Cities Are Free More Than Men Are

At one time considered among the leading poets of the Polish New Wave "Generation of ‘68", and now regarded as one of the most acclaimed and translated contemporary authors in the world, Adam Zagajewski visited Serbia this spring to promote a book of poems recently translated into Serbian.

By Vanja Savić
Photo by Milan Melka

The Serbian translation of a book of poems, The Antennas, by poet and essayist Adam Zagajewski, published by Arhipelag and translated by Biserka Rajčić, brought Zagajewski to Belgrade this spring for a fiveday visit. During his brief but much appreciated stay, he met with writers and literature fans, the Serbian PEN Centre, the Serbian Literary Society and the Belgrade Cultural Centre.

A long-time candidate for the Nobel Prize, Zagajewski has won the highest Polish and European literary awards and his essays and poems are published in prominent magazines and newspapers worldwide.

The President of the Serbian PEN Center, Vida Ognjenovicć, introduced Zagajewski to Belgrade journalists as one of the greatest world poets.

"His visit will give a boost to the literary life of this city and this country", said Ms. Vida Ognjenović, before reciting Zagajewski’s poem Absolute Pitch which, she said, she learned by heart after the first reading.

Zagajewski today lectures on creative writing at the University of Houston and is the co-publisher of the Parisian Literary Review. The 63-year old gentleman, known from the period of Poland’s legendary resistance during the 1980s, lives and works on a trajectory that runs Paris - New York - Houston. The last of these cities, located in the state of Texas, is where he graduated, and later taught philosophy and psychology. During his sojourn in Serbia, Zagajewski also visited Novi Sad and Sremski Karlovci.

- Mister Zagajewski, you are in Belgrade for the first time. What can you say about your poetic impressions?

- I came here out of curiosity. As I arrived, I thought about the paradox of our encounter, our meaning writers from Central Europe. I hadn’t met writers from Belgrade either here or in Poland, but I have them in other cities in the West. In Paris I met Danilo Kiš, whom I admired as a writer and loved as a person. Though we meet in other parts of the world, we all actually write about our countries. I live travelling in the West and writing about this here. If you read Danilo Kiš, Ivo Andrić or some new Hungarian writers, you feel the painful history of this region, which seems to believe in art more than other parts of Europe do. However, this doesn’t help much in terms of daily life, and belief in art hasn’t transferred into the social context. Still, upon this first encounter, I feel that Belgrade is an open city. The streets in the centre of Belgrade reminded me of the streets in Madrid. One can feel the pulse of a normal life here, without isolation, which is the worst thing that can happen.

- In one of your poems, you say that "cities are free, far more than men are". Do you think that this verse is yours only, or has it become something more, part of the poem of the same name that travels freely around the world?

- It is difficult for me to recall this line exactly because I expressed a subconscious problem with this verse. In writing this poem, I was thinking about the great drama of my life and the loss of my native city of Lwów. I have only written a few poems about this city, but to me they were all very important. They are neither nostalgic nor connected with politics. Poland has, until recently, been an agricultural country and it seems that I express the process of urbanisation. Each of us must have our own personal viewpoint and I create it by expressing love for cities. Because I think that only in them is it possible, in the best way, to create that unique microcosmos that exists in each of us.

- The world and cities have changed compared with the period when you were part of the New Wave and subsequently became a "traveler who doesn’t travel".

- I am a traveller who doesn’t like travelling. My ideal is not to travel anywhere. However, life has, through a strange series of events, forced me to live in cities in France, America … in Berlin. The most important thing is that during these travels I discovered something essential; expressions of universality and a certain commonality of all human destinies.

- What, in your opinion, makes poetry and poets in the 21^st century contemporary, and what is their position?

- The great European poets are trying to understand existence, and because of that, they search for some other attractive themes and end up abandoning the critical attitude so characteristic of poets in the 1970s. Each of us, even if not a Christian, longs for salvation of the soul. The soul is saved by preserving that which is personal, and it is lost by watching TV channels everyday. Poetry is today guided more by fashion and literature, and it is translated into other languages not because of its value, but because of its popularity. That’s why even Russia, after Brodsky, has not given a great poet. The same is true of France, where a great crisis of poetry is evident. On the other side, Ireland has been giving excellent poetry to the world.

- The Internet and poetry?

- I have nothing against the Internet. It helps me a lot in my work and if I am writing an essay and look for a quotation, I find it on the Internet. However, it is not a book. It has no covers, not the aureole of a book on whose pages you can underline the parts of texts you like. The only thing I consider bad is to reduce people exclusively to the Internet, without the chance for further reading of books.

- Hence poetry still lives?

- While on guest tours, I often have some exciting meetings. At an American university, a young beautiful girl approached me and told me that one of my poems had saved her life. I cannot believe her story absolutely, but perhaps that encounter hides a sense of poetry that is bigger than we are. In my travels I discover that there are wonderful readers in the world. Though they are a small circle of people, they are the salt of the society in which they live.

Bibliography of Adam Zagajewski: books of poetry, Communiqué (1972), Meat Shops (1975), Letter (1982), An Ode to Multiplicity (1983), Travelling to Lwow (1985), Canvas (1990), The Fiery Land (1994), Desire (1999) and The Antennas (2005); novels, Warm and Cold (1975), Absolute Pitch (1982), The Thin Line (1983); autobiographic prose, Another Beauty (2000) and the books of essays, Solidarity and Solitude (1990), Two Cities (1995), The New Little Larousse (1991), In Defense of Passion (2002)