So Czeslaw Milosz was my neighbor.
We worked on the translation of his poems for 25 years.
After his death, I was quite aware
that there was one set of the--
I never learned to read Polish.
I can tell whether the word "cloud" is in a poem or not,
but I knew that there was a hole in the English presentation
of his poetry.
From the time that he walked out of the destruction of Warsaw
by the Nazis at the end of World War II,
Hitler had said, destroy it.
Wipe out anything that moves.
As an act of-- vindictive act, the Russian army
was approaching the Vistula River.
80% of the buildings in Warsaw were wiped out.
175,000 people, mostly young, killed
within a couple of weeks.
This is not the Warsaw ghetto uprising, which
had happened two years before.
It was part of the experience of the murder of 3 million
Polish Jewish people.
So he walked away from the city, which
was burning, with his girlfriend, who would be his wife.
They found their way to Krakow, which was intact.
He applied for a job.
He was 34 years old.
Applied for a job with the diplomatic service
of the new country that was coming into being,
the People's Republic of Poland.
And he got a job.
And he was sent to the United States
because he had learned some English
and translated "The Waste Land" by TS Eliot
and arrived in January of 1946 in New York.
And he stayed there for five years, a very
awkward situation, taking in this city.
One of the first letters he wrote back
was, buildings this tall are nonsense.
This neon is a cheap gimmick.
He was--