“
I finished my own graduation exams a year later and went to see for myself the land that had sprung this group of writers and the linden trees that lined the avenues of Krakow in their poems.
I got a job teaching English in the closest city to that would have me. Bratislava was far enough from Krakow to maintain the former’s mystique, but close enough to reveal on visits that the city was like the poems which, I presume, were like the poets. That is to say, dark and lyrical and mysterious and tortured and playful and full of shadows and light. That is to say, full of life.
Milosz died in 2004 at 94. Call me cynic, but now, with Szymborka’s death, a literary era is ending: I stammer and flounder.
