Czesław Miłosz

The Eternal Moment

Czeslaw Milosz, the great Polish poet and essayist who died in 2004, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. Just after the publication of A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry and his memoir, Road-side Dog, I sat down with him in July, 1999, in the cozy, book-lined living room of his cottage on Grizzly Peak Road overlooking the San Francisco Bay shimmering in the distance. After the Cold War he returned in the summers to Krakow, but otherwise lived in Berkeley.

The Valley of Issa (Excerpt from the Novel)

I should begin with the Land of Lakes, the place where Thomas lived. For a long time this part of Europe was covered with glaciers, and the landscape has much of the severity of the north. The soil is sandy and rocky and suitable only for raising potatoes, rye, oats, and flax. This explains why such care was taken not to spoil the forests, which helped to soften the climate and offered protection against the Baltic winds. The forests are predominantly of pine and spruce, though birch, oak, and hornbeam are also in abundance, whereas the beech is something completely foreign, the border of its domain running farther to the south. Here you can wander for long hours without tiring of the scenery, for, like human cities, the tree communities have their own distinct peculiarities, form islands, zones, archipelagoes, and are set off from one another by a sandy rut, a foresters cottage, or by an old wood-distillery with dilapidated furnaces overgrown with weeds. From a hilltop, at any given moment, you can catch a view of a blue expanse of lake with a white, barely perceptible patch of grebe and a string of ducks threading through the reeds. The marshlands abound in every species of waterfowl, and in spring the grayish sky is filled with the persistent whirring of snipe a whew-whew-whew sound created by the wind passing through their feathery rudders as they perform their monotonous acrobatics signifying love. The faint whir of the snipe, the babble of grouse so much like a bubbling somewhere on the horizon and the croaking of myriad frogs in the meadows (the number of which will determine how many storks nest on the rooftops of cottages and barns) : These are sounds signaling that time of year when a sudden thaw gives way to the blossoming of cowslips and daphne tiny pink and lilac blossoms on bushes as yet without leaves. The two seasons most appropriate to this land are spring and autumn a long and sunny autumn, heavy with the smell of rainsoaked flax, the clatter of swingles, and the sounds of distant echoes. Thats when the geese show signs of restlessness and leap clumsily into the air in an attempt to fly after their wild brethren summoning them from on high; when someone would bring home a stork with a broken wing a creature spared the sort of death by pecking which is meted out by those guardians of the law on those not fit for the trip to the Nile; when word would get around that a wolf had made off with someones baby pig; and the woods would hear the music of the hounds always a soprano, a bass, and a baritone barking on the run in pursuit of wild game, their pitch being a sign of whether they were on the track of a hare or a roe.

The History of Polish Literature

This book is a survey of Polish letters and culture from its beginnings to modern times. Czeslaw Milosz updated this edition in 1983 and added an epilogue to bring the discussion up to date.