Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz ; 30 June 1911 – 14 August 2004) was a Polish poet, prose writer and translator of Lithuanian origin. His World War II-era sequence The World is a collection of 20 "naive" poems. After serving as a cultural attaché for the Republic of Poland (1945–1951), he defected to the West in 1951, and his nonfiction book The Captive Mind (1953) is a classic of anti-Stalinism. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Miłosz later became an American citizen and was awarded the 1978 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Life in Europe

Czesław Miłosz (right) with brother Andrzej Miłosz at PEN Club World Congress, Warsaw, May 1999

Czesław Miłosz was born on June 30, 1911 in the village of Szetejnie (Lithuanian:Šeteniai), Kaunas Governorate, Russian Empire (now Kėdainiai district, Kaunas County, Lithuania) on the border between two Lithuanian historical regions of Samogitiaand Aukštaitija in central Lithuania. As the son of Aleksander Miłosz (d.1959), a civil engineer, and Weronika, née Kunat (d.1945), descendant of the Siručiai noble family,[citation needed] Miłosz was fluent in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, English and French. His brother, Andrzej Miłosz (1917–2002), a Polish journalist, translator of literature and of film subtitles into Polish, was a documentary-film producer who created Polish documentaries about his brother.

Miłosz was raised Catholic in rural Lithuania and emphasized his identity with the multi-ethnic Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a stance that led to ongoing controversies; he refused to categorically identify himself as either a Pole or a Lithuanian. He said of himself: "I am a Lithuanian to whom it was not given to be a Lithuanian.", and "My family in the sixteenth century already spoke Polish, just as many families in Finland spoke Swedish and in Ireland English, so I am a Polish not a Lithuanian poet. But the landscapes and perhaps the spirits of Lithuania have never abandoned me". Miłosz memorialised his Lithuanian childhood in a 1955 novel, The Issa Valley, and in the 1959 memoirNative Realm.

In his youth, Miłosz came to adopt, as he put it, a "scientific, atheistic position mostly", though he was later to return to the Catholic faith. After graduating from Sigismund Augustus Gymnasium in Vilnius, he studied law at Stefan Batory University and in 1931 he travelled to Paris, where he was influenced by his distant cousin Oscar Milosz, a French poet of Lithuanian descent and a Swedenborgian. In 1931, he formed the poetic group Żagary together with the young poets Jerzy Zagórski, Teodor Bujnicki, Aleksander Rymkiewicz, Jerzy Putrament and Józef Maśliński. Miłosz's first volume of poetry was published in 1934. After receiving his law degree that year, he again spent a year in Paris on a fellowship. Upon returning, he worked as a commentator at Radio Wilno, but was dismissed, an action described as stemming from either his leftist views or for views overly sympathetic to Lithuania. Miłosz wrote all his poetry, fiction and essays in Polish and translated the Old Testament Psalms into Polish.

Miłosz spent World War II in Warsaw, under Nazi Germany's "General Government". Here he attended underground lectures by Polish philosopher and historian of philosophy and aesthetics, Władysław Tatarkiewicz. He did not participate in the Warsaw Uprisingsince he resided outside Warsaw proper.

After World War II, Miłosz served as cultural attaché of the newly-formed People's Republic of Poland in Paris and Washington DC. For this he was criticized in some emigre circles. Conversely, he was attacked and censored in Poland when in 1951 he defected and obtained political asylum in France. In 1953 he received the Prix Littéraire Européen (European Literary Prize).

Life in the United States

Czesław Miłosz 1998

In 1960 Miłosz emigrated to the United States, and in 1970 he became a U.S. citizen. In 1961 he began a professorship in Polish literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1978 he received the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He retired that same year, but continued teaching at Berkeley. Milosz' personal attitude about living in Berkeley is sensitively portrayed in his poem, "A Magic Mountain," contained in a collection of translated poems entitled Bells in Winter, published by Ecco Press (1985). Having grown up in the cold climates of Eastern Europe, Milosz was especially struck by the lack of seasonal weather in Berkeley and by some of the brilliant refugees from around the world who became his friends at the university.

In 1980 Miłosz received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Since his works had been banned in Poland by the communist government, this was the first time that many Poles became aware of him. When the Iron Curtain fell, Miłosz was able to return to Poland, at first to visit and later to live part-time in Kraków. He divided his time between his home in Berkeley and an apartment in Kraków. In 1989, he received the U.S. National Medal of Arts and an honorary doctorate from Harvard University.

Miłosz's 1953 book The Captive Mind is a study about how intellectuals behave under a repressive regime. Miłosz observed that those who became dissidents were not necessarily those with the strongest minds, but rather those with the weakest stomachs; the mind can rationalize anything, he said, but the stomach can take only so much. Through the Cold War, the book was often cited by US conservative commentators such as William F. Buckley, Jr., and has been a staple in political science courses on totalitarianism.

In an 1994 interview, Miłosz spoke of the difficulty of writing religious poetry in a largely postreligious world. He reported a recent conversation with his compatriot Pope John Paul II; the latter, commenting upon some of Miłosz's work, in particular Six Lectures in Verse, said to him: "You make one step forward, one step back." The poet answered: "Holy Father, how in the twentieth century can one write religious poetry differently?" The Pope smiled. A few years later, in 2000, Miłosz dedicated a rather straightforward ode to John Paul II, on the occasion of the pope's 80th birthday.

Death and legacy

Czesław Miłosz died on 14. August 2004 at his Kraków home, aged 93. He was buried in Kraków's Skałka Roman Catholic Church, one of the last to be commemorated there.[18] His first wife, Janina (née Dłuska), whom he had married in 1944, predeceased him in 1986. They had two sons, Anthony (b. 1947) and John Peter (b. 1951). His second wife, Carol Thigpen, an American-born historian, died in 2002.

Miłosz is honoured at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust, as one of the "Righteous among the Nations". A poem by Miłosz appears on a Gdańsk memorial to protesting shipyard workers who had been killed by government security forces in 1970. His books and poems have been translated by many hands, including Jane Zielonko, Peter Dale Scott, Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass.

In November 2011, Yale University hosted a conference on Miłosz's relationship with America. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which holds the Czesław Miłosz Papers, also hosted an exhibition celebrating Miłosz's life and work, titledExile as Destiny: Czeslaw Milosz and America. 2011 was deemed "The Milosz Year," which culminated in a large conference in Kraków (May 9–15, 2011).

Selected works

Poetry collections

• 1936: Trzy zimy (Three Winters); Warsaw: Władysława Mortkowicz
• 1945: Ocalenie (Rescue); Warsaw: Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza Czytelnik
• 1954: Światło dzienne (The Light of Day); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1957: Traktat poetycki (A Poetical Treatise); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1962: Król Popiel i inne wiersze (King Popiel and Other Poems); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1965: Gucio zaczarowany (Gucio Enchanted); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1969: Miasto bez imienia (City Without a Name); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1974: Gdzie słońce wschodzi i kedy zapada (Where the Sun Rises and Where it Sets); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1982: Hymn o Perle (The Poem of the Pearl); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1984: Nieobjęta ziemia (The Unencompassed Earth); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1989: Kroniki (Chronicles); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1991: Dalsze okolice (Farther Surroundings); Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak
• 1994: Na brzegu rzeki (Facing the River); Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak
• 2000: To (It), Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak
• 2002: Druga przestrzen (The Second Space); Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak
• 2003: Orfeusz i Eurydyka (Orpheus and Eurydice); Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie
• 2006: Wiersze ostatnie (Last Poems) Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak

Prose collections

• 1953: Zniewolony umysł (The Captive Mind); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1955: Zdobycie władzy (The Seizure of Power); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1955: Dolina Issy (The Issa Valley); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1959: Rodzinna Europa (Native Realm); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1969: The History of Polish Literature; London-New York: MacMillan
• 1969: Widzenia nad Zatoką San Francisco (A View of San Francisco Bay); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1974: Prywatne obowiązki (Private Obligations); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1976: Emperor of the Earth; Berkeley: University of California Press
• 1977: Ziemia Ulro (The Land of Ulro); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1979: Ogród Nauk (The Garden of Science); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1981: Nobel Lecture; New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux
• 1983: The Witness of Poetry; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
• 1985: Zaczynając od moich ulic (Starting from My Streets); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1986: A mi Európánkról (About our Europe); New York: Hill and Wang
• 1989: Rok myśliwego (A year of the hunter); Paris: Instytut Literacki
• 1992: Szukanie ojczyzny (In Search of a Homeland); Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak
• 1995: Metafizyczna pauza (The Metaphysical Pause); Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak
• 1996: Legendy nowoczesności (Modern Legends, War Essays); Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie
• 1997: Zycie na wyspach (Life on Islands); Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak
• 1997: Piesek przydrożny (Roadside Dog); Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak
• 1997: Abecadło Milosza (Milosz's Alphabet); Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie
• 1988: Inne Abecadło (A Further Alphabet); Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie
• 1999: Wyprawa w dwudziestolecie (An Excursion through the Twenties and Thirties); Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie
• 2004: Spiżarnia literacka (A Literary Larder); Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie
• 2004: Przygody młodego umysłu; Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak
• 2004: O podróżach w czasie; (On time travel) Kraków: Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy Znak

Translations by Miłosz

• 1996: Talking to My Body by Anna Swir translated by Czesław Miłosz and Leonard Nathan, Copper Canyon Press