True Life: Poems by Adam Zagajewski

Abstract

Reviewed by: True Life: Poems by Adam Zagajewski Magdalena Kay (bio) ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI True Life: Poems Trans. Clare Cavanagh. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2023. 80 pages. THERE IS SOMETHING MAGICAL about receiving a new book by an author who is no longer living. It is an unexpected gift, bringing with it a sense of excess or what Seamus Heaney called overlife, something over and above our expectations. Although it was inevitable that Adam Zagajewski's last volume in Polish, Prawdziwe życie (2019), would be translated into English, the poet's sudden death in 2021 created a deafening silence. Zagajewski represented something more than just a talented writer—he wrote with a voice that was, and is, inimitable and enigmatic. There is nobody who sounds like Zagajewski. The curious mixture of melancholy and gratitude, of mingled horror at history and celebration of beauty, was always infused by a tenderness that was his only. Something about his voice made us readers feel as if we were speaking with a dear friend, someone with whom we had moved past awkwardness, posturing, and drama for drama's sake. His ability to create such an impression in thousands of readers and in a variety of languages is truly a feat. This is not the sort of achievement that one encounters often. The fact that Clare Cavanagh manages to translate this indefinable quality of voice from Polish into English testifies to her skill. Her work has helped earn Zagajewski a large audience in English-speaking countries; indeed, the poet states that he has come to feel as if her translations were poetic originals. If there are occasional turns of phrase that will seem more familiar in Polish than in English (such as glancing historical references that depend on shared cultural freight), they are never alienating. Such gestures have been earned by a writer who is too often seen as a historical poet pure and simple. Zagajewski will always be associated with the anti-Communist resistance that remains an integral part of his legacy, but the mature poet who continued writing after the fall of communism in eastern Europe employed a different style and tackled different subjects than the young dissident of the 1970s. Today, Zagajewski is known for his everyday subjects, his aestheticism, his tender melancholy, and his indefinable spirituality—we may call it a type of mysticism. The poet's personal history claims as great a share of our attention as the public history that he is associated with. True Life retains the same ordering of poems as its Polish predecessor, which usefully allows readers to experience Zagajewski's range: rather than clustering poems that treat similar topics, the volume is organized according to the principle of variety and surprise. It opens with "The Twentieth Century in Retirement," thus summoning the historical awareness of what Czesław Miłosz dubbed the Polish School of Poetry, yet continues with an evocation of the poet's parents, of other poets, of bygone acquaintances, of the poet's travels, and, eventually, intensely personal anecdotes. Zagajewski has asserted that his poetry is more autobiographical than that associated with the Polish School. Readers of Miłosz, however, may counter that the difference between the two is not so much in the eschewal or embrace of autobiography as in the approach taken toward it. Zagajewski's tone is strikingly modest; his emphasis is often on belonging to a humbled collective ("Rain in Lvov") or an individual self that admits its capacity for error and for growth ("Enlightenment"). His poetic self that does not cover up its vulnerability, and the unguarded quality of his poetry, are among its most welcoming qualities. Such qualities breed both tenderness and humor: as the poet is tempted to stretch out a conceit (say, the practice of noting errata, or misprints, in books as a practice that begs to be applied to life itself), so he realizes the humor this may entail. It is both self-deprecating—he can feel the ponderousness of his own metaphor—and deftly ironic, as the poet concludes that errors may be incorrigible, and the urge to correct should be treated with gentle irony rather than moralistic zeal. Click for...