Adam Zagajewski Research Articles

W poszukiwaniu tożsamości. Lwów w twórczości Adama Zagajewskiego


 
 
 The paper devoted to an important theme in Adam Zagajewski’s work: the search for identity. Using the author’s biography as the background, the author of the paper refers to various works by the writer (including Two Cities, To Go to Lvov, and Should We Visit Sacred Places?) and draws attention to the fact that the author’s poetic declaration about homelessness is his identity status; consequently, the author of the paper focuses on the aspect of Lviv in Zagajewski’s work.
 
 

Literackie podróże, czyli o przestrzeni i miejscu w literaturze polskiej przełomu XX i XXI wieku (na przykładzie poezji Adama Zagajewskiego i prozy Andrzeja Stasiuka)

Artykuł dotyczy problemów tożsamości, poetyki miejsca i migracji oraz podróży w poezji Adama Zagajewskiego z tomów Jechać do Lwowa (Londyn 1985) i Ziemia ognista (Poznań 1994) oraz w prozie Andrzeja Stasiuka na przykładzie opowiadania Miejsce (Opowieści galicyjskie, Kraków 1995) i powieści Wschód (Wołowiec 2014). Autorka, odwołując się do wybranych tekstów obydwu twórców, prezentuje sposoby ukazywania przestrzeni w literaturze polskiej przełomu XX i XXI wieku naznaczonej doświadczeniem migracji i komunizmu. Szkic analityczno-interpretacyjny zawiera także uwagi związane z organizacją procesu dydaktycznego, ponieważ omawiane tutaj utwory mogą być inspiracją do mówienia o procesach migracyjnych i wielokulturowości na lekcjach języka polskiego w szkole średniej.

Asymmetry by Adam Zagajewski

cage, inside her house, inside her crumbling city. The reality she has created is soon destroyed after the appearance of a Hollywood actor, Gerónimo, who has come to interview her regarding her father, Mauricio Antonio Rodríguez, “el macho”, for a film he is making. Cleo’s whole life and history, as she knows it, is called into question by this investigation of her father’s life, leaving her shaken to the core as she moves through the falsified facts and fictions of her life. Indeed, Revolution Sunday is a dark, disjointed narrative with fragmented episodes and questions with no answers. Cleo moves seamlessly from Havana to Paris, to Mexico City, to Spain, to the United States, to Cannes without explanation of how she managed such trips with the authorities hot on her heels at every turn. As she muses, travels, and enters and exits one tumultuous relationship after another, it becomes apparent that she is a prisoner of her own personal situation as well as the political situation in Cuba. Her narrative and the poetry within it illustrate this imprisonment: “I’m trapped, full of doubts”; “when you’re born in captivity , you have a very precise set of gestures”; and “I’m imprisoned, completely imprisoned .” Throughout the novel, Cleo refers to Havana as home, yet she admits to herself that she needs to hide behind the disguises created by clothing or masks. The falsification of her own identity and the way that she alternates between her love for Cuba (“Cuba looks so small down there, while it’s so big inside me . . .”) and her desire to be free of the constant surveillance is the ultimate betrayal. Cleo is a sad person living a sad life. Nothing she does ever alleviates her sadness and, as she experiences repeated betrayals, she only imprisons herself more securely inside the cage she has created for herself. Revolution Sunday ties the realities of Cuba with the insecurities of her people. To be constantly afraid of what the authorities might do next, coupled with the frequent traveling to free democratic countries across Europe and the Americas, creates a paradoxical situation through which Cleo finds it difficult to navigate. Janet Mary Livesey Norman, Oklahoma Adam Zagajewski Asymmetry Trans. Clare Cavanagh. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 96 pages. THIS STUNNING NEW VOLUME from Adam Zagajewski deserves to be read by anyone who has wondered how language can describe absence. It is a classic conundrum. And Zagajewski’s humane, welcoming voice is just the one to think through it: he is a poet who eschews an academic tone, refuses to play linguistic games, and declines a podial manner, although he insists that the lyric can bring us above quotidian life even as this life grounds and innervates it. There is a reason Zagajewski has found so many readers—he is open to us. He makes no assumptions about his readership, no exclusions. The volume begins with the poem “Nowhere,” which in turn begins with the poet returning from his father’s funeral . His gaping loss obviously informs the disorientation that spirals through the poem. He feels he is “nowhere,” he belongs “nowhere,” and his pain is itself “nowhere,” which is the key to this paradox. He offers plenty of details that place him in space and time and give him what we call an identity—yet our commonplace belief is that identity is formed through tangible, explicable alliances and experiences. How can such identity account for absence, grief? An American cashier asks the speaker where he is from. She is expecting a statement of belonging, so she—and we—can situate him in a named location. But, he tells us, he had forgotten: “I wanted to tell her / about my father’s death, then thought: I’m too old / to be an orphan.” The socially correct answer, Poland, is not correct for the psychology of one experiencing the vertiginous effect of loss. He is coming from a funeral, from a brief encounter with the land of the dead, from the long land of memory where his father currently lives. This sense of being and belonging nowhere, of orphanhood in many guises, pervades Asymmetry and...

Poetic Musicology among Musical Discourses: The Poet as a Listener

This paper analyses selected examples of Polish poetry from the 20th century devoted to music (poems by Adam Zagajewski and Julia Hartwig), placing them in the context of the musicological discourses that exist today, particularly the auditive discourse. Poems devoted to music are treated as cultural statements – evidence of the reception of music. The concept of “poetic musicology” elaborated by Anna Baranczak in the 1970s, still one of the most valid and important strategies for speaking about music, has been updated and revitalised, placed in the space of culture, particularly in the area of Polish human sciences, where there is an exceptionally rich and diverse poetic output related to music.

Table of Contents, Masthead, and Editor's Note

World LiteratureToday REVIEWS OF BOOKS BY Ada Limón Mathias Énard OlgaTokarczuk Adam Zagajewski & more Achy Obejas On Danticat’s Fierce Forgiveness André Naffis-Sahely Seeks Salvation on the Shores of Morocco Emeka Ogboh Explores Migration Through Food NEUSTADT PRIZE LAUREATE Edwidge Danticat On Freedom, Salt, Geography, and Storytelling Your passport to great reading 4 FABULIST FLASH FICTIONS | WRITING SINGAPORE | A GOLDEN AGE OF TV CRIME Hallgrímur Helgason Edward Burtynsky Lisa Chen Ed Pavlić Han Yujoo Kyo Maclear C.D. Wright Lisa Moore order yours at brickmag.com One of my favourite magazines. — Ben Lerner in brick 102 One of my favourite magazines. A L I T E R A R Y J O U R N A L EDWARD BURTYNSKY EDEN ROBINSON KYO MACLEAR BILLY-RAY BELCOURT HIROMI GOTO JENNIFER BAICHWAL HAN YUJOO HALLGRÍMUR HELGASON LISA MOORE PHOEBE WANG LORNA CROZIER C.D. WRIGHT 102 b r i c k 1 0 2 Q&A 14 The Aesthetics of the City: Youssouf Amine Elalamy by Nisrine Slitine El Mghari 34 Writing Singapore: Grace Chia by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming & Jason Eng Hun Lee 48 Food and Migration: Artist Emeka Ogboh (Recipe Included) by Michelle Johnson 50 Critiquing Colonialism from Within: Helen Johnson & John Kinsella by Michelle Johnson Fiction 20 If You’d Only Look by Sonya Chyu 40 Four Fabulist Fables by Pierre Bettencourt 42 Auntie Nabat’s Bread by Nariman Hasanzade 44 The Talus of Madame Liken by Asja Bakić WorldLiteratureToday REVIEWS OF BOOKS BY Ada Limón Mathias Énard OlgaTokarczuk Adam Zagajewski & more Achy Obejas On Danticat’s Fierce Forgiveness André Naffis-Sahely Seeks Salvation on the Shores of Morocco Emeka Ogboh Explores Migration Through Food NEUSTADT PRIZE LAUREATE Edwidge Danticat On Freedom, Salt, Geography, and Storytelling Your passport to great reading 4 FABULIST FLASH FICTIONS | WRITING SINGAPORE | A GOLDEN AGE OF TV CRIME In Every Issue | 3 Editor’s Note | 5 Notebook | 47 Editor’s Pick | 75 Books in Review | 112 Outpost 59 All Geography Is Within Me by Edwidge Danticat 66 A Tribute to Danticat by Achy Obejas 68 A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat by Erik Gleibermann Essays 28 Seeking Salvation on the Shores of Morocco by André Naffis-Sahely 54 Weaving a Creole Patrimony by Patrick Chamoiseau WINTER 2019 Crime & Mystery 10 Our “Golden Age” of TV Crime Drama by J. Madison Davis Poetry 13 Two Poems by Namrata Verghese 19 Two Poems by Sharmistha Mohanty 27 Three Poems by Khal Torabully 33 Five Poems by Ennio Moltedo 39 Four Poems by Blanca Garnica Neustadt Prize Laureate Edwidge Danticat 58 cover feature on the cover Photo of Edwidge Danticat by Shevaun Williams 20 50 Contents What’s on worldlit.org Visit our website for fresh content including audio, video, web-exclusive stories, reading lists, and more. Connect with WLT online Find us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Goodreads, Flickr, and Pinterest to share ideas, view photos, watch video, discover book reviews, and more. Instagram Favorites Follow @worldlittoday on Instagram for literary inspiration. Join the Conversation Use the hashtag #IReadWLT on Twitter to share your opinions about the current issue of the magazine! Or visit worldlit.org/contact to write a letter to the editor. Digital Extras Suzanne Kamata @shikokusue Grateful to @worldlittoday for the intro to Yu Xiuhua, a Chinese subsistence farmer with cerebral palsy who is a poet. I hope someone is working on a book-length translation of her work! #IReadWLT #ownvoices #poetry George Henson, PhD @unpoetaloco Things I miss about @UofOklahoma: my @worldlittoday and @LatAmLitToday families, the @NeustadtPrize and #Puterbaugh festivals, and #TierraTinta. Sydney Solis @RisingSolis Really enjoyed reading the latest issue on the plane! Thank you! You’re my favorite literature magazine. MaryEHogarth @MaryEHogarth Talking to students about magazines from a business perspective is always a treat for me. So thank you magazine students @UofOklahoma for being such a great audience—and to Daniel Simon @worldlittoday for inviting me. #highered #KnowledgeExchange D. Nandi Odhiambo @nandi_odhiambo I was really happy to see this good review by Shazia Hafiz Ramzi of Smells Like Stars in World Literature Today. I greatly appreciate her considered and thoughtful reading of the novel. Look for these icons throughout the issue for information about exclusive content found online. photo gallery video audio...

Slight Exaggeration by Adam Zagajewski

FEATURED REVIEW Adam Zagajewski Slight Exaggeration Trans. Clare Cavanagh. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2017. 275 pages. Slight Exaggeration announces itself playfully , in a faithful translation of the Polish opening: “I won’t tell all regardless.” “I tak wszystkiego nie opowiem” answers an unuttered promise to tell more, presumably, than we have already got—but even so (“I tak”), this will be no tell-all confession. Is this an indirect commentary on Adam Zagajewski’s international fame or perhaps on the autobiographical nature of his writing, letting us know that it may conceal as well as reveal? Or, perhaps, is he calling attention to our late-contemporary, postrecession, realityshow -fueled infatuation with having it all and telling it all? This may be reading too closely. But Zagajewski himself enjoys careful rethinking . Readers of his previous prose works— especially Two Cities, Another Beauty, and A Defense of Ardor—will recognize some familiar themes in this new book (originally published in Polish in 2011) and will also recognize that these themes will never be exhausted; his intellectual conundrums can never be solved. Zagajewski’s thinking thrives on traveling through cycles of reconsideration. He picks up a topic, pushes it forward, lets it go, and presently finds it again. In a beguilingly modest admission, he claims that even as a student of philosophy, he was never a true philosopher , lacking the talent for ironclad logic and absolute rationality. Precisely for this reason, we should not expect linearity from Slight Exaggeration. Instead, this is a book in search of a form. Too straightforward to be branded belles lettres, it is too digressive to be called an exposition or even an autobiography, the genre to which it is closest. Its miniatures (anecdotes, thoughts, impressions) likewise cannot be called essays. Zagajewski relaxes into this unnamed form, opening his sections conversationally—“Let’s return to” this, “But once more on” that. The mature poet clearly relishes the stylistic liberty he allows himself, and here lies much of the book’s charm: even as it ambles along its meandering path, its author keeps a close eye on the “big” themes that guide him. Indeed, it is a relief to have a contemporary World Literature in Review Conor O’Callaghan Comes Alive Verse, page 84 Aminatta Forna’s Redemptive Happiness Fiction, page 70 Hilde & Ylva Østby Plumb the Hippocampus Miscellaneous, page 90 66 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2018 author so openly show us how his mind works, with no pretense of academic objectivity or absolute correctness. Chief among these themes is the author’s relation to his own past. Longtime readers will recognize Zagajewski’s enduring obsession with Lvov. A word for first-time readers: the Zagajewski family was forcibly resettled shortly after the poet’s birth in 1945, when the borders of Poland were redrawn after World War II. Poland “lost” Lvov (now called Lviv), a city in presentday Ukraine known as a cultural capital, and “gained” Gliwice, a rather less inspiring industrial town near the German border, one soon filled with resettled Lvovians. The Zagajewskis mourned the loss of their home city deeply. Their mythology of the lost home was passed down to Adam, whose most famous poem may be “To Go to Lvov.” Now, he knows very well that this is a private myth, and the facts of history only partially explain the workings of human psychology. He even relates an anecdote in which the strength of this myth creates a rift between him and his friends while visiting Lvov—friends who, he realizes, cannot participate in the myth, just as we cannot either. And he allows for a context of other displacements—geographic, socioeconomic, cultural—to situate that of his family, which helps gain further readerly empathy (because how many of us have no context of displacement, however oblique?). Here he catches us off guard by stating, “I didn’t suffer[;] I was an observer , not an emigrant,” since after all “displacement isn’t inherited, or perhaps it’s only passed on vestigially.” Perhaps. And perhaps not. This “vestigial” inheritance is vigorous enough to inform nearly all of Zagajewski’s writing. And it is crucial to understanding his persistent sense of inbetweenness : “I’m not an exile...

Magnetic Point: Selected Poems, 1968–2014 by Clare Cavanagh

oppressive rule of de Men, is that humans have lost the ability to reproduce, though something like love exists for some. The title suggests a plot embroidered by thoughts that transcend the action, implying perhaps a problematic supernatural . Indeed, with names such as Jean de Men, Christine, Trinculo, Joan, and a platform called CIEL, the teasers are there. And there are the grafted stories of Joan and a real Joan. We are intrigued, even if we are not entirely satisfied. I spent several foolish minutes puzzling over certain letters on the cover and spine that had a sort of gray smudge. I was thrust back to high school, filling out a book review form that asked me to complete “The theme of this book is . . .” The novel certainly has perspectives: an opening analysis of humans’ impossible situation, meditations on what has been lost and is now sought for, humans as part of all matter and energy, united with other “raging organisms that won’t give up”—a rage that can seek love or death. Can aspirations against circumstance ever succeed in a postapocalyptic setting ? A climactic battle has movement, violence , color, joinings, and sunderings, all in a haze, with theatrical shafts of light. Things happen, certainly—destruction and unification—but we see darkly. Our failure to have a clear view of an outcome corresponds to an earlier, blurred demonstration of possible earthly regeneration that does not quite suspend disbelief. The Book of Joan is an impressive structure built of stories and meditations, worshipful of life, love, and resistance. It offers hope, without a consoling clarity. That may be as much as the survivors of a humaninduced apocalypse deserve. W. M. Hagen Oklahoma Baptist University Verse Ryszard Krynicki. Magnetic Point: Selected Poems, 1968–2014. Trans. Clare Cavanagh. New York. New Directions. 2017. 224 pages. Ryszard Krynicki belongs to the extraordinary generation of Polish poets, known as the New Wave, who came of age in the late 1960s. Not to be confused with their cinematic counterparts elsewhere in Europe, the poets—besides Krynicki, the names one encounters most often include Adam Zagajewski, Stanisław Barańczak, and Julian Kornhauser—preferred the straight talk to poeticizing. Disgusted with the thinly veiled lies of official propaganda, they saw the directness of their poems, which they hoped anyone could understand , as an antidote to the omnipresent governmental obfuscating that pervaded their daily existence. However, Krynicki and Barańczak, who lived in Poznań, quite a ways from Kraków-based Zagajewski and Kornhauser, preferred a poetics rooted in linguistics that played up the absurdities which existed between the People’s Republic ideology and the daily reality. In any case, as this volume—the first to showcase a broad selection of Krynicki’s work in English—deftly illustrates, the chief trademarks of his work are “compression , mysticism, wit.” What’s more, as Clare Cavanagh reminds us, “Like Szymborska, another of his masters, he is a specialist in the infinite varieties of ‘nothing’ that surround us in poetry and life alike.” Here’s a fragment quoted by the translator in her introduction: “Nothing, night beyond the glass / looks through me with the non-gaze / of the boy I was, am // not, won’t be.” The kind of breaking of syntax we see here is rather common in Poland these days, as is the resulting careful interplay between the words and the white space, but it wasn’t always so. By translating Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, among other German -language poets, Krynicki perfected the kind of poem that one whispers rather than shouts. His crystalized poems resemble prayers. Reading these poems, one cannot help but notice that with time Krynicki became less concerned with mining the linguistic incongruities of his surroundings seen as if “through an iron curtain of clouds” than with becoming more like the Japanese haiku masters he reveres. While the reader encounters a gem here and there early on in the book, the final sixty pages feature his finest work. Meditative, precise, recording his travels and impressions of the natural world, they fulfill the promise of an earlier poem, called “How to Write?”: “To write so that a hungry man / might think it’s bread...

Maszyny muzyczne, maszyny poetyczne: urządzenia i nośniki fonograficzne w wierszach poetów polskich XX wieku1

For majority of poets in the 20th century, recording was a natural way to perceive music and the phonographic devices created frames and context for many poetic creations. As the evolution of recording technology developed very quickly, the phonographic conditions of poetry changed with it. The role of musical machines in poems is usually minor: they are named or implied as a source of music in various spaces and conditions. Nevertheless, sometimes they became very important: their characteristic, form, way of working become the subject of observation, reflection, point of departure for metaphors as well as symbolic senses. The paper shows and describes a few examples of Polish poetry metamorphosing the phonographic devices (poems of Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Miron Białoszewski, Adam Zagajewski, Maciej Woźniak).

Music and Memory: The Tlatelolco Refrain

Ever since the 1968 student movements and the events surrounding the Tlatelolco massacre, Mexico City rock bands have openly engaged with the intersection of music and memory. Their songs offer audiences a medium through which to come to terms with the events of the past as a means of praising a broken world, to borrow the poet Adam Zagajewski’s phrase. Contemporary songs such as Saúl Hernández’s “Fuerte” are a twenty-first-century voicing of the ceaseless revolutionary spirit that John Gibler has called “Mexico unconquered,” a current of rebellion and social hunger for justice that runs in the veins of Mexican history. They are the latest additions to what we might think about as “the Mexico unconquered songbook”: musical critiques of impunity and state violence that are rooted in the weaponry of memory, refusing to focus solely on the present and instead making connections with the political past. What Octavio Paz described as a “swash of blood” that swept across “the international subculture of the young” during the events in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968, now becomes a refrain of musical memory and political consciousness that extends across eras and generations. That famous phrase of Paz’s is a reminder that these most recent Mexican musical interventions, these most recent formations of a Mexican subculture of the young, maintain a historically tested relationship to blood, death, loss, and violence.

Knowing One's Place in Contemporary Irish and Polish Poetry: Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney, Hartwig

Knowing One's Place in Contemporary Irish and Polish Poetry: Zagajewski, Mahon, Heaney, Hartwig

Krakw, Poland: Books Abound 25 Years after Communism

March–April 2014 • 5 photo : nico trinkhaus Kraków has always appealed to aesthetes. A century ago, an avant-garde modernist movement, “Young Poland,” rejuvenated the city with inventive representations of an age of insouciance. One of its members was Stanisław Wyspiański, a painter who also became a playwright . Wesele (Eng. The Wedding, 1990), which he wrote in 1901, remains a classic of the national repertoire . It is at once a reflection on the country’s insurrectionist past as well as a mystical, haunting evocation of a new Poland. During my October visit, banners everywhere announced Kraków as the 2013 UNESCO City of Literature . A statue honoring national poet Adam Mickiewicz stands in the market square. Europe’s first bookstore opened on the square in 1610, and books are still sold in the building. There are so many independent bookshops on the square and adjoining streets that they’ve chased Poland’s major chain store to the railway station. Posters and billboards heralded Alice Munro as last year’s Nobel laureate —as if she were a native daughter . In the city’s National Museum an exhibit called “Wisława Szymborska’s Drawer” contains her library and writings in tribute to a true Nobel native daughter. She died in 2012. Czesław Miłosz, another Nobel-winning poet born in what is today Lithuania , lived in the city after World War II, subsequently immigrated to the US and taught at Berkeley for many years before returning to Kraków. He died in 2004 and was buried in a local church. Each May the city plays host to an annual poetry festival named after him. After communism’s fall, dilettante playwright Sławomir Mrożek returned from Mexico City to live here; he died last year. Poet Adam Zagajewski also moved here; many of his verses evoke Kraków rapturously . At the seventeenth Kraków Book Fair, I met Andrzej Stasiuk, one of the country’s best contemporary writers; he lives in the Beskidy mountains an hour south of the city. Even Karol Wojtyła, born close to Kraków, felt a need to write plays like The Jeweler’s Shop in 1960, foreshadowing the theatrical persona that he took with him to the Vatican. The book fair took place on the final weekend of October, coinciding with autumn’s last hurrah. Held twelve streetcar stops from the center in stuffy event tents, it still drew thirty thousand visitors over four days. A number of writers at the fair took part in panels at the Fifth Conrad Festival held in a palace overlooking the market square. Historians, too, attended the Conrad Festival. Author and journalist Anne Applebaum’s latest book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956, describes how communist leaders developed a language all their own. Iconic Polish intellectual Adam Michnik responded with a characteristic non sequitur: “So what? The pope speaks the same language as Luther.” The peasant girl in Wyspiański’s Wesele had Kraków’s obsession right: “Words, words, words, words.” Ray Taras is the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in European Studies for 2013–2014 at the University of Warsaw. Formerly director of Tulane University’s world literature program—before Hurricane Katrina forced its closure—he is the author of numerous scholarly books on nationalism and identities in Europe. notebook Kraków, Poland Books Abound 25 Years after Communism Ray Taras City Profile ...

The Accident of Beauty

This essay examines the work of Ewa Lipska, who, since the publication of her first book in 1967, has been among the most acclaimed of recent Polish poets but less well known in the West than Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, or Adam Zagajewski. She is a philosophical poet, making frequent reference to the tradition of the Frankfurt School, in order to ironize the Enlightenment, Marxism, and Critical Theory, but also in order to assess the dangers of globalization. The focus of the analysis is Lipska’s volume 1999, the linchpin of a poetic project that engages centuries of social systems (political, economic, scientific, technological, artistic) and their vocabularies in order to examine the viability of human knowledge and the motivations underlying its creation.

Ogień życia. Wiersz Adama Zagajewskiego O mojej matce

Any interpretation of one of the most personal poems written by Adam Zagajewski provides a good opportunity to reassess in the new light the elegiac, deeply personal body of his poetry, as well as the role of recollections and memory in the poet’s poetical and essayist writing. The work is interpreted not only within the parental context of the literary output of the author of the essay Lekka przesada [A slight exaggeration] (2011), but also against the background of the important theme in Polish poetry, including modern poetry, i.e. the motif of the mother. The title for the present sketch has been drawn from the essay The Fire of Life , the apology of poetry authored by Richard Rorty, and stresses its unique role in expressing human experience, indicated by the American philosopher.

"Invisible You Reign Over the Visible" Julia Hartwig's Reality Mysticism

CL Q. 2£ CD N -I LLI o Io X a. ESSAY My night Hartwig way in of her poetry told Warsaw me isa on long apartment. a hot way," August Julia Hartwig toldme on a hotAugust night inherWarsaw apartment. Hercomment isatonceenigmatic andprecise .Precise becausethepoet,whoturns ninety inAugust, hasbeenwriting foreight decades, sinceshewas ten.Shehasbeenpublishing collections ofherpoemssincethe1956thawover half a century ago.Yetherlongcareer isstill in glorious lateflower. Enigmatic, too:herrangeofvisionroams through centuries, continuing a conversation with herrecently deadcolleagues, literary forebears ,and friends throughout time.All great poetry doesthat, really - butinHartwig's case thesearch is direct andunambiguous. Titles of poemsin hernewestcollection in English, It WillReturn , reference Arthur Rimbaud, John Keats,and Joseph Brodsky as wellas Vincent Van Gogh,MstislavRostropovich, and Henri Rousseau. Inhersenseofhierarchy, asinmany things, sheisakintothegreatest Polish poetsofthelast century. "I can'tsay I belongto theMasters, you know. ButI amvery closetoit,"shesays, laughing .Others saysheisbetter than close.Celebrated journalist RyszardKapuscinski calledher "oneoftheforemost poetsofthetwentieth century ." CzeslawMiloszcalledher"thegrande dameofPolishpoetry." Milosz'spresence (hediedonherbirthday in2004)permeates hernewest collection: "Daimonion " obviously alludestohim;another, "To DietoSleep," hums with hispresence. Inanearliercollection , Hartwig's "O!"replies tohisown series ofpoems, alsocalled"O!" Milosz - more, perhaps, than anyone - wasrooted inthat sense ofhierarchy. "Respect! Themotto ofGoethewas taken upbyMilosz," shewrites in"Keats's Grave." But forMilosz,as forHartwig, that respect extends 16 1 World Literature Today beyond themerely human. He toldmein2000: "There was at a givenmoment a stableworld where wecouldsee,holdontovaluesthat were a reflection ofthe eternal order ofthings. Nowwe areina flux. Thisisa very peculiar wayoflife. Andthis isconnected with tradition. With traditional forms, traditional values. With a respect for tradition. Ifwecannot return tothestable world ofthepast, atleastwecanhavesomerespect for somestable points When everything isinflux, revision, itis healthy tohavesomepoetswho preserve thefeeling ofrespect/' Hartwighas echoedhis words,perhaps with themaestro inmind as "without sadness/ heparts from this world. . becausetoomany ofthose whodistinguished between whatispermanent andephemeral haveleft (from "Now") Sheisoften compared toWislawa Szymborska .Onewonders iftheassociation wouldcome lesseasilyifSzymborska werenota womanof thesame generation. Butit'snotentirely the comparison ofpoetess with poetess - bothhave a light, deft touch anda taste for whimsy. ButHartwig's terroir extends into a different psychological landscape. Shehascalledherway "reality mysticism," extending heracceptance of theworld toallitshorrors, then moving beyond totranscendence. Oftheworld, shewisely told hertranslator BogdanaCarpenter, "Onecannot setoneself apartfrom itand be alonelikean underground manora misanthrope." Butit'smorethanthat. Reality mysticism doesn'tabstract or withdraw fromthepresent , oruseitas a jumping-off point for dreamy speculations, butholdsussteadily there, usingit toincrease ourattention, ourpresence, andour appreciation. For example,"Return to My Childhood Home"begins with wonder andloss,moving to consolation andlight: Amida darksilence ofpines- theshouts of young birches calling eachother. Everything is as itwas.Nothing is as itwas. [...] Tounderstand nothing. Eachtime ina different way,from thefirst cry tothelast breath. Yethappymoments cometomefrom the past,likebridesmaids carrying oillamps. Whensaw I doorstep appeared in on 2008, Julia at Hartwig's Adam ZagaWar saw doorstepin 2008,at Adam Zagajewski 'ssuggestion, I knewthepoetonlyby name. Thewriter Marek Zaganczyk, aneditor at Poland'spremiere literary journal, Zeszyty Literackie , spirited methrough thedarkened streets ofthat mythical, reconstructed city, reminiscent ofthosedoomedtownsinfairy tales, reemergingfrom fire orwater intact andwhole, butwith a forever woundedspirit. When I first sawhernameontheitineraries forZagajewski's KrakowPoetry Seminars for U.S.students, I hadinitially assumed shewasa young, up-and-coming American. Julia isa name popular with theyounger set, andHartwig could beanyoneofa hundred peopleinMilwaukee. The Old Worldfacethatgreeted me at thedoor had the trademark eyebrows tilted upward - a permanent question, orsignaling her arch andintelligent skepticism. "Youcame, mostly ,tofind somethings aboutHerbert, yes?"she askedcordially aboutmystayinPoland.(I had beeninterviewing Zbigniew Herbert's widowfor several daysnearby inWarsaw.) "Ohyes, I knew him very well, from the German occupation," she addedwarmly ofPoland's unexiled bard. Someofmyquestions hadindeedbeenof Mitosz andHerbert, myownprocess ofmoving from theknown totheunknown. I wasn't alone: English-speaking audiences aregenerally unfamiliar with herwork. Theyshouldn't be.Shehaspublished more than a dozencollections inPolish, andherwork hasbeentranslated intoGerman, French, Italian, Greek, Lithuanian, Russian, Serbian, andEnglish. Hermanyawardsinclude theThornton Wilder Prize, theSolidarity Prize, thePEN Club(1979, 1997, 2009), the Georg Trakl prize, andthe Ministry ofCulture Awardfor Lifetime Achievement. She had,moreover, lived inAmerica for years. Atthat time, onesparevolume rescued her namefrom American oblivion - In Praise ofthe Unfinished. Shehadonehandy, andgaveittome that night - a classy hardcover with heavy, creamcolored pagesanda witty, understated design. "Itis hardtoseparate thepoetry from the poet,"shehaswritten inPolish Writers onWriting . "Regardless ofhowmuch a so-called lyrical July -August 201 1117 Hartwig's terroir extends into a different psychological landscape. She has called...

Beyond Description: Ekphrasis and the Expanding Lens

Beyond DescriptionEkphrasis and the Expanding Lens Vievee Francis (bio) Tell us, Dutch painters, what will happen When the apple is peeled, when the silk dims, when all the colours grow cold. Tell us what darkness is. —Adam Zagajewski, “Dutch Painters” I Ekphrasis, even if simply defined as a literary response to visual art, is rich in potential for the poet. The term suggests a boundless field of images, yes, but what to do with those images? Students in their initial study of ekphrasis seem to begin and end with description. Of course, that is not enough. Our poems fail if we do not utilize the poetic imagination to imbue with further possibilities what the previous artist has already imagined. The poet’s response to the visual imagination is to use the poetic imagination to disclose, unearth, and discover such possibilities, and to lend valences to the piece. In doing so, the poem gains its own set of potentialities. It is an act of revelation. There are several ekphrastic approaches, with varying narrative distances. The bit of Zagajewski above represents an approach that instantly resonates with us. It is thinking of the world as a canvas that we might paint. It puts the poet in the position of the painter recreating the visual piece and supplying the poetic response at once, going beyond mere description. Zagajewski’s lines force the reader, subject (and artist) into our own interrogations. What access to the great mysteries do these painters have? How can we acquire such access? What is “darkness” to us? The earliest type of ekphrasis considers not particular paintings, but the imagined object. Homer’s The Illiad, which contains one of the earliest examples of “ekphrasis,” provides an uncannily detailed description of the imagined object, the shield made for Achilles by the blacksmith god Hephaestus. But it is not the initial poem alone that is of interest to us. We are also concerned with the score of poems that arise from that initial instance of ekphrasis. We know Achilles’ shield does not stay with Achilles, for example. Homer passes it to the shepherd cum poet Hesiod who claims the shield for Heracles. Then, after centuries of movement, the shield is taken up by W. H. Auden who in “The Shield of Achilles” gives it back to the original owner, though the shield is altered to reflect the dark realities of the twentieth century. This speaks to how the culture of an age may shift what an object represents. Each poet reads the object imagined or not variously. A series of interactions occurs over time, space, and culture, creating a dialogue between pieces and poets. Auden [End Page 708] was not speaking to the audience of his day alone; he was speaking to Homer, presenting a new argument, and he continues to speak to us as we consider the poem and perhaps imagine what we see upon the ancient object. And at some point the poems may be said to leave the touchstone of the initial object (imagined or not) almost entirely. So in the writing of ekphrastic poetry as well as in our responses to earlier ekphrastic poems there exists the possibility of engagement with the art (and its referents as well as the artist), the poet writing in response to the art, and any other poets who have also responded to the art. As such, ekphrasis may be used as an effective means of entering a greater conversation across disciplines, and it is these interstices and allusions that allow not a crass self-referential engagement, but fresh modes of acknowledgement and interrogation. II That the 2011 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop in Poetry would incorporate ekphrasis seemed inevitable since my co-facilitator, the poet Gregory Pardlo, and I were both in literary work with art institutions. Gregory had recently led a series of poetry workshops sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, in which poets engaged objects in that museum’s collections, and I had completed my first semester as a Visiting Artist/ Poet at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, teaching poetry to fine artists as well as students in industrial design. While not...

Recent Polish Poems

Research Article| January 01 2010 Recent Polish Poems Wisława Szymborska; Wisława Szymborska Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ryszard Krynicki; Ryszard Krynicki Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Bronislaw Maj; Bronislaw Maj Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Adam Zagajewski Adam Zagajewski Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2010) 16 (1): 137–145. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2009-066 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Wisława Szymborska, Ryszard Krynicki, Bronislaw Maj, Adam Zagajewski; Recent Polish Poems. Common Knowledge 1 January 2010; 16 (1): 137–145. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-2009-066 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsCommon Knowledge Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: FICTION AND POETRY You do not currently have access to this content.

The Majesty of Sleep

The Majesty of Sleep* Adam Zagajewski (bio) Translated by Clare Cavanagh Sleep like the veranda of a country house spreads before you a forest and shadows and the interior of memories. Sleep is the mind free of constraint, the proud capital of poetry and plays, sleep is a thought not yet embodied, fed meagerly by jealous waking. Sleep is Assyria, severe and valiant. Sleep is Tuscany seen at dawn, when slim trees sip ink from the black earth—and a city, which breathes through long cigarettes of sorrow. Sleep visits hospitals and prisons, comforts the afflicted like a pure-hearted nun; sleep wanes, exhausted; it dies lightly, like Norwid, without grief or heirs. —translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh Adam Zagajewski Adam Zagajewski, a native of Poland, is the author of a number of books of poetry, some of which have been translated into English—Mysticism for Beginners, Tremor, Canvas, Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002), and Eternal Enemies: Poems (2008). He is also author of Solitude and Solidarity, Two Cities: On Exile History and the Imagination, and Another Beauty—all prose, the later being a memoir. Before joining the faculty of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, he taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. Footnotes * “The Majesty of Sleep” first appeared in AGNI Volume 54 (2001). Copyright © 2001 Adam Zagajewski. [End Page 7] Copyright © 2009 Charles H. Rowell

December

December* Adam Zagajewski (bio) Translated by Clare Cavanagh December, herald of destruction, takes you on a long stroll through the black torsos of trees and leaves scorched in autumn’s fire, as if to say: so much then for your secrets and your treasures, the fervent trill of small birds, the promises of summer months. Your dreams have been dissected, the blackbird’s song now has a rationale, plants’ corpses clutter the herbarium. Only the laboratory’s hard stone remains. Don’t listen: they may take everything away, but they can’t have your ignorance, they can’t take your mysteries, strip you of your third homeland. Don’t listen: the holidays draw near and frozen January, snow’s white paper. What you’ve waited for is being born. The one you’re seeking will begin to sing. —translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh [End Page 6] Adam Zagajewski Adam Zagajewski, a native of Poland, is the author of a number of books of poetry, some of which have been translated into English—Mysticism for Beginners, Tremor, Canvas, Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002), and Eternal Enemies: Poems (2008). He is also author of Solitude and Solidarity, Two Cities: On Exile History and the Imagination, and Another Beauty—all prose, the later being a memoir. Before joining the faculty of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, he taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. Footnotes * Reprinted with permission from Samizdat Issue #1, Autumn 1998 ( http://www.samizdateditions.com/issue1/ ). Copyright © 2009 Charles H. Rowell

Review Essay: Place, Desire, Existence: Trinity University Press’s Writers World Series

Reviewed: Mexican Writers on Writing Margaret Sayers Peden, editor Irish Writers on Writing Eavan Boland, editor Polish Writers on Writing Adam Zagajewski, editor

The Neustadt Silver Feather

I just renewed my subscription to WLT. So happy to renew I'm excited every time I receive your colorful publication with so many photos of writers. My congratulations to Adam Zagajewski, the 2004 Neustadt laureate (see WLT, May-August 2005, 3-26). I love that shot of him with the silver eagle feather in his suit pocket and his beautiful wife, Maya, smiling over his shoulder. I am especially attracted, because I conceived and sculpted the original silver eagle feather. Ivar Ivask, the longtime editor of WLT, asked me to come up with a symbol that would enhance the Neustadt cash award. You know the rest of the story (see below). It was my first sculpture commission, and I'm still proud. Mike Dirham