This expanded edition of Postwar Polish Poetry (which was originally published in 1965) presents 125 poems by 25 poets, including Czeslaw Milosz and other Polish poets living outside Poland. The stress of the anthology is on poetry written after 1956, the year when the lifting of censorship and the berakdown of doctrines provoked and explosion of new schools and talents. The victory of Solidarity in August 1980 once again opened new vistas for a short time; the coup of December closed that chapter. It is too early yet to predict the impact these events will have on the future of Polish...
This expanded edition of Postwar Polish Poetry (which was originally published in 1965) presents 125 poems by 25 poets, including Czeslaw Milos...
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.
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 epil...
This stimulating collection of essays, mostly concerned with subjects taken from Slavic literatures, is at once scholarly and reflective. The volume opens with a true story, "Brognart," which is a confession of the author's remorse based on conflict with French intellectuals. "Science Fiction and the Coming of the Antichrist" concerns Vladimir Solovyov. "Krasinski's Retreat" is another return to the author's student readings, which attempts to determine how a Polish romantic poet could write in 1833 a drama on the approaching world revolution. "Joseph Conrad's Father" sketches the biography...
This stimulating collection of essays, mostly concerned with subjects taken from Slavic literatures, is at once scholarly and reflective. The volume o...
Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, reflects upon poetry's testimony to the events of our tumultuous time. From the special perspectives of "my corner of Europe," a classical and Catholic education, a serious encounter with Marxism, and a life marked by journeys and exiles, Milosz has developed a sensibility at once warm and detached, flooded with specific memory yet never hermetic or provincial.
Milosz addresses many of the major problems of contemporary poetry, beginning with the pessimism and negativism prompted by reductionist interpretations of man's...
Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, reflects upon poetry's testimony to the events of our tumultuous time. From the spec...
Written in the early 1950s, When Eastern Europe was in the grip of Stalinism and many Western intellectuals placed their hopes in the new order of the East, this classic work reveals in fascinating detail the often beguiling allure its frightening effects on the minds of those who embrace it.
Written in the early 1950s, When Eastern Europe was in the grip of Stalinism and many Western intellectuals placed their hopes in the new order of the...
In these nine stories the Polish writer Aleksander Wat consistently turns history on its ear in comic reversals reverberating with futurist rhythms and the gently mocking humor of despair. Wat inverts the conventions of religion, politics, and culture to fantastic effect, illuminating the anarchic conditions of existence in interwar Europe. The title story finds a superbly ironic Lucifer wandering the Europe of the late 1920s in search of a mission: what impact can a devil have in a godless time? What is his sorcery in a society far more diablical than the devil himself? Too idealistic...
In these nine stories the Polish writer Aleksander Wat consistently turns history on its ear in comic reversals reverberating with futurist rhythms an...
This collection of thirty poems may be compared to the critical essays that have made Venclova famous. Venclova's major poetic accomplishment is his linking of intimate experience and historical incident in poems that are intensely contemporary at the same time as they reach back to the ethnic roots of an entire generation. Diana Senechal's deft translation from the Lithuanian - done in collaboration with the author - preserves both Venclova's lyric voice and the complex stanzaic patterns for which his poetry is known in his native country. Featuring an insightful introduction by the late...
This collection of thirty poems may be compared to the critical essays that have made Venclova famous. Venclova's major poetic accomplishment is his l...
Czeslaw Milosz did not believe he would ever return to the river valley in which he grew up. But in the spring of 1989, exactly fifty years after he left, the new government of independent Lithuania welcomed him back to that magical region of his childhood. Many of the poems in Facing the River record his experiences there, where the river of the Issa Valley symbolizes the river of time as well as the river of mythology, over which one cannot step twice. This is the river Milosz faces while exploring ancient themes. He reflects upon the nature of imagination, human experience,...
Czeslaw Milosz did not believe he would ever return to the river valley in which he grew up. But in the spring of 1989, exactly fifty years after h...
Anna Swir's poetry is featured in the best-selling anthologies Ten Poems to Set You Free and Risking Everything
Anna Swir (1909-1984) famously said "A poet should be as sensitive as an aching tooth." Swir was one of Poland's most distinguished poets, and she was open in her feminism and eroticism, with poetry that explored the life of the female body--from the agonizing depths of wartime to delirious sensual delight. The New York Times wrote that Swir's poetry pointed toward a "ferocious internal life."
A member of the Resistance during the Nazi...
Anna Swir's poetry is featured in the best-selling anthologies Ten Poems to Set You Free and Risking Everything
Thomas, the child-protagonist of The Issa Valley, is subject to both the contradictions of nature in this severe northern setting and sometimes enchanting, sometimes brutal timbre of village life. There are the deep pine and spruce forests, the grouse and the deer, and the hunter's gun. There is Magdalena, the beautiful mistress of the village priest, whose suicide unleashes her ghost to haunt the parish. There are also the loving grandparents with whom Thomas lives, who provide a balance of the not-quite-Dostoevskian devils that visit the villagers. In the end, Thomas is severed...
Thomas, the child-protagonist of The Issa Valley, is subject to both the contradictions of nature in this severe northern setting and someti...
