Title: Poet in a New World: Robert Hass, Karol Berger, and Peter Dale Scott read and discuss a new set of Czesław Miłosz translations
Please join us for “Poet in a New World.” Robert Hass, Karol Berger, and Peter Dale Scott read and discuss a new set of Czesław Miłosz translations.
Readings from newly translated poems by Czesław Miłosz, some never before translated into English, and a conversation about poetry, translation, history, and political and aesthetic struggle.
Robert Hass’s most recent book of poems is Summer Snow (Ecco/HarperCollins). A collection of essays, A Third Commonness, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. He worked with Czesław Miłosz on the translation of his poems for many years. He’s a Professor Emeritus of English at UC Berkeley.
For five years in the 1960s Peter Dale Scott, now aged 96, translated Polish poetry with Czesław Miłosz; and with him produced the first books in English on Post-War Polish Poetry and the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert (Penguin, 1968, reissued by Carcanet and Ecco). The writing of his poetic trilogy Seculum helped inspire his prose book on Miłosz’s life and poetry, Ecstatic Pessimist: Czesław Miłosz, Poet of Catastrophe and Hope (2023). For this book he was awarded the Jurkowska-Nawrocka Medal in 2024. A companion volume to Ecstatic Pessimist, acknowledging and developing his thinking on Miłosz, is his most recent prose book, Reading the Dream: A Post-Secular History of Enmindment (2024). Enmindment (the working title of the book for years) is there defined as the “coalition of dream and thought” and praised as “the source of creative evolution in the individual, and also in the supporting culture in which we develop. It is for this reason that poets in particular play such a large role in the evolution of culture.” Earlier this year he published online with Church Life Journal his essay “Miłosz’s ‘To Albert Einstein’: The Promethean Torture of Engagement with History.”
A native of Poland who emigrated to the USA in 1968, Karol Berger is the Osgood Hooker Professor in Fine Arts, Emeritus, at the Department of Music, Stanford University, where he taught from 1982 to 2020. His books include Musica Ficta (Cambridge University Press 1987; recipient of the 1988 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society), A Theory of Art (Oxford University Press 2000), Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow (University of California Press 2007; recipient of the 2008 Marjorie Weston Emerson Award of the Mozart Society of America), Beyond Reason: Wagner contra Nietzsche (University of California Press 2017; recipient of the 2018 Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society); and Mahler’s Symphonic World: Music for the Age of Uncertainty (The University of Chicago Press, 2025). In 2011 he received the Glarean Prize of the Swiss Musicological Society and in 2014 the Humboldt Research Award of the Humboldt Foundation. Since 2009, he is a Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences; since 2013, an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society; since 2014, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and since 2019, a Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea.