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Surprised by Joy

In the obituaries that appeared in 2021 for the Polish writer Adam Zagajewski, his prose, I was saddened to see, hardly got a mention. I suppose this is common with poets: their poetry is seen as the real work, and everything else is a sideline, left-handed writing. This is, to be fair, often the case. But Zagajewski was genuinely ambidextrous, writing just as many books of prose as poetry, and just as seriously. It was essentially the same work, only in a different form.

Of his five prose books to have been translated into English, the last, Slight Exaggeration, is my favourite. It’s hard to classify: a frag­mentary mix of literary and cultural criticism, aphorisms, Central and Eastern European history, biography and, above all, autobiography – even if mostly oblique autobiography. Whatever it is, though, it’s also the kind of book that could do with an introduction.

It begins, misleadingly, like a rarefied aesthete’s diary. In the first entry, Zagajewski remembers the previous night’s Shostakovich con­cert; the third begins, ‘I’m reading about Gottfried Benn in Poetry magazine’, and the fourth, ‘I’ve been reading Karl Corino’s thick biography of Robert Musil’. It’s not exactly auspicious, and he goes on like this for a little while longer, referring to almost two dozen writers or composers in the first ten pages alone. Fortunately, this is just throat-clearing: the book hasn’t yet found its raison d’être. It’s when he alights on memories of a recent trip to Lviv, his birthplace, that Slight Exaggeration opens up. From that point on, what began merely as fleshed-out notes of concerts attended and books read becomes instead a work of profound retrospection, a wise and beau­tiful final accounting of what is, to my mind, a truly exemplary life.

For Zagajewski, Lviv will always be Lvov. It’s a city with a compli­cated, unfortunate history – in the twentieth century alone, it changed han

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In the obituaries that appeared in 2021 for the Polish writer Adam Zagajewski, his prose, I was saddened to see, hardly got a mention. I suppose this is common with poets: their poetry is seen as the real work, and everything else is a sideline, left-handed writing. This is, to be fair, often the case. But Zagajewski was genuinely ambidextrous, writing just as many books of prose as poetry, and just as seriously. It was essentially the same work, only in a different form.

Of his five prose books to have been translated into English, the last, Slight Exaggeration, is my favourite. It’s hard to classify: a frag­mentary mix of literary and cultural criticism, aphorisms, Central and Eastern European history, biography and, above all, autobiography – even if mostly oblique autobiography. Whatever it is, though, it’s also the kind of book that could do with an introduction. It begins, misleadingly, like a rarefied aesthete’s diary. In the first entry, Zagajewski remembers the previous night’s Shostakovich con­cert; the third begins, ‘I’m reading about Gottfried Benn in Poetry magazine’, and the fourth, ‘I’ve been reading Karl Corino’s thick biography of Robert Musil’. It’s not exactly auspicious, and he goes on like this for a little while longer, referring to almost two dozen writers or composers in the first ten pages alone. Fortunately, this is just throat-clearing: the book hasn’t yet found its raison d’être. It’s when he alights on memories of a recent trip to Lviv, his birthplace, that Slight Exaggeration opens up. From that point on, what began merely as fleshed-out notes of concerts attended and books read becomes instead a work of profound retrospection, a wise and beau­tiful final accounting of what is, to my mind, a truly exemplary life. For Zagajewski, Lviv will always be Lvov. It’s a city with a compli­cated, unfortunate history – in the twentieth century alone, it changed hands five times. Now, it’s Ukrainian, but at the time of Zagajewski’s birth in 1945 it belonged to Poland. When he was only a few months old, though, it was given to the Soviet Union as part of the post-war reorganization of Europe, and most of the city’s Polish population were expelled. Zagajewski and his family ended up in the drab industrial town of Gliwice in western Poland – a world away from the ancient splendour of Lvov. As a result he never had a chance to know his birthplace other than as a tourist, but it was central to his work. Much of Slight Exaggeration reads, in fact, like a prose continuation of ‘To Go to Lvov’, the monumental opening poem of his first English-language collection, written over three decades earlier. In this elegy he charts the city’s transformation from ancestral homeland into a place of imagination: the lost paradise in which his parents, his grandparents and many of the other exiles lived in their minds: ‘. . . go to Lvov’, it ends, ‘after all/ it exists, quiet and pure as/ a peach. It is everywhere.’ In Slight Exaggeration, he continues to be fascinated by the city’s hold on his family, though now he sees through and around the myth. ‘I think about Aunt Ania,’ he writes early on, ‘who never made peace with her new surroundings and even now, at ninety-some­thing, remains a sceptical immigrant in her new town (new, some sixty years later!) . . . About my grandfather, how in his last years he . . . thought that by some miracle he’d gone back to his Lvov’. And about his father, for whom the city becomes a literal heaven: ‘After he’d already started to lose his memory, he once told Mrs L, who looked after him, “You know, I’ll be seeing my wife soon, I’m going to Lvov.” My mother was no longer living.’ Zagajewski’s own feelings are never quite settled. He occasionally tries to sound dispassionate, aloof: ‘I didn’t suffer, I was an observer, not an emigrant.’ And when his friends give him presents linked to the city – ‘old engravings, maps, yet another book on our lost para­dise’ – he’d like to ‘set them straight, to explain that such things don’t interest me’. And yet such things do interest him, and he does suffer: ‘It’s easy to satirize the perfect idyll that exiles find years later in their vanished homeland,’ he writes later, ‘but I never think of that lost city without pain. It pains me to know that I never lived there, the great vacuum of what never was, the childhood that should have been and wasn’t . . . the loves I didn’t meet, the familiarity with stones and trees, with streets I’ll never know.’ But he also uses the city’s symbolic power for his own ends, for­mulating a theory of suffering that is full of the true poet’s self-serving naïvety. The displaced had lost much, he writes, but ‘by way of the turbulence, the mystery they bore within them’, they became artists. Unlike those ‘who’d never been deported, who’d never had to aban­don family graves, family homes, native landscapes’, the displaced ‘carry secrets, they bear a loss, an abyss, a longing within them . . . their lives contain great stockpiles of meaning’. And being born among them, he believes, marked him for life: ‘I might never have taken up writing if not for [those] unhappy exiles.’ Later, he too became an exile. In the 1970s, as a vocal critic of Poland’s communist government, his books were banned and he struggled to make a living. So in 1982, he and his partner, the actress Maja Wodecka, fled to Paris, where he lived for the next twenty years. Thus began a period of semi-itinerancy. Paris was never quite home: he was often away, at conferences, giving readings or lecturing. After the first English-language edition of his poems was published in 1985, he accepted an invitation to teach one semester a year at the University of Houston. For almost two decades he kept this up, each year leav­ing Paris in the winter and returning four months later. In the fragments he gives us in Slight Exaggeration – reports not only from Paris and Houston, but also Krakow (where he returned to live in 2002), Chicago (where he taught after leaving Houston), Berlin, Bologna, Venice, Dresden and Athens, among others – he bears witness to a life that, after the turbulence and strife of its first half, has settled into a kind of cosmopolitan idyll. But its allure has less to do with the places themselves than with the spirit Zagajewski brings to them. His partly inherited sense of displacement – what he calls his homelessness – gives him a kind of innocent orientation to his surroundings, lends a beautiful novelty to everything he sees. Wherever he is, he remains always the unjaded non-native, ‘intoxicated with the world’, as Miłosz said of his poetry. ‘I also liked the smell of the Berlin metro,’ he writes in one typical digression,
which remains unchanged to this very day; I got to know other subways later, in London, Barcelona, Rome and other metrop­olises, but I’ve never encountered the precise, sober smell of the Berlin metro – like brown coal . . . a raw aroma, as if Germanic geological strata had been unearthed when the metro was con­structed. Few thought to delight in this subterranean world – for most people, after all, it was chiefly a key component in so- called urban transportation . . . they didn’t notice their extra-ordinary location, a place demanding veneration, a moment of reflection, meditation.
He is a great praiser, and he tries to take as his credo a line of Paul Claudel’s: ‘He who admires is never wrong.’ In Slight Exaggeration he lovingly returns again and again to his pantheon of composers, artists and, above all, writers – Weil, Cioran, Czapski, Proust, Benn, Rilke, Miłosz, Montale, Elzenberg, Mandelstam – most of whom have been a presence in his work for decades. At this stage in his life, he is espe­cially fond of ‘those little books, portable volumes holding poems, aphorisms, observations, brief essays, diarists’ notes’ by some of the above, which serve as splendid companions on long strolls. ‘Gatherings of great moments’, he calls these prized pocketbooks. A deep vein of spirituality runs through Slight Exaggeration. I can’t think of another serious contemporary writer as liberal with the use of the word ‘soul’, for example. And those ‘great moments’, rather than being of merely aesthetic import, have for Zagajewski a signifi­cance that borders on the holy: ‘Great moments,’ he writes, ‘instants of elation, of short-lived certainty, light, faith . . . these moments form the base, the foundation of everything.’ Still, his spirituality almost always remains grounded in the here-and-now. At one point he tries to go further: ‘The author believes in the existence of a higher world,’ he writes, in a slightly embarrassed and atypical third-person aside, but it’s quickly undercut. He cannot bring this world into being within his daily life: ‘At most a few pages in his books mark efforts, always failed, always faulty, to attain this higher realm.’ It is, in the end, a spiritual yearning destined to remain earth­bound – but happily. ‘Mysticism for Beginners’, he called one of his best-known poems, and as a label for his beliefs you could do a lot worse. Indeed, in Slight Exaggeration, he returns to this poem – it’s one of his favourites – and the account he gives of its ironic inception seems to encourage this reading. ‘Sometime in the mid-nineties,’ he writes, ‘in May, in a Tuscan village where impossibly swift swallows flitted through narrow streets, we ended up in a crowded café . . . and at the next table I saw a German tourist reading a little book [called] Mysticism for Beginners.’ He found it ‘a little silly, to tell the truth’, this ‘how-to book for spiritual searchers’ – but then, he goes on,
I experienced an epiphany: poetry is mysticism for beginners. That German tourist travelling through Tuscany with his funny little book helped me to realize that poetry differs from religion in essential ways, that poetry stops at a certain moment, stifles its exaltation, doesn’t enter the monastery, it remains in the world, among the swallows and the tourists, among palpable, visible things.
Not just poetry, but the poet, too. There’s a beautifully plain-spoken passage late in the book in which Zagajewski lives out – to an uncanny degree – this very vision. It is, for me, the self-portrait by which he ought to be remembered: a man for whom, finally, the ‘palpable, visible things’ of this world were enough – were more than enough. ‘A moment of happiness, inexplicable, while strolling along the Vistula’, he writes:
It was a warm afternoon and it began to rain. I had an umbrella with me, but I took refuge nonetheless in the gate of a house on Smocza Street . . . near the Church on the Rock, in whose crypt Czesław Miłosz now rests, and I stood there for some time, looking at the poplars and sniffing their branches’ bitter scent, which I like so much and remember from my childhood in Gliwice. I wasn’t in a hurry, I waited for the rain to stop and felt a joy whose only source, so it seems, was that the world existed, it was May, and a new generation of swifts, looking like their precursors’ twins, were whistling shrilly.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 76 © Kristian Doyle 2022


About the contributor

Kristian Doyle is a writer who lives in Liverpool. Prayers, a non-fiction pamphlet, is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books this December.

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