Cambridge University Central European Society - CUCES

Date: Tuesday 9 November 2004
Venue: Bateman Room, Gonville and Caius.

Tuesday, 9th of November 7:30.

An informal poetry readings devoted to Czeslaw Milosz with a talk by Gyorgy Gomori. Termed as the most spiritualised event of the term. This time it's not about drinking vodka and other spirits, but about poetry.

Czeslaw Milosz was born on June 30, 1911, in Szetejnie, Lithuania (then under the domination of the Russian tsarist government). Milosz graduated from high school in 1929, and in 1930 his first poems were published in Alma Mater Vilnenis, a university magazine. In 1931 he co-founded the Polish avant-garde literary group „Zagary“; his first collection of verse appeared in 1933. In 1936 he began working as a literary programmer for Radio Wilno. He was dismissed for his leftist views the following year and, after a trip to Italy, took a job with Polish Radio in Warsaw. He spent most of World War II in Nazi-occupied Warsaw working for underground presses.

In 1980, Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His other honours include an award for poetry translations from the Polish P.E.N. Centre in Warsaw, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He has written virtually all of his poems in his native Polish, although his work was banned in Poland until after he won the Nobel Prize. He has also translated the works of other Polish writers into English, and has co-translated his own works with such poets as Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky. His translations into Polish include portions of the Bible (from Hebrew and Greek) and works by Charles Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Simone Weil, and Walt Whitman. He died on August 14, 2004.

Gyorgy Gomori is a professor emeritus of Cambridge University and a fellow of Darwin College. He was a friend of Milosz and lectured at Berkeley at the time Milosz was a professor there. He translated works of Milosz into his native Hungarian and into English. He is also an author of many books on Polish literature, for example ‚The Magnetic Poles‘, which you should be able to buy during our event!