CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ: CONTINENTS [1999].

Description

We present the first official national edition of “Continents” by Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) – poet, prose writer, essayist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1980), one of the most outstanding and influential Polish intellectuals of the 20th century. The publication was released in 1999 in Krakow by Znak Publishing House as part of the prestigious series “Collected Works of Czeslaw Milosz.”

“Continents” is the first volume of essays and literary sketches by Milosz . The book was first published in 1958 by the Paris Literary Institute as the 29th volume of the legendary “Library of Culture.” The collection contains texts written mainly in 1944-1957, divided into three parts marking periods from the writer’s life: Poland, America (1946-1949) and France (from 1951). The whole consists of three types of texts: essays (including “American Notebook,” “Semi-Private Letter on Poetry,” “To Gombrowicz,” “Czechowicz – it’s about poetry between the wars,” “In Defense of Europe”), Miłosz’s poems (“Notebook: Pennsylvania”, “Notebook: Dordogne”, “To Myself for the New Year’s Eve 1950 album”) and poetic translations (Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Federico Garcia Lorca, Oscar Milosz, E.E. Cummings and others).

According to Elzbieta Kiślak in her study of Milosz’s essays, “Continents” is, according to the author’s term, “a diary of my successive interests and fascinations.” The volume was not reprinted by the author for many years and had few underground editions in the country. It was not officially published in Poland until 1999 by Znak. Thus, this is the first domestic edition of this collection – a testimony to the return of the Nobel Prize winner’s works to official reading circulation after years of communist censorship.

This is part of the prestigious “Collected Works” series – the most complete edition of Milosz’s works, including his poetry, prose, essays and translations. On the antiquarian market, copies from 1999 appear sporadically. The presented copy is clean and preserved in very good condition. It is a must-have for a collector of Milosz’s works, an admirer of his essays and a bibliophile looking for a representative edition of the Nobel Prize winner’s first collection of essays, an invaluable source for understanding his intellectual path and fascination with Anglo-Saxon culture.

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