Poland’s Forgotten Wars
Professor Clare Cavanagh discusses Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, based on Wladyslaw Szpilman’s memoirs, and Norman Davies’ book, Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw, the subject of a recent CNN documentary, as a way of approaching the complexities and enigmas of Poland’s wartime history. Poems by Nobel Laureates Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska provide a point of entry into Poland’s tumultuous wartime experience.
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About the Presenter
Clare Cavanagh is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at Northwestern University. She is the author of Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition, and prize-winning translator of Wislawa Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski, and other contemporary Polish writers. She is working on two books: Czeslaw Milosz and His Century: A Critical Life (Farrar Straus Giroux) and Poetry and Power: Russia, Poland and the West (Yale University Press). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and many other periodicals.
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