Apart from highlighting the poet’s life and output, the annual event in southern Poland focuses on the international literary scene in a wider context, according to organizers.
The programme of the five-day festival includes meetings with writers, debates, concerts and special attractions for children.
The motto of this year’s festival, Songs on the End of the World, refers to one of Miłosz’s best-known poems, entitled A Song on the End of the World, and "highlights the multitude of literary perspectives, while acknowledging some of the most important issues facing humankind."
The roster of prominent foreign poets in attendance includes Ukraine’s Kateryna Babkina, who is expected to introduce her latest volume of verse, Does Not Hurt. Other participants include Daniela Danz and Anja Kampmann from Germany, Norway’s Kristin Berget, and Maltese writer Antoine Cassar.
Antanas A. Jonynas from Lithuania, Miłosz’s native land, and Kārlis Vērdiņš from Latvia are also among the festival guests.
The Miłosz Festival features a large group of Polish poets, both well-established ones, such as Ryszard Krynicki, Jerzy Jarniewicz and Ewa Lipska, and up-and-coming names, including Agata Jabłońska and Marta Podgórnik.
Another Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Wisława Szymborska, whose birth centenary was celebrated on July 2, will be remembered during the event in three exhibitions: The Joy of Writing/The Joy of Photography; Wisława Szymborska Through a Lens by Joanna Helander; and Justyna Budzyn’s Mosaic and Joanna Więcław’s Collages.
The Miłosz Festival was first held in 2009.
Born in 1911 in present-day Lithuania, Miłosz spent almost 40 years in exile in America, where he worked as a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Berkeley.
During the communist era, his works were not officially available in Poland. In 1980, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for voicing "with uncompromising clear-sightedness man’s exposed condition in the world of severe conflicts."
After the fall of communism, Miłosz returned to Poland and spent the last years of his life in Kraków, where he died in 2004, aged 93.
(mk/gs)
Click on the audio player above to listen to a report by Radio Poland's Ada Janiszewska.
A Song on the End of the World
by Czesław Miłosz
translated by Anthony Milosz
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.
Warsaw, 1944