CZESLAW MILOSZ: Czeslaw Milosz, who has died aged 93, was perhaps the luckiest Polish writer of the last century, and not just because his achievement was crowned with the Nobel prize, world fame, and grovelling recognition by the Polish communist government which since his defection in 1951 had sought to turn him into a non-person.
He was fortunate to have been born in 1911, in time to grow up and benefit from university education (at Wilno) in newly-independent Poland, an early recognition of his talents and coveted employment with Polish Radio. He survived the collapse of Poland in 1939, and he survived in Warsaw under German occupation, supported by a wide circle of literary friendships, finding time to develop as a poet, translating Shakespeare and Eliot.
After the war his youthful left-wing sympathies led him to collaborate with the communist authorities, who rewarded him with prestigious diplomatic posts in Paris and Washington, so that he could enjoy the freedoms of the West at a time when Stalinism was corrupting and destroying writers and intellectuals in Poland.
When in 1951 he broke with the regime and published The Captive Mind, it became an international bestseller. Using the thinly-disguised biographies of his literary friends as case studies, Milosz documented communist brainwashing techniques. Not surprisingly, he provoked vilification from the Polish authorities and Polish intellectuals, as well as from the Stalin-infatuated French left.
More surprisingly, the mass of émigré Poles, with the exception of the Kultura circle in France and young writers in London, refused to forgive him his "errors". It was thanks to Kultura's powerful publishing base that Milosz was able to be heard as prolific poet, translator, novelist, essayist and polemicist.
Although closely identified with France through his family tie with the poet Oscar Milosz, and his admiration for Simone Weil (whose works he translated), Milosz craved for the primitive energy of American culture. A professorship of Polish literature at Berkeley in 1961 proved irresistible.
Throughout those years Milosz remained bitter and unrelenting, convinced that his life was riddled with misfortunes brought about by the malice of his countrymen. He could never understand that by choosing a life of high exposure and ideological manoeuvring, he was bound to provoke hostile reactions, as well as fierce loyalties.
Doubtless the Nobel prize in 1980 and Milosz's conversion from Marxism to Catholicism have helped many Poles to come to terms with this humourless, jaundiced Lithuanian. Lithuania, united with Poland in 1386, is viewed by Poles with affection as an enigmatic, romantic borderland which produced Mickiewicz and Pilsudski; it therefore obviously suited Milosz to stress his ties with that region to the point of denying any links with Poland.
But he never wrote anything in Lithuanian, preferring instead to move closer and closer to English (via a growing team of translators), for as he confessed:
I wanted glory, fame and power.
But not just in our city of modest renown.
So I fled to countries whose capitals
Had boulevards lustrous beneath incandescent lamps ...
What will best survive of the prolific corpus of this petulant Lithuanian Pole? As a poet, Milosz developed late. His prewar output consists mainly of apocalyptic rantings. The experience in Warsaw under the occupation purified his language and imagery; he avoided the temptation to compose lachrymose verses, recording horrors such as the destruction of the ghetto in measured neo-classical lines, and his unexpected masterpiece is the sequence of Naive Poems in which he records the child's magical view of the world. Neither then nor subsequently did Milosz attempt to push his poetry beyond 18th-century decorum. He cherished a profound distaste for what he termed the 20th-century avant-garde, and his poetry therefore lacks flexibility and adaptability.
On the other hand, his refusal ever to abandon his lonely tower enabled him in later years to create magisterial poetic meditations out of a rich and varied mixture of philosophical, quasi-philosophical and religious material, and from sharply-focused descriptions of historical events and the natural world.
Apart from his two novels, Milosz's prose works are made up of skilfully-blended elements of philosophical reflections, literary criticism, biographical sketches of his friends and enemies and snatches of autobiography.
He has, in effect, created a genre which most characteristically manifests his talents. The Land of Ulro and The Native Realm are the best examples. It is here Milosz's magpie yet well-disciplined mind functions at its best: what unites the disparate elements is not some dominating intellectual thread or philosophical thesis, but Milosz's protean and omnivorous intellectual appetites.
This is why his History of Polish Literature is not an orderly textbook, but a selective, highly readable anthology of his enthusiasms and prejudices.
Milosz's effortless command of the Polish language enabled him to produce a body of excellent translations from a wide range of English and American poets. With Peter Dale Scott's help and under Al Alvarez's watchful editorial scrutiny, he introduced his translations of Zbigniew Herbert to English-language readers, and his anthology Post-War Polish Poetry, first published in 1965, was a pioneering work. Milosz's Collected Poems (1931-87) first appeared in England in 1988.
His two wives predeceased him. He is survived by his two sons.
Let the last word be the poet's:
We drove before dawn through frozen fields,
The red wing was rising, yet still the night.
And suddenly a hare shot across our path.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.
That was long ago and both are dead:
The hare and the man who stretched his arm.
O my love, where are they, where do they lead,
The flash of a hand, the line of movement, the swishing icy ground -
I ask not in sorrow, but in contemplation.
Czeslaw Milosz:born June 30th, 1911; died August 14th, 2004