Czeslaw Milosz 가 본 미국

 

The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor 에서 읽은,

오늘(6/30)이 생일인 시인 Czeslaw Milosz (체스와프 미워시)를 소개하는 짧은 글에서:

He moved to the United States and began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley in 1960. He had mixed feelings about the United States: he wrote, “What splendor! What poverty! What humanity! What inhumanity! What mutual good will! What individual isolation! What loyalty to the ideal! What hypocrisy! What a triumph of conscience! What perversity!”

Milosz studied law rather than literature in college because, he said, “There were so many girls studying literature it was called the marriage department.”

After the [Nazi] invasion, he found a job as a janitor at a university, secretly writing anti-Nazi poetry for underground publications. He witnessed the genocide of the Jews in Warsaw, and was one of the first poets to write about it in his book of poems Rescue (1945).

One night in the winter of 1949, on his way home from a government meeting, he saw several jeeps filled with political prisoners, surrounded by soldiers. He said, “It was then that I realized what I was part of.” He defected in 1951, and made it to Paris even though his passport had been confiscated.