Documentary "The Age of Czeslaw Milosz"
A Noble prize winner in 1980, Milosz taught at Berkeley in the 60's and lived not far from where I live, on Grizzley Peak and Centennial where the journalist Mark Danner, CAl faculty, now lives...Milosz was very lonely while living at Berkeley, and mailed his poems to himself, sometimes...a survivor of the Russian revolution and both world wars, he was isolated from both the American literary scene and the literary life in Poland, from which he defected in 1951. His books were subsequently banned. The film by Juoazas Javaitis, Lithuanian director euologizes Milosz's life, childhood and time in Poland...he, also having had a life in Vilnius, Lithuania. Part of the "Auteur Author" film series presented as part of the second East Bay Berkeley Book Festival, june 2 and 3. Milosz died at age 93 in Cracow, to which he returned, as its compass suited him. Anthony Milosz, his son introduced the film, and asserted that his father was also American, as well as Polish. Robert Hass played a role in narrating the film, and said, "I miss him and revisit him all the time - his work, his mind, his way of thinking about things...his take on the world was profoundly non-American
From the Poetry Foundation: Mliosz published his first collection of poems, Poemat o czasie zastyglym(“Poem of the Frozen Time”), at the age of twenty-one. Associated with the catastrophist school of poets during the 1930s, their writings ominously foreshadowed World War II; when in 1939, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, Milosz worked with the underground Resistance movement in Warsaw, writing and editing several books published clandestinely during the occupation. A collection titled Wiersze(“Poems”), was published under the pseudonym J. Syruc. Following the war, Milosz became a member of the new communist government’s diplomatic service and was stationed in Paris, France, as a cultural attache. In 1951, he left this post and defected to the West.
"In a speech before the Congress for Cultural Freedom, quoted by James Atlas of the New York Times, Milosz declared: “I have rejected the new faith because the practice of the lie is one of its principal commandments and socialist realism is nothing more than a different name for a lie.” After his defection Milosz lived in Paris, where he worked as a translator and freelance writer. In 1960 he was offered a teaching position at the University of California at Berkeley, which he accepted. He became an American citizen in 1970.
Jessee Hamlin, in ARTS & ENDS continues about Milosz, saying that by remembering and rescuing fragments of the past, Milosz felt himself engaged in a "kind of combat against nothingness, against oblivion." Milosz wrote that he "grieved because of the cruelty of the world" and "learned to bear misfortune"... and tapped as many voices as he could summon to "make sense of his explosive time."...it was a very long film: 3 hours, and concentrated most on Milosz's life in Europe. It was poignant. I heard Milosz read a couple of times, once in New York, and I believe, another time in Philadelphia. A Song on the End of the World
From the Poetry Foundation: Mliosz published his first collection of poems, Poemat o czasie zastyglym(“Poem of the Frozen Time”), at the age of twenty-one. Associated with the catastrophist school of poets during the 1930s, their writings ominously foreshadowed World War II; when in 1939, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, Milosz worked with the underground Resistance movement in Warsaw, writing and editing several books published clandestinely during the occupation. A collection titled Wiersze(“Poems”), was published under the pseudonym J. Syruc. Following the war, Milosz became a member of the new communist government’s diplomatic service and was stationed in Paris, France, as a cultural attache. In 1951, he left this post and defected to the West.
"In a speech before the Congress for Cultural Freedom, quoted by James Atlas of the New York Times, Milosz declared: “I have rejected the new faith because the practice of the lie is one of its principal commandments and socialist realism is nothing more than a different name for a lie.” After his defection Milosz lived in Paris, where he worked as a translator and freelance writer. In 1960 he was offered a teaching position at the University of California at Berkeley, which he accepted. He became an American citizen in 1970.
Jessee Hamlin, in ARTS & ENDS continues about Milosz, saying that by remembering and rescuing fragments of the past, Milosz felt himself engaged in a "kind of combat against nothingness, against oblivion." Milosz wrote that he "grieved because of the cruelty of the world" and "learned to bear misfortune"... and tapped as many voices as he could summon to "make sense of his explosive time."...it was a very long film: 3 hours, and concentrated most on Milosz's life in Europe. It was poignant. I heard Milosz read a couple of times, once in New York, and I believe, another time in Philadelphia. A Song on the End of the World
Related Poem Content Details
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
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