October was his favorite month, and here’s a poem for the tail-end of it.
I’ve been on the road, giving talks for Czesław Miłosz: A California Life at the University of Chicago, San Francisco’s legendary City Lights Bookstore, and soon at the University of California, Berkeley. Now I’m camped out at Harvard for a few days. I’ll post links and photos soon.
Meanwhile, here’s a timely poem from the subject of my book, Czesław Miłosz, which comes to me courtesy NEA fellow Jim May on Twitter. The poem written in South Hadley. No doubt the Polish poet was visiting his friend and fellow Nobelist Joseph Brodsky.
Postscript on 10/31 from Stanford Prof. Grisha Freidin: “Exile, multiplied by another poet’s exile, by the melancholy season, by the Styx-like river, with the other shore still shrouded in darkness… Note absence of self-pity. Quintessential Czesław.”
Author: Cynthia Haven
Cynthia Haven has written for The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, World Literature Today, and other publications. Her work has also appeared in Le Monde, La Repubblica, The Kenyon Review, Quarterly Conversation, The Georgia Review, Civilization, and others. She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna. Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published in London, 2005. Her Czestaw Mitosz: Conversations was published in 2006; Joseph Brodsky: Conversations in 2003; An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czestaw Mitosz was published in 2011 with Ohio University Press / Swallow Press. She is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford. Her biography René Girard, A Life will be published next year.
Join me at twitter: @chaven
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Translated by Czesław Miłosz and Leonard Nathan
Thank you for correcting my oversight, David.