Czesław Miłosz

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Image:Czeslaw Milosz 1998 by Kubik.jpg

Czesław Miłosz(pronunciation (help·info); June 30, 1911 – August 14, 2004) was a Polish poet, prose writer, translator and essayist. In 1980, while living in Berkeley, California, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He spent the last days of his life in Kraków, Poland.

1 Life
2 Works
3 Books on or relating to
4 External links

[edit] Life

Born at Šeteniai, Lithuania, into a Polonized Lithuanian family (of the Lubicz coat-of-arms), he always emphasized his familial connection to the ancient Grand Duchy of Lithuania. (He did not speak Lithuanian.) He spent part of his childhood, about the time of the Revolution, in Russia.

Miłosz studied law at Vilnius University, then in the Polish-governed part of present-day Lithuania.

In 1944 he declined to take part in the doomed Warsaw Uprising.

In 1951, as cultural attaché of the communist People's Republic of Poland in Paris, he broke with the government and obtained political asylum in France. In 1953 he received the Prix Littéraire Européen (European Literary Prize).

In 1960 Miłosz came to the United States, and in 1970 he took U.S. citizenship. In 1961 he became a professor 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.

When the Iron Curtain fell, Miłosz was able to return to Poland, at first to visit and later to live there part-time.

In 1989 Miłosz received the National Medal of Arts and an honorary doctorate from Harvard University.

His book, The Captive Mind, is considered one of the finest studies of intellectuals under a repressive regime. He observed that the intellectuals who became dissidents were not necessarily the ones with the strongest minds, but rather those with the weakest stomachs. The mind can rationalize anything, he said, but the stomach can only take so much. He also said that as a poet he avoided touching his nation's wounds, for fearing of making them holy.

Czesław Miłosz is honored at Israel's Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust, as one of the "Righteous Among The Nations."

Poems by him were placed on a monument to fallen shipyard workers in Gdańsk.

Many of his books and poems have been translated into English by various hands, including his friend and Berkeley colleague, Robert Hass.

Miłosz died in 2004 at his home in Kraków, aged 93. His first wife, Janina, had died in 1986; and his second wife, Carol, a U.S.-born historian, in 2002. Miłosz was buried to the Skałka sanctuary in Kraków.

[edit] Works

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)