Czesław Miłosz Totally Explained

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Czesław Miłosz }}; (June 30, 1911—August 14, 2004) was a Polish-American poet, prose writer and translator. From 1961 to 1978 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1980 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is widely considered one of the greatest contemporary Polish poets.

Life

Europe

Czesław Miłosz was born on June 30, 1911, at (Polish: Szetejnie) in Lithuania, which was then part of the Russian Empire as a result of the 18th-century partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was a son of Aleksander Miłosz, a civil engineer, and Weronika, née Kunat. 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 some Polish documentaries about his famous brother.
   Miłosz 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 once said of himself: "I am a Lithuanian to whom it wasn't given to be a Lithuanian." Milosz was fluent in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, English and French. Miłosz memorialized his Lithuanian childhood in a 1981 novel, The Issa Valley, and in the 1959 memoir Native Realm. After graduating from Sigismund Augustus Gymnasium in Vilnius, he studied law at Stefan Batory University, then a Polish-language institution, Vilnius having been incorporated into the Second Polish Republic after "Żeligowski's Mutiny" (1920). In 1931 he traveled to Paris, where he was influenced by his distant cousin Oscar Milosz, a patriotic Lithuanian poet and Swedenborgian. His 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 for his leftist views. 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," where, among other things, he attended underground lectures by Polish philosopher and historian of philosophy and aesthetics, Władysław Tatarkiewicz. He didn't participate in the Warsaw Uprising due to residing outside Warsaw proper.
   After World War II, Miłosz served as cultural attaché of the communist People's Republic of Poland in Paris. In 1951 he defected and obtained political asylum in France. In 1953 he received the Prix Littéraire Européen (European Literary Prize).

United States

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.
   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 there part-time in a Kraków house that he'd received as a gift from the Polish people. He divided his time between his home in Berkeley and his home in Kraków.
   In 1989 Miłosz received the U.S. National Medal of Arts and an honorary doctorate from Harvard University.
   Through the Cold War, Miłosz's name was often invoked in the United States, particularly by conservative commentators such as William F. Buckley, Jr., usually in the context of Miłosz's 1953 book The Captive Mind. During that period, his name was largely passed over in silence in government-censored media and publications in Poland. The Captive Mind has been described as one of the finest studies of the behavior of intellectuals 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.
   Miłosz is honored 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.
   Miłosz's books and poems have been translated into English by many hands, including Jane Zielonko (The Captive Mind), Miłosz himself, his Berkeley students (in translation seminars conducted by him), and his friends and Berkeley colleagues, Peter Dale Scott, Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass.

Death

Miłosz died in 2004 at his Kraków home, aged 93. His first wife, Janina, had predeceased him in 1986; and his second wife, Carol Thigpen, a U.S.-born historian, in 2002. He is survived by two sons, Anthony and John Peter.
Miłosz is entombed at Kraków's historic Skałka Church, as one of the last persons who will be laid to rest there.

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)
Wiersze ostatnie / The Last Poems (2006)

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