MILOSZ WITHIN THE LIMITS OF LITERATURE (Milosz na miare literatury)

The title of the sketch is an allusion to Michal Pawel Markowski's essay Life Within the Limits of Literature (Zycie na miare literatury). Following Markowski's thesis, the author attempts to analyse selected pieces by Czeslaw Milosz from the breakthrough of his creativity (the turn of 1960s and 1970s), when Milosz more and more observably approaches a meditational model of poetry. The change was influenced by students' moral revolution in the year 1968 which he observed at the California University and by the decision to start translation of the Bible from its original languages. Milosz was baffled by the changes that took place in culture at that time and admitted his failure to understand them; thus he saw his aforementioned translating activity as a means of finding a contemporary hieratic language. It led to simplification of poetic language devoid of embellishments and rhetorics, together with treatment poetry in a similar mode as Greek philosophers did, i.e. as a meditation over one's own fortune and ultimate matters.