Little Abysses: Adam Zagajewski’s “Evening, Stary Sacz”

Abstract

Little Abysses: Adam Zagajewski’s “Evening, Stary Sacz” Rosanna Warren (bio) This essay was first delivered as a talk at a conference in honor of Adam Zagajewski at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, June 21, 2022. How does “Poetry Talk with Philosophy” in Adam Zagajewski’s work? The key is in the “how,” since poetry and philosophy don’t share a common language. Poetry, even in all its wild variety, is not an art of systematic propositions, arguments, and proofs. We should pay attention, as well, to the verb “talks”: poetry can talk, but it also murmurs, exults, evades, suggests, hints, curses, chants, sobs, and prays. In his essays and poems, Adam Zagajewski wrestled for decades with the “how” of poetry’s talk with philosophy: it mattered to him. Because, as he wrote in an essay on Nietzsche in A Defense of Ardor, unlike philosophy, “Poetry is condemned to live with mystery.” And he thought poets should be talking with philosophers (and with historians and scientists and theologians), because, as he declared in an essay aptly entitled “Against Poetry,” “It’s not the actual debate that’s at stake here—it’s truth.” I first encountered “Evening, Stary Sacz” in Clare Cavanagh’s English translation in the American journal Poetry in June 2006, and then two years later in the book Eternal Enemies. The last line has obsessed me for years: “Little abysses open between the stones.” Here’s the poem: Evening, Stary Sacz The sun sets behind the market square, and the nettle leaves reflectthe small town’s imperfections. Teapots whistle in the houses,like many trains departing simultaneously.Bonfires flame on meadows and their long sighsweave above the trees like drifting kites.The last pilgrims return from the church uncertainly.TV sets awaken, and instantly know all,like the demons of Alexandria with swindlers’ swarthy faces.Knives descend on bread, on sausage, on wood, on offerings.The sky grows darker; angels used to hide there,but now it’s just the police sergeant and his dear departed motorcycle. [End Page 109] Rain falls, the cobbled streets grow black.Little abysses open between the stones. Adam Zagajewski is no stranger to abysses. Many of his poems rip the fabric of the ordinary to reveal a startling gap or void or possibility. For instance, in “A Quick Poem” from Mysticism for Beginners (also translated by Clare Cavanagh): “I made my way toward the clouds, deep blue, / heavy, dense, / toward the future, toward the abyss.” It’s not always a Baudelairean gouffre or néant that’s revealed. Sometimes Zagajewski opens up a realm of spiritual hope or joy—even ardor—out of all proportion to our bumbling daily lives, as at the end of the poem “From Memory” (also in Mysticism for Beginners): “At noon the clouds’ eye gently / opened, the eye of tears and light.” At times, Zagajewski invokes an abyss that seems historical and political. This is the case in his discussion of the Nazi occupation and the Warsaw uprisings in the chapter called “Writing in Polish” in A Defense of Ardor: “The nothingness that Warsaw, and with it all Poland, had endured, would color the imagination of Polish writers for years to come. Not just color it; this nothingness became one of its chief ingredients. The Polish literary imagination assimilated the abyss.” But for Zagajewski, the historical and political slide quickly toward the moral and the metaphysical. How then are we to read the abysses in “Evening, Stary Sacz”? The town itself sounds like a charming, indeed celebrated, tourist spot, if one judges by various online descriptions. One of the oldest towns in Poland, it dates to the 13th century and still has medieval buildings (including a famous convent) and cobblestone streets; it sits in a nature reserve and attracts hikers, swimmers, and fishermen. Zagajewski seems to have known the town pretty well. But it’s not historical charm that his poems about it record. In an earlier poem entitled simply “Stary Sacz,” he focused on homely details—“jars of borscht and pickles”—and the whimsical if slightly sinister fable of the innkeeper’s daughter carried off, not by the wind, but by “other...