Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz [t ͡ʂɛswaf miwɔʂ ] ( listen / i? ) (* June 30, 1911 in Šeteniai (Polish: Szetejnie ), Kovno Governorate, Russian Empire (now Lithuania); † August 14, 2004 in Krakow, Poland ) was a Polish poet. In 1980 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Life

The family belonged to the long-established Polish gentry. Czesław Miłosz graduated from middle and high school studies in Vilnius, which became the capital of a voivodship in 1922 after the 1920 occupation by Poland took place. The study of literature, he broke off, because according to him, at this faculty so many women studied that this was called the "marriage department ". Reluctantly, he instead began to study law.

His first poems were published in 1930 in the student newspaper Alma Mater Vilnensis. Between 1931 and 1934 he was the tone of the louiseVuitton (German twigs ), a Polish nationalism skeptical position on circle of literati. This met in the café Rudnicki, meeting point of Polish artists, and gave out a vanguard leaflets of the same name, in which the art direction of catastrophism was propagated. 1933, his first book of poems Poemat o czasie zastygłym appeared (German poem about a solidified time). The following year he completed his studies, received the first of many literary prizes and the scholarship that allowed him to educate yourself in Paris for a year.

During the German occupation in World War II, he worked in the underground, for which he was honored by Yad Vashem with the title Righteous Among the Nations.

Between 1945 and 1949 he held various positions of diplomatic missions of the People 's Republic of Poland in New York City and Washington, DC, 1950, he was transferred to Paris. For a holiday in Warsaw him the passport was revoked in December, he was given back only thanks intercession of influential personalities in late January 1951. On February 1, 1951 " jumped " Miłosz " from " and received political asylum in France. 1953 was published simultaneously in New York and Paris, The Captive Mind ( The Captive Mind ) in English. The book analyzes based on four case studies (alpha, beta, gamma, delta) the immense force of attraction, exercise totalitarian systems on the writing guild. The great desire of the free-floating intellectuals is to part of the estate. This need is so impetuous, that many who once sought inspiration in fascist Germany or Italy, have now converted to the new faith. This stall urge the writer makes it, according to Miłosz, all peddlers so easy ( he borrowed the image at Witkiewicz ) those to turn their Murti - Bing pills. Most angry Miłosz, however, the tone-setting Paris intelligentsia with its consistent refusal, like other written bailed, engage in a dialogue with the dialectical materialism. He focused instead on describing the effects of this method and to analyze. The method itself he did from just the old story of the serpent, the dialectical animal is without a doubt, "Dad, the snake has a tail? " Asked the little Hans. " Nothing more than a tail ," the father replied. - Certain critics insisted from the beginning on to interpret the book against any evidence as a kind of roman à clef and persons criticism, and saw it as their duty to " expose " what " famous" people could have meant Miłosz, such as Jerzy Putrament (as Gamma, " the slave of history " ), Tadeusz Borowski ( beta ) and his former good friend, Jerzy Andrzejewski (as Alpha ), etc.

1960 Miłosz worked as a visiting lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages ​​and Literatures at the University of California at Berkeley, where he became a full professor in 1961. He became an American citizen in 1970.

1978, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature awarded him. He gave up teaching, and has been honored by his university with the highest recognition, The Berkeley Citation. In 1980 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, to which the censorship of his books was lifted in the same year in Poland. In June 1981, Miłosz entered after 30 years in exile again Polish soil, but soon returned to Berkeley. In December, his books were banned a second time (see also martial law in Poland 1981-1983). After the reunification in 1989, Miłosz shuttled back and forth between Krakow and Berkeley, until he finally settled in Krakow in 2000. In the same year the poet Pope John Paul II sent a tribute on his 80th birthday on May 18. Czesław Miłosz died on August 14, 2004 in Krakow.

Miłosz has his works, even in the period of his exile, almost exclusively written in Polish. The bulk of his poetic work is in very good issues of Harper Collins and Tate / Penguin in English translation. Particularly noteworthy are in the later poems, the translations he himself made ​​into English (in collaboration with Robert Hass ).

The poet colleagues in significant judgment

Joseph Brodsky calls him one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest poets of our time.

For Seamus Heaney, he is one of the few people who know more of the reality and they can better endure than all the others.

Andrew Motion is convinced that the turning point that ushered Ted Hughes with Crow, is ' can not be explained without the influence Miłosz.

Tony Judt thought he was the greatest Polish poets of the 20th century.

Honors

• Honorary citizen of Sopot
• Honorary citizen of Vilnius, 2001

Works in the Polish language

Works in German translation

• The Captive Mind. Suhrkamp, ​​1975, ISBN 3-518-36778-1
• The face of time. Europe -Verlag, 1953
• The Valley of Issa. Suhrkamp, ​​2002, ISBN 3-518-39926-8
• Western and Eastern terrain. DTV, 1986, ISBN 3-423-10583-6
• Song of the end of the world. Poems. Kiepenheuer and Petrovich, 1984, ISBN 3-462-01454-4
• Sign in darkness. Poetry and poetics. Suhrkamp, ​​2002, ISBN 3-518-13320-9
• History of Polish Literature. Wiss. and Pol., 1985, ISBN 3-8046-8583-8
• The country Ulro. Kiepenheuer and Malevich, 1982, ISBN 3-462-01501- X
• Poems 1933-1981. Suhrkamp, 1995, ISBN 3-518-03648-3
• The witness of poetry. Carl Hanser, 1984, ISBN 3-446-13949-4
• Poems. Suhrkamp, 1992, ISBN 3-518-22090- X
• Streets of Vilnius. Carl Hanser, 1997, ISBN 3-446-18945-9
• My ABC. Hanser Fiction, 2002, ISBN 3-446-20133-5
• DAS and other poems. Carl Hanser, 2004, ISBN 3-446-20472-5
• Visions on the Bay of San Francisco: American essays. Suhrkamp, ​​2008, ISBN 3-518-41993-5
• Poems. Carl Hanser, 2013, ISBN 3-446-24181-7