Acantilado has made available to the Spanish-speaking public what is the latest book of poems by Adam Zagajewski, Verdadera vida; posthumous in Spain, since the Polish original, Prawdziwe zycie, saw the light of day in 2019, two years before the poet’s death, which occurred in March 2021. Thus, this is the last volume in the series started in 2004 by the yearned for Jaume Vallcorba, which includes six of Zagajewski’s eleven books of poems: Tierra del fuego, Deseo, Antenas, Mano invisible, Asymmetry and the latter, True Life. .
I was lucky enough to meet Adam Zagajewski in 1997, on the occasion of the 13th edition of the Barcelona International Poetry Festival, to which Àlex Susanna had invited him to participate. The Zagajewski of 1997, although he was living in Paris at the time, was still very Polish, even—I dare say—very Cracovian. I remember him, sitting on a bench on the Rambla de Catalunya, with his worn-out jeans, his checked shirt and his leather rucksack over his shoulder; the look sad and, at the same time, vigilant; one would say that it emerged, suddenly, from the gray socialist Krakow of the eighties.
The poets invited to the Barcelona poetry festival recited in the original language at the Palau de la Música Catalana, while the public read the Catalan version of what was recited on the handheld program with the help of a mini-lantern, so that the entire audience of the Palau was dotted with countless sparkling points. When Zagajewski’s turn came, he addressed the audience and said in French that he felt “like the Champs-Elysées, but not those in Paris.” I wonder how many of the attendees would catch the subtle allusion to the abode of the blessed in Greek mythology.
In an interview he gave me in 2010 (published in Revista de Occidente in July 2011), an already more traveled, more mature Zagajewski asserted, regarding the classical tradition: “Before, who had studied Latin, who had studied Greek , at the lyceum or in the gymnasium, knew as much as today the professors of the best universities. That I did not have. Thus, 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 True Life Zagajewski “recovers” it in A Roman City of the Provinces: “They waited in fear for the barbarians, / they built walls and towers higher and higher. / But the barbarians did not arrive”.
Judaism is another recurring theme in Zagajewski’s poetry, that 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 so present in Zagajewski’s poetry: In True Life, in Drohobycz, Bruno Schulz’s hometown, “…the shadows / are more authentic / than things”, while, in Este, “… four / beautiful Jews from the Kolbuszowa ghetto / have been looking at the target for years as salvation, / but there will be no salvation, there was not”.
Remnants of that European anti-Semitism underlie the experience of contemporary tragedies: “night and fireworks / and the landing of refugees on a rocky beach / and the victorious Aphrodite marching / through the waves of a sea / dark as wine”, we read in November, while in Kardamyli “refugees from Syria sink into the sea / or suffocate in refrigerated trucks”. And he clinches, in Frontera: “the east on both sides of the border, / to the north is the east / and to the south is the east (…) the borders are everywhere”.
Léopolis, the hometown, abandoned after the war precisely because of the displacement of the borders; However, very vivid in memory, it is almost an obsession in Zagajewski’s poetry: “and this city, which was established / like Rome on seven hills / with the scepter and the orb, / is now flat and small”; although the passing —also the weight— of the years seems to have already ajar the door to resignation: “My friends advise me / Stop complaining now / You have not been left homeless / They tell me (…) And I begin to believe / In what they say / My friends”; because, after all, “philosophers have to choose their city, / only poets can live anywhere”.
In Verdadera vida there is, in effect, all of Zagajewski: the native Lviv and the family, “Polonidad” and cosmopolitanism, tradition and the Jews… However, there are also novelties: the harsh reproaches of the Catholic Church are striking. On Sunday, a priest with a thick chin “will speak to you for a long time in a tone / of indescribable superiority, / he will order you what to think and what to do”; and he concludes: “We don’t know anything. We live in the dark. / God is in another place, in another place”. Just as the sleaze of the verses is disturbing: “I am an altar boy in an ugly church, / I am twelve years old, I know the smell of the sacristy / where sweat is mixed with starch”.
In the poem November we read: “a fight in a dark alley / and an accordionist from the Ukraine / who plays toccata and fugue”; and, later on, some verses that may well be considered premonitory: “One hundred years have passed since the end / of the first war. / We wait for the second one”. In our 2010 conversation we also talked, of course, about the international situation, Europe, Russia and the US.
Of Russia, at that time, Zagajewski was of the opinion: “The philosophy of Czeslaw Milosz, of Józef Czapski, who always tried to understand Russian culture —who continued in poetry, in the novel, in philosophy— and who thought that, without a doubt, it is one of the great European cultures. Well, European, but also something different; because Orthodoxy has given great strength, to Russia. Its strength lies in the fact that, from the beginning, Russia bet because it was different, because it was the ‘Third Rome’, because it did not belong to the same world as Paris and London. Although, after all, the Russians deal with problems similar to the problems of the rest of the Europeans: freedom, the immortality of the soul…”.
“But, at the same time, added the poet- they are heirs of Byzantium!; and they have the right to another tone and another point of view. And therein lies its strength. Its weakness is that, if you speak that other language, it means that you are skeptical about the good and better things that Europe has: individual freedom, respect for justice, the fact that you cannot deport people massively… And here is the curse of Russian culture: that there is an abyss between culture as the domain of the imagination and culture as the sphere where political life takes place”.
Of the US, where Zagajewski lived and worked for a good part of the year at the time, “it is such a complex country,” he said, “that talking about it is more difficult than talking about any other country. I deeply admire the American university; and this because he combines the European idea of ??the university with American pragmatism. In Chicago he never failed to see students with Plato books. Plato is still at the base of the formation. On the other hand, it is noticeable that the US is a much younger country. Europe is a tired continent. You live better in Europe; Life is sweet in Europe. In the US, life is hard, and that’s why you can breathe this feeling of energy there. It is something that can also be seen in the attitude towards the war: to what extent in American politics the use of force is taken into account, that is something fascinating. They are often wrong, because they make big mistakes; but the mere fact that Homer’s ideals (such as, for example, the defense of the homeland) are still so present there, makes having to defend themselves something perfectly possible for them, something assumed”.
“So, then -he concluded-, the United States is, on the one hand, those refined university campuses and, on the other, there is that rapacious country, ready to fight; although, as I have said, he is often wrong…”
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. Then, at dinner, Zagajewski’s wife, Maria, enlivened the evening with an endless cascade of anecdotes, each more hilarious: from her stage as an actress, going through the complete repertoire of Polish complexes (Maria is a psychiatrist ), to her successes and failures as a businesswoman in Paris. Maria did not stop talking, while Adam laughed heartily; he raised his glass, to the health of who was not known, at what, and he laughed, Adam laughed… And there another Zagajewski revealed himself: he was no longer the shy, circumspect, eternally reflective intellectual, but a jovial and amusing character, almost Dionysian. And that was also “true life.”
Adam Zagajewski Verdadera screw
Cliff
trad. by Xavier Farré Vidal 80 pages 12 euros
