R.I.P. Adam Zagajewski

One of the world’s great contemporary poets, Adam Zagajewski, died this week at the age of 75.

I’ve been reading his poetry, his essays, for decades. There’s a weight to his work, a heaviness. In his obituary in The New York Times, the paper called him “Poet of the Past’s Presence” which is quite a lovely and very apt way to describe so much of his work.

Born in Love, which at the time was part of Poland, and after World War II when the borders of Europe were redrawn, the city became a part of Ukraine, and the family moved to Poland. He was a dissident poet and with another poet wrote a manifesto, a cal to arms in which they encouraged their contemporaries to avoid allegory and embrace realism and “speak the truth you serve.” His work was banned in the 1970s by the government, and he eventually went into exile in Paris. As Zagajewski would later say “I lost two homelands, but I sought a third: a space for the imagination.”

I’ve always been moved by what Robert Pinsky wrote about Zagajewski years ago, and I’m not always a fan of Pinsky but in this case I can find no fault with his words when he described the poems as “about the presence of the past in ordinary life: history not as chronicle of the dead, or an anima to be illuminated by some doctrine, but as an immense, sometimes subtle force inhering in what people see and feel every day—and in the ways we see and feel.”

His poem Try to Praise the Mutilated World was written in early 2001 but was published in The New Yorker afterwards (translated by the great Clare Cavanagh) and the reason was that he was able to do what poetry can do so well. What great poets are capable of doing.

I still remember some of his lines from Reading Milosz, Mysticism for Beginners, and especially To Go to Lvov, which is a poem that struck me just now as powerfully moving as it did years ago.

I will also admit to being sad that he never received the Nobel Prize. Not simply because his work stands alongside the work of Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, two other Novel laureates whose work I think Zagajewski can stand alongside. Of course he had a long list of awards and prizes ranging from the Neustadt International Prize to the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, recognition by Poland and Germany and France. In the end, no one will remember what we won or didn’t. Those lines, though, I believe will echo forward and be read by many who are not yet born.