The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in European history, Slavic studies, literature, philosophy, political science, international relations, religious studies, and related subjects.

Czesław Miłosz: a California Life is about a Polish Nobel Prize-winning poet, who spent many years teaching at the University of California at Berkeley.

The TU Library collection includes several books by and about Miłosz.

Miłosz was born in the village of Šeteniai, now Kėdainiai district in Kaunas County, Lithuania.

He wrote about Stalinism in an influential way in his book-length essay, The Captive Mind, which is available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.

In his writing, Miłosz often addressed questions of morality, politics, history, and religion.

Here are some examples of his poems that have been posted online on different websites:

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• Love

 

Love means to learn to look at yourself

The way one looks at distant things

For you are only one thing among many.

And whoever sees that way heals his heart,

Without knowing it, from various ills—

A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

 

Then he wants to use himself and things

So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.

It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:

Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

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• Late Ripeness

 

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,

I felt a door opening in me and I entered

the clarity of early morning.

 

One after another my former lives were departing,

like ships, together with their sorrow.

 

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas

assigned to my brush came closer,

ready now to be described better than they were before.

 

I was not separated from people,

grief and pity joined us.

We forget – I kept saying – that we are all children of the King.

 

For where we come from there is no division

into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

 

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part

of the gift we received for our long journey.

 

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago –

a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror

of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel

staving its hull against a reef – they dwell in us,

waiting for a fulfillment.

 

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,

as are all men and women living at the same time,

whether they are aware of it or not.

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• Hope

 

Hope is with you when you believe

The earth is not a dream but living flesh,

that sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,

That all thing you have ever seen here

Are like a garden looked at from a gate.

 

You cannot enter. But you’re sure it’s there.

Could we but look more clearly and wisely

We might discover somewhere in the garden

A strange new flower and an unnamed star.

 

Some people say that we should not trust our eyes,

That there is nothing, just a seeming,

There are the ones who have no hope.

They think the moment we turn away,

The world, behind our backs, ceases to exist,

As if snatched up by the hand of thieves.

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• Conversation with Jeanne

 

Let us not talk philosophy, drop it, Jeanne.

So many words, so much paper, who can stand it.

I told you the truth about my distancing myself.

I’ve stopped worrying about my misshapen life.

It was no better and no worse than the usual human tragedies.

 

For over thirty years we have been waging our dispute

As we do now, on the island under the skies of the tropics.

We flee a downpour, in an instant the bright sun again,

And I grow dumb, dazzled by the emerald essence of the leaves.

 

We submerge in foam at the line of the surf,

We swim far, to where the horizon is a tangle of banana bush,

With little windmills of palms.

And I am under accusation: That I am not up to my oeuvre,

That I do not demand enough from myself,

As I could have learned from Karl Jaspers,

That my scorn for the opinions of this age grows slack.

 

I roll on a wave and look at white clouds.

 

You are right, Jeanne, I don’t know how to care about the salvation of my soul.

Some are called, others manage as well as they can.

I accept it, what has befallen me is just.

I don’t pretend to the dignity of a wise old age.

Untranslatable into words, I chose my home in what is now,

In things of this world, which exist and, for that reason, delight us:

Nakedness of women on the beach, coppery cones of their breasts,

Hibiscus, alamanda, a red lily, devouring

With my eyes, lips, tongue, the guava juice, the juice of la prune de Cythère,

Rum with ice and syrup, lianas-orchids

In a rain forest, where trees stand on the stilts of their roots.

 

Death, you say, mine and yours, closer and closer,

We suffered and this poor earth was not enough.

The purple-black earth of vegetable gardens

Will be here, either looked at or not.

The sea, as today, will breathe from its depths.

Growing small, I disappear in the immense, more and more free.

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• Campo di Fiori

 

In Rome on the Campo di Fiori

Baskets of olives and lemons,

Cobbles spattered with wine

And the wreckage of flowers.

Vendors cover the trestles

With rose-pink fish;

Armfuls of dark grapes

Heaped on peach-down.

 

On this same square

They burned Giordano Bruno.

Henchmen kindled the pyre

Close-pressed by the mob.

Before the flames had died

The taverns were full again,

Baskets of olives and lemons

Again on the vendors’ shoulders.

 

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori

In Warsaw by the sky-carousel

One clear spring evening

To the strains of a carnival tune.

The bright melody drowned

The salvos from the ghetto wall,

And couples were flying

High in the cloudless sky.

 

At times wind from the burning

Would driff dark kites along

And riders on the carousel

Caught petals in midair.

That same hot wind

Blew open the skirts of the girls

And the crowds were laughing

On that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.

 

Someone will read as moral

That the people of Rome or Warsaw

Haggle, laugh, make love

As they pass by martyrs’ pyres.

Someone else will read

Of the passing of things human,

Of the oblivion

Born before the flames have died.

 

But that day I thought only

Of the loneliness of the dying,

Of how, when Giordano

Climbed to his burning

There were no words

In any human tongue

To be left for mankind,

Mankind who live on.

 

Already they were back at their wine

Or peddled their white starfish,

Baskets of olives and lemons

They had shouldered to the fair,

And he already distanced

As if centuries had passed

While they paused just a moment

For his flying in the fire.

 

Those dying here, the lonely

Forgotten by the world,

Our tongue becomes for them

The language of an ancient planet.

Until, when all is legend

And many years have passed,

On a great Campo dei Fiori

Rage will kindle at a poet’s word.

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(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)