Catapulted into California

A poet out standing...

We end our Polish mini-series with Poland's most famous poet, Czesław Miłosz, Nobel laureate, emigre, essayist, translator, teacher. A search of Selected Poems 1931-2004 (Milosz died in 2004 at the age of 93) produced these results on our BTB index:

Heart 15

Horse 10

Vodka 3

Death 22

Blood 17

Tears 6

Car 3 

More horses and vodka, but otherwise pretty consistent with our other Polish poets. Again, a car is as likely to be a train car as something you drive yourself. Remembering that Miłosz spent most of his adult life abroad, and most of that in the States, and most of that in California (where he taught at Berkeley), the Research Bureau checked out a collection of short prose pieces, titled Miłosz's ABC's. Another story emerges.

"Automobile" gets its own entry (so does "Alcohol"). Miłosz describes coming from the (now) Lithuanian countryside where there was only one car, the Count's, and being "catapulted into California, where the automobile was just the same as electricity and bathrooms." From seeing the automobile as a "threat, because of its noise," he came to appreciate its capacity to take one to places one might otherwise not see:

Transformed from a man outside an automobile to one seated behind the wheel, I ought to write a song of thanksgiving to the car, because thanks to it I have toured the West Coast of America from the Mexican border to the Canadian Rockies, slept in a tent beside lakes in the Sierras, and baked in the heat of the desert know as Death Valley.

Postscript: Friend of the Blog, One More Folded Sunset, contributes an anecdote, told by poet Robert Pinsky, and retold on Shed. Pinsky and Robert Hass (another poet), after working on translations with Miłosz, found themselves locked out of their car. It sounds like a joke perhaps, How many poets does it take...? According to Pinsky, Milosz appeared with a coat hanger and in no time did the trick. It's not recorded whether or not he knew how to hot-wire.

(I believe the photo above comes from the documentary The Magic Mountain: An American Portrait of Czesław, directed by Maria Zmarz-Koczanowicz.)