Miłosz. A Biography
By Andrzej Franaszek
Edited and translated by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker
Published by Harvard University Press
Publication date: April 2017
ISBN 9780674495043
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Andrzej Franaszek’s award-winning biography of Czesław Miłosz—the great Polish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980—offers a rich portrait of the writer and his troubled century, providing context for a larger appreciation of his work. This English-language edition, translated by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker, contains a new introduction by the translators, along with historical explanations, maps, and a chronology.
Franaszek recounts the poet’s personal odyssey through the events that convulsed twentieth-century Europe: World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland, and the Soviet Union’s postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. He follows the footsteps of a perpetual outsider who spent much of his unsettled life in Lithuania, Poland, and France, where he sought political asylum. From 1960 to 1999, Miłosz lived in the United States before returning to Poland, where he died in 2004.
Franaszek traces Miłosz’s changing, constantly questioning, often skeptical attitude toward organized religion. In the long term, he concluded that faith performed a positive role, not least as an antidote to the amoral, soulless materialism that afflicts contemporary civilization. Despite years of hardship, alienation, and neglect, Miłosz retained a belief in the transformative power of poetry, particularly its capacity to serve as a source of moral resistance and a reservoir of collective hope. Seamus Heaney once said that Miłosz’s poetry is irradiated by wisdom. Miłosz reveals how that wisdom was tempered by experience even as the poet retained a childlike wonder in a misbegotten world.
Franaszek’s outstanding biography of Czesław Miłosz narrates one of the great lives of the twentieth century, and does not shy away from recounting the more private side of the poet’s loves, moods, victories, and defeats. Milosz was an artist who was also a political thinker, who stood in the center of the ideological debates of his time, who was an incredibly industrious writer and on top of all this had a sublime gift for poetry. One of the finest literary critics of his generation in Poland, Franaszek is well suited to his subject. A triumph.
—Adam Zagajewski, University of Chicago
Andrzej Franaszek is Assistant Professor of Polish Literature at Krakow’s Pedagogical University.
Aleksandra Parker is a translator and international communications adviser.
Michael Parker is Visiting Professor in English Literature, Oxford Brookes University, and a writer and lecturer.