Risk, Try, Revise, Erase
Polish poet Adam Zagajewski on his growing fame, his past as a
political activist, and his desire to see the world as if from outer
space.
by Cynthia Haven
Three angels appear by a bakery on St. George Street in Krakow and
question the bystanders. “We just wanted to see,” the first angel says,
“what your lives have become, / the flavor of your days and why / your
nights are marked by restlessness and fear.”
In
Adam Zagajewski’s
poem “Three Angels,” the patient angel is met with the usual litany of
complaints, which culminate in “a swelling sonata of wrath.” The second
angel, however, “mumble[s] shyly” that
there’s always a little joy, and even beauty
lies close at hand, beneath the bark
of every hour, in the quiet heart of concentration,
and another person hides in each of us—
universal, strong, invisible.
Zagajewski
is the second angel. His quiet, insistent poems
chart an idiosyncratic spiritual sensibility. Acclaim has followed: in
2004, he won the biennial Neustadt International Prize for Literature,
often viewed as a precursor to the Nobel.
Praise has been widespread: “Nothing could take the reader in a
direction more contrary to today’s cult of the excitements of self than
to follow Zagajewski as he unspools his seductive praise of serenity,
sympathy, forbearance; of ‘the calm and courage of an ordinary life,’”
wrote Susan Sontag.
Zagajewski, who divides his time between Krakow and Houston,
replies with characteristic modesty: “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,” he
told PoetryFoundation.org. “Somehow I hope that the rhetoric of
tranquility is after all stronger and more long-term than the one of a
furious attack.”
Zagajewski was born in 1945 in Lvov. After the victorious Red Army
occupied the city, integrating Poland into the Soviet empire, the
family was forcibly repatriated to western Poland. They lived in
Gliwice, a grim industrial Silesian city formerly in Germany. He
studied philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.
His poetic masterpiece
“To Go to Lvov”
recalls the city (now in Ukraine) that his family abandoned during his
infancy. It has been called the anthem of all émigrés and exiles—but it
is more than that, for all of us are exiles, in time if not in space.
We recall the innocence and beauty of our imperfect but idealized past,
cities we cannot return to because they never quite existed, except as
we make them in our minds.
. . . I won’t see you anymore, so much death
awaits you, why must every city
become Jerusalem and every man a Jew,
and now in a hurry just
pack, always, each day,
and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all
it exists, quiet and pure as
a peach. It is everywhere.
Zagajewski’s self-effacement is inevitable. He follows in the
footsteps of giants: the last century has brought an international
spotlight to the outstanding poets in a previously obscure tongue.
Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Aleksander Wat, Wislawa Szymborska,
Anna Swir, Tadeusz Rozewicz, and their contemporaries created one of
the greatest literary legacies in world history.
Zagajewski has “many contradictory explanations” for the sudden
embrace of 20th-century Polish poetry. “One of the main ones is that
the attention given to the meaning of human life in radical
circumstances, as opposed to the hermetic direction or to a purely
formal quest.” Polish poetry “after the World War II catastrophe . . .
gave the dying Modernism a new energy. It ‘rehumanized’ a highly
sophisticated but a bit empty palace of modern poetry.”
In his Neustadt lecture, “Poetry for Beginners,” Zagajewski
bewailed the predicament of today’s writers in this context: “The fact
that we, the living ones, still write poems verges on impudence. After
all these masterpieces!”
But then he added, “We also recognize that imagination has to
struggle with the dragon of time afresh each day. Poetry must be
written, continued, risked, tried, revised, erased, and tried again as
long as we breathe and love, doubt and believe.”
The death of Milosz in 2004, the year Zagajewski won the Neustadt,
effectively marked the passing of the scepter to the younger poet, the
crown prince of Polish poetry. “What a joy to see a major poet emerging
from a hardly differentiated mass of contemporaries and taking the lead
in the poetry of my language,” Milosz had written in a 1985
introduction to his verse, by way of investiture and blessing.
Zagajewski’s self-effacement is more than a stance before history,
however. According to poet Dan Rifenburgh, a colleague in the
University of Houston’s creative writing program, “I think Adam trusts
natural facts more than ideas, that he sees the world as a site of
exile, and strange in its beauty, alien, but beautiful still. I think
his greatness lies in his humility before the natural facts of the
world. I love the human touches and grace notes he employs, speaking of
newly washed linen or fresh strawberries as mystical objects.”
Indeed, Zagajewski sees grace notes everywhere: in
Two Cities
he wrote: “Human life and objects and trees vibrate with mysterious
meanings, which can be deciphered like cuneiform writing. There exists
a meaning, hidden from day to day but accessible in moments of greatest
attentiveness, in those moments when consciousness loves the world.”
While the earlier generation of Polish poets was honed by war,
Holocaust, Stalinism, and Nazism, Zagajewski remembers a long, gray
Soviet occupation.
Zagajewski reacted as his counterparts in America did: with poetry
of protest. In fact, he became the leading Polish poet of the
“Generation of ’68” or “New Wave,” an unofficial literary movement that
attempted, and to some extent succeeded, in speaking for a generation.
They paraphrased and parodied the empty rhetoric of the official
communist propaganda.
In 1979 he received a fellowship from the International
Künstlerprogramm and spent two years in Berlin. In 1982 he moved to
Paris, returning to live in Krakow two decades later. His emigration
coincided with a growing change of heart. Zagajewski finally broke with
the poetry of protest—characteristically, without repudiation,
insisting only on his need to balance the concerns of the outer world
with those of the inner.
In
Solidarity, Solitude, published in Paris in 1986, he
summarized his position: “I have the urge to become a dissident from
dissidents,” he wrote. “I take a seat in between. . . . I am alone but
not lonely.”
His former colleague Julian Kornhauser, in reviewing the book,
criticized him for exchanging his “collective subject” to become a mere
“lyric speaker.” Said Kornhauser: “Birds, trees, wind now carry
[Zagajewski] beyond space and time. . . . He has brought himself to a
halt in order to forget about conflicts. He has brought the world to a
standstill in order to commune with mute material.”
The charge stings—at least a little. In America’s fascination with
poetry rooted in historical circumstance, Zagajewski is seen
differently than he is in Poland, where he said he has been called a
“frivolous” poet.
“In their accusing, Polish critics are like district attorneys—they
all have this accusatory mood. And they accuse poets, but also fiction
writers, of not being socially motivated enough,” Zagajewski said in a
2004
Agni interview.
America has been kind to Zagajewski: His translated books of poems, memoirs, and essays—
Tremor (1985),
Canvas (1991),
Two Cities (1995),
Mysticism for Beginners (1997),
Another Beauty (2000),
Without End (2002), and
A Defense of Ardor (2004)—have been published by the premier house, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (
Solidarity, Solitude
was published by Ecco in 1990). In 1988 he received an appointment to
teach every winter at the University of Houston. In 2003 his
Without End: New and Selected Poems
was short-listed for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He became
one of the most recognized, if least pronounceable, names in American
poetry.
But Zagajewski shot to national prominence—if any poet can be said
to have reached that empyrean without marrying a rock star—following
the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center towers, when
The New Yorker published his poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”:
You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,
you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world. . . .
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
According to
The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Alice Quinn, the poem was tacked to bulletin boards and refrigerators across the nation.
Zagajewski’s quiet, persistent optimism is refreshing in a nation
of shallow enthusiasms. What are its roots? Friend and fellow poet
Rifenburgh has an insight: “I personally think he believes in a ‘world
without end’ and the eternality of the spirit. I think he believes
death as a finality would be too easy: it’s not that simple.”
Expressing such a vision is not that simple, either. Milosz once
said that “we are in a largely post-religious world.” He recounted a
conversation with Pope John Paul II, who commented upon Milosz’s work,
saying, “Well, you make one step forward, one step back.” Milosz
replied, “Holy Father, how in the 20th century can one write religious
poetry differently?”
Zagajewski concurred: “I don’t want to be a New Age vague religious
crank, but I also need to distance myself from ‘professional’ Catholic
writers. I think poets have to be able to find fresh metaphors for old
metaphysical objects and longings. I’m a Christian, a sometimes
doubting one (but this is almost a definition of a Christian: to doubt
also). In my writing I have to be radically different from a priest. My
language must have the sheen of a certain discovery.”
His view is a counterpoint to the current fashion of irony, which
he decries. “I adore irony as a part of our rich rhetorical and mental
apparatus, but not when it assumes the position of a spiritual
guidance,” he said. “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.”
Hints and guesses: how else in the 21st century? When a breath of
apocalypse arises, it is mentioned offhandedly, in passing. It must be
whispered. In “Houston, 6 p.m.” he writes:
Poetry summons us to life, to courage
in the face of growing shadow.
Can you gaze calmly at the Earth
like the perfect astronaut?
In the face of growing shadow, Zagajewski aims for his effects with
averted vision—subtly, like the three angels who, after visiting
Abraham in
Genesis 18, gaze silently at Sodom and turn their
steps toward the city they will destroy. The image of three angels is a
recurring motif of Christian iconography, an Old Testament prefiguring
of mankind’s redemption, unforgettably evoked in Russian painter Andrei
Rublev’s “The Hospitality of Abraham.” Significantly, in Zagajewski’s
“Three Angels,” the second angel’s argument for forbearance and joy
meets with swelling crowds and “waves of mute rage”:
until at last the envoys rose lightly
into the air, whence, growing distant,
they gently repeated: peace be unto you,
peace to the living, the dead, the unborn.
The third angel alone said nothing,
for that was the angel of long silence.
In Zagajewski’s poem, the angels bless only as they return
heavenward—perhaps reminding us that it is wise to limit our downward
gaze as they do, before they disappear.