Król Popiel i inne wiersze

by Czesław Miłosz

Genres: Poetry

Unknown Binding

About the author

Czesław Miłosz was a Nobel Prize winning poet and author of Polish-Lithuanian heritage. He memorialised his Lithuanian childhood in a 1955 novel, The Issa Valley , and in the 1959 memoir Native Realm . After graduating from Sigismund Augustus Gymnasium in Vilnius, he studied law at Stefan Batory University and in 1931 he travelled to Paris, where he was influenced by his distant cousin Oscar Milosz, a French poet of Lithuanian descent and a Swedenborgian. His first volume of poetry was published in 1934.

After receiving his law degree that year, he again spent a year in Paris on a fellowship. Upon returning, he worked as a commentator at Radio Wilno, but was dismissed, an action described as stemming from either his leftist views or for views overly sympathetic to Lithuania. Miłosz wrote all his poetry, fiction, and essays in Polish and translated the Old Testament Psalms into Polish.

Awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature for being an author "who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts."

Reviews

[Luke]

IN MILAN
How far off are those years, mine and not mine,
When one wrote poems on Italy
Telling about evenings in the fields of Siena
Or about cicadas in Sicilian ruins.

Long into the night we were walking on the Piazza del Duomo.
He: That I was too politicized.
And I answered him more or less as follows:

If you have a nail in your shoe, what then?
Do you love that nail? Same with me.
I am for the moon amid the vineyards
When you see high up the snow on the Alps.
I am for the cypresses at dawn
And for the bluish air in the valleys.
I could compose, right now, a song
On the taste of peaches, on September in Europe.
No one can accuse me ofbeing without joy
Or of not noticing girls who pass by.
I do not deny that I would like to gobble up
All existing flowers, to eat all the colors.
I have been devouring this world in vain
For forty years, a thousand would not be enough.
Yes, I would like to be a poet of the five senses,
That's why I don't allow myself to become one.
Yes, thought has less weight than the word lemon
That's why in my words I do not reach for fruit.