(b. 1962) – a writer, radio and television journalist, reporter, historian of Polish literature and academic teacher. While taking Polish Studies he was a…
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The Book Institute offers translations of excerpts from Czesław Miłosz’s works in the following languages: Arabic, Croatian, German, Italian Lithuanian, Persian, Russian and Ukrainian. Interested parties are kindly invited to contact us.
(1911‒2004) ‒ a poet, prose writer, essayist and translator.
He was born in Šeteniai, Lithuania, and spent his youth at school and university in Wilno (presently Vilnius, Lithuania), where he debuted as a poet in the university Alma Mater Vilnensis journal. The land of his childhood years had a major impact on his work; he returned to it in ‘Dolina Issy’ (The Issa Valley, 1955). He was a member of the poet group Żagary and co-creator of a journal by the same name. After the USSR attacked Poland, he fled Lithuania, survived the German occupation in Warsaw, and in 1945, he lived in Krakow. After the war he worked in the communist Polish diplomatic service – in the USA, then in France, until 1951, when he applied for political asylum in Paris. In 1960, he set off for California, where he lectured at Berkeley for twenty years, as a professor of Slavic languages and literature. He also sat in various award chapters and cultural institutions and gave guest lectures and readings at American and European schools. Before 1989, he mainly published in the Parisian Kultura journal and in the Polish underground press. After 1989, he lived in Berkeley and in Krakow.
According to the international critics and his contemporary poets (such as Joseph Brodsky), Miłosz’s poetry is among the most significant literary phenomena. Apart from his densely metaphorical symbolic/visionary poems, in which the idyllic and the apocalyptic meet, there is stark philosophical prose and religious epiphany. Alongside the lyric poems there are theological treatises – such as the ‘Świat. Poema naiwne’ (The World: A Naive Poem) cycle, written in German-occupied Warsaw in a ‘nursery rhyme’ convention, and the ‘Sześć wykładów wierszem’ (Six Lectures in Verse) cycle in ‘Kroniki’ (Chronicles). Miłosz goes beyond genre, as a poet and translator he dips into the whole tradition of poetry – from his contemporary American poets to the Bible (fragments of which he retranslated into Polish).
As a novelist, he gained popularity with ‘Zdobycie władzy’ (The Usurpers, 1953), about the installation of a communist government in Poland, but the work that was rated highest by both readers and himself was the quasi-autobiographical Issa Valley, a story of growing up and loss of innocence filled with philosophical subtext. Personal references came back strong in his essays, both in ‘Zniewolony umyśł’ (The Captive Mind, 1953), a book that is a classic of literature on totalitarianism, and ‘Rodzinna Europa’ (Native Realm, 1959), which remains one of the best books about the ‘Central European’ mindset, and the intellectual and literary autobiography that is ‘Ziemia Ulro’ (The Land of Ulro, 1977). These books and ones that followed, such as ‘Świadectwo poezji’ (The Testimony of Poetry, 1987) and ‘Życie na wyspach’ (Life on the Islands, 1997) take the reader to the very heart of life and literature.
He won many awards, most importantly, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. He also received the Italian Grinzane Cavour (1992), the Nike Literary Award for ‘Piesek przydrożny’ (Roadside Dog, 1998) and the Two Nations Prize from the presidium of the Polish Parliament and the Parliament of the Lithuanian Republic (2002). He was given honorary Doctorates from many universities in the USA and in Poland, including the Jagiellonian University and Harvard University, and in cities abroad, such as Rome and Bologna. He was an honorary citizen of Lithuania and the city of Krakow. In 1989, he and his brother Andrzej received a medal of the ‘Righteous among the Nations’ for helping Jews during World War II, from the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem. In 1991, the private Czesław Miłosz Award was established for writers. He was given the National Medal of Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts (USA 1989), the Order of the White Eagle (1994), Silver Medal of the 600th Anniversary of the Revitalisation of the Krakow Academy (2001) and a second class Order of the Great Lithuanian Prince Gediminas for service to Lithuania (1995).
In 2003, The Miłosz Institute Library and Archives began work in Oakland, California and in Krakow, gathering and arranging knowledge on Czesław Miłosz. In 2007, the Embassy of the United States in Warsaw established the Czesław Miłosz award for strengthening understanding between Poland and he USA, awarded to those working to improve dialogue between the two nations. The Czesław Miłosz Festival has been organised in Krakow every two years since 2009, and 2011 was declared the Year of Czesław Miłosz by the Polish and Lithuanian parliaments.
His works have been translated into several dozen languages.
translation works (selected):
from Greek and Hebrew:
from English:
from French:
into English from Polish:
Albanian:
Arab:
Belarussian:
Bulgarian:
Catalan:
Chinese:
Croatian:
Czech:
Danish:
Dutch:
English:
Estonian:
Finnish:
French:
German:
Hebrew:
Hindi:
Hungarian:
Italian:
Japanese:
Latvian:
Lithuanian:
Macedonian:
Malay:
Marathi:
Norwegian:
Portuguese:
Romanian:
Russian:
Serbian:
Slovak:
Slovenian:
Spanish:
Swedish:
Turkish:
Ukrainian