To Begin Where I Am: Selected Essays (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780374528591)

A comprehensive selection of essays--some never before translated into English--by the Nobel Laureate.

To Begin Where I Am brings together a rich sampling of poet Czeslaw Milosz's prose writings. Spanning more than a half century, from an impassioned essay on human nature, wartime atrocities, and their challenge to ethical beliefs, written in 1942 in the form of a letter to his friend Jerzy Andrzejewski, to brief biographical sketches and poetic prose pieces from the late 1990s, this volume presents Milosz the prose writer in all his multiple, beguiling guises. The incisive, sardonic analyst of the seductive power of communism is also the author of tender, elegiac portraits of friends famous and obscure; the witty commentator on Polish complexes writes lyrically of the California landscape. Two great themes predominate in these essays, several of which have never appeared before in English: Milosz's personal struggle to sustain his religious faith, and his unswerving allegiance to a poetry that is on the side of man.

Author: Czeslaw Milosz, Milosz
ISBN-10: 0374528594
ISBN-13: 9780374528591
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
Language: English
Published: 10/02/2002
Pages: 480
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.40w x 1.30d