Colophon

Czeslaw Milosz in 1986

As The Prague Post reported Feb. 23, a transnational project entitled “Letters to Milosz” is underway throughout Europe under the auspices of HALMA, the European Association of Writing Centers, in honor of what would have been Czeslaw Milosz’s 100th birthday. Writers throughout Europe have been invited to comment on changes in Europe reflected in Milosz’s 1959 biography Native Land. In Prague, March 16, Petra Hůlová and Alexander Lukashuk will take part.

But just what is Milosz’s legacy, and is the Nobel Prize winning Polish poet, who died in 2004, still relevant today?

One key to Milosz’s legacy is the fact that he moved to the United States in 1960 and became a U.S. citizen in 1970. During this time Milosz was teaching at the University of California at Berklee. He began to translate his own poems into English and occasionally to write in English as well. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980 while his work was systematically banned in Poland until after the fall of communism. He returned to Krakow in his old age.

Milosz’s life in the United States, where he formed several important friendships with other poets and was a prominent teacher, allowed his influence to be felt on both sides of the Atlantic. For American readers, Milosz’s poems, especially those like the harrowing “And the City Stood in Its Brightness,” filled in a void of knowledge enforced by the Iron Curtain, allowing a glimpse in Central and Eastern European politics, history and poetry.

In Poland, Milosz was an important influence for a younger of generation of poets that included Adam Zagajewski, one of the most prominent living Polish poets, and an individual who has – like Milosz – achieved significant fame in the United States. (Zagajewski is perhaps best known for his poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” which was published in The New Yorker in its first issue after 9/11.)

However, as the American poet Edward Hirsch has commented, “I think Adam is the end of the line. The thing that I first found exciting about Polish poetry doesn’t interest these younger poets. They don’t like its seriousness, its commitment, its engagement with the world. They prefer a poetry that courts meaninglessness, that plays with language, that denies significance, that upsets consciousness. Polish poetry is now like all the other poetries.”

If it is true that Zagajewski is “the end of the line,” it is the line that was towed for decades by Czeslaw Milosz. But perhaps the line dropped by young Polish poets has been picked up by American poets.