#polish poet

“My Catholic upbringing implanted in me a respect for all things visible, connected by the property of esse, that calls for unceasing admiration. I think that the sign of a healthy poetry is striving to capture as much of reality as possible.”
– Czesław Miłosz 
[Flower Garden - 1919 - Emil Nolde]

• The Nobel Prize in Literature 1980 was awarded to Czeslaw Milosz “who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts.” More: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1980/milosz/biographical/ 

• InDumont’s stunning new release, Emil Nolde: My Garden Full of Flowers, Manfred Reuther describes the existential threat that grew up around the painter in the 1930s. “More than one thousand of his works were confiscated from German museums in conjunction with the action against ‘degenerate art.’ More: https://www.artbook.com/blog-featured-image-emil-nolde-my-garden-full-of-flowers.html 

• PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEW: This interview was conducted primarily at Milosz’s home in the Berkeley hills overlooking San Francisco Bay, where he lives with his wife, Carol, and a cat named Tiny. Other portions were recorded before a live audience at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YMHA in New York. The first part of the conversation in Berkeley lasted four hours without interruption, until the poet looked at his watch and then, somewhat sympathetically, at his exhausted interlocutor to ask, “It is six o’clock, time for a little vodka?” https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1721/the-art-of-poetry-no-70-czeslaw-milosz 

PoemPsalm by Wisława Szymborska, Polish Nobel Laurate, 1976

~ Earth/Terra: More important than homeland!!! 

“Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!  How many clouds float past them with impunity; how much desert sand shifts from one land to another; how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil  in provocative hops!

Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers or alights on the roadblock at the border?  A humble robin - still, its tail resides abroad  while its beak stays home. If that weren’t enough, it won’t stop bobbing!

Among innumerable insects, I’ll single out only the ant between the border guard’s left and right boots blithely ignoring the questions "Where from?” and “Where to?”

Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos prevailing on every continent! Isn’t that a privet on the far bank smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river? And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms,  would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?

And how can we talk of order overall? when the very placement of the stars leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?

Not to speak of the fog’s reprehensible drifting! And dust blowing all over the steppes as if they hadn’t been partitioned! And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves, that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!

Only what is human can truly be foreign. The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.“

~ Translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh