CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ: EXTRACTS FROM USEFUL BOOKS [2000].

Description

We present the edition of “Excerpts from Useful Books” 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 2000 in Krakow by Znak Publishing House as part of the prestigious “Collected Works of Czeslaw Milosz” series. This is the second edition of this book (the first was published in 1994).

“Excerpts from Useful Books” is an anthology of world poetry selected and translated by Czeslaw Milosz. In the introduction, the author explained his idea: “My proposal is that I show poems that are very, with few exceptions, short, clear and readable, and – to use an unjustly discredited name – realistic, that is, loyal to reality and trying to describe it as concisely as possible. Thus, they refute the widespread judgment of poetry as a vague and evasive field of understanding. (…) My intention is to contribute not so much to the defense of poetry in general, but to remind that it can be very necessary to the reader today for certain reasons.” .

The volume contains translations of poems by, among others, Wislawa Szymborska(In Praise of Bad About Myself), Anna Świrszczyńska(Thank You Fate), William Stafford(Holiday), Blaise Cendrars(Fish Cove), Mary Oliver(Kingfisher), Wang Wei(Song of Xi Shi) and many others . The anthology is accompanied by a bibliography and index.

The volume was published as part of the prestigious “Collected Works” series, which, under the auspices of Wydawnictwo Literackie and Znak, was published in 1999-2005, bringing together the Nobel Prize winner’s complete oeuvre. “Excerpts from Useful Books” is an expression of Milosz’s late fascination with Anglo-American poetry, which he translated throughout his life.

It is part of the prestigious “Collected Works” series – the most complete edition of Milosz’s works, covering his poetry, prose, essays and translations. The 2000 edition is hardly available on the antiquarian market anymore. The presented copy is clean and preserved in very good condition. It is a must-have for a collector of Milosz’s works, a poetry lover and a bibliophile looking for a representative edition of the anthology, in which the Nobel Prize winner shares his literary fascinations and expounds his own poetic credo.

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