Dr. Natalie Gerber’s essay, “Missing Milosz,” which presents her reflections of working with Czeslaw Milosz, one of the great moral and literary figures of the 20th century, is included in a new book, “An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czeslaw Milosz.”
Gerber, associate professor of English, was a graduate student at University of California Berkley when she served as a personal assistant to Milosz, the 1980 Nobel Laureate of Literature. For Gerber, the highlight of that humbling and instructive experience was helping Milosz prepare an early draft of the English-language notes and commentary for the first, full-length translation in English of his epochal poem, “Traktat Poetychie, Treatise On Poetry,” considered one of the major works of the post-war world.
The book, set for a March 28 release by Ohio University Press, reveals the fascinating life story of Milosz in America through recollections by U.S. poet laureates Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky and Irish poet and writer Seamus Heaney, among other major literary figures, as well as his former students and assistants.
Miłosz was a Polish poet, prose writer and translator of Lithuanian origin and subsequent American citizenship. His World War II-era sequence The World, is a collection of 20 "naive" poems. He defected to the West in 1951 and his non-fiction book The Captive Mind (1953) is one of the classics of anti-Stalinism. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1980, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
