Miłosz's stomping ground in Berkeley
UC-Berkeley has become a necessary pilgrim destination for devotees of Nobel poet Czesław Miłosz, who lived in California while writing in exquisite poems in Polish.
Nobel poet Czesław Miłosz lived longer in California than anywhere else in his life – more years than he spent in Lithuania, where he was born; more years than he lived in Poland, the home of his beloved Mother Tongue.
After defecting from Communist Poland in 1951, he found a home and a job at the University of California at Berkeley. That was where he taught generations of Berkeley students, and some of them became his translators (Lillian Vallee, Robert Pinsky, Richard Lourie, Clare Cavanagh among them). It’s also where he met the Pulitzer-prizewinning poet Robert Hass, a former poet laureate, who would become his foremost translator.
Part of my role in life: giving Berkeley tours to the Polish literati visiting the Miłosz landmarks in Berkeley, as I did yesterday. Enter Barbara Gruszka-Zych, who is writing a book about Miłosz, Our Poet, Czesław Miłosz. Voices from Lithuania, Poland, and America, hence the pilgrimage. Photographer Grzegorz Lityński, a colleague, collaborates with her on a range of projects, and took the photos below.
Berkeley’s Prof. John Connelly was our host. At bottom, the Newman Center where, after the death of his first wife Janina Miłosz, the poet married his second wife, an academic from Georgia, Carol Thigpen Miłosz.
Just read your 2008 essay on Milosz. Very moving, as was everything he touched. His access to gravity took me a peculiarly long time to appreciate, as if something in my ego, one of Kafka's frozen lakes, had to break and remain broken.
RECOGNITIONS
by Stephen Dobyns
The awful imbalance that occurs with age
when you suddenly see that more friends
have died, than remain alive. And at times
the memory seems so real that the latest
realization of a death can become a second,
smaller death. All those talks cut off in mid-
sentence. All those plans tossed in the trash.
What can you do but sit out on the porch
when evening comes? The day's last light
reddens the leaves of the copper beach.
(BOA Editions, 2016)
Stephen, an old close friend, died this past Sunday at 85. When he was alive, I feel that I was always somewhat tongue-tied, he was so casually and radiantly intense, seemed to know so much better than me how to behave, was always so amused by my stumbling foibles and faux pas, I always feared I was a disappointment, that he was secretly exasperated. This was probably not true, just another foible and faux pas. That's enough, but I also want to say that the opposite is also half-true, that when an old dear friend or someone you've loved dies, they take a world they illuminated along with them. The other half of truth is that The days last light/Reddens the leaves of the copper beach.