%0 Journal Article
%T "For here have we no continuing city, but we seek one to come." Friends United by Exile: On the Correspondence of Czesław Miłosz and Thomas Merton
%A Ward, Jean
%J Przekładaniec
%V Issues in English
%R 10.4467/16891864ePC.13.023.1212
%N Issue 25/2011– Between Miłosz and Milosz
%P 171-184
%K Miłosz-Merton correspondence, exile, spiritual homelessness, writing in a foreign language, Miłosz’s English
%@ 1425-6851
%D 2013
%U https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/przekladaniec/article/for-here-have-we-no-continuing-city-but-we-seek-one-to-come-friends-united-by-exile-on-the-correspondence-of-czeslaw-milosz-and-thomas-merton
%X 
	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.