An Introductory Note

   “From the Rising of the Sun” was originally published by a distinguished Polish émigrépress, Instytut Literacki, in Paris tn 1974 in a volume which bore the name of the title poem, Gdzie wschodzi slonce i kedy zapada. When its author, Czeslaw Milosz, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, and his work was briefly available in his own country, where it had not been reprinted for almost thirty years, the volume —for which crowds lined the streets outside bookstores in many Polish cities—published this time by Wydawnictwo Znak in Kraków, bore the same title. An English version of the poem, translated by Mr. Milosz and Lillian Vallee, had appeared in the Ecco Press volume. Bells in Winter, in 1978, and it was through this translation that the poem had become known to English and American readers.