Miłosz the Visionary: His American experience in Visions from San Francisco Bay

Abstract

Nobel Prize winner Czesław Miłosz is one of the most influential poets, prosiest, philosophers, and diplomats, his works spanning two centuries and multiple continents. Born in 1911, in what is now modern-day Lithuania, Miłosz spent most of his professional life in Europe including Poland and France. In 1960, fleeing the power of the communist regime, he found political asylum in California, teaching in the Slavic languages department at the University of California Berkley. The following paper examines Czesław Miłosz’s perspective on the radical West culture of the 1960s and ‘70s in his book Visions from San Francisco Bay. This work brings attention to previously unnoticed English mistranslations. I propose a new translation to reflect Miłosz’s original meaning, which changes the way English readers interpret his American experience as well as his book Visions from San Francisco Bay. Specifically, I consider two sets of Miłosz’s pros and cons which he crafted to describe the essence of his American experience, and one set of pros and cons I crafted from his writing to frame his experience. These juxtaposing pros and cons ultimately led him to the conclusion of the importance of richly interpreting one’s reality, especially in a time of change and uncertainty. By way of comparative literary analysis of Miłosz’s Visions and selected poems, we change the way we traditionally think of the ‘60s and ‘70s, realizing that instead of being a time of explosive interpretive energy, this was a time when Americans fell away from rich interpretation of their metaphysical realities.