BEINECKE LIBRARY AT YALE UNIVERSITY
HOSTS CONFERENCE AND MAJOR EXHIBITION FROM THE CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ ARCHIVE
New York, October 27, 2011 — The Polish Cultural Institute New York, together with the Polish Book Institute, and the The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University are delighted to present a major exhibition from the Miłosz papers entitled Exile as Destiny: Czesław Miłosz and America, and a conference of poets, scholars, and translators to consider Miłosz’s American legacy and the ways in which he served as a cultural mediator between Poland and the US and more broadly between Europe and America, becoming an icon in his adopted country. The conference will offer opportunities to see rarely screened films including two documentaries and Tadeusz Konwicki’s film The Issa Valley based on Miłosz’s novel about his childhood in Lithuania where Konwicki also had his roots.
Poets Tomas Venclova and Adam Zagajewski will reflect on Miłosz’s work in light of their own acquaintance with the poet himself. Andrzej Franaszek, author of a monumental biography of Miłosz recently published in Poland, will present some conclusions to be drawn from his comprehensive survey of the poet’s life. Scholars from Poland and the US, many of whom knew Miłosz, including Bogdana Carpenter (U of Michigan), Krzysztof Czyżewski (Borderlands Foundation), Irena Grudzińska Gross (Princeton), Jerzy Jarzębski (Jagiellonian U), Marek Zaleski (Institute for Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences), Mark Danner (UC Berkeley), and others will consider Miłosz’s intellectual legacy as the author of the penetrating critique of the accommodations that intellectuals make to survive under totalitarianism, The Captive Mind, as well as his reflections on topics ranging from history and politics to literature and theology.
Bożena Shallcross (U of Chicago) and young activist, researcher, and publisher, Sławomir Sierakowski (Ed. Krytyka Polityczna, “Political Critique”) will present their research from the Miłosz archive at the Beinecke Library, and some of the original documents they are discussing will be on display in the exhibition.
Miłosz was passionate about the subject of translation, and not only of his own poetry and prose. He realized that in translation he was shaping his ideas, his art, and his image for different audiences and even as this was always an intensely collaborative project, he saw himself as the ultimate translator of his own work. Translators who worked closely with Miłosz on his own texts including Madeline G. Levine and Lillian Vallee, will relate their experiences in working with the poet and will examine his practice as a dedicated translator of poetry from other languages into Polish.
Miłosz and America is organized by the Polish Cultural Institute New York in collaboration with the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, and the Polish Book Institute.
WHAT: MIŁOSZ AND AMERICA (conference)
WHEN: Nov 4-5, 2011
WHERE: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (and other campus locations)
121 Wall St., New Haven, CT 06511
TEL: 203-432-2977
DIRECTIONS: http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/brblinfo/brbldirections.html
ADMISSION: Free and open to the public with registration at the Conference Website
CONFERENCE WEBSITE: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/milosz/Program1.html
DOWNLOAD PROGRAM: http://beta.asoundstrategy.com/sitemaster/userUploads/site217/MiloszYale_confprogram.pdf
WHAT: EXILE AS DESTINY (exhibition)
WHEN: Oct 24 – Dec 17, 2011
WHERE: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 121 Wall St., New Haven, CT 06511
TEL: 203-432-2977
DIRECTIONS: http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/brblinfo/brbldirections.html
ADMISSION: Free and open to the public with registration at the Conference Website
DOWNLOAD EXHIBITION PAMPHLET: http://beta.asoundstrategy.com/sitemaster/userUploads/site217/MiloszYale_exhibition.pdf
Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) was born in Szetejnie, Lithuania. A poet, scholar, essayist, and translator, he won the Nobel Prize in 1980 and many other prestigious literary awards throughout his life. Joseph Brodsky claimed, “I have no hesitation whatsoever in stating that Czesław Miłosz is one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest.” Miłosz’s work has been translated into forty-two languages. His poetry is rich in visual-symbolic metaphor. The idyllic and the apocalyptic go hand-to-hand. Simple songs and theological treatises alternate, as in the “child-like rhymes” about the German Occupation of Warsaw in The World: Naive Poems (1943) or “Six Lectures in Verse” from the volume Chronicles (1987). Miłosz transcends genre and style. As a poet and translator, he moves easily from contemporary American poets to the Bible (portions of which he has rendered anew into Polish).
As a novelist, he won renown with The Seizure of Power (1953), about the installation of communism in Poland. Both Miłosz and his readers have a particular liking for the semi-autobiographical The Issa Valley (1955), a tale of growing up and the loss of innocence that abounds in philosophical sub-texts. There are also many personal themes in Miłosz’s essays, as well as in The Captive Mind (1953), a classic of the literature of totalitarianism. Native Realm (1959) remains one of the best studies of the evolution of the Central European mentality. The Land of Ulro (1977) is a sort of intellectual and literary autobiography, and the essays in Visions from San Francisco Bay (1983) present his unique perspective on his adopted home of California.
Adam Zagajewski was born in Lwów (L’viv) in 1945 and became widely known in the US when his poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” offered consolation to a country under attack from the back page of the 9/11 issue of The New Yorker with its black-on-black cover. Zagajewski moved to Paris in 1982, began teaching in the University of Houston Creative Writing program in 1988, and since 2002 he has been splitting his time between Kraków and the US, in recent years serving as a visiting professor on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Volumes of his poetry published in English include: Tremor, Canvas, Mysticism for Beginners, and Without End. Four collections of essays have also been published: Solidarity, Solitude, Two Cities, Another Beauty, and A Defense of Ardor. In 2004, he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.
Tomas Venclova (b. Klaipėda, Lithuania, 1937) is one of Lithuania’s most distinguished poets and translators. He has translated T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Charles Baudelaire, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Boris Pasternak into Lithuanian, and was a friend of Joseph Brodsky. He was permitted to leave Lithuania in 1977, after drawing the attention of the Soviet authorities for his dissident activities, living first in Paris and then in the US, developing a close association to Polish poet Czesław Miłosz during a brief period at UC Berkeley. His poems, which carry the weight of the experiences of war and totalitarianism in Lithuania over the course of the twentieth century, rendered into elegant classical form, have been translated into over twenty languages, and he is the recipient of many significant awards, including an honorary doctorate from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He has served for over 25 years as a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University.
The POLISH CULTURAL INSTITUTE NEW YORK, established in 2000, is a diplomatic mission to the United States serving under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland.
The Institute’s mission is to build, nurture and promote cultural ties between the United States and Poland by presenting Polish culture to American audiences and by connecting Polish artists and scholars to American institutions, introducing them to their professional counterparts in the United States, and facilitating their participation in contemporary American culture.
The Institute has been producing and promoting a broad range of cultural events in theater, music, film, literature, the humanities, and visual arts. Among its American partners are such distinguished organizations as Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; Brooklyn Academy of Music; The Museum of Modern Art; The Jewish Museum; The PEN American Center; The Poetry Society of America; National Gallery of Art; Yale University; Columbia University; Princeton University; Harvard Film Archive; CUNY Graduate Center; Julliard School of Music; The New Museum; La MaMa E.T.C.; and many more. Our programs have included American presentations of works by such luminaries as filmmakers Roman Polanski, Andrzej Wajda and Jerzy Skolimowski; writers Czesław Miłosz , Adam Zagajewski and Wisława Szymborska; composers Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Lutosławski and Mikołaj Górecki; theatre directors Krystian Lupa, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor and Grzegorz Jarzyna; visual artists Krzysztof Wodiczko, Katarzyna Kozyra, Artur Żmijewski; and many other important artists, writers, historians, scholars, musicians, and performers.
THE POLISH BOOK INSTITUTE (INSTYTUT KSIĄŻKI) is a national institution established in Krakow by the Polish Ministry of Culture in 2004. The Institute’s basic aims are to popularize books and reading within Poland, as well as to promote Polish literature worldwide. These goals are accomplished by promoting the best Polish books and their authors; educational activities designed to encourage regular book reading; introducing Polish literature abroad; organizing research visits for translators; increasing the number of translations from Polish into foreign languages through the © POLAND Translation Program; and making information on Polish books and the Polish publishing market accessible to foreign consumers.
The Polish Book Institute presents Polish books at national and international book fairs, arranges appearances by Polish writers at literary festivals, participates in programs designed to promote Polish culture worldwide, publishes catalogues of New Books from Poland, runs study and educational activities, and sets up meetings and seminars for translators of Polish literature.
THE BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY is Yale University‘s principal repository for literary papers and for early manuscripts and rare books in the fields of literature, theology, history, and the natural sciences. In addition to its general collection of rare books and manuscripts, the library houses the Yale Collection of American Literature, the Yale Collection of German Literature, the Yale Collection of Western Americana, and the Osborn Collection. The Beinecke collections afford opportunities for interdisciplinary research in such fields as medieval, Renaissance, and eighteenth-century studies, art history, photography, American studies, the history of printing, and modernism in art and literature.
http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/