Posts Tagged ‘Adam Zagajewski’

When Clare Cavanagh was first invited by a mutual friend to translate the poems of Adam Zagajewski, who died two years ago this month, how did she respond? “I froze, answered ‘No,’ and hung up the phone.” She was known for her translations of Stanisław Barańczyk, and so the suggestion seemed somehow disloyal. “How could I work without Stanislaw? How could I translate the great Zagajewski on my own? I told my husband, who said I was an idiot. ‘It’s translating, not sex,’ he said. ‘You can do it with more than one person.’ Adam loved that line.”

You can read Clare’s article, “Working with the poet who told us to ‘Praise the Mutilated World,'” over at the Washington Post here. I love Clare Cavanagh’s writing – frank, unpretentious, and yet unpretentiously insightful. The occasion for the article: the great Polish poet’s latest collection, his final volume, True Life, is out in English this month.

Why did Adam approach her through an intermediary? “I discovered the reason for Adam’s shyness only long after. I’d published a scholarly book on the poet Osip Mandelstam that year, and Adam had actually read it. I’m still a bit shocked by that decades later,” she writes.

“He’d thought I would be some remote, imposing professor and was afraid to call me himself. This too continues to shock me. He was a great Polish poet after all, and I was just some Slavist in Wisconsin. But he knew I loved Mandelstam. And he knew I’d been translating Wisława Szymborska with his longtime friend, the great poet and translator Stanislaw Barańczak. So he thought it was worth a try.”

Again, read it all here. It’s worth it. I don’t want to spoil the stories for you, and I’d be tempted to tell them all.

I love Robert Pinsky’s writing, too, and his tribute to Adam, “A Poet Whose Tone Was Personal and Whose Vision Was Vast“ in The New York Times is here. It’s a retrospective as well as a review of True Life. An excerpt:

“Proper names occur in many of the poems, sometimes the innocent-looking place name (Drohobycz, Belzec) of an extermination ghetto, sometimes the name of a crucial, renowned or emblematic victim, such as the artist and writer Schulz, or Jean Améry, repeatedly tortured, known for his writing about sadism as the defining, essential nature of fascism, not incidental to it.

“The poems of True Life do not denounce these horrors explicitly, but seemingly allude to them almost as if in passing. The surface calm avoids the customary postures of condemnation; this poetry has a blade of penetration that is less forgiving and more demanding than ordinary, rhetorical righteousness. To put that point another way, Zagajewski by implication doubts the reassurance of “never again” or “never forget.” Slogans cannot correct the absence of moral imagination.

“The poems are at an extreme of truth-telling. They deploy understatement like a talisman as they enter the grandly menacing yet oblivious borderland of our worst human doings. Where does this manner, with its indictment by reason, come from? Zagajewski invokes and declines a particular intellectual-historical source in a poem of 11 short lines, entitled “Enlightenment.”

Czeslaw Milosz wrote in his introduction to Zagajewski’s 1985 selected poems in English, “Tremor” (translated by Renata Gorczynski), that Zagajewski, “taking the lead in the poetry of my language,” gives “living proof that Polish literature is energy incessantly renewed against all probabilities.”

Robert Pinsky extends a line of thought I advance in my own book, Czesław Miłosz: An American Life: “The poetry of Miłosz, Zbigniew Herbert and Wisława Szymborska in English translation has been a powerful strand in American poetry. In a tradition Zagajewski inherited, those three senior poets, in their different ways, by necessity engage historical realities. That mission has mattered to American writers.”

Read the whole thing at The New York Times here.

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.

Tomasz Różycki and I met a decade ago, at a New York City party celebrating the publication of my An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz. He was an up-and-coming poet then, a new generation, and I was told he was someone to watch.

I had met Poland’s greatest living poet, Adam Zagajewski, during my first visit to Kraków in 2008; he became an important reason to return to that jewel-box city. But I didn’t know of the connection between the two poets until The Los Angeles Review of Books‘ quarterly review (that’s right, the LARB has a print edition) published this marvelous homage: “Dark Coat: On Adam Zagajewski,” remembering the poet’s life and work before his shocking and unexpected death on March 21. The artistic reason for the tribute: the younger poet writes that “poetry is, finally, a mourning of each death, of every vanishing, witness to the ‘fury of disappearance.'” In this case prose will serve the cause as well.

According to Tomasz Różycki: “He followed his own path, and at times it seemed that he had been abandoned there, alone.” In writing a retrospective, he has written the best introduction to Adam Zagajewski and his work I know. (The translation of the essay, by the way, is by the poet Mira Rosenthal, a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford.)

A couple excerpts, the first one discussing Adam Zagajewski’s renowned poem, “To Go to Lvov”:

It was a very concrete and Polish kind of poetry, as much as Polish recollections of a lost Lwów can be — and, at the same time, it was detached from our cursed Polish problems. It was different, worldly, free. Not because the poems were detached from reality, as Polish critics often accused them of being, no — they were about reality itself, since our reality is twofold, if only because of the fact that it’s made up of the visible and the invisible and, in addition, to quote Hegel, it is threatened by the “fury of disappearance” and, therefore, only accessible to us within the blink of an eye. Moreover, poetry is the awareness of this vanishing, an elegy, a farewell to reality, a moment of mourning, necessary for us to be able to cope with the loss and to deal with the overabundance of memory. 

I’m writing this because some things only happen once in a lifetime; we can pass them over in silence, but sooner or later that silence will overwhelm and engulf us. We can try to be thankful for them, however ineptly, but that gratitude by its very nature will be less than the gift we received. It’s helpful to gain distance from something in order to describe it. It’s even better if the object of description has been frozen, though that’s not possible in this case, even with the help of such a fixative as death.

***

His poetry seemed different from anything I had read before, especially from contemporary poetry, which was marked by some king of gloomy heaviness, some kind of dry, wooden palpitation of language. Within Adam’s poetry, there was breath, space; it was not cramped, but exploding with light. Within it, there was no confusion or great toil; it was exactly as he had written — “a search for radiance.” And it was a poetry of joy — the pure joy of being, of admiration for beauty and the world, of being a child in the world. Joy like the joy of swimming in the warm Mediterranean Sea. He understood and wrote about the fact that, in the same sea, refugees were drowning, just as he understood and wrote about the fact that Lwów, a city that he loved dearly, was the site of so much death just before his birth. “A poem grows on contradictions, but it can’t grow over them,” as he wrote in “Ode to Plurality.” His poetry did not absolve him of anything, but it took on what poetry has taken on from the beginning: a celebration of human existence, of human life. The world is sometimes difficult and unbearable, but it also deserves to be praised, life deserves our gratitude and good that is more powerful than evil. Czesław Miłosz adored how Adam’s poems were so “intoxicated with the world.” His poems are often ecstatic, orgasmic, starting with the concrete and transforming into a hymn — as in, among many others, the poem “Lava,” which could be seen as an attempt to answer Adorno’s famous assertion that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. So many poems tell of flashes of happiness — of those times, as Schopenhauer says, when “we are, for that moment, unburdened of the base press of the will, we celebrate the Sabbath of the workhouse of willing, the wheel of Ixion stands still,” and which Nietzsche described with the phrase “eternal return.” Adam’s poetry is slight and piercing at the same time, and when I read it, I get the sensation that the calendar has made some kind of mistake again and forgot to note the holiday that the poem announces.

We haven’t finished talking about Adam Zagajewski, who died last month. We never will. Now we have Ilya Kaminsky‘s amazing tribute in The Yale Review (We wrote about the Ukrainian poet and novelist here and here.)

His article, “Going to Lvov,” begins:

I will always remember how, on a street corner in Chicago, the late Polish poet Adam Zagajewski turned to me and breathlessly said, “Oh, how much I hate Dante!”

I kept laughing all the way to my train. But of course, like everything Adam said, it made perfect sense in context. He was teaching at the University of Chicago that semester, away from his hometown of Kraków. I saw him twice a month when I visited Chicago for work. On that occasion, as usual, our conversation began with a report of what we had been reading: in my case, Dante, in Adam’s, Kobayashi Issa’s haiku. He loved the short lyric, its self-contained inner life, and minimalists like Pascal and E. M. Cioran; the latter he quoted often. But he also struggled with Cioran’s pessimism: “I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to toss that book against the wall.”

“A skinny man who carried a world of books within him, Adam Zagajewski was the kind of person who would offer to drop you off at your hotel after a poetry reading only to pull over midway to better focus on a conversation about poetry.  He would email the next day to recommend some more poets he loved, without any of that Bloomian anxiety of influence. None of this was a performance: he was a very shy person, gracious, precise. He believed in the soul—that the soul must live in lyric poetry. That, most of all.

“What I love about his own poems is how, in the second half of the horror that was the twentieth century, knowing what happened to Gabriel García Lorca, César Vallejo, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Paul Celan, and countless others, Adam insisted that a poem can be both an elegy for what happened and also a hymn to life. He gave us, if not a healing, then a way to go on, to give each other a measure of reprieve, music, and “gentleness.”

“To Go to Lvov” gives us context the poem, “a dream that refuses to end”: “Think of this poem, written in the 1980s, in a time when half of Europe was still under Soviet rule. Think of the joy it gives, composed in the shadow of a pained, disjointed requiem like Celan’s “Death Fugue.” Think of how much it took for a refugee and a child of refugees—for a man whose people died in exile—to stand up and imagine a way forward.”

In “To Go to Lvov,” the city’s rhythms are in the poem’s repetitions, line breaks, and sentence patterns. At the end of twentieth century, in a postwar poem about exile we expect an elegy, a protest, a dirge, but instead receive an ode’s joyful, impossible praise.

Much like “Late Beethoven,” this poem juxtaposes tonalities: humor, high lyricism, heartbreak. There is that same tension between description and invocation.

Oh! Oh! Oh! Go to the link to read Adam Z.’s matchless poem for the late Beethoven, called, justly enough, “Late Beethoven.” The poem, and Ilya’s tribute, are over at The Yale Review here.

Postscript on May 11: Sculptor Jonathan Hirschfeld has identified the playful man in the pink shirt. It is Adam’s lifelong friend, the actor Wojciech Pszoniak, who passed away at 78 last October. (Some may remember that he played Robespierre in Andrzej Wajda‘s 1983 Danton.) Adam was grieving deeply for his friend. The Bulgarian-French thinker Tzvetan Todorov, who died in 2017, is in the back row on the left.  

My Q&A with the late great Polish poet is now up over at the Los Angeles Review of Books here. The title: “’Poetry Has to Defend Itself’: A Conversation with Adam Zagajewski.”

An excerpt from the long-ago interview (circa 2006, I think):

What is this disease that you have identified – this relaxing into irony, if not cynicism – and how do we cure it?  And why have two prominent Polish poets struggle with it so consciously and conspicuously?  I ask because so many are completely oblivious to it – and it is a noticeable feature in both your writing and Milosz’s. 

I recall your comments about the influence of Nietzsche:  Noting his minting of such terms as “superman,” “will to power,” “beyond good and evil” – and adding that “someone once rightly observed that beyond good and evil lies only evil” – you suggested that without these influences, “the spiritual atmosphere of our century might have been purer and perhaps even prouder.” 

Well, the disease of irony seems to be well identified. I adore irony as a part of our rich rhetorical and mental apparatus but not when it assumes the position of a spiritual guidance. How to cure it? I wish I knew. The danger is that we live in a world where there’s irony on one side and fundamentalism (religious, political) on the other. Between them the space is rather small but it’s my space.

You wrote: “We need to go on, paying the price, sometimes, of being not only imperfect but even, who knows, arrogant and ridiculous.”

My temperament is different. Sometimes I wish I were an arrogant prophet, an aggressive guy. But my force – if I have any – is different, it lives more in nuances, in tranquility of my voice. Somehow I hope that the rhetoric of tranquility is after all stronger and more long-term than the one of a furious attack.

***

The future of poetry.  I know this sounds trite – the lamenting of poetry as an “endangered species.” But as someone who writes about poetry for a living, I know what a tough sell it is.  Despite the national drumbeating for “Poetry Month,” we live in a world where long, slow thoughts are disappearing.

What do you think?  What is the future for us who like to spend our days chewing the end of a pen and having long thoughts?

We’ll be living in small ghettos, far from where celebrities dwell, and yet in every generation there will be a new delivery of minds that will love long and slow thoughts and books and poetry and music, so that these rather pleasant ghettos will never perish–and one day may even stir more excitement than we’re used to now.

You wrote that Erbarme Dich is the heart of civilization. Comment?

Bach represents the center and the synthesis of the western music. To say, as I did, that this particular aria is the center of western music is a leap of faith, of course. I couldn’t prove it. I love this aria.

Read the rest at the Los Angeles Review of Books here.

And for Adam … the “Erbarme Dich.“

I wrote about poet Adam Zagajewski, who died last weekend at 75, for the Poetry Foundation about a decade ago. The published article, “Risk, Try, Revise, Erase,” wasn’t a Q&A, but I sent him some questions anyway, for the fun of it. Some of his replies were included in my 2006 article, but my questions were more guided by my interests and curiosity than focused journalistic intent.

That’s why this interview was never published before. It didn’t seem polished enough or grand enough. But I can’t get my friend out of my mind today. So the Book Haven provides me an opportunity to share these outtakes with a very gifted poet who left us too soon. He was one of the reasons I wanted to go back to Kraków, and now it’s hard to imagine the city without him. It is said that he lived in the shadow of poetry giants, but he also became one, and on his own his quiet terms. (A week or ago I wrote about sculptor Jonathan Hirschfeld’s sculpture of Miłosz. I also share his portrait of Adam above, circa 1990, in the same spirit of the moment.)

It’s now up over at the Los Angeles Review of Books here. A few excerpts:

I recall your comments about the influence of Nietzsche:  Noting his minting of such terms as “superman,” “will to power,” “beyond good and evil” – and adding that “someone once rightly observed that beyond good and evil lies only evil” – you suggested that without these influences, “the spiritual atmosphere of our century might have been purer and perhaps even prouder.” 

Well, the disease of irony seems to be well identified. I adore irony as a part of our rich rhetorical and mental apparatus but not when it assumes the position of a spiritual guidance. How to cure it? I wish I knew. The danger is that we live in a world where there’s irony on one side and fundamentalism (religious, political) on the other. Between them the space is rather small but it’s my space.

***

You wrote: “We need to go on, paying the price, sometimes, of being not only imperfect but even, who knows, arrogant and ridiculous.”

My temperament is different. Sometimes I wish I were an arrogant prophet, an aggressive guy. But my force – if I have any – is different, it lives more in nuances, in tranquility of my voice. Somehow I hope that the rhetoric of tranquility is after all stronger and more long-term than the one of a furious attack.

***

What do you think?  What is the future for us who like to spend our days chewing the end of a pen and having long thoughts?

We’ll be living in small ghettos, far from where celebrities dwell, and yet in every generation there will be a new delivery of minds that will love long and slow thoughts and books and poetry and music, so that these rather pleasant ghettos will never perish–and one day may even stir more excitement than we’re used to now.

You wrote that Erbarme Dich is the heart of civilization. Comment?

Bach represents the center and the synthesis of the western music. To say, as I did, that this particular aria is the center of western music is a leap of faith, of course. I couldn’t prove it. I love this aria.

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books here. And for Adam … the “Erbarme Dich.“