Czeslaw Milosz’ Swiat / The World comprises twenty poems printed here in the original Polish and in an English translation by the poet himself.  It was written in 1943 at a time when Milosz was working at an underground press as part of the Polish resistance to the Nazis.  He purposefully adopted a naïve voice for the poems in order to “describe the world as it should be seen by children as opposed to the world of horror I knew.”  He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980 for voicing, in the words of the Nobel Committee, “man’s exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts.” 

This edition by the Arion Press is limited to 250 copies (plus twenty-five copies hors commerce) and is signed by Milosz.  It includes a signed dry-point portrait of the poet by artist Jim Dine.