«To find my home...», Czeslaw Milosz

«To find my home...», 

a poem by

Czeslaw Milosz

[Šetenial, 1911-2004, Cracovia]

Premio Nobel de Literatura 1980

To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. 

Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness. 

Berkeley-Paris-Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981-1983

My Book

About the author

Czeslaw Milosz was a Nobel Prize winning poet and author of Polish-Lithuanian heritage. He memorialised his Lithuanian childhood in a 1955 novel, The Issa Valley, and in the 1959 memoir Native Realm. After graduating from Sigismund Augustus Gymnasium in Vilnius, he studied law at Stefan Batory University and in 1931 he travelled to Paris, where he was influenced by his distant cousin Oscar Milosz, a french poet of Lithuanian descent and a Swedenborgian. His first volume of poetry was published in 1934.

After receiving his law degree that year, he again spent a year in Paris on a fellowship. Upon returning, he worked as a commentator at Radio Wilno, but was dismissed, an action described as stemming from either his leftist views or for views overly sympathetic to Lithuania.

Milosz wrote all his poetry, fiction, and essays in Polish and translated the Old Testament Psalms into Polish.

Awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature for being an author «who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man´s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts».

Notas

- Poetry Foundation: 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/czeslaw-milosz

- Images:

• Czeslaw Milosz portrait, by Horst Tappe/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
• Personal home