Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942–1943. By Czeslaw Milosz. Translated by Madeline Levine. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 266 pages, $25.00.
The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories. By Hanna Krall. Translated by Madeline Levine. Other Press, 260 pages, $19.00.
Madeline Levine raised an interested eyebrow at what her undergraduates were saying, but she readjusted her syllabus for “Literature of Atrocity: The Gulag and the Holocaust,” and moved on.
We’re bored, they’d told her. We read too many of these, and they just say the same thing over and over.
They’d pored over scores of World War II essays written by Polish children who’d survived deportation by Soviet forces. Somewhat dreary and monotonous, the records say, “This person was killed here. This is what’s happening to us today.” Now the students only read a few of these, which helps them to stay focused a little longer.
“I wanted to call it ‘Literature of Terror,’” Levine says, her hands folded cozily in her lap. But the course committee feared students would expect a class on Stephen King. The millions of people they read about in class aren’t fictional, but the blood and gore are there throughout.
“What you’re going to learn happened is overwhelming,” she tells them. “And you will want to know more about the facts.”
Madleline Levine. Her friendship with Polish author Czeslaw Milosz, which lasted the rest of his life, was unexpected and wonderful. Photo by Jason Smith.
Levine’s research and writing are almost exclusively about things Polish. She is part of a small community of scholars who study Poland, a country that has been smashed and rebuilt time and again since the seventeenth century. Tucked away in Central Europe, Poland exists inaudibly, far from most Americans’ consciousness.
Over the last fifteen years, Levine has focused her creative energy on what she calls the scholarly art of literary translation. “It’s a totally selfish indulgence,” she confesses, “of my passion for the translator’s art.” In writing about and translating Polish literature, she can share her expertise with a much wider audience.
Literary translation is the act of heaving novels, poetry, and essays from their original languages into another. The new language, though, doesn’t always share (or even have equivalents to) the original’s literary traditions. All the unfamiliar creative devices and forms must be translated along with the individual words. Meaning is conveyed across cultures, a pathway laid between separate traditions of narrative. Literary translators must know not only the language, but the culture, heritage, and values of the translated author.
Levine works primarily with literature concerning historical events, namely, the Holocaust. In choosing to bear this material across the divide, she shoulders a colossal responsibility: the way she translates may affect a piece of our historical knowledge, the “memory” of the English-speaking world. Much of Poland’s literature is rich with the politics and history of the country, and is often, without the right translator, completely inaccessible to American readers. Polish writers must trust her with what she takes, and we must trust her with what she brings.
Czeslaw Milosz, a Polish writer and winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, had unreserved confidence in Levine’s understanding of the American audience and allowed her to cut and shape his works for translation into English. They worked together for fifteen years to bring his experiences, which spanned almost the whole of the twentieth century in a country slammed by one totalitarian rule after another, to English-speaking readers.
One day in the late 1980s, Levine’s telephone rang.
Milosz, already a legend and then a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, was distraught. A book he’d been working on was worrying him. Was it worth publishing? Was it really any good? You see, he’d recently read a critical review of one of his book proposals, and it said that some of the essays repeated each other, that some were too obscure, too Polish, for American audiences. Well, it made some good points, he said sadly.
Um, do you know who wrote this review? she asked him.
Editors, Levine knew, are scared to death of editing a Nobel winner and happy to attribute criticism to the “anonymous” reviewers they hire. Knowing her identity would not be revealed to Milosz, Levine had written the critical review despite her admiration for him and his work, and she hadn’t minced words. She remembered contacting him years earlier, a distant colleague whom she had met only briefly, to ask to translate one of his works; he’d politely turned her down because one of his students was already on the job.
As she admitted to Milosz that the words had been hers, she saw her fantasies of translating for him disappear down the drain.
Today, in her sunny office, she looks at me hard and whispers, “His response was incredible.”
“Ever since I got the Nobel,” he said, grateful and relieved, “no one will tell me that anything I’ve done is not good.”
Their friendship, which lasted the rest of his life, was unexpected and wonderful.
Levine’s most recent translation of Milosz’s work is a collection called Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942–1943. He wrote the original contents during World War II, when he was in his early thirties. He and his friend Jerzy Andrzejewski, whose letters also appear in the book, wanted to publish the manuscript at the end of the war, but some pieces were lost or burned when the city was razed during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.
After he renounced Poland’s Communist regime in 1951, Milosz was exiled from his homeland for thirty years, until the fall of Communism. Only then did he return and begin to piece the collection of essays and letters back together for publication.
As with every book Levine translated for him, Milosz insisted on a certain dance before he would allow Legends of Modernity out of his hands. I don’t know, he said. Is it worth all the trees that would be killed to print this book?
She rolled her eyes.
It is, he said finally, and I would like you to translate it.
Milosz was sick, dying in a hospital when Levine mailed the final draft of her translation to him. His eyesight had already failed.
Through Legends of Modernity, Milosz accomplishes something Levine strives for in her classes. He hunts through the writings of certain authors—Daniel Defoe, Honoré de Balzac, André Gide—searching for an understanding of the events through which he was living at the time. What about post-Enlightenment Western civilization spawned the two totalitarian ideologies, Nazism and Communism, that brought about so many millions of deaths?
Milosz passed away in 2004 without ever knowing Legends of Modernity in translation. Levine nods her head slowly and says, “It was the only one he wouldn’t see.” Her voice is soft and sad.
Levine now translates for other Polish writers, including former journalist Hanna Krall, whose book The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories was released in English this year.
Krall tells twelve stories that focus on the effects of World War II in Poland and on survivors and their descendants. A man with a bullet lodged in his jaw returns to Poland to see the barn where he once hid with friends. A group of Jews in hiding strangles an old man to stop his coughing; his wife miraculously rises from her wheelchair and turns them all in. Krall spoke with each of them, traveled with them, and she tells their stories in her own matter-of-fact voice, in short, pithy accounts.
When undergraduates come into her class, Levine says, they think they know what they don’t really know. Having seen Schindler’s List or read Anne Frank’s diary, many students enter the classroom confident in humanity’s ability to triumph over great evil, in the beauty of the human spirit. That’s the part of history they want to read about.
But “Literature of Atrocity” is not a history course. Levine doesn’t wish to manipulate her students’ feelings by forcing a heavy diet of cruelty and bloodshed. That would be, as she says, exploitative and cheap.
Instead, she shows them how experience is transformed into words and how literature engages with the human spirit in the extreme. Asking students to read coarsely written accounts by untrained authors allows her to show them how important the aesthetic structure and conscious construction of a work are to getting the reader’s attention and to making him or her understand.
Actually, Levine says, her new students have it completely backwards. The day-to-day struggle, described monotonously in those wobbly, unskilled hands, is the reality. Writers such as Milosz attempt, in their native tongues, to expand the reader’s understanding that to be human is both evil and beautiful. World War II writers of all ages and expertise chronicled terrifying events and, in a nearby classroom, Levine’s students unravel the meanings of their stories.
“I want them to think about what happens,” she says, “when you have a superbly gifted writer trying to take this, and yes, make a work of beauty out of something horrendous so that we are really moved to understand the individual’s experience.
“I tell them that if they start to have nightmares to come see me,” Levine says. “And some of them do.”
Madeline Levine has been a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures for thirty-one years. She has spent nearly half that time as department chair and is now the director of graduate studies.