Czeslaw Milosz

File:Czeslaw Milosz 1998 by Kubik.jpg

Czeslaw Milosz in 1998.

Czeslaw Milosz (June 30, 1911—August 14, 2004), Polish poet and novelist, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.

Milosz' works are notable for insights into religion, philosophy, nature, and politics. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he declared that the books that linger should “deal with the most incomprehensible quality of God-created things.”

Biography

Early Years

Born to a Polish-speaking family in Lithuania, Milosz studied Polish literature and law in its capital city, Vilna, (today, Vilnius), a meeting point between East and West. In that ancient city, Lithunians, Poles, Byelorussians, and Tartars, Christians, Jews, and Muslims intermingled peacefully.

Yet Milosz, like other Central Europeans who had experienced at close range the impact of the first World War and of the rise of Communism in nearby Russia, felt a sense of foreboding, of impending catastrophe.

His first published poems, a 1933 volume entitled Poem of Frozen Time (Poemat o czasie zastyglym), deal with the imminence of yet another war and the worldwide cataclysm that it portends.

When the Nazis did invade Poland, Milosz moved to Warsaw to join the resistance. There he edited an underground anthology of Polish wartime poetry, Independent Song (Pien niepodlegla) (1942). The defeat of Poland and the tragic fate of the Poles and Jews surrounding him were deeply burned into his life. He personally witnessed the end of the walled Jewish ghetto in Warsaw.

In response to the horror, Milosz offered “The World” (Polish translation) (1943). Reaching beyond suffering, Milosz helped his readers sense divine promise within ordinary things, a presence that suggests that evil in the world is not an expression of its innermost nature and will pass.

Post-war Career

After the war, Milosz, then a socialist, joined the Polish diplomatic corps. He served in New York and Washington DC before being sent to Paris where he asked for political asylum in 1951. Stalinism had increased its hold on Poland. In France, Milosz published The Captive Mind (Zniewolony Umysl), perhaps his best-known work, a critique of the Polish Communist Party’s assault on the independence of the intelligentsia. Governments can use more than censorship to control people; they can even change the meaning of words, Milosz reminds us.

In the early 1960s, Milosz left Paris to become professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1970, he became a United States citizen. He is not often thought of as a commentator on American politics and culture, but in Visions from San Francisco Bay, he talks at length about America in the 1960s.

Milosz frequently experienced his life as one of exile; not only because of the years in which he was separated from his native land, but in the larger sense that the human condition as he knew it was one in which all humanity endures metaphysical or even religious exile. This spiritual awareness touched every dimension of his life, and he wrote of The Unattainable Earth (Nieobjeta Ziemia). The longing awakened by an intimate, pure, and unconcious childhood bond with nature that almost spontaneously identified with the entire world, could not be fulfilled.

In The Land of Ulro, Milosz wrote about good and evil using his relationship with nature:

“When my guardian angel...is triumphant, the earth looks precious to me and I live in ecstasy...surrounded by divine protection...my dreams are of magically rich landscapes, and I forget about death, because whether it comes in a month or five years it will be done as it was decreed, not by the God of the philosophers but by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. When the Devil triumphs, I am appalled...I look at trees in bloom as they blindly repeat...what has been willed by the law of natural selection...I am oppressed by the randomness and absurdity of my individual existence...and then the terror: my life is over, I won’t get another, only death now.”

Milosz was much influenced by William Blake ("Ulro" is Blake’s creation); Emanuel Swedenborg; and Milosz’ cousin, the poet and mystic Oscar Milosz.

Throughout his life, Milosz remained deeply involved in Polish letter. In his later years, he translated the writing of Polish authors largely unknown in the West such as Alexander Wat, a man whose time in Communist concentration camps produced a profoundly honest theological and literary voice. Wat’s autobiography, My Century, was edited from conversations between Milosz and Wat.

Death and Legacy

After the Soviet empire disintegrated, Milosz was once again able to live in Poland. He eventually settled in Kracow, where his ninetieth birthday was widely celebrated. There he died in 2002 at the age of 93. Milosz' first wife, Janian Dluska, the mother of his two sons, Anthony and John Peter, had died in 1986. His second wife, Carol Thigpen, an American-born historian and Dean at Emory University, had passed away in 2001.

Milosz is buried in Krakow's Skalka Church.

Milosz received many honors. He is listed at Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial to the holocaust as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.” His words were placed on a monument to fallen shipyard workers in Gdansk. He received the Prix Litteraire Europeen (check spelling and accents)(1953), the Marian Kister Award (1967), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1977), the Neustadt International Prize (1978), and National Medal of Arts of the U.S. Endowment for the Arts (1989. He was appointed a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (date) and of the American Institute of Arts and Letters (1982). He was granted numerous honorary doctorates including one from Harvard (1989) where he gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures (1982).

Works

File:Herb Lubicz.jpg

Lubicz coat-of-arms.

• Kompozycja (1930)
• Podróż (1930)
• Poemat o czasie zastygłym (1933)
• Trzy zimy / Three Winters (1936)
• Obrachunki
• Wiersze / Verses (1940)
• Pieśń niepodległa (1942)
• Ocalenie / Rescue (1945)
• Traktat moralny / A Moral Treatise (1947)
• Zniewolony umysł / The Captive Mind (1953)
• Zdobycie władzy / The Seizure of Power (1953)
• Światło dzienne / The Light of Day (1953)
• Dolina Issy / The Issa Valley (1955)
• Traktat poetycki / A Poetical Treatise (1957)
• Rodzinna Europa / Native Realm (1958)
• Kontynenty (1958)
• Człowiek wśród skorpionów (1961)
• Król Popiel i inne wiersze / King Popiel and Other Poems (1961)
• Gucio zaczarowany / Gucio Enchanted (1965)
• Widzenia nad Zatoką San Francisco / Visions of San Francisco Bay (1969)
• Miasto bez imienia / City Without a Name (1969)
• The History of Polish Literature (1969)
• Prywatne obowiązki / Private Obligations (1972)
• Gdzie słońce wschodzi i kiedy zapada / Where the Sun Rises and Where It Sets (1974)
• Ziemia Ulro / The Land of Ulro (1977)
• Ogród nauk / The Garden of Learning (1979)
• Hymn o perle / The Poem of the Pearl (1982)
• The Witness of Poetry (1983)
• Nieobjęta ziemio / The Unencompassed Earth (1984)
• Kroniki / Chronicles (1987)
• Dalsze okolice / Farther Surroundings (1991)
• Zaczynając od moich ulic / Starting from My Streets (1985)
• Metafizyczna pauza / The Metaphysical Pause (1989)
• Poszukiwanie ojczyzny (1991)
• Rok myśliwego (1991)
• Na brzegu rzeki / Facing the River (1994)
• Szukanie ojczyzny / In Search of a Homeland (1992)
• Legendy nowoczesności / Modern Legends (1996)
• Życie na wyspach / Life on Islands (1997)
• Piesek przydrożny / Roadside Dog (1997)
• Abecadlo Miłosza / Milosz's Alphabet (1997)
• Inne Abecadło / A Further Alphabet (1998)
• Wyprawa w dwudziestolecie / An Excursion through the Twenties and Thirties (1999)
• To / It (2000)
• Orfeusz i Eurydyka (2003)
• O podróżach w czasie / On Time Travel (2004)
• Wiersze ostatnie / The Last Poems (2006)

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Faggen, Robert, ed. Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czesław Miłosz, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1996. ISBN 978-0374271008
• Maciuszko, Jerzy J. Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz.: An article from: World Literature Today. University of Oklahoma, September 22, 1997, v. 71, Issue n4, p 88.

External links

• Milosz.pl — official website of Czesław Miłosz (Polish)
• Interview with Czesław Miłosz (Georgia Review)
• Czesław Miłosz, Poet and Nobelist Who Wrote of Modern Cruelties, Dies at 93 (New York Times)
• Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz dies (CBC News)
• Nobel laureate poet Miłosz dies (BBC News)
• Czesław Miłosz Obituary (The Economist)
• Czesław Miłosz memorial (San Francisco Chronicle)
• Nobel poet Czesław Miłosz of Poland and Berkeley, one of the icons of the Solidarity movement, dies (UC Berkeley Press Release)
• Open Directory Project: Czesław Miłosz
• Biography of Czesław Miłosz
• Miłosz reading his poems in English and in Polish at the Internet Poetry Archive on ibiblio.org
• Miłosz reading his poems in English at UC Berkeley, February 3, 2000 (online audio file)
• Miłosz reading his poems in English at UC Berkeley, April 4, 1983 (with Robert Hass and Robert Pinksy (online audio file)
• Information relating to Miłosz as the winner of the Official site 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature

Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates (1976-2000)

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