Works by
Czesław Miłosz
(Writer)
[June 30, 1911 – August 14, 2004

As Editor

• A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry (1996)
  Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz selects and introduces 300 of his favorite poems in this “magnificent collection” that ranges “widely across time and continents, from eighth century China to contemporary americanca” (San Francisco Chronicle).

• Postwar Polish Poetry (1965)
  The stress of the anthology is on poetry written after 1956, the year when the lifting of censorship and the breakdown of doctrines provoked and explosion of new schools and talents. The victory of Solidarity in August 1980 once again opened new vistas for a short time; the coup of December closed that chapter. It is too early yet to predict the impact these events will have on the future of Polish poetry.

As Translator

• Talking to My Body (1996) by Anna Swirszczynska with Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan, Translators

Biography/Memoirs

• A Year of the Hunter (1994)
  Memoirs.

• Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition (1958, aka Rodzinna Europa)
  Before he emigrated to the United States, Czeslaw Milosz lived through many of the social upheavals that defined the first half of the twentieth century. Here, in this compelling account of his early life, the author sketches his moral and intellectual history from childhood to the early fifties, providing the reader with a glimpse into a way of life that was radically different from anything an American or even a Western European could know.
  
  Using the events of his life as a starting point, Native Realm sets out to explore the consciousness of a writer and a man, examining the possibility of finding glimmers of meaning in the midst of chaos while remaining true to oneself.
  
  In this beautifully written and elegantly translated work, Milosz is at his very best.

Essays

• Legends of Modernity Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942-1943 (2005)
  Legends of Modernity, now available in English for the first time, brings together some of Czeslaw Milosz's early essays and letters, composed in German-occupied Warsaw during the winter of 1942-43.
  
  "Why did the European spirit succumb to such a devastating fiasco?" the young Milosz asks. Half a century later, when Legends of Modernity saw its first publication in Poland, Milosz said: "If everything inside you is agitation, hatred, and despair, write measured, perfectly calm sentences..." While the essays here reflect a "perfect calm," the accompanying contemporaneous exchange of letters between Milosz and Jerzy Andrzejewski express the raw emotions of "agitation, hatred and despair" experienced by these two close friends struggling to understand the proximate causes of this debacle of western civilization, and the relevance, if any, of the teachings of the Catholic church.
  
  Passionate, poignant, and compelling, Legends of Modernity is a deeply moving insight into the mind and emotions of one of the greatest writers of our time.

• Milosz's ABC's (aka Milosz's Alphabet) (1997, aka Abecadlo Miłosza)
  Perhaps my ABC's are instead of: instead of a novel, instead of an essay on the twentieth century, instead of a memoir. Each of the individuals remembered here sets into motion a network of mutual allusions and interdependencies linked to the facts of my century.
  
  The ABC book is a Polish genre, a loose form composed of short, alphabetical entries. In Czeslaw Milosz's conception, the ABC book becomes a sort of hybrid autobiographical reference book, combining citations of characters from his earlier prose works and poems with references to real historical figures-like Camus, Cézanne, Edward Hopper, Arthur Koestler, and Mark Edelman; the Polish writers Gombrowicz and Herbert; and the poets Baudelaire and Frost-who were particularly influential during his formative years, to places, and to broader topics such as "The City," "Unhappiness," and "Money." Another fascinating entry in Milosz's bold opus, Milosz's ABC's is an engaging tribute to a brilliant mind.

• To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays (2001)
  To Begin Where I Am brings together a rich sampling of poet Czeslaw Milosz's prose writings. Spanning more than a half century, from an impassioned essay on human nature, wartime atrocities, and their challenge to ethical beliefs, written in 1942 in the form of a letter to his friend Jerzy Andrzejewski, to brief biographical sketches and poetic prose pieces from the late 1990s, this volume presents Milosz the prose writer in all his multiple, beguiling guises. The incisive, sardonic analyst of the seductive power of communism is also the author of tender, elegiac portraits of friends famous and obscure; the witty commentator on Polish complexes writes lyrically of the California landscape. Two great themes predominate in these essays, several of which have never appeared before in English: Milosz's personal struggle to sustain his religious faith, and his unswerving allegiance to a poetry that is "on the side of man."

• Beginning With My Street: Essays & Recollections (1985, aka Zaczynając od moich ulic)
  In this gathering of essays and reminiscences, written over a span of three decades, the Nobel prize-winning Polish Poet traces a kind of informal autobiography against the street map of his home city of Wilno.

• Roadside Dog (1997, aka Piesek przydrożny)
  A moving miscellany of poems, parables, essays, and epigrams from the Nobel Prize winner.

• Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision (1977)
  This stimulating collection of essays, mostly concerned with subjects taken from Slavic literatures, is at once scholarly and reflective. The volume opens with a true story, "Brognart," which is a confession of the author's remorse based on conflict with French intellectuals. "Science Fiction and the Coming of the Antichrist" concerns Vladimir Solovyov. "Krasinski's Retreat" is another return to the author's student readings, which attempts to determine how a Polish romantic poet could write in 1833 a drama on the approaching world revolution. "Joseph Conrad's Father" sketches the biography of a poet and revolutionary and also throws some light upon the fate of the hero of the last chapter.

• The Seizure of Power (1953, aka Zdobycie władzy)
  Interrelated essays by the Nobel Laureate on his adopted home of California, which Lewis Hyde, writing in The Nation, called "remarkable, morally serious and thought-provoking essays, which strive to lay aside the barren categories by which we have understood and judged our state . . . Their subject is the frailty of modern civilization."

Fiction

• The Issa Valley: A Novel (1955, aka Dolina Issy)
  Thomas, the child-protagonist of The Issa Valley, is subject to both the contradictions of nature in this severe northern setting and sometimes enchanting, sometimes brutal timbre of village life. There are the deep pine and spruce forests, the grouse and the deer, and the hunter's gun. There is Magdalena, the beautiful mistress of the village priest, whose suicide unleashes her ghost to haunt the parish. There are also the loving grandparents with whom Thomas lives, who provide a balance of the not-quite-Dostoevskian devils that visit the villagers. In the end, Thomas is severed from his childhood and the Issa River, and leaves prepared for adventures beyond his valley. Poetic and richly imagined, The Issa Valley is a masterful work of fiction from one of our greatest living poets.

Poetry

• Selected Poems: 1931-2004 (2006)
  Selected Poems: 1931-2004 celebrates Czeslaw Milosz's lifetime of poetry. Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of our time, Milosz is a master of expression and probing inquiry. Life opened for Czeslaw Milosz at a crossroads of civilizations in northeastern Europe. This was less a melting pot than a torrent of languages and ideas, where old folk traditions met Catholic, Protestant, Judaic, and Orthodox rites. What unfolded next around him was a century of catastrophe and madness: two world wars, revolutions, invasions, and the murder of tens of millions, all set to a cacophony of hymns, gunfire, national anthems, and dazzling lies. In the thick of this upheaval, wide awake and in awe of living, dodging shrapnel, imprisonment, and despair, Milosz tried to understand both history and the moment, with humble respect for the suffering of each individual. He read voraciously in many languages and wrote masterful poetry that, even in translation, is infused with a tireless spirit and a penetrating insight into fundamental human dilemmas and the staggering yet simple truth that "to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name." Unflinching, outspoken, timeless, and unsentimental, Milosz digs through the rubble of the past, forging a vision -- and a warning -- that encompasses both pain and joy. "His intellectual life," writes Seamus Heaney, "could be viewed as a long single combat with shape-shifting untruth."

• The Last Poems (2006, aka Wiersze ostatnie)

• Second Space: New Poems (2004)
  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."

• On Time Travel (2004, aka O podróżach w czasie)

• Orfeusz i Eurydyka (2003)

• A Treatise on Poetry (2001)
  The Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz began his remarkable A Treatise on Poetry in the winter of 1955 and finished it in the spring of 1956. It was published originally in parts in the Polish émigré journal Kultura. Now it is available in English for the first time in this expert translation by the award-winning American poet Robert Hass.
  
  A Treatise on Poetry is a great poem about some of the most terrible events in the twentieth century. Divided into four sections, the poem begins at the end of the nineteenth century as a comedy of manners and moves with a devastating momentum through World War I to the horror of World War II. Then it takes on directly and plainly the philosophical abyss into which the European cultures plunged.
  
  "Author's Notes" on the poem appear at the end of the volume. A stunning literary composition, these notes stand alone as brilliant miniature portraits that magically re-create the lost world of prewar Europe.
  
  A Treatise on Poetry evokes the European twentieth century, its comedy and terror and grief, with the force and expressiveness of a great novel. A tone poem to a lost time, a harrowing requiem for the century's dead, and a sober meditation on history, consciousness, and art: here is a masterwork that confronts the meaning of the twentieth century with a directness and vividness that are without parallel.

• New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 (2001)
  New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 celebrates the exceptional career of Czeslaw Milosz, from his first work, written when he was twenty, to his newest poems, published for the first time in English in this volume.
  
  Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of our time, Czeslaw Milosz is a master of probing inquiry and graceful expression. From his early poems, in which he declares, "I, a faithful son of the black earth, shall return to the black earth" ("Hymn"), to his newest work, in which he sees himself as a lofty, gray-headed spirit "Saved by his amazement, eternal and divine" ("For My Eighty-eighth Birthday"), Milosz's poetry is infused with a tireless spirit and penetrating insight into fundamental human dilemmas. In "Report," he arrives at the staggering yet simple truth that "to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name." in "Craftsman," he looks back over a life that was difficult to lead, but in the end he is nonetheless "Praising, renewing, healing. Grateful because the sun rose for you and will rise for others."
  
  With its clarity, historical awareness and moral vision," writes Don Began in The Nation, Milosz's work proves that "poetry can define and address the concerns of an age." Milosz himself describes poetry as "the passionate pursuit of the Real," "a witness and participant in one of mankind's major transformations." A defector to France in 1951 after having lived under Communism and National Socialism in Eastern Europe, he brings to bear the political awareness of an exile -- most notably in A Treatise on Poetry, a sixty-page exploration of the world wars that rocked the first half of the twentieth century. His newer poems, such as "Sarajevo," "Zdziechowski," and "On the Inequality of Men," also reflect the sharp political focus through which he continues to bear witness to the events that stir the world.
  
  Unflinching, outspoken, and unsentimental, Milosz digs among the rubble of the past, choosing from the bad as well as the good, forging a vision that encompasses pain as well as joy. His work is "one of the monumental splendors of poetry in our age" (Edward Hirsch, The New York Times Book Review). New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 is an essential collection from one of the most important voices in contemporary poetry.

• Bells In Winter (1999)
  The poet's entire effort is directed toward a confrontation with experience-and not with personal experience alone, but with history in all its paradoxical horror and wonder .... The translations in Bells in Winter reveal a voice that is unadorned and discursive, yet capable of powerful (and delicate) poetic effects; it is a voice that works through traditional forms to transform and revivify tradition .... Few other living poets have argued as convincingly for the nobility and value of the poet's calling.

• It (2000, aka To)

• An Excursion through the Twenties and Thirties (1999, aka Wyprawa w dwudziestolecie)

• A Further Alphabet (1998, aka Inne Abecadło)

• Life on Islands (1997, aka Życie na wyspach)

• Modern Legends (1996, aka Legendy nowoczesności)

• Facing The River (1994, aka Na brzegu rzeki)
  Czeslaw Milosz did not believe he would ever return to the river valley in which he grew up. But in the spring of 1989, exactly fifty years after he left, the new government of independent Lithuania welcomed him back to that magical region of his childhood. Many of the poems in Facing the River record his experiences there, where the river of the Issa Valley symbolizes the river of time as well as the river of mythology, over which one cannot step twice. This is the river Milosz faces while exploring ancient themes. He reflects upon the nature of imagination, human experience, good and evil--and celebrates the wonders of life on earth.
  
  In these later poems, the poems of older age, this Nobel laureate takes a long look back at the catastrophic upheavals of the twentieth century; yet despite the soberness of his themes, he writes with the lightness of touch found only in the great masters.

• In Search of a Homeland (1992, aka Szukanie ojczyzny)

• Farther Surroundings (1991, aka Dalsze okolice)

• Poszukiwanie ojczyzny (1991)

• Rok myśliwego (1991)

• Collected Poems (1990)

• The Metaphysical Pause (1989, aka Metafizyczna pauza)

• Chronicles (1987, aka Kroniki)

• Unattainable Earth (1987)
  Prose, poetry

• The Unencompassed Earth (1984, Nieobjęta ziemio)

• The Witness of Poetry (1983)
  Czeslaw Miosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, reflects upon poetry's testimony to the events of our tumultuous time. From the special perspectives of "my corner of Europe," a classical and Catholic education, a serious encounter with Marxism, and a life marked by journeys and exiles, Milosz has developed a sensibility at once warm and detached, flooded with specific memory yet never hermetic or provincial.
  
  Milosz addresses many of the major problems of contemporary poetry, beginning with the pessimism and negativism prompted by reductionist interpretations of man's animal origins. He examines the tendency of poets since Mallarmé to isolate themselves from society, and stresses the need for the poet to make himself part of the great human family. One chapter is devoted to the tension between classicism and realism; Milosz believes poetry should be "a passionate pursuit of the real." In "Ruins and Poetry" he looks at poems constructed from the wreckage of a civilization, specifically that of Poland after the horrors of World War II. Finally, he expresses optimism for the world, based on a hoped-for better understanding of the lessons of modern science, on the emerging recognition of humanity's oneness, and on mankind's growing awareness of its own history.

• The Poem of the Pearl (1982, Hymn o perle)

• The Garden of Learning (1979, aka Ogród nauk)

• Where the Sun Rises and Where It Sets (1974, aka Gdzie słońce wschodzi i kiedy zapada)

• Selected Poems (1973)

• Private Obligations (1972, aka Prywatne obowiązki)

• The History of Polish Literature (1969)
  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.

• Visions from San Francisco Bay (1969, aka Widzenia nad Zatoką San Francisco)
  Interrelated essays by the Nobel Laureate on his adopted home of California, which Lewis Hyde, writing in The Nation, called "remarkable, morally serious and thought-provoking essays, which strive to lay aside the barren categories by which we have understood and judged our state . . . Their subject is the frailty of modern civilization."

• City Without a Name (1969, aka Miasto bez imienia)

• Gucio Enchanted (1965, aka Gucio zaczarowany)

• Człowiek wśród skorpionów (1961)

• King Popiel and Other Poems (1961, aka Król Popiel i inne wiersze)

• Kontynenty (1958)

• A Poetical Treatise (1957, aka Traktat poetycki)

• The Captive Mind (1953, aka Zniewolony umysł)
  The best known prose work by the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature examines the moral and intellectual conflicts faced by men and women living under totalitarianism of the left or right.

• The Light of Day (1953, aka Światło dzienne)

• A Moral Treatise (1947, aka Traktat moralny)

• Rescue (1945, aka Ocalenie)

• Pieśń niepodległa (1942)

• Verses (1940, aka Wiersze)

• Obrachunki

• Three Winters (1936, aka Trzy zimy)

• Poemat o czasie zastygłym (1933)

• Kompozycja (1930)

• Podróż (1930)

Prose

• Native Realm (1988)

• The Separate Notebooks (1986)

• Ziemia Ulro / The Land of Ulro (1977)
  This major prose work, originally published in English in 1985, is both a moving spiritual self-portrait and an unflinching inquiry into the genesis of our modern afflictions. A man who was raised a Catholic in rural Lithuania, lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, and emerged, first in Europe and then in America, as one of our most important men of letters, speaks here of the inherited dilemmas of our civilization in a voice recognizable for its honesty and passion.

Other

• Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz (1996)
  "These letters, written from 1958 to 1968, trace the growing friendship and fascinating arguments between the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz, the poet who was later exiled from his native Poland, yet went on to win the 1980 Nobel Prize in literature. The quest to make sense out of the human condition is the bridge between their worlds of literature and religion, and the two men have a lot to say to one another. Is humanity inherently good? Can art save us from ourselves? Can war be justified? These letters are worth reading strictly for the quality of the writing and the thinking, but they are also valuable as literary biography and cultural history." -- Amazon.com

See also:

• Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations (2006) by Cynthia L. Haven
  Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations collects pieces from a wide range of sources over twenty-five years and includes an unpublished interview between Milosz and his friend and fellow Nobel Laureate poet Joseph Brodsky. This volume acquaints us with a man whose work, life, and thought defy easy characterizations. 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.