Czezlaw Milosz
by Maxine
Today, June 30, is the birthday of poet, Czselaw Milosz who was born in Lithuania in 1911. His family eventually settled in Poland. After studying law in college, Milosz worked for a Polish radio station but was fired when he let Jews broadcast their opinions on the air. He also worked for another radio station where he covered the invasion of Poland by the Nazis in 1939. While working as a janitor at a university, he began to secretly write anti-Nazi poetry. His first book of poems, Rescue, was about the mass killing of Jews in Warsaw. After the war, he moved to Paris and then to the U.S. where he taught at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1980, he received the Nobel Prize for literature.
Following is one of his poems:
A Task
In fear and trembling, I think I would fulfill my life
Only if I brought myself to make a public confession
Revealing a sham, my own and of my epoch:
We were permitted to shriek in the tongue of dwarfs and
demons
But pure and generous words were forbidden
Under so stiff a penalty that whoever dared to pronounce one
Considered himself as a lost man.
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