This article presents a selection of Czesław Miłosz’s comments on American
culture, economy and politics during his diplomatic service in the United States in the
years 1946–1950. They were formulated in his postwar correspondence and in a series
of articles entitled “Life in the USA,” which he published in Odrodzenie under the
pseudonym of Jan M. Nowak from 1946 to 1947.

This paper sketches Miłosz’s (non)-existing book on America, consisting
of his numerous articles and columns written during his fi rst stay in the United States
from 1946 to 1950. They were published in the Polish literary press, often under pen
names (such as “Jan M. Nowak” or “Żagarysta”). The book is a signifi cant record of
the period: the political transformations at the beginning of the Cold War and the Anti-
Americanism that was gaining popularity among European intellectuals in the late
1940s.

This article aims to examine selected historical contexts of Miłosz’s
encounters with America. Its purpose is to demonstrate that the poet’s attitude towards
the country where he spent many years of his adulthood and creative life was full of
confl icts, paradoxes and contrasts. Early readings, a boyhood passion for discovering
the laws and secrets of nature, and Romantic and modern literary traditions signifi cantly
infl uenced both Miłosz’s perception of American landscapes and American culture,
shaping new landscapes within him. The transformations of the speaking “I,” which
the reader witnesses through Miłosz’s experiences with the New World, allow for
an understanding of how his unique spatial imagination developed. This article also
attempts to indicate areas where Miłosz searches for a solution to his disintegrated
imagination, particularly in its religious dimension, while tackling the challenges and
crises of modernity.
 

Over the years Visions from San Francisco Bay (1969) has proven to be essential both to Miłosz’s life and to his writings. It was there that he formulated, for the fi rst time with such a force, the theses that would later reappear regularly in his essays and poetry. One vital aspect of the intellectual construction outlined in Visions was the concept of Nature. Miłosz proposed a “presentistic” approach, arguing for the concept of Nature as an indispensable element of contemporary thought. His refl ections were restricted to motifs closely related to his theses about Nature: Nature and beauty, human/animal relations, and the theory of evolution.

This paper investigates the ambiguous process of Czesław Miłosz’s integration
into America (both its nature and culture) in the context of his literary commitments and
“private obligations” to American poetry. It was a long and painful process, a constant
struggle with the state of exile, feelings of homelessness and uprootedness that fi nally
showed the poet the “new identity” of the modern man, bound to recognise his unstable,
tenuous position in space and time. According to Miłosz, America was a testing ground
for all mankind, and the very core of American literature had always been the question:
“Who am I?” Thus, Miłosz’s serious involvement in American history and culture gave
him a new perspective on global civilisation; it helped him to recreate his own identity
and to strike a balance between homelessness and belonging.

This paper undertakes a critical examination of Czesław Miłosz’s negative
responses to contemporary art in general, and American modernist poetry in particular.
It focuses on Miłosz’s interpretations of Cézanne’s statements and Wallace Stevens’s
poems, and concludes that the Polish poet’s inability and unwillingness to appreciate
contemporary art results from his recognition and approval of mimetic representation
as the only strategy which guarantees rationality, certainty, a sense of metaphysical
hierarchy and which is informed by them. Quoted are Miłosz’s somewhat angry
reactions to the concepts of abstract, non-fi gurative art as well as his words of
admiration for the representational moment apparently inherent in both poetry and
painting. Parenthetically, the paper points to Miłosz’s repressed feelings of existential
and epistemological ambivalence, arguably the most valuable aspect of his work.
 

Miłosz was an avant-garde poet who consequently realized his program
of rejuvenating mid-twentieth-century Polish poetry: he wanted to cure the maladies
of Romantic and nationalistic discourses in order to prevent poetry from addressing
important contemporary issues. Although he fi nally became very critical of avantgardes,
his initial, restoring impulse came from the Poundian need to “make it new.”
Miłosz’s great poetry of the 1970s developed Pound’s formal inventions, particularly
the “ideogrammatic method,” thus generating meanings in the poem by setting its
fragments against one another. The Polish poet often criticized the achievements of the
New York School poets, yet he admired their artistic freedom. He realized, however,
that he himself could not contradict the “poetics of rescue” he had been following for
years. The world presented in Miłosz’s late poems is not obvious. Its most astonishing
feature is the perspective from which the narrator addresses the reader: the timeless
space, where the dead meet the living, has nothing to do with a picture of the world
based on mimesis. Miłosz’s “second space” has a lot in common with the “real reality”
designed by surrealists, which John Ashbery evokes in his recent poems. Both poets
reach a similar mystical point where the word touches upon the mystery.

This article discusses Czesław Miłosz’s ambiguous relationship with American beat
and confessional poetry as well as with the counterculture of the 1960s. It focuses
on one of Miłosz’s late poems dedicated to Allen Ginsberg, published in Facing the
River in 1994. The poem, though ostensibly about Ginsberg, is in fact one of the most
confessional poems the Polish poet has ever written, presenting his own life as a failure,
“a discarded tire by the road,” and setting up Ginsberg as an exemplary wiser poet,
“who persisting in folly attained wisdom.” On the one hand, it seems diffi cult not to
see Miłosz and Ginsberg as two very different personalities. On the other hand, Miłosz
saw Ginsberg as the true heir to Whitman, whom he himself had always admired.
The discussion of the poem reveals that Miłosz uses Ginsberg as his own antithesis,
a Yeatsian mask or a Jungian shadow, representing everything that the Polish poet, with
his admitted contempt for any trace of weakness and mental instability, has never been or valued.

This article discusses the relationship between the American counterculture
of the 1960s and Miłosz’s poetry created during that time in Berkeley. The poet
observes the student revolt through his own experience with history, including his leftist
sympathies. He is critical both of the naïve hippie postulates and Herbert Marcuse’s new
version of Marxism. However, he treats counterculture as a symptomatic response to
vital problems of the Western civilization in the second half of the twentieth century. He
refl ects upon the infl uence of art on power, totalitarian as well as democratic. He sees
the necessity of commitment, though he asks about its form and effects. Countercultural
experiments coincide also with Miłosz’s own search for “a more capacious form” and
with the epiphanies described in his poems.
 

This essay sets out to examine Miłosz’s attitude towards confessional poetry,
or rather, to examine his stance on confessionalism as a seemingly inseparable element
of any poetic utterance. By means of such terms as decorum, referentiality of poetic
language and its usefulness, I try to show why Miłosz preferred to stay away from
overtly confessional modes of poetic utterance, which draw too heavily on the poet’s
own experiences and may result in blurring the distinction between biography and
literature. One reason why the poet so intensely disliked excessive confessionalism
is that its main purpose is to describe the emotions of the speaker, whereas he felt that
the main task of poetry is to celebrate the dazzling beauty of the outside world, whose
existence transcends and surpasses the insignifi cantly small inner world of a troubled
psyche. Last but not least, the notion of the usefulness of poetry, in his understanding of
the term, is that it makes it possible for poems written in diverse countries and epochs
to intensify the contemporary reader’s sense of belonging to the great family of the
human race.

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.

During his life in America Czesław Miłosz met many people but few of
them were more important than a man whom he saw only twice – Thomas Merton.
Miłosz and Merton corresponded regularly for almost ten years (1959–1960) and their
letters, published in Polish and English, show two great minds involved in a deep and
sincere dialogue, revealing their most intimate thoughts as well as fears and hopes.
Close to each other, they nevertheless remained independent in their thinking. This
article presents their exchanges on political issues such as the Cold War, the Civil Right
Movement or communist Russia. It also describes how each of them perceived the
changes in the Catholic Church initiated by the Second Vatican Council. Interesting
parallels in their biographies are also mentioned.

This article discusses the politics of translation of eleven negro spirituals,
which Czesław Miłosz produced in 1948, while working as a cultural attaché of the
Polish embassy in Washington D.C. Initially, Miłosz intended to publish all of these
translations in the Polish literary weekly Nowiny Literackie. Although only a few of
these translations appeared in the weekly, the article proposes that Miłosz’s project
played a role in opposing the Soviet cultural and political domination of Poland after
World War II. Drawing parallels between research on slavery and the analysis of
power structures in post-war Poland presented in The Captive Mind, the article argues
that Miłosz’s translations were driven by the “ethics of deception” akin to resistance
strategies inscribed in the original contexts of production of negro spirituals. The article
relies on theories of translation developed by deconstruction to question the traditional
hierarchies between “translation” and “the original,” and, consequently, to complicate
Miłosz’s position as “a translator” of spirituals. Since spirituals are improvisational by
origin, specifi c examples of Miłosz’s translation choices demonstrate that his role in
the translation process was participatory and creative rather than imitative. Thus the
article concludes that the translation of spirituals enabled Miłosz both to be and not to
be the author of these texts, a subversive move in the Soviet-dominated system, where
direct expressions of longing for freedom (only implicitly voiced in the spirituals) may
not have been welcome. This interpretation is consistent with Miłosz’s other early
works, which draw parallels between Polish post-war and slavery/colonial experiences,
and adds to current debates on the possible convergences between post-Soviet and
postcolonial conditions.

Examining the ideological underpinnings of the anthology Postwar Polish
Poetry, this article considers the impact of Czesław Miłosz’s translatory choices on the
rise in popularity of Polish poetry in English translation in the 1960s and its infl uence
on contemporary American poetry. Postwar Polish Poetry by and large introduced
Polish literature to the Anglophone audience. The analysis of the paratext (translator’s
preface, author biographies, jacket copy) and the translations foregrounds Miłosz’s
translatorial, poetological, historical, and political concerns. The article focuses on
delineating the anthology’s role in shaping the historiography of Polish poetry for the
Anglophone reader and touches on the political commentary embedded in Miłosz’s
poetological choices. The overwhelmingly positive reception of the anthology reveals,
in turn, the needs of American poets during the political upheaval of the 1960s to seek
poetry outside their own tradition. Finally, the article argues that the subtleties of the
anthology’s framing of Polish poetry cannot be overlooked, for it continues to exert
infl uence on the canon of Polish literature as it develops in English translation.

This article considers Russian themes in Miłosz’s writing, especially
in his work written in the USA. The transoceanic perspective gave the Polish poet
keen observations and insight into Russia; his opinions resulted from systematic and
thorough studies. The article also discusses migration, exile and empires – issues
central to Miłosz – by contrasting and comparing the Polish Nobel Prize winner and the
Russian Joseph Brodsky.

This article discusses Czesław Miłosz as a poet-translator of the poetry of
his younger colleagues: Herbert, Różewicz and Szymborska. The comparative analysis
focuses on features largely neglected in translation studies, such as Polish-English
linguistic asymmetries and the poetics of grammar, that is, the functions of defi nite,
indefi nite and zero articles, verbs and their aspects, personal pronouns as well as the
auxiliary verb jest/is. Whereas some of these items cannot be translated adequately
because they cause aesthetic loss in any translation, others allow for adequate,
sometimes even “optimal” translation.

The fi rst Polish edition of The Land of Ulro appeared in France in Maisons
Laffi tte in 1977, published by Instytut Literacki. The preface to this
edition was written by Father Józef Sadzik, a philosopher specializing in
Heidegger, and the director of the Pallotine Centre for Dialogue in Surcouf
Street, Paris. Following his advice and encouragement, Miłosz, who had
been connected to Father Sadzik through a long-standing friendship and
mutual respect, began to translate the biblical texts which Sadzik had scrupulously
published in Editions du Dialogue (in August 1980 the latter died
suddenly of heart failure, holding photocopies of The Book of Job, never
to witness the Solidarity victory in Gdańsk, nor his friend’s receipt of the
Noble Prize).

This paper discusses a selection of Czesław Miłosz’s poetry published in Slovenia in 2008. First, it briefl y describes the Polish Nobel Prize winner’s works present in Slovenia. Next, it focuses on their most important translations. This evaluation highlights the multigenerational aspect of the selection: it compiles most of the translations of Miłosz’s poetry (made by seven translators) which have appeared
over the last three decades. The various techniques and approaches adopted by the translators defi ne the poet’s current image in Slovenia. Last but not least, the article presents Jana Unuk’s essay, which closes the selection. Unuk perceives Miłosz primarily as a poet of paradoxes and private experience who constantly returns to the questions of God, religion and eroticism. The popularity of the individual and the existential dimensions of Miłosz’s works is a result of the Polish poet’s peculiar  sensibility, which largely derives from his generation. 

translated by Mikołaj Denderski