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But then, in Paris, no one could dream about the Nobel Prize. Milosz … honored me with an invitation for dinner. We made an appointment in the Latin District, where it took the poet a long time to find the restaurant. He looked around, he kept losing his way. … Finally he found it. It was a small, warm Bulgarian pub. We sat down, Milosz ordered wine, and said: 'This is exactly where I wanted to bring you. I used to come here in the beginning of the '50s every day, and every day I thought I would commit suicide.'

The conversation was long and fascinating. At one point—more or less after the third bottle of wine—I began, without too much stuttering, to recite his poems from memory. I knew quite a few of them. Soon, to my great surprise, I saw that tears were running down Milosz's cheeks. Astonished, I stopped the recitation, and heard the moved voice of the poet: 'I didn't know that young people in Poland knew my poems by heart. I thought I had been cursed.'

He had the right to think that. His writings had been ruthlessly confiscated, as if the communists were out to prove that their vengeance had no end."

Milosz's death is a great loss to the world of literature and to Poland. But there's comfort and guidance in what's he's left behind, including the threat in the poem to those who "harmed a simple man":

The poet remembers.
You can kill him
—a new one will be born
to chronicle the deeds
and the conversations.

Agnieszka Tennant is an associate editor at Christianity Today.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

For more information, see official Milosz website set up by his publisher Znak.

The Nobel Foundation has more information about Czeslaw Milosz.

NPR's All Things Considered has an interview with a Milosz translator, Robert Hass.

The AFP news wire has an obituary.

Books & Culture Corner appears every Tuesday. Earlier editions of Books & Culture Corner and Book of the Week include:

Be Careful What You Pray For | The strange tale of the controversial Bishop Pike and his fatal quest for relevance. (Aug. 31, 2004)

Book 'Em! | The concluding installment of our three-part midyear book roundup (Aug. 24, 2004)

(Not Just) Summer Reading | Part 2 of our midyear report on outstanding books. (Aug. 17, 2004)

Real Fantasy | The first installment in a new Tolkien-inspired series shows genuine promise. (Aug. 17, 2004)

We've Got Books | The first installment of our new midyear book report. (Aug. 10, 2004)

'Be Happy!' | How the ancient Olympics differed from the modern spectacle. (Aug. 10, 2004)

Rediscovering 'Husbandry' | What Colonial farmers have to teach us about living with the land. (Aug. 03, 2004)

China's Spiritual Hunger | The lessons of Falun Gong (July 27, 2004)

Ambiguous Redemption | A riveting memoir by the author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. (July 20, 2004)

Tending the Garden | Evangelicals and the environment. (July 07, 2004)

How the Monster Grew | A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian looks at the origins of modern media. (July 05, 2004)

Wasn't That a Mighty Fall | Martha Stewart, VeggieTales, and Narnia revisted. (June 29, 2004)

Insect Theodicy | Who sent the locusts? And who exterminated them? (June 22, 2004)

Telling Lies, Telling Stories | Lars Saabye Christensen's The Half Brother reveals imagination as escape. (June 15, 2004)

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September (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48