A Book of Luminous Things

A Book of Luminous Things

Author: Czesław Miłosz

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9780156005746

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Nobel laureate poet Czeslaw Milosz personal selection of 300 of the world's greatest poems written throughout the ages and around the world.


Milosz

Milosz

Author: Andrzej Franaszek

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-04-24

Total Pages: 575

ISBN-13: 0674495047

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Andrzej Franaszek’s award-winning biography of Czeslaw Milosz—winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature—recounts the poet’s odyssey through WWI, the Bolshevik revolution, the Nazi invasion of Poland, and the USSR’s postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. This edition contains a new introduction by the translators, along with maps and a chronology.


To Begin Where I Am

To Begin Where I Am

Author: Czeslaw Milosz

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2002-10-02

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 9780374528591

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Collects five decades of essays by the Nobel Prize-winning writer, covering topics including war, human nature, faith, communism, and Polish culture.


Second Space

Second Space

Author: Czeslaw Milosz

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2005-08-23

Total Pages: 114

ISBN-13: 0060755245

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Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz's most recent collection Second Space marks a new stage in one of the great poetic pilgrimages of our time. Few poets have inhabited the land of old age as long or energetically as Milosz, for whom this territory holds both openings and closings, affirmations as well as losses. "Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, / I felt a door opening in me and I entered / the clarity of early morning," he writes in "Late Ripeness." Elsewhere he laments the loss of his voracious vision -- "My wondrously quick eyes, you saw many things, / Lands and cities, islands and oceans" -- only to discover a new light that defies the limits of physical sight: "Without eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point, / That grows large and takes me in." Second Space is typically capacious in the range of voices, forms, and subjects it embraces. It moves seamlessly from dramatic monologues to theological treatises, from philosophy and history to epigrams, elegies, and metaphysical meditations. It is unified by Milosz's ongoing quest to find the bond linking the things of this world with the order of a "second space," shaped not by necessity, but grace. Second Space invites us to accompany a self-proclaimed "apprentice" on this extraordinary quest. In "Treatise on Theology," Milosz calls himself "a one day's master." He is, of course, far more than this. Second Space reveals an artist peerless both in his capacity to confront the world's suffering and in his eagerness to embrace its joys: "Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds. / Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice! / How will I live without you, my consoling one! / But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees, / And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth."


Facing the River

Facing the River

Author: Czesław Miłosz

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 84

ISBN-13:

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Milosz's poems move forward while attending to his past, and deal with how his Lithuania, and Europe at large, maintain their habit of partial memory and forgetting. In these poems, such as the sequence Lithuania. After Fifty-Two Years, Wanda (about the painter Wanda Telakowska), Sarajevo, Translating Anna Swir on an Island in the Caribbean, visible worlds exist and sensations of body and soul exist in memory, a living resource and not a nostalgia. Milosz remains aware of suffering but aware too, of the poet's duty to celebrate. Facing the River does not have the tone of finality, but of a restless seeking which finds.


The Poet's Work

The Poet's Work

Author: Leonard Nathan

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9780674689701

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Born eighty years ago in Lithuania, Czeslaw Milosz has been acclaimed "one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest" (Joseph Brodsky). This self-described "connoisseur of heavens and abysses" has produced a corpus of poems, essays, memoirs, and fiction of such depth and range that the reader's imagination is moved far beyond ordinary limits of consciousness. In The Poet's Work Leonard Nathan and Arthur Quinn follow Milosz's wanderings in exile from Poland to Paris to Berkeley as they chart the singular development of his art. Relating his life and his works to the unfolding of his thought, they have crafted a lucid reading of Milosz that far surpasses anything yet written on this often enigmatic poet. The Poet's Work is not only a solid introduction to Milosz; it is also a unique record of the poet's own interpretations of his work. As colleagues of Milosz at Berkeley, Nathan and Quinn had long, detailed discussions with the poet. It is this spirit of collaboration that brings a sense of immediacy and authority to their seamless study. Nathan and Quinn reveal as never before why Milosz is a true visionary, a poet of ideas in history. And they show how the influence of Blake, Simone Weil, Dostoevsky, Lev Shestov, and Swedenborg, together with Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and Robinson Jeffers, has enriched his vision. Milosz's lifelong experience of totalitarian regimes that exalt science and technology over individual needs and aspirations, his acute sense of alienation as an migr , and his humanistic zeal and belief in the primacy of living have brought a prismatic quality to his poetry. At seventy, Milosz spoke of himself as an "ecstatic pessimist." In their sensitive mapping of his art, Nathan and Quinn skillfully demonstrate that Milosz's global influence has been achieved by the ever-shifting balance he strikes between ecstasy and pessimism. Irony and humor are never far from this book, which not only communicates Milosz's polyphonic message but also evokes his uniquely humane sensibility. The Poet's Work is an illuminating introduction to Milosz that will inform and engage scholars and general readers for years to come.


The History of Polish Literature, Updated Edition

The History of Polish Literature, Updated Edition

Author: Czeslaw Milosz

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1983-10-24

Total Pages: 628

ISBN-13: 9780520044777

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This book is a survey of Polish letters and culture from its beginnings to modern times. Czeslaw Milosz updated this edition in 1983 and added an epilogue to bring the discussion up to date.


Road-side Dog

Road-side Dog

Author: Czeslaw Milosz

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 1999-11-29

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780374526238

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"I went on a journey in order to acquaint myself with my province, in a two-horse wagon with a lot of fodder and a tin bucket rattling in the back. The bucket was required for the horses to drink from. I traveled through a country of hills and pine groves that gave way to woodlands, where swirls of smoke hovered over the roofs of houses, as if they were on fire, for they were chimneyless cabins; I crossed districts of fields and lakes. It was so interesting to be moving, to give the horses their rein, and wait until, in the next valley, a village slowly appeared, or a park with the white spot of a manor in it. And always we were barked at by a dog, assiduous in its duty. That was the beginning of the century; this is its . I have been thinking not only of the people who lived there once but also of the generations of dogs accompanying them in their everyday bustle, and one night-I don't know where it came from-in a pre-dawn sleep, that funny and tender phrase composed itself: a road-side dog." --Road-Side Dog


Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz

Author: Czesław Miłosz

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9781578068289

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Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) felt that part of his role as a poet and critic was to bear witness to bloodshed and terror as well as to beauty. He survived the Soviet invasion of his beloved Lithuania, escaped to Nazi-occupied Warsaw where he joined the Socialist resistance, then witnessed the Holocaust and the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto. After persecution and censorship triggered his defection in 1951, he found not relief but the anguish of solitude and obscurity. In the years of loneliness and labor, Miłosz continued writing poems and essays, learning to love his privacy and preoccupations and enjoying the devotion of his students at the University of California, Berkeley. International fame came like lightning when Miłosz won the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature. Czesław Miłosz: Conversations collects pieces from a wide range of sources over twenty-five years and includes an unpublished interview between Miłosz and his friend and fellow Nobel Laureate poet Joseph Brodsky. This volume acquaints us with a man whose work, life, and thought defy easy characterization. He is a sensualist with a scholar's penchant for history, as likely to celebrate Heraclitus as the hooks on a woman's corset. He is a devout but doubting Catholic, and a thinker tinged with a heretical sensibility. Cynthia L. Haven is a literary critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Her work also has been published in Civilization, the Georgia Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Cortland Review.