The Nobel Prize is commonly called the "kiss of death" as it has commonly been awarded to grey-haired and venerable writers to crown their lifetime achievement. There is no more radical exception to the rule than the person and work of Czesław Miłosz. More than twenty years after receiving the Stockholm laurel wreath, the ninety-year-old poet is still in excellent form and publishes volumes of poetry, collections of essays, books of journalism and volumes of letters, each of which is better than the one before, if that is possible.
Second Space marks a new stage in one of the great poetic pilgrimages of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Few poets have inhabited the land of old age as long or energetically as Miłosz, for whom this territory holds both openings and closings, affirmations as well as losses. Second Space is typically capacious in the range of voices, forms, and subjects it embraces. It moves seamlessly from dramatic monologues to theological treatises, from philosophy and history to epigrams, elegies, and metaphysical meditations. It is unified by Milosz's ongoing quest to find the bond linking the things of this world with the order of a "second space," shaped not by necessity, but grace. Second Space invites us to accompany a self-proclaimed "apprentice" on this extraordinary quest. In "Treatise on Theology," Czesław Miłosz calls himself "a one day's master." He is, of course, far more than this. Second Space reveals an artist peerless both in his capacity to confront the world's suffering and in his eagerness to embrace its joys:
Sun. And sky. And in the sky white clouds. / Only now everything cried to him: Eurydice! / How will I live without you, my consoling one! / But there was a fragrant scent of herbs, the low humming of bees, / And he fell asleep with his cheek on the sun-warmed earth.
- Polish edition:
Druga przestrzeń
Społeczny Instytut Wydawniczy ZNAK, Kraków 2002
© Czesław Miłosz, rights available
155 x 233, 120 pages, hardcover
ISBN 83-240-0146-8
- English edition:
Second Space
Translated by the author and Robert Hass
New York: Ecco, 2004
ISBN: 9780060755249
Source: Harper Collins