 | Zeszyty Literackie
Warsaw 2007
210 × 135
145 pages
paperback
ISBN: 978-83-60046-85-2
Translation rights: Adam Zagajewski |
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Adam ZagajewskiThe Poet Talks to the Philosopher
Excerpt
Adam Zagajewski’s new set of short essays is on the nature of writing, on what links literature with philosophy and history, about himself and others, about Miłosz and Herbert, Gombrowicz and Cioran, Marai and Kertesz. The title, "The Poet Talks to the Philosopher", is taken from a text about the correspondence of Zbigniew Herbert and Henryk Elzenberg. “It is a very good title for the whole book,” writes one delighted reviewer, “because an atmosphere of conversation pervades all the articles in it. They are reports on what Zagajewski has read and considered, a record of what has surprised him or set him thinking. The theme of this conversation is thoughts about writing, mainly about poetry.” Zagajewski is curious about poetry which, “in spite of catastrophes, has recorded, and by doing so has also sustained, co-created and co-produced the continuity of our spiritual life – that unremitting contemplation we have inherited from past generations, culminating in the experience of beauty and evil, time and good, transcendence or, for others, nothingness, meditation being something like an everlasting emergency department without which mankind as we know it would be bound to suffer serious injury.”
“I don’t know what the place that Adam Zagajewski will finally occupy in Polish culture will be called,” writes Irena Grudzińska-Gross. “He doesn’t fit any formula, though he is a poet and writer from the very centre of Polish and European literary tradition. Multilingual, erudite, in his poems he writes about music and philosophy, about other poets, architecture and art. Yet it is not classical poetry, removed from the modern day; on the contrary, it is relevant to everyday life, and people turn to it at moments of crisis. It brings comfort, as Susan Sontag said of this poetry, though it is not consolatory verse. Zagajewski the poet has no anger or obsession in him, yet he is determined and resolute. Reading him is not a fight, but a sort of conversation that becomes addictive.”
Adam Zagajewski (born 1945) is a poet, prose writer and essayist. He has won many prestigious literary awards and his work has been translated into many languages. Zagajewski’s regular poetic themes include: constant questioning of the biographical and existential roles of the hero of lyrical verse and praise for life viewed in “its variability, in its undulation, in its ambiguity”, submersion in the world of European culture and contemplation of its inheritance.
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