The Separate Notebooks

by Czesław Miłosz

A selection of poetry written during and after the Second World War details the devastation, hardships, horrors, and consequences of the era

Genres: Poetry

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Czesław Miłosz was a Nobel Prize winning poet and author of Polish-Lithuanian heritage. He memorialised his Lithuanian childhood in a 1955 novel, The Issa Valley , and in the 1959 memoir Native Realm . After graduating from Sigismund Augustus Gymnasium in Vilnius, he studied law at Stefan Batory University and in 1931 he travelled to Paris, where he was influenced by his distant cousin Oscar Milosz, a French poet of Lithuanian descent and a Swedenborgian. His first volume of poetry was published in 1934.

After receiving his law degree that year, he again spent a year in Paris on a fellowship. Upon returning, he worked as a commentator at Radio Wilno, but was dismissed, an action described as stemming from either his leftist views or for views overly sympathetic to Lithuania. Miłosz wrote all his poetry, fiction, and essays in Polish and translated the Old Testament Psalms into Polish.

Awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature for being an author "who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts."

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book swept me away. The sweep of history, of personal reflection, of life in a very short book. I am always suspect of translation, particularly of poetry, but this has the ring of a statement of truth couched in succinct, perfect language.
I wish to use a couple of quotations from the liner notes:
‘There are no direct lessons that American poets can learn from Milosz. Those who have never seen modern war on their own soil cannot adopt his tone; the sights that scarred his eyes cannot be seen by the children of a young provincial empire. A thousand years of history do not exist in American bones and a culture secular from birth cannot feel the dissolution of the European religious synthesis, on which Milosz dwelled….the living and tormenting re-voicing of the past makes Milosz a historical poet of bleak illumination.’
His poems ‘A Mistake’ and ‘Reading the Japanese Poel Issa,’ are incredible moving, and almost casually place themselves historically, although nothing is casual in his poems.
Short passages from the notebooks are gems:
‘Where is it written that we deserve the Earth for a bride,
That we plunge in her deep, clear waters
And swim, carried by generous currents?’
There are too many to quote even in this short book. Read it. It is worth your time.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

gorgeous and devastating

[Vivian Zenari · Rating 4 out of 5]

I preferred the older poems about Europe and its wars than the newer poems of the US period. Still, the poems I liked won't fade from my memory quickly.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful!