A poet's cry for strength of heart and soul
Sunday, November 28, 2004
|
A Defense of Ardor
By Adam Zagajewski,
translated by Clare Cavanagh
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX; 198 PAGES; $24
Timing gives a special twist to Adam Zagajewski's "A Defense of Ardor." The unquestioned giant of Polish poetry, Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, died in August. The crown is passing from an era of titans -- Milosz, Szymborska, Herbert, Wat -- to another generation, turning the spotlight to 59-year-old Zagajewski, pre-eminent among his peers.
Zagajewski is also the winner of this year's prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Awarded from the unlikely locale of Norman, Okla., it is generally considered to put one into the running for a Nobel.
Definitely a name to watch, but "A Defense of Ardor," a collection of his essays rather than his poetry, will serve as an uneven introduction to Zagajewski's life and work. The essays are rambling, digressive and many focus on figures that will be dim and unpronounceable to American readers -- Jozef Czapski, for example. But strewn among the loosely strung recollections and musings, Zagajewski's observations are often sharp, memorable and provocative: Of language "experiments," he writes, "the language entrusted to a poet is extraordinarily precious and fragile, and in grave peril; and the poet's task is to nurture this language, not to mock it." On irony in an era of valuelessness, he notes, "Irony knocks some very useful holes into our walls, but without walls, it could perforate only nothingness."
In addition to memoirs and discussions of Milosz, Herbert, Cioran and Czapski, we get a shrewd take on Nietzsche's hold on Western thought. Zagajewski recalls scrounging old bookstores in Krakow to find rare editions, as Nietzsche was a "denounced" writer, along with Milosz, Orwell, Arendt and others. Noting Nietzsche's coinage 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"), Zagajewski suggests that without these influences, "the spiritual atmosphere of our century might have been purer and perhaps even prouder."
Zagajewski was not shaped by Stalinist horrors and the Holocaust, as a previous generation was. His story is formed against the backdrop of the grinding monotony of Soviet-bloc schooling, "socialist realism," enforced Russian and relentless mediocrity.
And yet ... the consequence of this Soviet monochrome curiously resembles the fallout of American capitalism and consumerism. Zagajewski's spiritual longings are wistful and vague -- he refers to "higher reality" and "yearning for eternity." He observes that Polish literature is one of "last bastions of a more assertive attitude" toward such things. He wants sacred feeling, religious sensibility -- while avoiding the word "God." (What a far cry from Milosz's anguished Catholicism!)
His cri de coeur: "Ardor, metaphysical seriousness, the risky voicing of strong opinions are all suspicious nowadays." And elsewhere: "everyone who experiences powerful religious yearnings is almost automatically suspected of being a 'right-winger' ... is this contemporary affliction curable?"
What's triumphed instead, he laments, is a "skeptical landscape." In literature, "we're up against a kind of fainthearted appeasement, a policy of evasions and concessions" -- "one of the chief symptoms of this weakness [is] the overwhelming predominance of a low style, tepid, ironic, conversational ... ":
"Surely we don't go to poetry for sarcasm or irony, for critical distance, learned dialectics or clever jokes. These worthy qualities and forms perform splendidly in their proper place -- in an essay, a scholar tract, a broadside in an opposition newspaper. In poetry, though, we seek the vision, the fire, the flame that accompanies spiritual revelation. In short, from poetry we expect poetry."
Zagajewski wants to change the symptom without healing the disease -- to fix literature without curing the society from which it arises. It's a daunting task. Inevitably, he flounders: "But where do we find what's lasting? Where do the deathless things hide?" In an Agni interview last year, he admitted, "My defense of poetry would be much more savage and desperate now than it used to be." Rightly so.
Zagajewski makes us want to scour the Internet for the works of Norwid, Gombrowicz and Kolakowski. Poland has produced a slew of gifted writers who should be better known. Milosz paved the way with his landmark "Postwar Polish Poetry" 40 years ago. The trend is likely to continue with Zagajewski, who has taught at the University of Houston since 1988, dividing his time between Texas and Krakow.
The link with Milosz is curious in yet another way. Forty years in Berkeley made Milosz an American figure as well as an Eastern European one. In his poetry, California's landscapes and wildflowers melded into those of his native Vilnius; his long-standing collaboration with his translators, particularly Robert Hass, gave a user-friendly cadence to his English translations. Zagajewski, too, is becoming an American figure as well as a Polish one. Clearly, America has affected him -- but how will he affect us?
The marriage of Polish language with American sensibility and residence is a peculiar one, given the universality of English, the relative obscurity of Polish (sufficiently obscure for Zagajewski to defend writing in it in one of these essays). Zagajewski is divided between two worlds, two mind-sets -- and he knows it. His words are Polish, but he lives in "a world divorced from poetry and given over to the Internet and ads."
Zagajewski's literary double vision will likely extend the odd marriage of Polish literature and America. We will only be the better for it.
Cynthia L. Haven writes for the Washington Post Book World, the Los Angeles Times Book Review and the Times Literary Supplement.
Page E - 2