Czeslaw Milosz, 1986

Among the many excellent articles about Poland this week in the UK Guardian, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney pens a moving tribute to writer Czeslaw Milosz.

Seamus Heaney, who attended the first Czeslaw Milosz literary festival in Krakow in 2009, writes of the Polish intellectual’s journey from Poland to his exile in the US, to his return again to Poland after the fall of communism.

Hear part of the tribute Heaney gave to us two years ago at the literary festival on the character and work of Milosz.

In the Guardian article, Heaney writes:

“[The] impulse towards the transcendent contributed to his faith in poetry itself, up until the very end when he returned to the land of his "faithful mother tongue" and lived in Kraków.

“As he writes in his poem on reading the Japanese poet Issa: "To know and not to speak. / In that way one forgets. / What is pronounced strengthens itself. / What is not pronounced tends to non-existence."

“What distinguishes Miłosz as a poet is the abundance and spontaneity of the work, his at-homeness in so many different genres and landscapes, his desire for belief and his equally acute scepticism. Chiefly, however, what irradiates the poetry and compels the reader is a quality of wisdom. Everything is carried and feels guaranteed by the voice. Even in translation, even when he writes in a didactic vein, there is a feeling of phonetic undertow, that the poem is a trawl, not just talk. And this was true of the work he did right up to his death in Kraków in 2004,” the Irish poet concludes.

The Polish parliament designated 2011 as Year of Milosz in honour of the writer who was born 100 years ago.

For more on Heaney’s tribute to Czeslaw Milosz back in 2009 see here. (pg)