Poland's Nobel Laureate Milosz Dead at 93

Reuters ^ | Sat, Aug 14, 2004

[Grzegorz 246]

WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland's Nobel Prize-winning emigre poet, Czeslaw Milosz, died Saturday at his home in the southern Polish city of Krakow at the age of 93, Polish media reported.

Long a symbol of opposition to totalitarianism, he received the 1980 Nobel Literary Prize for his lifelong poetic achievements amid the heady atmosphere of the Polish Solidarity movement's bold challenge to Soviet-style communist rule.

Initially a supporter of Poland's Soviet-imposed post-war regime, he served in its diplomatic corps from 1945 to 1950 before becoming disillusioned with communism and defecting in 1951.

He made his home in France before moving to the United States in 1960 where he taught literature at the University of California in Berkeley, wrote poetry and translated English literature into Polish.

In the 1990s, after Poland's largely peaceful revolution from communism to democracy he returned to Poland and settled in Krakow.

[martin_fierro]

Polska Pingski.

[theDentist]

Looks like Poet Laureates are dropping left and right.

[southernnorthcarolina]

I've always thought it a shame that poetry is one of the few art forms that can't be fully appreciated in languages other than the original. Musical scores, paintings, and sculpture need no translation of course, and novels and short stories can be translated while retaining 99% of their effect. Translate a poem (or song lyrics), however, and you lose the rhyme, cadence, and meter.

But iambic pentameter wasn't what Milosz was about, anyway. Even though I am unable to appreciate his art, his message got through loud and clear.

[CasearianDaoist]

I knew him at Berkeley, knew him well. My roommate was a student of his, he was his thesis advisor. Interest person. He had the reputation of being a real character on campus.

[Borges]

His 'The Captive Mind' is the classic work on why so many artists are attracted to collectivism and the intellectual mistakes that draw them to it.

R.I.P.

[elhombrelibre]

I read "The Captive Mind" many years ago. He was a great one to have on our side when we opposed the Soviets, and when others saw the world as complicated and nuanced.

[RightWingAtheist]

Bibliopath ping

[RightWingAtheist]

He had the reputation of being a real character on campus.

Naturally if he was Berkely. His life work was based on tweaking communist regimes :-)

[RightWingAtheist]

I've always been of the opinion that it was the anti-communists who were really the ones with a complicated and nuanced worldview, who realized that there are no free lunches, that what looks good on paper doesn't always work out in reality, and that while we all want peace, we cannot have it if we are to remain free. The anti-anit-communists, on the other hand, saw everything in terms of "imperialists and militarists vs. the oppressed", refused to aknowledge that were flaws in communism or even atrocities committed in its name, and could never, ever, admit that they were wrong.

[CasearianDaoist]

Well Berkeley, or at least the University as a whole, is less radical than you might know. Most of the commies are not actually connected in any official way with the University, and most of the radical leftists that are students or faculty are in the usual humanities departments - social science, polysci and the like - or the "victimology" departments.

Berkeley has wonderful science and engineering departments, runs the Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories National Labs, and has had much to do with the technological history of the Cold War. Science and Engineering areas tend conservative or at least toward the middle - they are not out and out lefties.

I think that Berkeley was much less radical in the late 70s and 80's than it is today. It also had great foreign language studies and their Russian studies where quite hot at the time and not very pro Soviet (Miloz was in the Slavic languages department.) He was a considered such a character because he was a boisterous, cranky, outspoken old man. I do not think his politics had much to do with it. He did not care much for internal American politics, but if he were to vote in an American election I would have no doubt that he would vote for Democrats. His whole political focus was on Central Europe and the calamity of Russian Communism that befell it. WHile I think that he appreciated America, I do not think he took us very seriously as a civilization. He was a poet, after all, and very much a "Middle European." He was fairly typical of Polish intellectual culture of the late 19th and 20th centuries

I get the feeling that as an institution Berkeley has gone downhill in the last 15 years or so. They started this open admission program for minorities and have added on all of these "community outreach" programs. The last time I was there I noted an trend toward mediocrity and thought the campus looked a tad seedy. But when I was there it was like an Ivy League school: A beautiful campus, First rate research, first rate teachers and student and world class facilities. It had something like 39 Nobels on campus. The admissions were extremely selective (I had to take a week long set of test on campus just to apply for grad school after they had already selected me from the applicant pool based on grades, undergraduate institution, board scores and professional accomplishments.) I had a great time there and it was as exciting intellectuall as any university in the world. No public university in EUrope even came close to it.

Considering that it was a public school and had extremely low fees, it was really an amazing institution.

[Tax-chick]

I heard him speak once at Trinity in the mid-80's. Interesting guy.

[RadioAstronomer]

Thanks for the ping.

[Revolting cat!]

Yes, the man was cranky, with sometimes strange political views, which is why he wasn't loved by all. But in public pronouncements he stayed away from politics. One interesting thing, his English co-translator American poet Robert Hass, a politically thoughtlesss infantile neo-marxist, who uses every occasion while promoting poetry to take a jab at those heartless Republicans, recalled in the Sunday SF Comical that he and others had to explain to Milosz some idiomatic references in New Yorker cartoons, as Milosz despite years in the country didn't keep up with the everyday culture.

This may also explain why some of the choices in the English translations seem rather odd to bilingual readers - translator Hass doesn't spaek a word of Polish as far as I know.

[dighton]

Telegraph obit.