Volume 48, Number 9 · May 31, 2001
'A Lament in Three Voices'
By Helen Vendler
A Treatise on Poetry
Czeslaw Milosz, translated from the Polish by the author and Robert Hass
Ecco, 125 pp., $23.00
Milosz's ABC's
Czeslaw Milosz, translated from the Polish by Madeline Levine
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 313 pp., $24.00
At times, a poem is so powerful that it bursts the bounds in which it was written—the bounds of language, geography, epoch. The notorious modern case is The Waste Land—an untranslatable poem, one might have thought, except that it has been universally translated, universally read, and universally—strange though it may seem—understood. Coming upon a poem of that degree of power is a revelatory experience. Thanks to Czeslaw Milosz, born in 1911, and his translator, the poet Robert Hass, another such poem, Milosz's Treatise on Poetry—written in 1955–1956—is appearing in English for the first time.
Review, 6201 words
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