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"Language is my only homeland"
- Czeslaw Milosz
".... He moved to the United States and began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley in 1960. He had mixed feelings about the United States: he wrote, “What splendor! What poverty! What humanity! What inhumanity! What mutual good will! What individual isolation! What loyalty to the ideal! What hypocrisy! What a triumph of conscience! What perversity!”
He kept writing poetry in Polish, even though almost no one was reading it. His books had been banned in Poland, and his poems weren’t translated into English until 1973. Then, in 1980, he got a phone call at 3:00 in the morning telling him that he’d won the Nobel Prize in literature...."
From today's Writers Almanac
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