowed tomes of fiction
and verse (“assignèd here,” then “here withheld”),
creates a quaint chiasmus. This is how
kings speak: the bird-boned monarch who bespelled
the young girl in the film we watched just now,
Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, might talk this way
(rolling a poisoned peach inside his palm),
mightn’t he? Except that he would never say
that “gift is random,” or that chance is “almost
always correct”: he’d hold that free will matters—
your choice of words decides who’s saved, who shatters.

One penguin right-side up one penguin up-

side down…….so that they seem to be asleep

Together holding hands and smiling then

…………I zip the lunchbox stuff it deep

 

Into the biggest pocket of your backpack

And you have listened know…….it’s time to go

To stand and go you stand you drop your trash in

…………A plastic bag and for a mo-

 

ment you…….are standing in the kitchen in

The dark I’m standing in the dining room

A wall between us listening…….the bag

…………Rustles like dry leaves…….it will bloom

 

As fresh as it is now for centuries

After we you…….and I and any leaf

We see today has vanished…….still you pull

…………The drawstring tight…….a flash of grief

 

Seeing the bag’s mouth puckered like a mouth

I used to think lost paperclips were lonely

And any trash…….and filled my desk with trash

…………When I was maybe I was only

 

Four five years younger…….than you are…….and wept

From day to day…….but half your face is hid-

den now…….we leave for school…….the things that will

…………Outlive us are already dead

Americans love children the idea of

Sometimes the execution……sometimes one

-On-one we……know which children to steer clear of

We love them……when they four and cold alone

 

Walk shuffling through the dark in……footies to

America’s car in the drive-thru line and ask

Do you know where my daddy is……we do

Child trust us we will……find his body task

 

Us with the task……and we enraged will love

Our children……temporarily and pull

Them close as if they each……child were the moth

-Chewed blanket we……found in our mother’s hall

 

-way closet when we threw away her things

And hold them close until we smell their stink

We love our……children while the singer sings

About their fathers beating them……the link

 

Disappeared or we would have given money

But hearts are money……so we heart the song

The cutest kitten shivers and has runny

Eyes……or at least it can’t retract its tongue

 

And will die smiled-at……love is smiles and cry

-ing……oh the big-eyed kid whose big eye runs

We love that kid those kids heart……each sick eye

And we have tear gas for the healthy ones

He, too, was a tamer of horses: His plane was the Mustang. The sirens
would sing in the cities he sacked from the air, in Leipzig, that cluster
of doll houses, in Frankfurt, where Goethe was born, the searchlights
revealing the texture of clouds where his squadron lost one, no voice
in his earpiece, just static and flak now, the clatter of hail on a roof,
his ailerons juddering. Luck is the god who departs through the smoke.
Far from him now are the white-armed barmaids of Steeple Morden
as he bails from the fiery cockpit and yanks on the cord.

His parachute opens and wafts him, on an even
breeze, across the ocean, home to Cleveland.
There he marries. Takes his pug on walks.
Sells ball bearings for a living. Stares at
graphs and spreadsheets, seeing city blocks,
pens in neat rows, waiting on the airstrip.