Czesław Miłosz, fot. Judyta Papp
Robert Hass, Clare Cavanagh and Adam Zagajewski gather at the 92nd Street Y in New York City for a discussion of the poet's life and work. It is the first event on the year-long programme celebrating the centennial anniversary of the poet's birth
The event has been organised by the Unterberg Poetry Center, which hosted six readings by
Czesław Miłosz during his lifetime, and the Polish Institute in Warsaw. Three poets and scholars close to the poet - friend and Berkeley colleague- the poet Robert Hass - along with translator and Miłosz biographer Clare Cavanagh, and the brilliant poet
Adam Zagajewski - who has also balanced his life between Poland and the U.S. for many years. Each of them bring their own memories, reflections and insights upon the life and work of Czesław Miłosz at the 92nd Street YMCA. The following day they reconvene at Queen College.
The event ushers in a year-long commemoration of the Nobel Prize-winning poet, essayist, poet, translator and scholar on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of his birth. The U.S. is among more than a dozen nations joining Poland in dedicating a series of events to his legacy.
One hundred years after his birth, fifty-seven years after the publication of his seminal essay [The Captive Mind], Milosz's indictment of the servile intellectual rings truer than ever: "his chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself".
-Tony Judt, New York Review of Books, 2010
Miłosz's career was a monumental one, but certainly full of tribulations. From being branded a "catastrophist" by critics of his early poetry in the 1930s, publishing underground at great risk during the Second World War, challenged by leftist intellectuals in Paris in the 1950s for seeking asylum from the Polish Communist government to being criticised by Polish émigrés for having served as a diplomat in the same government, joining the anti-war movement at Berkeley in the 1960s, and, finally, questioned by conservative Catholics as a heretic at his burial. In spite of all challenges Czesław Miłosz lived a full life as an independent thinker and as an inspiration to others struggling against the prevailing forces in their own contexts. Milosz spent over 40 years in the United States, becoming an important figure in the West Coast poetry scene, across the country, and throughout the world, and many of the Milosz Year events in the United States in 2011 will focus on his time in America and his American legacy.
In 2004, Irish poet and fellow Nobel-prize winner Seamus Heaney remarked that Miłosz's"trust in the delicious joy-bringing potential of art and intellect was protected by strong bulwarks built from the knowledge and experience that he had gained at first hand and at great cost".
"A celebration of Czesław Miłosz", with Clare Cavanagh, Robert Hass, and Adam Zagajewski takes place at the Unterberg Poetry Center on March 21, 2011 at 8:00 PM.
Select programme of Miłosz Year Events in the U.S. and Poland
- March 21, 2011, New York, NY A Celebration of Czesław Miłosz with Robert Hass, Adam Zagajewski and Clare Cavanagh at the 92nd Street Y
- March 22, 2011, New York, NYA Centennial Celebration of the Work of Czesław Miłosz with Clare Cavanagh, Robert Hass, Edward Hirsch, and Adam Zagajewski at Queens College (CUNY)
- March 28, 2011, 7 PM, New York, NYRemembrances of Miłosz with Cynthia Haven, author of An Invisible Rope at Columbia University, Lindsay Rogers Room (IAB 707).
- March 30, 2011, Berkley, CAMiłosz celebration with Robert Hass and Adam Zagajewski organized by the Departments of English and Slavic Languages at the University of California, Berkeley
- May 9-11, Kraków, PolandCzesław Miłosz Festival
- September 30 - October 2, 2011, Chicago, IL Miłosz In/On America, Conference at the University of Illinois-Chicago
- October 19-21, 2011, Claremont, CAMiłosz Festival at the Czesław Miłosz Institute, Claremont-McKenna College
- October 27, 2011, New York, NYOpening of an exhibition of Miłosziana from the Columbia University archives at Butler Library, Columbia University
- November 4-5, 2011, New Haven, CTMiłosz in America, Conference at the Milosz archive at the Beinecke Library, Yale University
The Unterberg Poetry Center
1395 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY
Tel.212.415.5550
Source:
www.polishculture-nyc.org