[Milosz's] entire effort is directed toward a confrontation with experience—and not with personal experience alone, but with history in all its paradoxical horror and wonder.

Such an ambition could only be conceived, let alone undertaken, by a writer who has been immersed in history; and Mr. Milosz, far more than most writers of our time, has witnessed some of its cataclysmic events. (p. 14)

The translations in "Bells in Winter," made by Mr. Milosz in collaboration with Lillian Vallee, reveal a voice that is unadorned and discursive, yet capable of powerful (and delicate) poetic effects; it is a voice that works through traditional forms to transform and revivify tradition. The occasional stiffness of the English I take as a kind of tacit reminder of a wealth of allusion and linguistic play in the original Polish that is impossible to re-create in translation. This astringent and simple style, capable...