Summary for Zeszyty Literackie 94 (2006)
This year's third issue of Zeszyty Literackie is dedicated to Czeslaw Milosz and W. A. Mozart.
In her essay Czeslaw Milosz and America Clare Cavanagh indicates that Milosz became a vivid presence in American poetry as an author of verse and as an editor of publications directed against mass crimes. He confronted important events with conviction and introduced them into his work. Seamus Heaney, Robert Hass, and Derek Walcott drew from Milosz the notion that poetry could carry considerable intellectual as well as moral content. However,as Cavanagh points out, the vitality, power, and seriousness of Milosz's poems owe something to the example of T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Karl Shapiro, and Hart Crane.They saved him from the influence of the nationalistic, patriotic, and romantic literature. However international Milosz's reading and his interests, he clung to Lithuania as a source of his imagery.
Milosz was closely associated with Joseph Brodsky and is compared with him by Irena Grudzinska-Gross.
Pawel Hertz, a brilliant poet, essayist, and translator, was portrayed by Milosz in his novel Seizure of Power. Zeszyty Literackie features an article on Hertz by Milosz.
In his essay Lights and Powers: 'The Magic Flute' Jean Starobinski compares the violence of the French Revolution to the shadow, lurking in the works of Mozart's followers. Starobinski perceives the Enlightenment through the prism of the twentieth century. The spirit of the Age of Reason has not been extinguished but we no longer believe in eternal, timeless truths. Mozart is not didactic for he knows that the truth is most adequately expressed with delicacy.
Tomas Cyz in his essay examines the myths and tales underlying The Magic Flute.
Also of note in this issue: a fragment of Mariusz Wilk's new
novel.
Published 2006-08-02
Original in English
Contributed by Zeszyty Literackie
© Zeszyty Literackie
© Eurozine













