Volume 28, Number 11 · June 25, 1981
Return of the Native
By John Bayley
BOOKS BY CZESLAW MILOSZ DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
The Issa Valley
by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Louis Iribarne
Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 288 pp., $13.95
Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition paperback edition
by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Catherine S. Leach
to be published by the University of California Press in August in a, 300 pp., $7.95
Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision
by Czeslaw Milosz
University of California Press, 263 pp., $6.95 (paper)
Bells in Winter
translated by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Lillian Vallee
The Ecco Press, 71 pp., $4.95 (paper)
The Captive Mind
by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Jane Zielonko. (with a new foreword by the author)
to be published by Vintage Books in August in a paperback edition, 272 pp., $4.95
'Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.' (I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, a true German.) The twelfth line of The Waste Land, a fragment from the poet's reading in a German memoir, raises more echoes than even T.S. Eliot was likely to be aware of, and certainly more than are grasped by most of his readers. The connection with the poem is minimal, but as in so many of its other lines randomness has achieved an air of inevitability, in its suggestion of unhappy and not-so-far-off things, unknown lives, and fates, the product of complex histories, the inspissated rivalries and relations of Lithuanians, Balts and Letts, Jews, Germans, and Russians.
Review, 5441 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |