Poland’s Poet

Alan Sheridan

• Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Catherine Leach
  Sidgwick, 300 pp, £8.95, July 1981, ISBN 0 283 98782 0
• The Issa Valley by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Louis Iribarne
  Sidgwick, 288 pp, £6.95, July 1981, ISBN 0 283 98762 6

1980 was certainly the year of the Poles. With Solidarity Poland was making history, for once without tragedy, or at least not immediate tragedy. The first-ever Polish pope was riding in triumph through the world’s cities, including his own Cracow. In Stockholm the Swedish jury awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to Poland’s greatest living poet, Czeslaw Milosz. He, too, was given a hero’s welcome when he visited his native country, after nearly thirty years’ exile – an event that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.