Overview

A new collection of work from Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz that includes previously untranslated poems written during his time in Washington, D.C., and his years in Europe before and after. One of the most revered poets of the twentieth century, Czeslaw Milosz, a defining voice in Polish literature, famously bore witness to its violence in his native Poland and in the war's aftermath from exile in Europe and the United States. Immediately after the war, he lived in Washington, D.C., working as a diplomatic official, having left behind an old world stained by bloodshed and still in the throes of ideological conflict as he sought to find his bearings in a new world. Poet in the New World gathers the poems written during these years--for the first time in English translation--and is contextualized by the poetry that came directly before and after, from poems written in Warsaw in 1945, shortly before he departed for the United States, to others written in Europe from 1951 to 1953, after his significant time away. Capturing Milosz at his existential and stylistic best, this collection of post-war poetry is attuned to the necessity of imagination and the duty of language and is filled with wonder and skepticism. Milosz grapples with the extraordinary violence he had witnessed in Warsaw and the strange postwar United States he has inhabited, all while pondering the enduring fate of his beloved Poland. In the poem ""Warsaw,"" the poet asks, ""How can I live in this country/Where the foot knocks against/the unburied bones of kin?"" Equal parts affecting and illuminating, Poet in the New World is an essential addition to the Milosz canon, in a beautifully rendered work of poetry in translation by Robert Hass and David Frick, that reverberates with the questions of histories past, present, and future. What does it mean to be a poet caught between the ruins of an old world and the strange comforts of a new one? Poetry of Exile: Explores Milosz's complex feelings as a Polish diplomat in Washington, D.C., caught between a homeland ravaged by war and an America he struggles to understand. A Major Poetic Translation: For the first time in English, these poems capture a crucial period of transition, rendered by the renowned poet Robert Hass and scholar David Frick. The Complete Milosz Canon: Contextualized with poems written immediately before his departure and after his return to Europe, this collection fills a vital gap in the Nobel laureate's formidable body of work.

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9780063423008

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Reviews

""Milosz is a poet of history, of consciousness, of the deep engagement with the necessity of intellectual freedom. . . Poet in the New World is a superb introduction to a poet of reality who remembers his 'sweet European homeland' where 'blood gathers in the mouths of tulips.'"" -- Wall Street Journal

""Milosz is a poet of history, of consciousness, of the deep engagement with the necessity of intellectual freedom. . . Poet in the New World is a superb introduction to a poet of reality who remembers his 'sweet European homeland' where 'blood gathers in the mouths of tulips.'"" - Wall Street Journal

Author Information

Czeslaw Milosz was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania, in 1911. He worked with the Polish resistance movement in Warsaw during World War II and was later stationed in Paris and Washington, DC, as a Polish cultural attaché. He defected to France in 1951, and in 1960 he accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, and was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in 2004. David Frick, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, was an accomplished scholar and translator. His translation of Jerzy Pilch's A Thousand Peaceful Cities was awarded the 2011 Northern California Book Award for Fiction in Translation. He also translated a volume of Pilch's My First Suicide, a short story collection which appeared on Kirkus Review's list of best fiction books. In 2016, he translated and edited the first-ever English language edition of Fryderyk Chopin's Polish letters. The culmination of his many scholarly publications, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors has been translated into Lithuanian and Polish. In 2021, he was recognized by the Republic of Poland with the Benedykt Polak (Benedict of Poland) Award for his lifetime contribution to the interpretation of Polish culture around the world. Frick died in December 2022. Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema (Ecco, 2010), Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Time and Materials (Ecco, 2008), Sun Under Wood (Ecco, 1996), Human Wishes (1989), Praise (1979), and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer's Selected Poems (2012) and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994). His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

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