 | | Wydawnictwo Literackie
Kraków 2002
© Czesław Miłosz
c/o The Wylie Agency
167 x 230
56 pages
hardcover
ISBN 83-08-03347-4
rights available |
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Czesław MiłoszOrpheus and Eurydice
About the author
People have always said that there is some sort of power in Miłosz that we cannot define. That power is what made him sit down to write Orpheus and Eurydice, and once again we have great poetry! (Małgorzata Dziewulska, Res Publica Nowa)
Czesław Miłosz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, wrote the long poem Orpheus and Eurydice shortly after his wife's death. The work is dedicated to her memory. A "work of grief" following the death of the beloved, it also conveys a dramatic reinterpretation of the Christian dogma of resurrection. While highly personal, the poem can be read as a manifesto of its author's faith in art and literature as vehicles for recalcitrant meanings that remain profoundly intimate and individual. A recapitulation of the myth, familiar to us all, about Orpheus descending into Hades in pursuit of his beloved, Milosz's elegy establishes once again an order in which, as the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote, "death has no dominion".
Orpheus and Eurydice has been published in a volume containing the Polish text and translations in English (by Miłosz and Robert Hass), German (by Doreen Daume), Russian (by Anatol Roitman) and Swedish (by Anders Bodegard).
Unable to weep, he wept at the loss
Of the human hope for the resurrection of the dead.
He was, now, like every other mortal.
His lyre was silent and in his dream he was defenceless.
He knew he must have faith and he could not have faith.
(p. 10)
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