Acantilado has made available to the Spanish-speaking public what is the last book of poems by Adam Zagajewski, Verdadera vida; posthumously in Spain, given that the Polish original, Prawdziwe zycie, was published in 2019, two years before the poet’s death, passing the sea in 2021. So, this is the last volume of the series started in 2004 by the long-lost Jaume Vallcorba, which includes six of Zagajewski’s eleven books of poems: Tierra del fuego, Deseo, Antenas, Mano invisible, Asimetría and the latter, Verdadera vida (from now on, Real life).
I was lucky enough to meet Adam Zagajewski in 1997, on the occasion of the 13th edition of the Barcelona International Poetry Festival, in which Àlex Susanna had invited him to participate. The Zagajewski of ’97, although then resident in Paris, was still very Polish, even – dare I say – very Krakowian. I remember him, sitting on a bench on the Rambla de Catalunya, wearing worn jeans, a checkered shirt and a leather shoulder bag; the sad look and, at the same time, lurking; how it emerged, all of a sudden, from the gray socialist Krakow of the eighties.
The poets invited to the Barcelona poetry festival recited in the Palau de la Música Catalana in the original language, while the audience read the Catalan version of the text recited on the handheld program with the help of a mini-flashlight, so that the entire audience of the Palau appeared sprinkled with countless sparkling points. When it was Zagajewski’s turn, he addressed the audience and said in French that he felt “like standing in front of the Champs Elysees, but not those of Paris”. I wonder how many of the attendees must have caught the subtle allusion to the sojourn of the blessed in Greek mythology.
In an interview he gave me in 2010 (published in Revista de Occidente in July 2011), a more mature, more traveled Zagajewski asserted, regarding the classical tradition: “Before, who had studied Latin, who had studied Greek , at the lyceum or the gymnasium, he knew as much about it as today the professors of the best universities. I didn’t have that. So, throughout my life I have tried to follow a self-taught program, in order to ‘recover’ what was taught in the old European schools”. In La vida de bò Zagajewski “recovers” it in the poem A Roman city of provinces: “The barbarians waited with embassies, / they raised walls and towers as high as possible. / However, the barbarians did not arrive”.
Judaism is another recurring theme in Zagajewski’s poetry, a Judaism to which Polish culture is so indebted: “The Old Testament is, above all, an extraordinary epic work. There is the story of Job, the story of Joseph, the book of Ruth… The New Testament, in a narrative sense, is much poorer.” And it is this admiration that makes the suffering of the Jewish people, at the same time, so present in Zagajewski’s poetry: In Real life, in Drohobycz, Bruno Schulz’s hometown, “… the shadows / are more authentic / than things”, while, in the East, “… four / Jewish gangs from the Kolbuszowa ghetto / look, for years!, the goal as salvation, / but not there there will be salvation, there was none”.
Flavors of this European anti-Semitism underlie the experience of contemporary tragedies: “night and fireworks / and the arrival of refugees on a stony beach / and a triumphant Aphrodite advancing / serene through the waves of a sea ??/ which is dark like wine”, we read in November; while in Kardamili “refugees from Syria sink into the sea / or suffocate inside refrigerated trucks”. And rebla, in Frontera: “on both sides of the border there is the east, / to the north there is the east / and to the south there is also the east (…) borders are already everywhere”.
Lwów (present-day Lviv), the hometown, abandoned after the war due to the displacement – here too – of the borders; very vivid, at least, in the memory, it is almost an obsession in Zagajewski’s poetry: “and this city that like Rome / spread over seven hills / garnished with the scepter and the globe / has become squalid and empty”; although the passage – also the weight – of the years seems to have already opened the door to resignation: “My friends advise me / That I’m already mourning / It’s not that you don’t have a roof / They tell me (…) And I begin to believe / In what they tell me / My friends”; you see that, at the end of the day, “philosophers must choose their city, / only poets can live in public”.
In The real life, you can, in fact, find everything Zagajewski: the native Lwów and the family, “Polishness” and cosmopolitanism, tradition and the Jews… However, there are also novelties: The serious ones attract attention reproaches to the Catholic Church. On Sunday, a thick-jawed priest “will address you for a long time / in a tone of indescribable superiority, / he will tell you what to think and how to act”; and ends: “We don’t know anything. We live in the dark. / God is in another place, in another place”. Just as the sordidness of the verses is also disturbing: “I’m a student in an ugly church, / I’m twelve years old, I know the smell of the sacristy / where sweat and starch are mixed”.
In the poem Novembre we read: “a batussa in a dark alley / and a Ukrainian accordionist / who plays tocata and fugue”; and, further on, some verses that can well be considered premonitory: “One hundred years have passed since the end / of the first war. / We look forward to the next one.” In our conversation in 2010 we also talked – and of course – about the international situation, in Europe, in Russia and in the US.
Of Russia, then, Zagajewski opined: “I am close to the philosophy of Czeslaw Milosz, of Józef Czapski, who always tried to understand Russian culture – which continued in poetry, in the novel, in philosophy— and that they thought that, without a doubt, it was one of the great European cultures. Well, European, but also a little different; because Orthodoxy has given it great strength, in Russia. Russia’s strength lies in the fact that it bet in the past because it was something else, because it was the “Third Rome”, because it did not belong to the same world as Paris and London. Although the Russians deal with problems similar to the problems of other Europeans: freedom, the immortality of the soul… But at the same time they are heirs of Byzantium!, and they have the right to another tone and another point of view. And therein lies its strength. The weakness lies in the fact that, if one speaks this other language, it means that one is skeptical about what is good and better in Europe: individual freedom, respect for justice, the fact that one cannot deport the people en masse… And here is the curse of Russian culture: that there is a gulf between culture as the domain of the imagination and culture as the sphere in which political life takes place”.
Of the United States, where Zagajewski then lived and worked for a good part of the year, “it is such a complex country”, he said, “that it is more difficult to talk about it than to talk about any other country. I deeply admire the American university; and this because it brings together the European idea of ??university with American pragmatism. In Chicago, I keep seeing students with Plato books. Plato remains at the base of the training. On the other hand, the US it has this, that it is noticeable that it is a much younger country. Europe is a tired continent. People live better there, in Europe; life is sweet in Europe. In the US life is hard, and that’s why you breathe this feeling of energy. It can also be seen in the attitude towards war: To what extent in American politics the use of force is taken into account, this is a fascinating fact. Quite often they make mistakes, because they make big mistakes; but the mere fact that Homer’s ideals (such as the defense of the homeland) are still so present makes that for Americans the fact of having to defend oneself is something perfectly possible, something assumed. So, the US are, on one side, these refined university campuses and, on the other, is this rapacious country, ready to fight; although, as I said, he often makes mistakes…”.
The last time I spoke with Zagajewski was in November 2018, on the occasion of a literary meeting at the Cervantes Institute in Warsaw, where his poems were recited in the five peninsular languages. Later, at dinner, Zagajewski’s wife, Maria, enlivened the evening with an endless cascade of anecdotes, which one was more hilarious: from her time as an actress, passing through the entire repertoire of Polish complexes (Maria she’s a psychiatrist), to her successes and failures as an entrepreneur in Paris. Maria kept talking, while Adam burst out laughing; he raised his glass, in health you didn’t know who, what, and laughed, Adam laughed… And here another Zagajewski was revealed: He was no longer the shy, circumspect, eternally reflective intellectual, but a jovial character and funny, almost Dionysian. And this was also “real life”.
The Catalan translation of Adam Zagajewski’s verses quoted in this article is the work of Josep Maria de Sagarra Àngel
Adam Zagajewski Verdadera screw
Cliff Trad. by Xavier Farré Vidal 80 pages 12 euros
