Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) felt that part of his role as a poet and critic was to bear witness to bloodshed and terror as well as to beauty. He survived the Soviet invasion of his beloved Lithuania, escaped to Nazi-occupied Warsaw where he joined the Socialist resistance, then witnessed the Holocaust and the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto. After persecution and censorship triggered his defection in 1951, he found not relief but the anguish of solitude and obscurity. In the years of loneliness and labor, Miłosz continued writing poems and essays, learning to love his privacy and preoccupations and enjoying the devotion of his students at the University of California, Berkeley. International fame came like lightning when Miłosz won the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature. Czesław Miłosz: Conversations collects pieces from a wide range of sources over twenty-five years and includes an unpublished interview between Miłosz and his friend and fellow Nobel Laureate poet Joseph Brodsky. This volume acquaints us with a man whose work, life, and thought defy easy characterization. He is a sensualist with a scholar's penchant for history, as likely to celebrate Heraclitus as the hooks on a woman's corset. He is a devout but doubting Catholic, and a thinker tinged with a heretical sensibility. Cynthia L. Haven is a literary critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Her work also has been published in Civilization, the Georgia Review, the Kenyon Review, and the Cortland Review.

Personal experiences underlie a biography of observations in which the author examines himself from a sociological perspective and reflects on the sights, sounds, and civilization of Europe and the United States

Milosz's poems move forward while attending to his past, and deal with how his Lithuania, and Europe at large, maintain their habit of partial memory and forgetting. In these poems, such as the sequence Lithuania. After Fifty-Two Years, Wanda (about the painter Wanda Telakowska), Sarajevo, Translating Anna Swir on an Island in the Caribbean, visible worlds exist and sensations of body and soul exist in memory, a living resource and not a nostalgia. Milosz remains aware of suffering but aware too, of the poet's duty to celebrate. Facing the River does not have the tone of finality, but of a restless seeking which finds.

This collection of thirty poems may be compared to the critical essays that have made Venclova famous. Venclova's major poetic accomplishment is his linking of intimate experience and historical incident in poems that are intensely contemporary at the same time as they reach back to the ethnic roots of an entire generation. Diana Senechal's deft translation from the Lithuanian - done in collaboration with the author - preserves both Venclova's lyric voice and the complex stanzaic patterns for which his poetry is known in his native country. Featuring an insightful introduction by the late Joseph Brodsky, and a fascinating exhange between Venclova and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz about the city of their respective youths.

Like Native Realm, Czeslaw Milosz's autobiography written thirty years earlier, A Year of the Hunter is a search for self-definition. A diary of one year in the Nobel laureate's life, 1987-88, it concerns itself as much with his experience of remembering - his youth in Wilno and the writers' groups of Warsaw and Paris; his life in Berkeley in the sixties; his time spent with poets and poetry - as with the actual events that shape his days. Throughout, Milosz tries to account for the discontinuity between the man he has become and the youth he remembers himself to have been. Shuttling between observations of the present and reconstructions of the past, he attempts to answer the unstated question: Given his poet's personality and his historical circumstances, has he managed to live his life decently?

Vilnius is celebrated today as the centre of nationalistic fervour which marked Lithuania's declaration of independence from the USSR and the beginning of the Soviet empire's downfall. But when Nobel Prize-winning author Czeslaw Milosz was born there it was called Wilno, and was Polish. In this book he celebrates this remarkable city, with its rich heritage of diverse cultures, languages and beliefs, using its streetmap as a backdrop to portraits of its people and places. Some are famous, others unknown, but all are described with the same perception and understanding.

This book is a survey of Polish letters and culture from its beginnings to modern times. Czeslaw Milosz updated this edition in 1983 and added an epilogue to bring the discussion up to date.