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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN 13A
MONDAY,AUGUST 16,2004
NEWS
Polish Nobel Prize winner, poet Milosz dies at 93
The Associated Press
WARSAW, Poland — Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, known for his intellectual and emotional works about some of the worst cruelties of the 20th century, died Saturday, the Polish news agency PAP reported. He was 93.
The report, quoting his son Antoni and his daughter-in-law Joanna, said he died at his home in Krakow. It gave no cause of death.
Milosz had lived in Krakow since the fall of the Iron Curtain allowed him to return home after almost 30 years in exile in France and the United States, a time in which he became a prominent symbol for anti-communist dissidents.
shook communist rule in Poland.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1980, an honor that coincided with the emergence of the Solidarity worker protest movement that
Milosz's best-known works include The Captive Mind, a study of the plight of intellectuals under communist dictatorship. It brought him international fame in the early 1950s.
Born to a noble family in what is now Lithuania, Milosz lived through the World War II Nazi regime and the Stalinist tyranny that wiped out the culture in which he grew up.
Once a diplomat for communist Poland, he broke with the regime and emigrated to the United States, coming back to live in his native country only after Poland won freedom in 1989.
He was "a witness to crucial and terrible events of the 20th century, and an original and contrary thinker — and feeler — about them," said Robert Hass, a University of California at Berkeley professor who translated Milosz's poetry.
matter and technique, and its mix of sensuousness and references to culture, religion and philosophy.
Milosz's poetry was praised for its enormous range of subject
"How do you write about suffering and still be able to approve of the world at the same time? If you really think about the horror of the world, the only suitable attitude seems to be to reject it." Milosz told the Polish weekly Tygodnik Powszechnv in 2001
tygoume.
"I've always regretted that I'm made of contradictions. But, if contradiction is impossible to overcome, we have to accept both its ends."
his eras.
Milosz also carried the burden of being an intellectual in exile, one whose poems were only published in his native country after he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
"The birth of Solidarity and martial law made Milosz a myth, which he couldn't entirely shake off — a myth of anti-communist militant, fighter for freedom," said Milosz biographer Lukasz Stadnicki. "Even if he didn't want
it, he had to face the role of national prophet."
Exile and the feelings of being a foreigner intensified the theme of memory in his work. He often explored the problem of roots in his writing.
The Isaa Valley, published in 1955, tells the story of the poet's childhood. A View of San Francisco Bay, published in 1969, traces the poet's efforts to find his own place in the United States where, in his words, he "remained an outcast."
Aleksander Flut, a philology professor at Krakow's Jagiellonian University said Milosz attained new relevance amid the post-communist change that swept Poland.
Milosz looked "for hope in what's beyond the sphere of everyday life which is so fragile, beyond the consumption," Fiut told The Associated Press.
"He refers to religious imagination, he upholds that a human
being is a value."
Milosz was born on June 30, 1911, in Szetejnie, now Lithuania, and studied law at the University in Vilnius. There, he published his first book of poems, "Three Winters," in 1936.
The themes of his early poetry were a portent of his later works, a historical perspective combined with individual experience of the world, expressed in simple images of the idyllic and the apocalyptic.
After World War II, Milosz served in communist Poland's diplomatic service as a cultural attache in New York and Paris. In 1951, he severed ties with the government and sought political asylum in France, entering into cooperation with a Paris-based institute that specialized in Polish emigre literature.
The Cold War peak of the early 1950s was a period of great loneliness for him, during which he said he often thought about suicide. His works, written in Polish, did
not reach his native country because of communist censorship, and he was unknown to foreign readers.
The essay collection The Captive Mind, written during that time, became a classic of the literature of totalitarianism and made him internationally known.
In 1960, Milosz left France for California, where he spent more than 20 years as Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Berkeley. English-speaking audiences got access to his poetry only in 1973, when some of his work was translated in Selected Poems.
Poems.
At 90, Milosz said he was still up at night writing poems.
"It's not possible to be sated with the world. I'm still insatiable," he said. "At my age, I'm still looking for a form, for a language to express the world."
Milozs' first wife, Janina, died in 1986. His second wife, Carol, a U.S.-born historian, died in 2003.
Cooking legend Julia Child's legacy: 'She got us cooking'
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOS ANGELES — Julia Child had a recipe for teaching Americans to make classy food: combine the art of a master chef with chirpy humor and the occasional gourmet pratfall.
And don't forget the wine.
her niece said.
For generations of Americans, she was a 6-foot-2 kitchen icon, sharing her delight of French cuisine through her TV show and cookbooks. Her warbling voice and cheery manner merited endless parodies but her contribution to U.S. gourmet cooking was undeniable.
Child died early Friday at her home in an assisted-living center in Montecito, about 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles, said her niece, Philadelphia Cousin
Child, who had suffered from liver failure, died in her sleep two days before her 92nd birthday.
She was a "great, great figure of the art of cooking" said top French chef Alain Ducasse, who knew Child.
"Her enthusiasm for cooking was endless. Ms. Child was an inspired ambassador of cuisine in the United States," Ducasse said in a statement, "Today, the entire community of cooks is sad and feels like orphans."
Child was 51 when she made her television debut as The French Chef. The series began in 1963 and continued for 206 episodes. Child won a Peabody award in 1965 and an Emmy the following year. She went on to star in several more series for Boston's WGBH-TV.
"She was incredibly smart, and if she wanted to learn something, she set about learning it," said Russell Morash, who produced The French Cook and other public television shows featuring Child as recently as the mid-1990s.
fecently it was how to make French bread, or how to prepare the perfect omelet, she would take the trouble to learn about something, and then she mastered it in a way that I never saw anone else do," Morash said.
Her gourmet philosophy included drinking. In one TV program, chef and friend Jacques Pepin asked what kind of wine she preferred with picnics — red or white.
"I like beer," Child said enthusiastically, pulling out a cold bottle and two glasses.
Child also expressed a fondness for hamburgers, which she ate while recovering from 2002 knee-replacement surgery.
"We'd go to the market, and she'd buy Wonder Bread," Pepin said in a telephone interview. "She had no snobbism about food whatsoever."
She wasn't always tidy in the kitchen, and just like the rest of us, sometimes dropped things or had trouble getting a cake out of its mold.
invoice.
"If she made a mistake on TV she would keep going." Moulton said. "Here was this 6-foot-2 woman with a warbly voice dropping the meat on the burner and saying 'No big deal.' So why should I be nervous about cooking? Her real legacy is she got us cooking."
Last year, President Bush awarded Child the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
"She was more than a pioneer, a legend or a giant. She's the rock
Her custom-designed kitchen including small utensils, personal cookbooks and six-burner Garland commercial range has been on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
that started the avalanche that changed the way America eats," said Brooke Johnson, president of the Food Network, which will air a documentary on Child Aug 22.
When World War II began, she joined the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA. She was sent off to do clinical chores in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where she met Paul Child, a career diplomat who later became a photographer and painter.
Child was born in Pasadena, Calif. and graduated from Smith College in 1934 with a history degree.
They married in 1946 and two years later were sent to Paris.
In France, she enrolled in the famed Cordon Bleu cooking school and also met Simone Beck and Louise Bertholle, with whom she collaborated on Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The book was nine years in the
making and became mandatory for anyone who took cooking seriously.
It was published in 1961 and was followed by The French Chef Cookbook; Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. II, with Beck; From Julia Child's Kitchen; Julia Child & Company; Julia Child & More Company; and The Way to Cook, in October 1989.
Recently, she teamed with fellow television chef Jacques Pepin for the 1994 PBS special, Julia Child & Jacques Pepin: Cooking in Concert and a 1996 sequel, More Cooking in Concert.
Child's husband died in 1994. A longtime resident of Cambridge, Mass., she moved to Santa Barbara in late 2001. The couple had no children.
A private memorial service was planned, but Child asked that no funeral be held.
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