O. V. de L. Milosz 1877-1939
biography
A Lithuanian diplomat in Paris after World War I, Milosz eventually became a French citizen. Milosz wrote fiction, drama, and essays, as well as collecting Lithuanian folk tales. He exerted a great influence on his younger cousin, Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. Largely neglected during his lifetime, Milosz has increasingly come to be considered as an important figure in French poetry.
selected works in translation
Fourteen Poems translated by Kenneth Rexroth (Copper Canyon Press, 1983)
The Noble Traveller edited by Christopher Bamford (Lindisfarne Press, 1985)
selected poems in The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry edited by Paul Auster (Vintage, 1982)
writing
when she comes
When she comes - will her eyes go green, gray,
Gray or green in the river?
The hours will be new in the archaic future,
New, but hardly novel -
Old hours: one has seen, dreamed, spoken them all!
I pity you the knowledge...
There will be something of the present and its street-sounds
Just as today and always - stern ordeals -
And odors, depending on the season, September's, April's,
And the false sky, and the clouds in the river;
And words, depending on the moment, spirited, broken,
Under skies arranged correspondingly,
For we shall have lived a great deal, shall have pretended to live such a great deal
When she comes with her eyes of rain over that river.
There will be (weary voice, impotent smile)
The moment we now have, senile, sterile, dry,
The pulsing of eternity, sister of silence;
The moment we now have, just as we have it now.
Yesterday, ten years ago, today, in a month -
Frightful words, cliches, but what does it matter.
Drink, sleep, die - one must escape from himself
In some way or another...
excerpt from - l' étrangère
You know nothing of your past. You have dreamed it,
Yes most assuredly dreamed it.
I see your face in the rain's gray brilliance.
November shrouds the landscape and my life.
And your life I know nothing of, nor do I wish to.
Your eyes murmur of remote cities, hazy -
I shall never see them
Or hear their names in your own voice.
November comes over me, and across the plain.
I watch you, unrecognized, drift this side of formerly...
From your eyes I salvage what is real in dreams,
Dreamed, all of them, in the gone time
And visions blossoming in vivid sun.
One might say the eternal comes full circle
In this twilight poisoned with rain.
return to the library
return to kicking giants