The motto of this year’s event, Ocalenie (Rescue), is taken from the title of Miłosz’s collection of verse, which was published in 1945.
Festival curator Szymon Kloska said that Ocalenie, which brings together Miłosz’s most important poems penned in German-occupied Warsaw during World War II, poses crucial questions about the atrocities of the war and ways of countering evil.
Kloska added that both Ocalenie and the collection of essays The Land of Ulro, “the true gems for the lovers of Miłosz’s writings,” would be published this week in new editions by the Kraków-based Znak Publishers.
Kloska also said that this year’s 13th edition of the festival is special because it is a highlight of the Year of Miłosz, a yearlong celebration of the poet’s life and output marking the 20th anniversary of his death.
This year's Miłosz Festival lasts eight days and has attracted a record number of visitors, including a large group of prominent international poets such as Rasha Habba from Syria, Katja Gorecan from Slovenia, Dmitri Strocew from Belarus, Inga Gaile from Latvia, and Māris Salējsa, a Latvian translator of Miłosz’s verse.
Also planned are meetings with Spanish author Yolanda Castaño, Hinemoana Baker from New Zealand, Birgit Kreipe and Nadja Küchenmeister from Germany, and leading Chinese poet Yang Lian, an unwavering campaigner for freedom of speech and the recipient of the 2024 Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award.
Cynthia Haven, an American literary scholar and author, will talk about her book Czesław Miłosz: A California Life. The book focuses on Miłosz’s almost four-decade residence in Berkeley, where he taught at the University of California's Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.
During the communist era, Miłosz’s 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, he returned to Poland and spent the last years of his life in Kraków, where he died in 2004, aged 93.
(mk/gs)