News Release

The San Francisco Public Library will kick off April National Poetry Month with a tribute to Czeslaw Milosz, the 1980 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Polish poet and writer lived and worked in the Bay Area for more than four decades. The remembrance and celebration takes place 1-3 p.m. on April 2 in the Koret Auditorium at the Main Library.

Poets, scholars, and translators will speak of Milosz’s work and life as well as read from his poems. Presenters include Robert Hass, former U.S. Poet Laureate and the main collaborator in the translation of Milosz’s poems from Polish to English; Anthony Milosz, the poet’s son; journalist Mark Danner; Bay Area poets Brenda Hillman, Michael Palmer, and Jane Hirshfield; and Milosz’s former student and early co-translator, Lillian Vallee. Professor Robert Faggen, host of the 1998 International Milosz Festival at Claremont McKenna College, will serve as the master of ceremonies.

Born in Lithuania in 1911, Milosz spent most of World War II in Nazi-occupied Warsaw working for underground presses. He later worked as a diplomat for the communist People’s Republic of Poland until he broke with the government in 1951 and defected to France. In 1960, he accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley where he taught Slavic languages and literature. Milosz wrote in relative obscurity for many years in Berkeley until the 1980 Nobel Prize brought him to a broad public attention.

His body of work, spanning more than seven decades, includes poetry, fiction, essays, memoirs, cultural analysis, translations, among others. Stating in one poem, “I have always aspired to a more spacious form,” Milosz continually expanded the reach of both thought and language. An exile himself, the world that Milosz depicts in his poetry, prose and essays is the world that remains for us, as one poem’s title says, “after paradise.” A witness to the full range of 20th-century experience, his central concern was the question of human suffering. In answer to this insoluble dilemma he offered remembrance of those who had vanished, a persistent questioning even amid strong Catholic faith, and praise—the desire “to glorify things just because they are.” His 1953 book The Captive Mind on the effects of totalitarianism on the freedom of thought is considered one of the finest studies of the condition of the intellectual under repressive regimes.

Milosz died Aug. 14, 2004, at the age of 93.

This program is free and open to the public.
For more information, please call (415) 557-4277.