#zagajewski

[dostoyevsky-official]

Adam Zagajewski, Tremor, trans. Renata Gorczynski

[flakopancho]

[theinwardlight]

The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski passed away yesterday, at the age of 75. This is a fragment from one of my favourites of his. It reminds me of a quotation from Elias Hicks (1748–1830):

The fulness of the godhead dwelt in every blade of grass.

Perhaps even, or even especially, in the blades trampled on, the dying or dried up, the uncared for, and the just remembered.

[elizabethanism]

I didn't realize that a majority of people belonged to domain of profound meaning not through their knowledge, but through their lives, through their radiant living substance, and that's why it is dumb to accuse them of ignorance. I should have looked with tenderness

-Zagajewski

[lapeaudelamemoire]

My father never went back to Lvov either. To "visit" the place where an unhealed wound gaped would be like visiting purgatory, like visiting volcanoes (their interiors), like setting up camp on the edge of a crater spewing flames. The word visit, so frivolous, lighthearted, swift as a windshield wiper on a rainy day, presupposes a speedy return. There and back, a picnic, a walk, and then home again, maybe in time for the evening news. But if what you're visiting is home, then what do you call it? Making a pilgrimage to your own memory, to something that doesn't exist—is that a visit?

Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration, tr. Clare Cavanagh

[lapeaudelamemoire]

She didn't need praise for the city she'd been missing for sixty years; she'd never gone back, of course, not even when things got easier, when the borders suddenly started to shrink like a cheap dress after washing.

Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration, tr. Clare Cavanagh

[lapeaudelamemoire]

Such estates vanished after the war, and the eastern borderlands lived on only in memory, replaced by new borderlands to the west.

Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration, tr. Clare Cavanagh

[lapeaudelamemoire]

While awaiting the end of the partitions, Poland danced, played games, flirted, read, played the piano, and, upon occasion, conspired against the invaders.

Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration, tr. Clare Cavanagh