Czeslaw Milosz on bohemian dress
Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2009 9:29 pm
I've been rereading Roadside Dog, the 1998 book by Nobel prize-winning Polish/Lithuanian poet, Czeslaw Milosz, who emigrated to the United States and taught at Berkeley from 1961 until his death in 2004. I thought some of you might enjoy his brief prose poem "Dresses." He employs typically double-edged irony in his conclusion (this was a man who worked on underground publications just outside Nazi-occupied Warsaw):
- translated by the author and Robert HassBlack capes, ties lavaliere, large-brimmed hats--the uniform of the bohemians. Or jeans, beards, pigtails, black sweaters. Those who by such dress want to prove that they are poets, musicians, painters. And the dislike of that uniform among the solitary who are sure enough of their work's value to manage without that paraphernalia. Yet, had they not hidden their profession under the disguise of normal people, they would have been more honest: here we demonstrate in public our shameful stigma of deviants and madmen.