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Lyrical Ethics: The Poetry of Adam Zagajewski

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Extract

Art is not life and cannot be

A midwife to society.

—W. H. Auden, "New Year Letter," 1940

What is poetry which does not save

Nations or people?

—Czeslaw Milosz, "Dedication," 1945

If dictators still wished

to read our wrathful, rabid,

well-wrought rhymes, then poetry

would surely change the world.

—Adam Zagajewski, "Thorns," 1983

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2000

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References

1. For recent accounts of the lyric under seige, see inter alia: Paul Breslin, “Shabine among the Fishmongers: Derek Walcott and the Suspicion of Essences” (unpublished essay); Edmundson, Mark, Literature against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida: A Defence of Poetry (Cambridge, Eng., 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gregory, Eileen, H. D. and Hellenism: Classical Lines (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), esp. 129–39Google Scholar; Jeffreys, Mark, “Ideologies of Lyric: A Problem of Genre in Contemporary Anglophone Poetics,PMLA 110, no. 2 (March 1995): 196205 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolfson, Susan J., “'Romantic Ideology’ and the Values of Aesthetic Form,” in Levine, George, ed., Aesthetics and Ideology (New Brunswick, 1994), 188–218Google Scholar; Zimmerman, Sarah, Romanticism, Lyricism and History (Albany, 1999).Google Scholar

2. Lentricchia, Frank, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago, 1983), 9495 Google Scholar; Wolfson, “'Romantic Ideology, '” 191–92; Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis, 1983), 21.Google Scholar

3. Morson, Gary Saul and Emerson, Caryl, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, 1990), 322–23Google Scholar; Bakhtin, Mikhail, “Discourse in the Novel,” in Bakhtin, , The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Mikhail (Austin, 1981), 287, 296–98.Google Scholar

4. Fredric Jameson laments the “new totalitarian organization of things, people, and colonies into a single market–system … a new systematization of the world itself, of which the so–called totalitarian regimes are only a symptom. “Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth–Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, 1971), 35–36. Still, this is preferable to the easy analogy that Lentricchia draws between the oppressions of “capitalist and Stalinist society” in Criticism and Social Change (15). I have come across only two critics thus far who note the reluctance of academic Marxists to grapple with this century's history of failed Marxist regimes. Mark Edmundson devotes several eloquent pages to this issue in Literature against Philosophy (116–20). And Thomas McFarland rebukes Marxist critics for refusing to recognize that “their theoria has been contradicted by the massive praxis of communism's collapse” in Romanticism and the Heritage of Rousseau (Oxford, 1995), 31–32.

5. Edmundson, Literature against Philosophy, 6; Wat, Aleksander, Ciemne świecidlo (Paris, 1968), 11.Google Scholar

6. “Nowy świat,” in Zagajewski, Adam, Sklepy mięsne (Kraków, 1975), 5 Google Scholar. All translations of Zagajewski's poems are my own, unless otherwise noted.

7. I am paraphrasing from Marjorie Levinson's argument in Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge, Eng., 1986).

8. Kornhauser, Julian and Zagajewski, Adam, Świat nie przedstawiony (Kraków, 1974), 32, 28, 4344 Google Scholar.

9. Zagajewski, “Sklepy miesne,” Sklepy mięsne, 25. Here I am drawing on Tadeusz Nyczek's comments in “Komunikaty, listy, wyznania,” in Nyczek, , Powiedz tylko slowo (London, 1985), 47–56Google Scholar. Eliot, T. S., After Strange Gods (New York, 1934), 30.Google Scholar

10. Zagajewski, Adam, Solidarity, Solitude: Essays, trans. Vallee, Lillian (New York, 1990), 114, 71.Google Scholar

11. Zagajewski, Adam, Jechać do Lwowa (London, 1985), 35–36Google Scholar. Translation taken from Zagajewski, Adam, Tremor, trans. Gorczynski, Renata (New York, 1985), 34 Google Scholar.

12. Nyczek, Tadeusz, “Bach na dachu Lubianki (Aleksander Wat),” in Nyczek, , Emigranci (London, 1988), 28.Google Scholar

13. Kornhauser, Julian, “Lwów jest wszędzie,” in Kornhauser, , Międzyepoka (Kraków, 1995), 100.Google Scholar

14. Kornhauser, “Zycie wewnętrzne,” Międzyepoka, 147.

15. Zagajewski, , “Ogierń,List: Oda do wielośi: Poezje (Paris, 1983), 12 Google Scholar; translation from Zagajewski, Tremor, 29.

16. Davie, Donald, Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric (Knoxville, 1986), 28 Google Scholar; Shelley, Percy Bysshe, “A Defense of Poetry,” in Shelley, , Poetry and Prose (New York, 1977), 478–510.Google Scholar

17. Eastman, Max quotes Trotskii, in Artists in Uniform: A Study in Literature and Bureaucratism (London, 1934), 52 Google Scholar; Boris Eikhenbaum's comments on the lyric come from his essay “O Mandel'shtame: 14 marta 1933,” in Botvinnik, S. V. and Oifa, P. N., eds., Den’ poezü 1967 (Leningrad, 1967), 167.Google Scholar

18. Adam Zagajewski, “Budowniczy Peiper,” in Kornhauser and Zagajewski, Świat nie przedstawiony, 25; Tadeusz Nyczek, “Kot w mokrym ogrodzie (Adam Zagajewski),” Emigranci, 92.

19. Zagajewski, “Sklepy mięsne,” Sklepy mięsne, 25.

20. Quoted in Katanian, Vasilii, Maiakovskii: Literaturnaia khronika, 2d ed. (Moscow, 1961), 145.Google Scholar

21. Zagajewski, Adam, “W pierwszej osobie liczby mnogiej,” in Zagajewski, , Komunikat (Kraków, 1972), 14.Google Scholar

22. Mandel'shtam, Osip, “Literaturnaia Moskva: Rozhdenie fabuly,” in Mandel'shtam, , Sobranie sochinenii, ed. Struve, G. P. and Filipoff, B. A. (New York, 1971), 2: 334.Google Scholar

23. Zagajewski, “O tym jak 27 marca 1972 roku 19 studentów pod kierunkiem doktora Prokopa analizowalo mój wiersz Miasto,” Sklepy mięsne, 33.

24. Zagajewski, “W liczbie mnogiej,” List: Oda do wielośi, 49.

25. Zagajewski, “Ogień,” List: Oda do wielości, 12; translation from Zagajewski, Tremor, 29.

26. Zagajewski, ‘Jak wygląda czlowiek, który ma rację,” Sklepy mięsne, 15.

27. Zagajewski, Adam, W cudzym pięknie (Kraków, 1998), 1617.Google Scholar

28. Adorno, Theodor, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” trans. Mayo, Bruce, Telos, no. 20 (Summer 1974): 58.Google Scholar

29. Zagajewski, Solidarity, Solitude, 125; Zagajewski, , Two Cities: On Exile, History and the Imagination, trans. Vallee, Lillian (New York, 1995), 239, 98, 203.Google Scholar

30. Zagajewski, “Oda do wielości,” List: Oda do wielości, 34.

31. Zagajewski, Solidarity, Solitude, 70.

32. Zagajewski, Two Cities, 260.

33. Szymborska, Wislawa, “Obóz głodowy pod Jasłem,” in Szymborska, , Sól (Warsaw, 1962), 25–26Google Scholar; translation from Szymborska, Wisława, Poems, New and Collected, 1957–1997, trans. Baranczak, Stanislaw and Cavanagh, Clare (New York, 1998), 42.Google Scholar

34. Herbert, Zbigniew, “Pan Cogito czyta gazete,Pan Cogito (Wroclaw, 1998), 24 Google Scholar; translation from Herbert, Zbigniew, “Mr. Cogito Reads the Newspaper,Mr. Cogito, trans. Carpenter, John and Carpenter, Bogdana (Hopewell, N.J., 1993), 16.Google Scholar

35. Zagajewski, Two Cities, 263.

36. Zagajewski, Adam, “Trzej królowie,” in Zagajewski, , Ziemia ognista (Poznan, 1994), 13.Google Scholar

37. Zagajewski, Adam, Mysticism for Beginners, trans. Cavanagh, Clare (New York, 1997), 9 Google Scholar; Zagajewski, Solidarity, Solitude, 109.

38. Zagajewski, Adam, “Jesień,” in Zagajewski, , Płotno (Paris 1990), 64 Google Scholar; translation from Zagajewski, , Canvas, trans. Gorczynski, Renata, Ivry, Benjamin, and Williams, C. K. (New York, 1991), 54.Google Scholar

39. Zagajewski, “Malarze Holandii,” Ziemia ognista, 16; translation from Zagajewski, “Dutch Painters,” Mysticism, 12.

40. “Z pamięci” and “To bylo dzieciństwo” (manuscripts); translation from Zagajewski, “From Memory” and “Sisters of Mercy, “Mysticism, 62–63, 68.

41. Witkowski, Tadeusz, “The Poets of the New Wave in Exile,Slavic and East European Journal 53, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 209.Google Scholar