A Song On the End of the World
by Czeslaw Milosz
translated by Anthony Milosz
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.
Czeslaw Milosz
Czeslaw Milosz was born to Weronika and Aleksander Milosz on June 30, 1911,
in Szetejnie, Lithuania (then under the domination of the Russian tsarist
government). After the outbreak of World War I, Aleksander Milosz was
drafted into the Tsar's army, and as a combat engineer he built bridges and
fortifications in front-line areas. His wife and son accompanied him in his
constant travels about Russia. The family did not return to Lithuania until
1918, whereupon they settled in Wilno (then a part of Poland; also called
Vilnius or Vilna).
Milosz graduated from high school in 1929, and in 1930 his first poems were
published in Alma Mater Vilnenis, a university magazine. In 1931 he
co-founded the Polish avant-garde literary group "Zagary"; his first
collection of verse appeared in 1933. That same year he co-edited an
Anthology of Social Poetry. In 1934 he earned a degree as Master of Law and
traveled to Paris on a fellowship from the National Culture Fund. In 1936
he began working as a literary programmer for Radio Wilno. He was dismissed
for his leftist views the following year and, after a trip to Italy, took a
job with Polish Radio in Warsaw. He spent most of World War II in
Nazi-occupied Warsaw working for underground presses.
After the war, he came to the United States as a diplomat for the Polish
communist government, working at the Polish consulate first in New York,
then in Washington. In 1950 he was transferred to Paris, and the following
year he requested and received political asylum. He spent the next decade
in Paris as a freelance writer. In 1953 he published The Captive Mind, and
his novel, The Seizure of Power, received the Prix Littéraire European from
the Swiss Book Guild. In 1960 he moved to the United States to become a
lecturer in Polish literature at the University of California at Berkeley.
He later became professor of Slavic languages and literature. He did not
visit Poland again until 1981.
In 1980, Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His other
honors include an award for poetry translations from the Polish P.E.N.
Center in Warsaw, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Neustadt International
Prize for Literature. He has written virtually all of his poems in his
native Polish, although his work was banned in Poland until after he won
the Nobel Prize. He has also translated the works of other Polish writers
into English, and has co-translated his own works with such poets as Robert
Hass and Robert Pinsky. His translations into Polish include portions of
the Bible (from Hebrew and Greek) and works by Charles Baudelaire, T. S.
Eliot, John Milton, William Shakespeare, Simone Weil, and Walt Whitman. He
died on August 14, 2004.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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