It is the late 1970s. From his study on Grizzly Peak, California, a 66-year-old man gazes out on the Pacific Ocean, and asks himself: “Who was I? Who am I now?”
This man is Czesław Miłosz. Born into a Lithuanian-Polish family in 1911, he studied law in Vilnius before making his name as a young poet, “a catastrophist”, in the 1930s. As a newly translated biography by Andrzej Franaszek recounts, Miłosz spent much of World War II in Warsaw, witnessing the “meat-grinder of history” as it went into overdrive. Later he would be awarded the medal of Righteous among the Nations for his efforts to help Jewish families escape capture.
