Written because the mid-30s of Milos within the early Nineteen Forties, these poems can’t be in comparison with a later work, composed when, by combating the losses of exile, the poet has grown each extra award and extra compassionate. Few of those poems will be thought of amongst his greatest, though many have hints and whispers for the newest type. (One quarter of the poems – the work of different translators, as is clear solely in case you are deeply immersed within the notes – have been included within the “Milos’ New and Collected Poems”, however the remainder are new translations.)
Their weak point lies within the mafia of abstractions, which shoulder apart particulars that will have revealed the emotional prices that they didn’t die within the warfare. Strains like “listed here are violet junk,/peach suns of jellyfish” or “Roshi and sunken faces take a look at it. Typically Milos’ studying in English isn’t any higher than fascinated about the panorama by the iron bars of the jail cell, not the window of the image.
The most effective tracks in Poet within the New World have the painful recognition of “Porcelain Music”: “A glass and a plate of pink shade,/colourful demitas:/you mislead the river/the place an armored column passes.”
Too many passages elsewhere reside in prose like freshly floor oak boards:
These traces of my youth
Haven’t been thrown out of the inertia of the seasons
Solely. I’ve witnessed distress, I do know what it means
To cheat life with reminiscence coloring.
Different poems, nevertheless, fall into photographs extreme as a marriage cake (“heavy watches, silver hits, trunks of hammering steel/stream, now amongst forgotten stars,/lightning and disappear within the abyss of time”), or to transmit a minor fantasy (“I weighed its mild fruits in my hand.
Whether or not by the fault of Milos or his translators, a number of slips have slipped to: “After the rust of carved ships” (can picket ships rust?), For instance, “books with gilded backs” (books can have gilded edges or gilded letters of the backbone, however I’ve by no means seen such a shocked. The Morale Remedy on practically 500 traces seems to be as annoying as an interstate gadget buying and selling invoice caught in a imprecise subcommittee of Congress. This makes you grateful for the little joke that Milos makes on the expense of Polish thinker: “Do not learn/his books are virtually an obligation.”
