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A comprehensive selection of essays--some never before translated into English--by the Nobel Laureate.To Begin Where I Am brings together a rich sampling of poet Czeslaw Milosz's prose writings. Spanning more than a half century, from an impassioned essay on human nature, wartime atrocities, and their challenge to ethical beliefs, written in 1942 in the form of a letter to his friend Jerzy Andrzejewski, to brief biographical sketches and poetic prose pieces from the late 1990s, this volume presents Milosz the prose writer in all his multiple, beguiling guises. The incisive, sardonic analyst of the seductive power of communism is also the author of tender, elegiac portraits of friends famous and obscure; the witty commentator on Polish complexes writes lyrically of the California landscape. Two great themes predominate in these essays, several of which have never appeared before in English: Milosz's personal struggle to sustain his religious faith, and his unswerving allegiance to a poetry that is "on the side of man."
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Introduction
My Intention
PART ONE: THESE GUESTS OF MINE
Who Was I?
Notes on Exile
Happiness
Dictionary of Wilno Streets
After All . . .
Miss Anna and Miss Dora
Journey to the West
On Oscar Milosz
The Prioress
Brognart: A Story Told over a Drink
Alpha the Moralist
Tiger
Zygmunt Hertz
Pity
PART TWO: ON THE SIDE OF MAN
Letter to Jerzy Andrzejewski
Speaking of a Mammal
Facing Too Large an Expanse
Religion and Space
Carmel
To Robinson Jeffers
Essay in Which the Author Confesses That He Is on the Side of Man, for Lack of Anything Better
The Importance of Simone Weil
Shestov, or the Purity of Despair
Dostoevsky
A Philosopher
Saligia
If Only This Could Be Said
Why Religion?
PART THREE: AGAINST INCOMPREHENSIBLE POETRY
Remembrance of a Certain Love
A Semi-Private Letter About Poetry
Ruins and Poetry
Anus Mundi
Against Incomprehensible Poetry
Reflections on T. S. Eliot
Robert Frost
On Pasternak Soberly
Notes About Brodsky
PART FOUR: IN CONSTANT AMAZEMENT
From "Notebook"
Notes
Index
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Czeslaw Milosz; Edited by Bogdana Carpenter and Madeline G. Levine
