This article discusses the decade-long correspondence of Czesław Miłosz and Thomas Merton, published fi rst in a Polish translation in 1991, and only later, in 1997, in the original English. Though Merton offered to write in French, a language that Miłosz at the time knew much better than English, Miłosz chose to use the latter. The article concentrates on Miłosz’s side of the correspondence, comparing the impression of struggle and incomplete command that his letters evoke in the original version with the linguistic elegance and control implied by the Polish translation. The article suggests that Miłosz’s slightly foreign English is a kind of refl ection of the theme implied by the English title of the correspondence, Striving Towards Being. Moreover, the article argues that writing in English, despite the constraints that it imposed, enabled the Polish poet to discover a childlike freedom of expression and to meet his “correspondent,” a fellow-sufferer from spiritual homelessness, in sympathetic understanding, though the external experience of the two was very different. Paradoxically, each partner, in his search for someone who “spoke the same language,” found what he sought in a person who, in the literal sense, did not.