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Says Adam Zagajewski:

“I will never be someone who writes only about bird song, although I admire birdsong highly - but not enough to withdraw from the historical world, for the historical world is fascinating. What really interests me is the interweaving of the historical and cosmic world. The cosmic world is unmoving - or rather, it moves to a completely different rhythm. I shall never know how these worlds coexist. They are in conflict yet they complement each other - and that merits our reflection.”

Thursday, November 29 7:30 PM
Where: Butler University, Atherton Union Reilly Room

The Poetry Foundation gives this biography of Adam Zagajewski:

Adam Zagajewski is an internationally acclaimed poet who was born in Poland, immigrated to France, and now teaches in Houston, Texas. Though he writes in Polish, several of his poetry collections have been translated into English, including Tremor (1985), Canvas (1991), and Mysticism for Beginners (1997). Zagajewski has been awarded the Berliner Kunstlerprogramm fellowship, the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, a Prix de la Liberte, and a Guggenheim fellowship. His essays have been collected in Two Cities (1995) and Solidarity, Solitude (1990). Zagajewski is, wrote Adam Kirsch in the New Republic, “the preeminent Polish poet of his generation.” According to Jaroslaw Anders in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, he is “one of the most interesting poets of his generation writing in any language.”

As David Lehman noted in Newsweek in his review of Tremor, Zagajewski’s poetry “oscillates between praise . . . and pain that stubbornly resists being transformed into beauty.” Lehman singled out the following three lines to illustrate his point: “God / is the smallest poppy seed in the world, / bursting with greatness.” As in these lines, Zagajewski often shifts in his poems from the physical object to a moment of abstraction. “Such a quest for transcendence is essentially romantic in its impulse, but Mr. Zagajewski,” stated Eva Hoffman in the New York Times Book Review, “is a modern romantic, in whom an attraction to quietude and to interstitial, hidden spaces often coexists with mosaics of contemporary urban detail, a taste for incongruity and a sometimes ironic reflectiveness.” Another reviewer of Tremor, Stanislaw Baranczak in the New Republic, pointed out that Zagajewski’s poems are not the “typically dissident” poetry one might expect from a Polish poet who long resisted the communist government of his homeland. Zagajewski’s poetry, Baranczak explained, “has something important to say about life, death, love, loneliness, and other rather universal matters.”

Zagajewski’s Canvas (1991) has been described by poet Robert Pinsky in the New Republic as being “about the presence of the past in ordinary life: history not as chronicle of the dead, or an anima to be illuminated by some doctrine, but as an immense, sometimes subtle force inhering in what people see and feel every day—and in the ways we see and feel.” “Zagajewski’s themes,” noted Joachim T. Baer in World Literature Today, “are the night, dreams, history and time, infinity and eternity, silence and death.” Pinsky found that in Zagajewski’s work, “the engulfing, ferocious historical reality appears as our habitat. . . . And the perception of that habitat has a mysterious, elating power.”

In Mysticism for Beginners, Zagajewski presents poems which “meander gently toward moments of enlightenment,” as John Taylor noted in Poetry. Anders explained that in this collection, Zagajewski sought to find whether serious contemporary poetry can “survive without mystery and ecstasy; can it be sustained by irony alone”? This question reveals the poet to be “a very modern mystic,” according to Anders, “one who realizes that the mystical pursuit is essentially a contradictory one.” “This collection,” wrote the reviewer for Publishers Weekly, “reconfirms the international status of a vigorous, ever-questioning voice.”

Since 9/11, Zagajewski’s best-known poem in the US is “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”:

Spróbuj opiewać okaleczony świat.

Pamiętaj o długich dniach czerwca

i o poziomkach, kroplach wina rosé.

O pokrzywach, które metodycznie zarastały

opuszczone domostwa wygnanych.

Musisz opiewać okaleczony świat.

Patrzyłeś na eleganckie jachty i okręty;

jeden z nich miał przed sobą długą podróż,

na inny czekała tylko słona nicość.

Widziałeś uchodźców, którzy szli donikąd ,

słyszałeś oprawców, którzy radośnie śpiewali.

Powinieneś opiewać okaleczony świat.

Pamiętaj o chwilach, kiedy byliście razem

w białym pokoju i firanka poruszyła się.

Wróć myślą do koncertu, kiedy wybuchła muzyka.

Jesienią zbierałeś żołędzie w parku

a liście wirowały nad bliznami ziemi.

Opiewaj okaleczony świat

i szare piórko, zgubione przez drozda,

i delikatne światło, które błądzi i znika

i powraca.

Try to praise the mutilated world. 

Remember June’s long days, 

and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew. 

The nettles that methodically overgrow 

the abandoned homesteads of exiles. 

You must praise the mutilated world. 

You watched the stylish yachts and ships; 

one of them had a long trip ahead of it, 

while salty oblivion awaited others. 

You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere, 

you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully. 

You should praise the mutilated world. 

Remember the moments when we were together 

in a white room and the curtain fluttered. 

Return in thought to the concert where music flared. 

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn 

and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars. 

Praise the mutilated world 

and the grey feather a thrush lost, 

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes 

and returns. 

 Provocate wishes its Polish was good enough to produce the English translation — Provocate wishes its English was good enough to produce the English translaiton — but it was in fact Renata Gorczynski. śkoda

If Zagakewski’s visit sounds interesting, make sure you see Carlos Fuentes October 15.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 5:06 am and is filed under Events, Democracy, Europe, Poets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.