Poet in the New World

A new collection of work from Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz that includes previously untranslated poems written during his years in Washington, D.C. One of the most revered poets of the twentieth century, Czeslaw Milosz famously chronicled life under Communism in Poland. However, Milosz also lived in Washington, D.C. from 1946 to 1950, working as a diplomatic official and leaving behind an old world tarnished by violence and bloodshed to take his bearings in a new world. Gathering these poems for the first time in English translation and contextualized by the poetry which came directly before and after, Poet in the New World captures Milosz at his existential and stylistic best. Attuned to the necessity of imagination and the duty of language, filled with wonder and skepticism, Milosz grapples with the extraordinary violence he had witnessed and the strange postwar United States he has inhabited while pondering the enduring fate of his beloved Poland. In the poem "Warsaw" the poet asks, "How can I live in this country/Where the foot knocks against/the unburied bones of kin?" Equal parts affecting and illuminating, Poet in the New World is an essential addition to the Milosz canon, in a beautifully rendered translation by Robert Hass and David Frick that reverberates with the questions of histories past, present, and future.

Auteur

Czeslaw Milosz was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania, in 1911. He worked with the Polish resistance movement in Warsaw during World War II and was later stationed in Paris and Washington, DC, as a Polish cultural attaché. He defected to France in 1951, and in 1960 he accepted a position at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, and was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in 2004.

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema (Ecco, 2010), Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Time and Materials (Ecco, 2008), Sun Under Wood (Ecco, 1996), Human Wishes (1989), Praise (1979), and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer's Selected Poems (2012) and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994). His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.