“True Life” in the Country of the Imagination
By Rochelle Goldstein
Internationally acclaimed and deeply admired poet and essayist Adam Zagajewski was rooted and firmly identified with post war Poland, a direct descendent of literary giants Wistlawa Szymborska, Czeslaw Milosz, and Zbigniew Herbert, yet he lived in exile for many years and felt emotionally homeless. Deeply philosophical and sensual at the same time, Zagajewski walked the tightrope between detachment and ecstatic lyricism, his poems journeying through the ordinary and the extraordinary landscapes of the late 20th century.
Through eight collections of poetry, a memoir and two collections of essays, he wrote with a quiet lyricism and an unwavering moral clarity. He viscerally understood that because we live in the world, we are always in the crosshairs of history even if we choose to ignore it. No doubt, a lesson learned from his family’s upheaval at the end of World War II.
“The Zeitgeist chisels our thoughts and mocks our dreams,” he said in his memoir, Another Beauty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). “The space we inhabit isn’t neutral, it shapes our existence.”
The speaker in many of Zagajewski’s poems is an observer, a wanderer, a walker, a restless spirit, “a soldier in an unseen war” as he expresses it in his poem “Lindens” in World Without End. The word “soldier” seems at odds with this humane, contemplative writer. But the serene surfaces of a Zagajewski poem are deceptive: gentle, intensely metaphorical–you are lulled by the aesthetics of his language, and don’t even realize you have been pulled into a dark undertow and made to confront it. Throughout his work, the ecstasy of the everyday sublime is tempered by his unflinching steely-eyed gaze that has over the years looked at the Holocaust and state-sponsored violence, dislocation, exile, and brutality. Nobel-prize-winning poet Derek Walcott, said of his poems, “They enter and possess you quietly…His is the quiet voice at the corner of the immense devastations of an obscene century.”
Clare Cavanagh’s English translation of True Life (Farrar Straus and Giroux), gives us the last poetry collection Zagajewski wrote before passing away in March 2022; it is a spare, powerful, and sometimes wryly funny volume that distills concerns of earlier work, and even answers some of them, but is darker, stripped to its essence. Where in earlier work there had been consolations of sudden beauty–moments that are redemptive, a way out of darkness–in this volume there are fewer reprieves, only warning. Embedded in peaceful panoramas are reminders of human suffering, and the apathy and moral confusion that allowed these things to happen. As there are no barriers in his poetry between the past and the present, these crimes seem to exist in present-day landscapes like characters waiting in the wings.
“Music was created for the homeless because of all the arts, it is least connected with place,” Zagajewski said. The acclaimed poet was not homeless, but identified himself that way. Yet place, and its opposite–displacement–shaped his life and was incredibly important to his work. Contradiction was inherent in the way he saw poetry itself. In his micro essay “Ecstasy and Irony” from Two Cities, he writes: “Two contradictory elements meet in poetry….Ecstasy [which] is ready to accept the entire world; [and] irony, following in the footsteps of thought, doubts everything…Irony knows the world is tragic and sad.”
Yet his poems are most like music in that impossible way different strands weave together to make what was intractable, fluid. Feeling and thought are one. And music happens in the moment; it exists and is gone.
His eye is a camera’s eye; Zagajewski was once a photographer himself. In many poems, he surveys scenes–urban, pastoral–and situates the reader in concrete details of life, eschews abstraction in favor of a kind of philosophical questioning for which there are no answers. These landscapes are screens on which he projects questions he is dealing with. “Landscapes enter our innermost being,” Zagajewski writes in his memoir, Another Beauty (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). “[T]hey leave traces not just on our retinas, but on the deepest strata of our personalities.”
There are different landscapes in True Life. “The East,” opens in the Polish town of Zamosc, a placid place of Renaissance buildings, with a scene of pastoral abundance—sunflowers, growing beans, “[t]he idyll of deep gardens, roosters crow.” Occupied by the Nazis, 8,000 people were slaughtered there. The speaker pans from the mallows that bloom near the home of a Polish poet, Bratslaw Lesmain, to Belzec, the extermination camp built to accomplish the slaughter of all the Polish Jews. These elements represent the twin “poles of the globe” as Zagajewski says in his memoir--poetry and terror. After this wide angle view of the landscape, the poet’s restless eye focuses on a photo of “pretty Jewish girls” (presumably part of a memorial) who are depicted “gazing for years at the camera as if it was salvation/but there was and will be no salvation,/only the camera, there is and will be/ the lens with its azure sheen/like alcohol set flaming in a glass.” The poem ends with an almost apocalyptic vision of the future. “This is the east without the sun/this is the sun without summer/it’s not far now/to final places, to origins, the edge/to black earth, to the aria with no end.” Poetry and terror are so interwoven, it is impossible to extricate one without disturbing the other. They run into each other, borderless and pervasive, like music, or scent.
Throughout the force field of True Life, various personages from the past-- philosophers, poets, musicians, politicians and butchers--- make appearances. Hans Frank, the Nazi known as the butcher of Poland, meets with physicist Werner Heisenberg, the father of quantum mechanics, a friend of the family; Basho, so involved in an upcoming journey he abandons a child by the wayside, saying that it is “Heaven’s will.” Everywhere, people betray themselves and others.
In “The Twentieth Century in Retirement” that starts off True Life, Zagajewski’s persona is Tolstoy who wanders through a revue of the century’s devastation, starting in Picardy, the scene of World War I battles, to “the town /where Bruno Schulz died/…[he] sits on a riverbank//above the Vistula’s dim water,/a meadow scented with warm/dandelions, burdocks, and memory.//He doesn’t speak, rarely smiles./Doctors warn him/to avoid emotion.//He says: I’ve learned one thing/There is only mercy---/for people. Animals, trees, and paintings.//Only mercy---/always too late.”
Juxtaposing barbarism with the vulnerability of a speaker trying to, but being unable to, avoid emotion makes the vast cold century very intimate and all the more terrifying. It intensifies our despair that mercy and forgiveness–our only salvation-- always comes too late, a comment about the past that can seem prophetic.
Bruno Schulz, considered to be one of the finest prose stylists of the 20th century, is alluded to a second time in True Life In “Drohobycz”, the town where he was shot. It is a spare poem, like a piece of falling ash. “But in some small towns, the shadows are more real/than things//Evening also arrives there /Old houses calmly wait/Darkness comes next//See how gently.”
In interviews, Zagajewski talked about the irony of being born on the summer solstice, June 21, 1945, the longest day of the year, at that brief triumph of light over darkness. For his parents the joy of his birth was mixed with the grief of having to leave Lvov (then Poland, now Ukraine), a city where their forebears had lived for generations. Rather than being incorporated into the Soviet Union, they relocated to Silesia, a small town of Gliwice–an industrial, bland backwater radically different from the cobblestoned and fabled Lvov his parents carried with them in memory.
In September 1939, the Nazis invaded Lvov, then within the territory of Poland; seventeen days later the Soviet Union came in. At the end of 1941, the Soviet occupation ended and another Nazi occupation began. As a result of the conference at Yalta, at the end of World War II, the territory was given to the Russians. As Europe lay in ruin, instead of enjoying peace, they were forced to leave. They moved to escape the Russians but were cornered by Soviet rule anyway.
Displacement and exile are strong, deep themes throughout his oeuvre. Perhaps this is why he called identity, “a miracle”, adding that “it is one of our very few weapons against time.” In his memoir, Zagajewski says, “I lost two homelands as a child. I lost the city where I was born, the city where countless generations of my family had lived before my birth. Soviet-style rule meant I forfeited natural access to a general, self-evident truth. It took me many years to return to life’s main current, to accept once more the simplest certainties.” He found reprieve from this in language, saying, “I lost a real city but I sought a city of the imagination.”
Throughout his work, the city of Lvov is a haunting, ghostly presence. In his memoir he confesses, “I came to Krakow to study…but something else drew me as well. I was propelled half-consciously by the need to recover my city, the city that had---and I knew it---been lost forever. But, of course, we always seek what’s gone for good.”
Everywhere in his work the timbre of loss vibrates like a long deep cello note, a paean to the fleeting to be sure, but also to this essential dislocation from place. This elegiac strain is sounded in earlier works, such as “To Go to Lvov” from the collection Tremor, the first of his collections to be translated into English and spans to “Rain in Lvov” in his last work, True Life. The differences between them is telling. The earlier Lvov poem, written in the 1990s when he was in exile in Paris, is a nostalgic, deeply realized fantasy of a place that no longer exists. His father used to copy out this poem and give it to people; it became a kind of exile’s mourning song. But the later poem, Rain in Lvov, has none of the sweep towards the mythic. It is a landscape of rain where everything is being deluged, the Armenian Cathedral and the High Castle, Kaiserworld and the synagogue, the Scottish Café and Ostap Ortwin, “a gallant man” shot on the street by the gestapo. “Civilization has five syllables//Pain---only one.” This city, “which sat on seven hills like Rome/… grew flat and small.//Tram wheels screeched/on their tight tracks./And all of us wept/bypassers and guests/victors and vanquished.”
Lvov, now Lviv in Ukraine, is still fighting for its independence. Zagajewski died a year before the Russian invasion but “November” in True Life seems almost prescient. You can feel his weariness and apprehension over the way history was repeating itself: “You walk along a street that doesn’t end/and on both sides/minor battles are waged/negotiations proceed//Drab November a day lost in thought//A fight in a dark alley/and an accordionist from Ukraine/who plays the toccata and fugue//A hundred years pass since the first/war’s conclusion/We await the second/…”
The past is like a lost language you need to reclaim. In “Farewell to Zbigniew Herbert” (Without End), Zagajewski praises his fellow Polish poet who was also born in Lvov, although a generation before Zagajewski, for “your quest for places where the glaciers/of the past melt, baring forms/.” His sensitivity to history was whetted by growing up in the Communist system that “declared war on history,” adding, “Whoever has not lived through something like this cannot know the incredible contempt with which Communism treated the past…”
When he was a college student at Jagiellonian University in Krakow in the 1970s, he protested against Soviet state policies and was a leading member of Nowa Fala, a group of poets active in resisting the Communist takeover, especially the bastardization of their language with state-speak euphemisms. This distortion, Zagajewski argued, made it impossible for people to reflect their actual reality. There can be no shared sense of reality without clarity of the language.
Throughout his writing, he refers to “my city” as sometimes referring to Lvov, sometimes Krakow, an indication of his deep yearning for place and for being placed geographically and emotionally. Despite his deep roots, Zagajewski felt as if he were in continual exile. In his poem “Nowhere” (Asymmetry), the speaker confesses that he feels “nowhere,” a word repeated five times in the poem. “It was a day nowhere…//a day between two continents; lost, I walked the streets//I belonged nowhere,…//…the cashier in a grocery store, nowhere…/couldn’t place my accent and asked “Where are you from?”/but I’d forgotten.”
He even described himself in his essay “Two Cities” (University of Georgia Press) as being homeless, explaining, “If people are divided into the settled, the emigrants, and the homeless, then I certainly belong to the third category. “
Landscapes hold our history like a palimpsest of our cultural and historical selves. Most Americans were introduced to Zagajewski when his poem of radical forgiveness and acceptance, “Praise the Mutilated World” was printed by the New Yorker right after 9/11. In an interview, he related that the poem came to him through a memory of a hike he took with his father decades before when they trekked through an Ukrainian valley and came across an abandoned village. The inhabitants had to flee, perhaps in the same way the Zagajewskis did. Nature had begun to take over and reclaim the structures that were half standing and half being consumed by the earth. The scene was incredibly beautiful, he said yet filled with the memory of pain. For an artist whose need for place is strong–whose poems are grounded in the solid material world–it is interesting that the real impetus is transport, transcendence; to be free of the earthly if just for a moment of pure radiance. Transport not by ignoring the charnel house but transport in spite of the ugliness and cruelty.
In earlier works, Zagajewski created a series of self portraits that were comical and reflective. The poet becomes part of the landscapes he describes. In this final volume, facing his own mortality, the tone is elegiac, but here, too, he describes the moment as landscape. In “Self Portrait with Drip,” his hospital surroundings is a nature scene. “The antibiotic is transparent/ as spring water and never hurries. /Outside the window I see an old ash tree/it spreads its young leaves/ enjoys the air/and the May sun and the breeze.”
The title of this new work, True Life, is puzzling to me. Somewhat declarative from a poet not given to declarations, it’s a title that carries with it the expectation of definition. An epigraph by the French philosopher, Edward Levinas helps explain its enigma: “The true life is absent. But we are in the world.” The word “but” conveys a hinge of meaning. There is no true life, no ideal, no idea of a life, just the world itself with its incredible cruelty and ecstasy.
In the poem Brief Moments, the poet asks a series of questions that touch on the central question of True Life. Where is true life? “The brief moments/ that happen so seldom----/Is this really life? //The rare days// when brightness returns /Is this really life?/…/.The few hours/when love prevails---/Is this really life?” The poem ends with the same questions it began with, coming to no conclusion.
