Adam Zagajewski: The Wry Metaphysician

Hudson Review, The, Spring 2005 by Lewis, Tess

Adam Zagajewski: The Wry Metaphysician

THE POET ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI WAS EXILED TWICE, once physically and once metaphysically. His role as dissident in 1970s pre-Solidarity Poland made life increasingly difficult. Although Zagajewski was never imprisoned, he felt it necessary to leave his homeland for France and the United States not long after the imposition of martial law in 1981. And yet, it is his family's forced move from Lvov to the provincial Silesian town of Gliwice shortly after his birth in 1945 that reverberates through his work as a banishment from Eden.

Zagajewski has written of Lvov, that "mythical eastern city," often and affectingly in the four books of poetry and four collections of his essays' that have been translated into English. His poem, "To Go to Lvov," opens with the call of his longing:

To go to Lvov. Which station

for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew

gleams on a suitcase, when express

trains and bullet trains are being born. To leave

in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September

or in March. But only if Lvov exists,

if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just

in my new passport.

But this Lvov is not to be found on any map. It is a construct of imagination, nostalgia, and aesthetic sensibility.

Zagajewski differs from other lovers of invisible cities-Proust and Illiers-Combray, C. P. Cavafy and André Aciman each with his own Alexandria, Italo Calvino's reflections of Venice, even Bruno Schulz and his magical Drohobycz-in that he did not live in his fabled city. It is a realm of the imagination, fashioned from details embellished by the memories of an older generation. In his essay "Two Cities," he explains

I spent my childhood in an ugly industrial city: I was brought there when I was barely four months old, and then for many years afterward I was told about the extraordinarily beautiful city (Lvov) that my family had to leave.

The older generations made as few concessions to the drab postwar reality as possible. They "carried their pasts around like moth balls," addressing each other by obsolete titles, Mr. Councilman, Mr. Editor, Mr. President, Mrs. Wife-of-Doctor So-and-So. A downstairs neighbor, filled with hatred and despair by Soviet-style rule, refused to leave his apartment or to change out of his pajamas, choosing instead to remain ensconced in dreams of his former city. Even the somewhat more adaptable elderly sooner or later returned to their beloved past. Zagajewski tells of accompanying his grandfather on walks after the old man's memory had begun to deteriorate. "I was a sober boy with a memory as small as a hazelnut, and I was absolutely certain that in walking the streets of Gliwice, among Prussian secessionist tenements decorated with heavy granite caryatids, I was really where I was. My grandfather, however, despite his walking right next to me, was in Lvov."

A Lvovian aura surrounded the few objects that had survived the deportation. These were, of course, whatever valuables could be carried, but also family keepsakes of purely sentimental value. These, for Zagajewski, were aristocratic objects and even had their own scent. He could discern them with his eyes closed. More mundane things fell into two categories, the bourgeois and the socialist. The first were the utilitarian things left behind by the displaced Germans: appliances, sewing machines, bicycles, and tools, not to mention apartments. The latter were the shoddy goods produced by "the incompetent postwar Polish People's Republic."

In Gliwice, not even nature could measure up to the paragons left behind. When, as a boy, Zagajewski exulted in the emerald green of flawless spring leaves, his elders flaired treachery. Lvov leaves, after all, were peerless, "eternal, eternally green and eternally alive, indestructible and perfect, they moved as lightly and gracefully as dolphin fins. Their only flaw was their absence, and even their nonexistence." But he persisted in taking seriously things others viewed with disdain. In fact, Zagajewski's realization that flashes of beauty and instances of rapture could be found in his dismal surroundings if one simply knew how to look offered him his first intimations of a poetic calling. As an adolescent, he would be astounded to find that great writers confirmed the existence of this spiritual world (that magical Lvov!) hovering above or behind or within "trivial, empirical reality."

This domain of the imagination is accessible only briefly and by chance. The central force of Zagajewski's poetry arises from such moments of illumination set against the awareness of their transience. In the short poem "Moment," the qualities of illumination-clarity, definitiveness, form-are as salient as their brevity.

Clear moments are so short.

There is much more darkness. More

ocean than terra firma. More

shadow than form.

A moment of illumination can also reveal unsuspected incongruities as in the conclusion of "Ode to Plurality."

To live, if only to live longer,

Giving oneself perhaps to the power