Poet in the New World

A new collection of work from Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz that includes previously untranslated poems written during his time in Washington, D.C., and his years in Europe before and after.

One of the most revered poets of the twentieth century, Czesław Miłosz famously bore witness to violence in his native Poland in the aftermath of World War II. Miłosz lived in exile in Europe and the United States and, immediately after the war, worked as a diplomatic official in Washington, D.C., leaving behind an old world stained by bloodshed and still in the throes of ideological conflict as he sought to find his bearings in a new one.

Poet in the New World gathers the poems written during these years―for the first time in English translation―and is contextualized by the poetry that came directly before and after, from poems written in Warsaw in 1945, shortly before he departed for the United States, to others written in Europe from 1951 to 1953, after his significant time away. Capturing Miłosz at his existential and stylistic best, this collection of post-war poetry is attuned to the necessity of imagination and the duty of language and is filled with wonder and skepticism. Miłosz grapples with realities of the strange postwar United States he has inhabited, as well as the extraordinary violence he had witnessed in Warsaw, all while pondering the enduring fate of his beloved Poland. In the poem “Warsaw,” the poet asks, “How can I live in this country/Where the foot knocks against/the unburied bones of kin?”

Equal parts affecting and illuminating, Poet in the New World is an essential addition to the Miłosz canon, in a beautifully rendered work of poetry in translation by Robert Hass and David Frick, that reverberates with the questions of histories past, present, and future.