Czesław Miłosz: A California Life

Robert Pogue Harrison speaks to Cynthia L. Haven, whose new book is “Czesław Miłosz: A California Life.”

July 25, 2022

“I did not choose California, it was given to me.”

When the name Czesław Miłosz is mentioned, faces tend to fall. “Poet of Witness” is the stock association. People think of bombed cities and the Holocaust. Yet Miłosz is also a poet of the miraculous, a poet of wonder, a poet of doubt, and perhaps the best poet of old age we’ve had since Whitman.

He was born in Šeteniai in 1911, a son of the Polish-speaking gentry in rural Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. After his education, he worked in Warsaw.

Hence, he was in Warsaw for the German invasion, the destruction of the Jewish Ghetto, and the subsequent demolition of the city itself. After the war, he took a position as cultural attaché for the Stalinist government of Poland, appointed to New York City, Washington D.C., and finally Paris.

In 1951, he defected from Stalinist Poland, and was ostracized by the pro-Stalinist Parisian intellectuals. Miłosz answered his critics with Captive Mind, a book that has never gone out of print since it was first published in 1953, a study of how the individual responds to totalitarianism.

It is, however, as a poet that he is best known. As a University of California, Berkeley, professor, he trained a cadre of his students and colleagues to translate Polish into English. In his American exile, he could publish freely, in a number of translations as well as in Polish, and he could become, in 1980, a Nobel poet with an international profile — a life that would have been impossible in Poland.

He spent four decades in California, more than anywhere else in his life. The passionate poet who longed for detachment, a more objective place from which to see himself, found it here, writing, “The majestic expanse of the Pacific seacoast has imperceptibly worked its way into my dreams, remaking me, stripping me down, and perhaps thereby liberating me.”

Stanford’s Robert Pogue Harrison, host for Entitled Opinions, interviews Cynthia L. Haven, author of a new book, Czesław Miłosz: A California Life, recently published by Berkeley’s Heyday Books.

“The paramount duty of a poet is to tell the truth.”