After Adam

It’s been a year to the day since the unexpected death of Poland’s leading poet Adam Zagajewski. He was 75. Yesterday, sculptor Jonathan Hirschfeld sent me his retrospective, “Without Irony,” in the January/February issue of Britain’s PN Review. I can do no better, in the waning hours of the day, to include a few excerpts from his excellent tribute. It begins:

About a year ago Adam Zagajewski wrote to me, and now his words echo as only last words can.

Dear Jonathan,

Today I’m crying for Wojtek Pszoniak who just died. As you know, when you lose a friend there’s an avalanche of things that come to your mind. I knew Wojtek for 70 years, he was like a brother for me.

I’ve read your essay on Milosz, I like it very much, you’ve found a way to capture his essence not only in clay but also in words.

It’s a pity that we’ve lost contact years ago. Let’s hope that – at least – we can be in touch through words. I remember many beautiful moments in your study, with leafless trees outside or spring trees.

Love to all of your family,
Adam

Last March I received the news that Adam was very ill. Initially there were some grounds for hope, but
within barely a few weeks it was over. Suddenly it was I, struggling to restore coherence to my own
recollections as he gazed from a pedestal a few meters away. “Leafless trees outside / or spring
trees” – this familiar hesitation and this nod to time – Adam’s voice.

I have become familiar with this feeling of irrevocable void, but nothing can compress the time it takes
to absorb it.

***

Early on we had shared our appreciation for a proverb that we only knew in English, by Malebranche, a French eighteenth-century religious philosopher: “Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.”

***

One day Adam asked if we could use my studio as the setting for a documentary about him to be filmed for German television. We had spent many hours together in this luminous space, working against the background chatter of chirping birds that he loved and recognized. There is a sequence in which he meanders through the atelier and settles on the small head of a young boy, for which he felt a particular affection. As I watch this video today I am reminded of his affirmation, with which he concluded his Neustadt lecture in 2004, that “innocence is perhaps the most daring thing in the entire world.” The camera panned across the collection of portrait heads. Adam was among them.

***

On sculpting Adam:

I am reminded of what I saw and felt when I made the sculpture. He looked shy, yet warm, quiet, solitary and contained, watchful, extremely sensitive; a certain stillness. Yet there was also a current of inner motion, as if I could feel his mind at work, or more precisely, his way of sensing the world. This became a conscious theme for the portrait – a state of receptivity and preparedness, even his skin needed to feel like an organ of the senses. Within his way of being I sensed a quiet, determined strength. It took me some time to grasp that this demeanor was a reflection of his conscious urge “to dissent from dissidents”. He held true to his contemplative gaze and to an unabashed search for beauty; he could write of the ecstatic and he believed in the soul – this was the form of his resistance, more radical than it might appear. A dissident in the regime of post-modern decline, he wondered how the clay could take that on. And I thought to myself, only clay could take that on.

There’s more. Of course there’s more. Read the rest here. There’s much more about Adam in the Book Haven, too: type “Zagajewski” into the search engine.

Tags: Adam Zagajewski

This entry was posted on Monday, March 21st, 2022 at 8:37 pm by Cynthia Haven and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.