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Arts & Culture > Poetry & Prose > This Only by Czeslaw Milosz
 

This Only by Czeslaw Milosz


Photo Grand Tetons


This Only

A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map leads him there.
Or perhaps memory. Once long ago in the sun,
When snow first fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong, without reason,
Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm
Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast in motion.
He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations,
fears,
or hopes,
At the edge
where there is
no I or not-I.

~ Czeslaw Milosz ~

(The Collected Poems, 1931-1987, trans. by Robert Hass)
PHOTO>> Grand Tetons

Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/This_Only.html
Czesław Miłosz
['ʧɛswaf 'miwɔʃ] (June 30, 1911 – August 14, 2004)
was a Polish poet, prose writer and translator. From 1961 to 1978 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1980 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
MORE>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czes%C5%82aw_Mi%C5%82osz
~~~~~~~
"The late Russian poet Joseph Brodsky hailed Czesaw Miosz as the greatest living poet, praising a severe and relentless mind of such intensity that the only parallel one is able to think of is that of the biblical characters, most likely Job. That intensity has drawn journalists, scholars, and fans to the hills above Berkeley, where the Nobel laureate poet lived for decades in his Grizzly Peak home, a secluded Tudor-style cottage buried amid ivy and trees. I too was drawn to his home in February and March 2000.
The dates are significant: Miosz was to leave for Krakow a few months later, and these may possibly be his last American interviews. Arranging a meeting with the Polish poet, then eighty-nine years old, was as carefully planned as a satellite launch; the poet's health had been precarious, and it took months of negotiation to schedule a suitable time for an interview. It was worth the wait.
Miosz's face is softer, paler, rounder than it appears in the photos that have made his face a literary icon, though the trademark bushy eyebrows still give him a slightly forbidding look. But if his replies seemed hesitant, whimsical, or elliptical, his edge was as sharp as ever as he continued to prepare poems, articles, and manuscripts for the tenth decade of his astonishing life."
MORE>> https://www.uga.edu/~garev/summer03/haven.htm

posted on Mar 6, 2008 6:03 AM ()

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