'Between Virgil and Young People Engrossed in Rock'

In a 2009 interview with a publication in Barcelona, Spain, Adam Zagajewski is asked a question about political correctness, euphemisms and other debasements of language. He replies:

“There is the harsher side of existence -- disease and death -- and the loftier reasons for poetry. In all writing, there is a clear tension between the ‘higher’ world, so to speak, and everyday life. The former is part of the world of dreams and ideals, while the latter describes the more terrible or laughable aspects of the human condition. If you keep to one side or the other, you'll be called a hypocrite.”

Poets are not the only ones dealing with such tension. How do we, culture’s civilians, balance ideals, the wisdom we have derived from literature, philosophy and religion, and the growing horror of life in the twenty-first century. We’re privileged in the U.S., relatively safe and prosperous unlike residents of, say, Ukraine or Sudan. We’ve experienced nothing like the Poles who were serially raped by the Germans and Russians. That history is behind Zagajewski’s comment made elsewhere that his friend Zbigniew Herbert’s poems are “like a suitcase upholstered in soft satin; but the suitcase holds instruments of torture.”

Zagajewski’s characteristic tone in poetry and prose is a gently skeptical irony. His style is plain-spoken (at least in translation) but learned and often wryly amusing. Among American readers he is often mistaken for a “nice guy,” a safely inoffensive fellow. He’s seldom strident and is not by nature a dogmatist of any school. He is Roman Catholic down to the chromosome level but never a preacher. Consider this ingenious metaphor from the Barcelona interview:

“An elevated style, which is devoid of a sense of humour and full of indulgence for our ridiculous, cruel and imperfect world, would be similar to the quarries of Carrara in Tuscany, from where all the marble has been extracted and there is only whiteness left."

That’s the danger, coming off as superior, safely above the concerns of mere mortals. Such a tone is not exclusive to left or right. It might be called haughty, snobbish, cold. Zagajewski continues:

“An elevated style comes from a constant conversation between two spheres: the spiritual sphere, the guardians and creators of which are the dead, and on the other hand, that of the eternal present, our path, our unique instant, the box of time that we have to live in. The elevated style acts as an intermediary between the spirits of the past, between Virgil and young people engrossed in rock, who slide around on skateboards on the narrow pavements of western cities. The honest writer must combine the ugliness of life with ‘the beauty it possesses in his work.’”

“Fire” (trans. Renata Gorczynski, Tremor, 1985):

“Probably I am an ordinary middle-class

believer in individual rights, the word

‘freedom’ is simple to me, it doesn’t mean

the freedom of any class in particular.

Politically naive, with an average

education (brief moments of clear vision

are its main nourishment), I remember

the blazing appeal of that fire which parches

the lips of the thirsty crowd and burns

books and chars the skin of cities. I used to sing

those songs and I know how great it is

to run with others; later, by myself,

with the taste of ashes in my mouth, I heard

the lie’s ironic voice and the choir screaming

and when I touched my head I could feel

the arched skull of my country, its hard edge.”

 

The exchange with the Spaniard concludes with the interviewer asking a fairly fatuous question: “To what extent should poets have firm and clear opinions about contemporary problems?” Zagajewski replies: “They must have firm opinions about life and death, but not political opinions: I don't think that tax reform legislation is any business of poets.”

 

Zagajewski would have turned eighty today. He was born in Lwów a month after the conclusion of the war in Europe and died at age seventy-five in Kraków on March 21, 2021.