Adam Zagajewski

• Born: April 21, 1945
• Birthplace: Lwów, Poland (now in Ukraine)
• Died: March 21, 2021
• Place of death: Kraków, Poland

Other literary forms

Although poetry constitutes the most important part of the oeuvre of Polish writer Adam Zagajewski, he also has written three novels: Ciełpo zimno (1975; It’s cold, it’s warm), Das absolute Gehör (1982; Absolute pitch), and Cienka kreska (1983; Thin line). Zagajewski’s fiction, patterned on the traditional bildungsroman, is an ironic reworking of this nineteenth century genre. One of Poland's most prominent poets, Zagajewski was awarded the 2004 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, the 2017 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature and the 2018 Golden Wreath of Poetry at the Struga Poetry Evenings.

Zagajewski also published a number of important essays and essay collections. His Świat nie przedstawiony (1974; The world not represented), coauthored by Julian Kornhauser, played a seminal role in shaping the literary consciousness of the decade. Drugi Oddech (1978; Second wind) and Solidarność i samotność (1986; Solidarity, Solitude: Essays, 1990), continue probing the question of literature’s ethical and social responsibility. Dwa miasta (1991; Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination, 1995) and W cudzym pięknie (1998; Another Beauty, 2000) explore the richness and variety of Europe, as found in the author’s memories, readings, and travels. Zagajewski is also the author of Polen: Staat im Schatten der Sowjetunion (1981; Poland: A state in the shackles of the Soviet Union), an analysis of the Polish state under Soviet rule.

Achievements

The literary debut of Adam Zagajewski took place in a country oppressed by Soviet domination. This historical circumstance led the poet and other writers of his generation (known as the Generation of ’68, or the New Wave) to take upon themselves the duty of opposing both political oppression and the conformist attitudes found among Polish intellectuals, thus turning around the Communist slogan, “Writers are the conscience of the nation.” Although in his later writings Zagajewski abandoned the earlier political agenda, his poetry never ceased to defend the human right to individual perception and sensitivity. Zagajewski’s poems have been translated into English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, and Swedish.

Zagajewski received a number of prestigious fellowships and awards, including the Jurzykowski Foundation Award, a fellowship from the Berliner Kunstlerprogram, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Prix de la Liberté, the International Vilenica Award, the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, the Tranströmer Prize, the Neustadt Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Princess of Asturias Award. His Without End (2003) was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Biography

Adam Zagajewski was born in Lwów (Lviv, now in Ukraine) in 1945 to a family of Polish intelligentsia. When he was four months old, his family was forced to abandon the city of his birth and to move westward, reflecting the newly reshuffled Polish borders. The Zagajewskis settled in the Silesian town of Gliwice, where Zagajewski spent his childhood and adolescence. Throughout these early years, his family kept alive the memory of their hometown: “I spent my childhood in an ugly industrial city; I was brought there when I was barely four months old, and then for many years afterward I was told about an extraordinarily beautiful city that my family had to leave.” Nevertheless, Zagajewski’s sensitivity allowed him to find enchantment even in the unattractive town of his youth.

At the age of eighteen, Zagajewski left Gliwice to pursue a university education in the historic town of Kraków. After receiving degrees in philosophy and psychology at the Jagiellonian University, he worked as an assistant professor at the Akademia Górniczo-Hutnicza (University of Mining and Metallurgy). It was during this period that he became the cofounder of the poetic group Teraz (Now) as well as the coauthor of its literary program. The poets of Teraz emphasized the social importance of poetry and its role in reclaiming a language devalued by the rhetorical manipulations of a bureaucratic, totalitarian state. In 1972, Zagajewski became one of the editors of Student. He was also involved in editorial work at such prestigious literary journals as Odra and Znak. After signing a letter of protest concerning amendments to the Polish constitution in 1976, Zagajewski suffered the fate of many Polish writers of the time: The government placed a ban on his publications, effectively ending the official circulation of his works.

In 1979, Zagajewski won a scholarship from the Berlin Kunstlerprogram and went to Berlin. After a brief return to Poland, he emigrated to Paris in 1982. Unlike many Polish artists, Zagajewski chose to leave his homeland for personal, not political, reasons. In Paris, he became involved in editing Zeszyty Literackie (Literary review), a seminal émigré literary journal. In 1989, Zagajewski began teaching creative writing at the University of Houston, Texas, spending four months there out of each year. He has also taught at the University of Chicago.

Having moved from Lwów to Gliwice to Kraków to Berlin to Paris to Houston, then to Kraków again in 2002, in the course of his life Zagajewski became a wanderer and a citizen of the world. The poet described his own cosmopolitan status:

I am now like a passenger of a small submarine, which has not one, but four periscopes. The first, and major, one points to my native tradition. The second opens up toward the literature of Germany, its poetry, its—onetime—desire of the infinite. The third—toward the landscape of French culture, with its penetrating intelligence and Jansenist morality. The fourth—toward [William] Shakespeare, [John] Keats and Robert Lowell, the literature of the concrete, of passion and conversation.

Analysis

Critics frequently divide the poetry of Adam Zagajewski into two major periods: one “political,” focused on the problems of the human community, the other “philosophical,” concerned with the individual. The poet’s first three collections, published during the 1970s, followed the poetic program of the Generation of ’68, with its emphasis on the social responsibilities of the artist in a totalitarian state. Beginning with the fourth collection, Oda do wielości (Ode to plurality), published after his emigration to Paris, Zagajewski turned to a poetry of philosophical reflection, rich in complex metaphors and sophisticated symbolism. A number of his contemporaries had commented on the poet’s passage from one period to the other. However, it is also important to emphasize the continuity of themes and methods in Zagajewski’s work. Even in the most political poems, he deals with the oppression of the individual. Even the most private lyrical reflections are situated within the broader context of European, or world, culture.

Komunikat, Sklepy mięsne, and List

When Zagajewski and other poets of his generation, such as Stanisław Barańczak, Julian Kornhauser, Ryszard Krynicki, and Ewa Lipska, set out to wage poetic war on the Communist state, they focused their efforts on laying bare the “falsified language” of state propaganda and bureaucracy. The newspeak favored by the government and disseminated by the mass media had become, according to the young poets, a tool of totalitarian oppression. Rather than representing reality, such language falsified it. In contrast, the poetry of the Generation of ’68 was to be plain, clear, and direct. It aimed at a sincere realism, a reclamation of the concrete. This goal is illustrated in Zagajewski’s poem “Sklepy Mięsne” (Meat shops). The poem describes the change from the older, straightforward term “butcher,” to the new, sanitized “meat shop,” a name that conceals rather than reveals the true nature of the establishment.

Another feature of Generation of ’68 poetry is an interest in the problems of its time, adequately reflected in the name of the poetic group Teraz (Now), of which Zagajewski was a cocreator. His early poetry collections, Komunikat (Communiqué), Sklepy mięsne, and, to a lesser extent, List (A letter), realized the ideals of contemporaneity and simplicity. These poems spoke of Communist Poland in a language verging on the prosaic. They were characterized by a frequent use of the present tense (conveying a sense of immediacy), a scarcity of conjunctions and adverbs, and a disciplined syntax. Syntactic simplicity is particularly apparent in the first collection and gives way to slightly more sophisticated structures, such as inversion, in the later volumes. This simple, almost conversational form revealed a deep distrust of inflated or manipulative language. The goal of Zagajewski’s early poetry was to defend the individual against the obscure manipulations, linguistic and otherwise, of the regime. Like other members of his generation, Zagajewski strongly believed in the ethical dimension of a poetic calling.

Oda do wielości

The title poem of Zagajewski’s fourth collection, Oda do wielości, introduced a theme that would become central to the poet’s subsequent writing: a fascinated affirmation of the world’s multiplicity and richness:

I don’t understand it all and I ameven glad that the world like a restlessocean exceeds my abilityto understand . . .You, singular soul, stand beforeThis abundance. Two eyes, two hands,Ten inventive fingers, andOnly one ego, the wedge of an orange,the youngest of sisters. . . .

While a number of poems in this 1982 collection still address painful political issues, such as “Petit,” “Zwycięstwo” (Victory), and “Ogień” (Fire), others point in a new direction. Tadeusz Nyczek, in 1988, described this ideological shift in Zagajewski’s writing as a turn from “no” to “yes,” from negation (negating the totalitarian state) to affirmation (affirming the world, its richness, and its sensual existence). With the expansion of themes came an expansion of form: The syntax became more intricate; the metaphors became increasingly sophisticated and abundant. Zagajewski’s later poetry is characterized by complex metaphorical structures of great intensity and beauty. Czesław Miłosz in 1985 described the artistic development of his fellow Pole and poet: “His poems have been acquiring a more and more sumptuous texture, and now he appears to me as a skillful weaver whose work is not unlike Gobelin tapestries where trees, flowers, and human figures coexist in the same pattern.”

Jechai do Lwówa, Canvas, and Ziemia Ognista

Jechai do Lwówa (To go to Lwów), Canvas, and Ziemia Ognista (Tierra del Fuego), the collections published from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, offer sophisticated meditations on the nature of memory, history, art, culture, and the spiritual quest of humankind at the end of the twentieth century.

The poem “Jechai do Lwówa” (“To Go to Lwów”) is an imaginary journey to the place of the poet’s birth, conjuring up both the magic of the “lost” city, with its “white napkins and a bucket / full of raspberries standing on the floor” and the ruthless political “scissors” that brought about destruction and exile. The poem “W obcych miastach” (In strange cities, from Canvas) captures the delight of journeys to unknown places: “In strange cities, there’s an unexpected joy / the cool pleasure of a new regard.” Cities, visited in person or in the imagination, become an important theme in Zagajewski’s poetry. “Widok Krakowa” (The view of Kraków, from Jechai do Lwówa) is a tender and eclectic portrait of the former Polish capital. “Widok Delf” (The view of Delf) from the same collection honors both the place and its painter.

These are poems deeply embedded in the European cultural tradition. Zagajewski pays poetic homage not only to Europe’s metropolises but also to its artists and thinkers. The poet invokes the composers Franz Schubert and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the painters Jan Vermeer and Rembrandt, the poet C. K. Norwid, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and many others.

While delighting in the richness of art and culture, Zagajewski remains aware of the reverse side of civilization—wars, genocide, cruelty. His poems present a world in a state of paradox. An acute awareness of the paradoxical nature of reality is expressed in the poem “Lawa” (Lava) from Canvas:

And what if Heraclitus and Parmenidesare both rightand two worlds exist side by side,one serene, the other insane; one arrowthoughtlessly hurtles, another, indulgent,looks on; the selfsame wave moves and stands still. . . .

The proper response to a paradoxical reality is perhaps a stance of permanent inquiry, constant alertness and distrust. Such a mind-set has always been part of Zagajewski’s poetics. One of his preferred characters is the wanderer—homeless, always journeying toward a yet unknown goal. The collection Ziemia Ognista is dominated by traveling and homelessness, as in the poem “Szukaj” (Search):

I returned to the townwhere I was a childand a teenager and an old man of thirty.The town greeted me indifferently . . .Find another place.Search for it.Search for your true homeland.

Zagajewski’s mature poetry has become a poetry of spiritual inquiry. Agnostic and mystical, it seeks the “nameless, unseen, silent.” In “Gotyk” (“The Gothic,” from Jechai do Lwówa), the speaker asks: “Who am I here in this cool cathedral and who/ is speaking to me so obscurely?” Another poem from the same collection brings the lament: “So many errors, with an incorporeal/ ruler governing a tangible reality.” The title poem of Ziemia Ognista ends with the prayer: “Nameless, unseen, silent, / save me from anesthesia, / take me to Tierra del Fuego. . . .”

Pragnienie and Unseen Hand

The contrast between the “anesthetized” late twentieth century with its bored, sate conformity, and the desire for a genuine spiritual experience is the theme of Pragnienie (Desire). This fin de siècle collection opens with childhood memories and ends with a self-portrait of a mature artist, “between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter,” living in “strange cities,” listening to “Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich,” reading “poets, living and dead.” This artist is no longer young and knows it. His voice has grown quiet, reflective. At this stage of his life, he has many dead to mourn. The collection contains a number of elegies dedicated to other poets (Joseph Brodsky, Zbigniew Herbert) and artists (Krzysztof Kieślowski, Józef Czapski). The theme of death and loss pervades this nostalgic volume.

Pragnienie is both a very private reflection on the poet’s life and, as Zagajewski’s former translator Renata Gorczyńska has it, a report on the conditions of the human community at the end of the twentieth century. Zagajewski portrays a Western culture devoid of genuine spiritual values, atrophied, sedated, paralyzed with boredom. Always sensitive to the ethical role of literature, the poet has diagnosed a new threat to the human spirit: Like a totalitarian regime, mass culture blunts sensitivity and chokes metaphysical inquiry. Can poetry kindle a new flame? Awaken a new desire? These are the questions Zagajewski poses at the end of a troubled century.

Zagajewski continued his work into the twenty-first century, publishing four collections in the 2000s. Niewidzialna reka (2009) was published in English in 2011 as Unseen Hand. Writing for the Prague Post, Stephan Delbos said of the collection that it “shows the poet in a more mature state of mind than much of his earlier work, less of a political reactionary and more a settled poet musing on deep matters of the mind and heart. . . . Unseen Hand offers evidence of a deepening of his already-impressive gifts and a welcomed ability to live in moments of uncertainty. Let us hope his poems will continue to guide readers through their own moments of uncertainty for many books to come.”

Bibliography

Bieńkowski, Zbigniew. “The New Wave: A Non-Objective View.” In The Mature Laurel: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry, edited by Adam Czerniawski. Chester Springs, Pa.: Seren Books, Dufour Editions, 1991.

Carpenter, Bogdana. “A Tribute to Adam Zagajewski.” World Literature Today 79, no. 2 (May-August, 2005): 14-16.

Corn, Alfred. “Poetry and Dialectic.” Review of Eternal Enemies. Hudson Review 61, no. 4 (Winter, 2009): 801-809.

Karpowicz, Tymoteusz. “Naked Poetry: A Discourse About the Newest Polish Poetry.” Polish Review 1/2 (1976): 59-70.

Shallcross, Bożena. “The Divining Moment: Adam Zagajewski’s Aesthetic Epiphany.” Slavic and East European Journal 44, no. 2 (2000): 234-252.

Shallcross, Bożena. Through the Poet’s Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002.

Witkowski, Tadeusz. “The Poets of the New Wave in Exile.” Slavic and East European Journal 33, no. 2 (1989): 204-216.