185-86. A central concern of Zagajewski's poetry is how to keep the historical at bay, how to keep it from establishing sovereignty over one's private world." ON SALE - only $29.95 19.95! Prepare a computerized slide presentation on their political themes. 36-40. On fall days I am happy with my dying brethren, the leaves, but in spring my head aches from the flowery scents. 4, Fall 1998, p. 500. Review of Mysticism for Beginners, in Publishers Weekly, December 22, 1997, pp. Scorn, hatred, loathing for totalitarianism is everywhere in his work; but so is a distrust of antitotalitarianism, the other seal that disfigures the wax of reality. This Westerner is using Poland just as generations of modern Westerners have used Greece, or the Renaissance, or the Middle Ages: as an imagined ideal, an instrument of vicarious living, a name for a condition of spiritual wholeness. But once Zagajewski has made his choice for privacy, for the inner life, he is faced with a more difficult problem, and one which is less specific to Poland. POEM SUMMARY Nevertheless, it doesn't weaken the import of the poem; on the contrary, it is the emotive and intellectual fissures cross-cutting Zagajewski's work that make him such a serious, compelling, and human poet. … take me to Tierra del Fuego, take me where the rivers flow straight up, horizontal rivers flowing up and down. I always felt in you the desire for unity, the Greek dream of combining emotion and courage….". He instructs himself to reenter a recognizable world: "Go find the height again, and the dark, / where longing, pain, and joy live / and faith in the good God who does / and undoes." "Listen to this poetry reading to hear poet Adam Zagajewski read his poem ""My Self-Portrait."" Even if we cannot say that Lvov is Zagajewski's literal home, it is certainly an imaginative one. And the mystical is, perhaps, not the mystical at all, but merely a moment of contentment, a feeling, a shadow. Style There are always elements, in the self and in the world, that one cannot fit into an ordered scheme. In Solidarity, Solitude, the poet insisted that the most important events are private, not public; and in his poetry, we see that these important events are often mystical, which is privacy carried to the point of incommunicability. A literature that is not alienated from the polis. And the margin between the touching and the maudlin is inevitably blurred in translation. And so the mystical for Zagajewski is never free from doubt. In "Letter from a Reader," which seemingly defines his own aims, he tells himself to attend to "the endless patience / of the light." Typically, Zagajewski reaches sentiment through the maze of irony, thus justifying the reward by the difficulty of the quest. Most of the poets in the New Wave eventually emigrated because of the artistic restrictions they experienced in Poland. Near-prayers can result, such as is expressed by his wish to see "Tierra del Fuego, / … where the rivers / flow straight up.". In the late 1970s, Zagajewski's poetic focus shifted from politics to cultural and metaphysical themes. This possibility hovers around the title poem of Mysticism for Beginners, itself a fine example of Zagajewski's philosophical wit: The day was mild, the light was generous. The second situation is not identified as evil, but it is serious enough to require intervention. One day it will be half a century. Mysticism for Beginners, the title of the collection that contains "Self-Portrait," denotes one of the main themes of the poem. We do not know what suffering is. CRITICISM Such "clear moments" become more common in his later books of poetry, Canvas (1991) and now Mysticism for Beginners. Poetry thrives on themes that are at the same time simple and fertile: thus Shakespeare can write 154 sonnets about love, and Tennyson can write hundreds of stanzas on mourning, because the subject is at the same time universal enough to compel our interest and general enough to admit of new situations, new shadings. The German on the cafe terrace held a small book on his lap. It was spring or early summer, warm walls, air soft as an orange rind; I was very young or rather old, I could choose, I could live. In the early 1960s, however, Gomulka strengthened his ties with Moscow and began a campaign to return to the restrictive policies of Communism. The poem reveals an aesthetic program that joins sensual pleasure with a spiritual quest. His new attitude toward individual artistic expression is outlined in his collection of essays, Solidarność i samotność (Solidarity, Solitude, 1990). The construct of home answers a deep psychological need. The world experienced a decade of aggression in the 1930s that culminated in World War II, a war that resulted from the rise of totalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan. As he strives to characterize his relationship with his world, the speaker admits that his immigrant status results in a sense of disconnection and alienation from his adopted, "strange" city. Refusing to allow politics to infiltrate his artistic vision, the speaker, and Zagajewski, will not name the evil. But if Romanticism was spilt religion, today the spill has just about been sopped up; and the presumption, or even the suggestion, of a mystical dimension to life can seem anachronistic, an evasion of the real and secular responsibilities of the time. Approximately six million Poles were killed, and 2.5 million were deported to German camps. Throughout most of the poem, he does not identify his homeland or the reason for his emigration. 1999 The speaker is a "child of air, mint, and cello," refusing to devote himself exclusively to any cause. It was clear he was dying to talk. The adjective is the indispensable guarantor of the individuality of people and things. Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter. This poem shows the prehistory of the self. peculiar forms into which this situation forces him, the poetic strategies and the poetic evasions that it requires, reveal a great deal about the possibilities of poetry today. Irony knows that the world is tragic and sad. Such a space must be atemporal. The syntax is breathless. The speaker never identifies the first evil, but readers can assume, given Zagajewski's own experience, that it is a reference to the totalitarian takeover of Poland after World War II. Hong, Anna Maria, "Adam Zagajewski on the Power to Restore Beauty and Advice for Beginning Mystics," in Poets and Writers, August 13, 2004, available online at http://www.pw.org/mag/dq_zagajewski.htm. repetition of the word "strange" in lines 3 and 4 implies that the speaker feels alienated in the places in which he now lives, among "strangers" with whom he discusses "matters strange" to him. The clearest sign of Zagajewski's attachment to the world is his wit. We do not know what death is. On this view, the moral crisis of Eastern Europe gives poetry an urgency and a public stature that it can never have in the United States, where it is largely a hobby confined to writing workshops. In lines 17 and 18, the speaker recognizes the perfection of nature in the form of green trees but suggests that he cannot articulate his relationship to it, because the trees are expressionless and "indifferent." The ability of the man who aspires to certainty to stop short of certainty: this is the hallmark of the liberal intelligence. In 1963, after Zagajewski graduated from high school, he moved to Kraków, where he studied philosophy and psychology at the Jagiellonian University. The government subsequently cut off relations with the Vatican, and religious leaders became the chief targets of persecution. Zagajewski reminds his countrymen that "we have to conquer totalitarianism in passing, on our way to greater things, in the direction of this or that reality, even though we may be unable to say exactly what reality is." Within the darker specter generated by these polarities, the speaker sometimes experiences moments of clarity when he discovers a transcendent connection to his world. It uses cunning. THEMES Witkowski traces the development of Zagajewski's poetics, from his early days in the New Wave to his later years as an exile. For an opponent of adjectives, this matter presents no difficulty: "Melons are piled on the fruit stand." Encyclopedia.com. As she reads the poems, Osherow reports that she thinks to herself "so this is what it is to be alive" and "so this is how a person writes a poem." He immediately contrasts this interior world with a more public space when he notes that he lives in "strange cities," suggesting that the external world will also have an impact on how he defines himself. An even more important ingredient of this philosophy was a thesis I knew well … that all is social, common, and collective. Indeed, Zagajewski parodies the Steiner view quite devastatingly in "Central Europe," a short sketch from Two Cities: He was an unremarkable, tiny man with dark greasy hair combed flat across his head who, without waiting for permission, joined my table. "From Poland," I said. Adam Zagajewski’s Self Portrait (translated by Claire Cavanaugh) is clever, moves easily between the common/sentimental and the high-minded, and feels honest. The speaker rarely stands apart from his subject matter in Zagajewski's work but is part of the perceived scene. Designed with busy students in mind, this concise study guide includes: plot summary; character analysis; author biographies; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. In 1947, Boleslaw Beirut, a Communist Pole and citizen of the Soviet Union, was elected president by the Polish parliament. This moment, mortal as you or I, was full of boundless, senseless, silly joy, as if it knew something we didn't. If a name is like a hat, then it isn't a necessary part of one's identity. If we accept the idea that a journey to a heightened realm is possible, then the title of the poem becomes a question of logistics—how to reach Lvov—instead of ontology—if a journey to Lvov is possible. The speaker gains more from poets, from whom he learns "tenacity, faith, and pride." The darker tone of nature emerges in lines 19 and 20, in which the speaker describes black birds pacing "like Spanish widows" waiting for something, possibly death. We reach its conclusion with a certain shock, though it is the logical endpoint of the journey to Lvov. As he struggles to understand and express himself in his relation to the external present and historical experience, the speaker faces the inevitable tensions between private and public, individuality and collectivism. Territorial conquests are not just changes in boundaries and the imposition of an unwanted government. It is an imaginative ability, which keeps its peace and purity because of its separation from the actual city of Lvov, which we may have assumed was the subject of the poem. How much is really lost in translation is a constant question; but it is likely to be closer to everything than to nothing. I see a pile of melons at a fruit stand. 20-22. Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter half my day passes. Rather, he sees solidarity as the antithesis that arises in opposition to the thesis of totalitarianism: "Totalitarians have their own primitive seal, which they stamp onto the wax of reality. This group was made up of several diverse literary groups, among them, the Poznań group Attempts, which included Stanislaw Barańczak and Ryszard Krynicki; the Cracow group Now, which included Zagajewski, Julian Kornhauser, Jerzy Kronhold, and Stanislaw Stabro; and the Warsaw and Lódź group Hybrids, which included Krzysztof Karasek, Jaroslaw Markiewicz, Jacek Bierezin, Zdzislaw Jaskula, and Witold Sulkowski. He would have exchanged half his life for a moment of conversation. One of the most personal poems in the 1997 collection, "Self-Portrait" shows the difficulties inherent in the struggle to find a clear sense of individuality separate from the external world of experience. Meanwhile, one melon is as sallow as Talleyrand's complexion when he addressed the Congress of Vienna … another has sunken cheeks, and is lost in a deep, mournful silence, as if it could not bear to part with the fields of Provence. The speaker's insistence that Lvov can be found everywhere allows the city to be both transient and eternal. In "Self-Portrait," that sense of disconnection is revealed through the speaker's attempts to define and locate himself in relation to the here and now as well as to history. Gomulka eased restrictions on personal freedoms and reestablished ties with the Catholic Church and the West. (Antonio Machado y Ruiz was a Spanish poet and a member of the Generation of 1898 in Spain, a literary group that encouraged a link between politics and poetry, much as the Generation of 1968 had done in Poland.) (The few writers who do make poems into polemics, such as Adrienne Rich or Audre Lorde, generally fail at both.) 33, No. 218, No. Not only is the speaker's physical situation unstable, but he is himself unstable, uncertain, not a strong presence. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. In this paradoxical way, Zagajewski is representative: he is a mystical poet of the liberal imagination. Poetry for Students. ." 56, No. 234-52. In this essay, Hawkins applies Zagajewski's literary theories to his poetry, specifically his thoughts on irony. Zagajewski's insistence on the individuality of creative expression generates a complex and often troubling universe for his speaker in "Self-Portrait." As he describes his interior space, the speaker suggests that he finds a sense of connection there that he has not been able to establish in his public world. Step #2: Taking a Closer Look. He notes that his home country "freed itself from one evil" but suggests that it is still experiencing another situation from which it must gain "liberation." Dawn is the time of birth, when objects are born fresh, coated with a baptismal dew. For some critics—George Steiner most egregiously—this amounts to a complacency that diminishes American art. Witkowski, Tadeusz, "The Poets of the New Wave in Exile," in the Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. He notes his love for "gazing at [his] wife's face." "It was a gray landscape," he solemnly recalls, "houses small / as Tartar ponies, concrete high-rises, / massive, stillborn; uniforms everywhere, rain, / drowsy rivers not knowing where to flow, / dust, Soviet gods with swollen eyelids." This relationship is first mapped out in an external sense as the speaker defines himself as an exile who lives "in strange cities" where he "sometimes talk[s] / with strangers about matters strange" to him. Now rain dictates a long, tedious lecture…. Zagajewski's work is important for its rejection of this view. He is not an otherworldly or ascetic mystic, who feels driven from this world by hints of another. The print version of this textbook is ISBN: 9780787687151, 0787687154. The external world is "strange" to him, peopled with "strangers" with whom he fails to connect. Poetry like Adam Zagajewski’s “Self-Portrait” may also be of interest to older elementary students. Zagajewski's collection of poems Mysticism for Beginners, which includes " Self-Portrait," was published in 1997 and has become one of his most celebrated works. Shallcross, Bozena, "The Divining Moment: Adam Zagajewski's Aesthetics of Epiphany," in Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 2002 Zagajewski is a master of the precise image. Poetry for Students. Source: Magdalena Kay, "Place and Imagination in the Poetry of Adam Zagajewski," in World Literature Today, Vol. But what is implied by this is that freedom of thought is more important than thinking rightly. What is the inner life? Zagajewski does not disavow mysticism in this poem, but he makes it the subject of a melancholy lightness, and thus puts it at an immense remove from belief. Yet for all its sad tonalities, his verse shows that an existence marked by mobility and ontological doubt need not eventually bog down into anguish—the paralyzing predicament of many modern writers. After the Solidarity movement rose to prominence in 1980, Zagajewski sensed that Communism in Poland was in retreat. The Polish people suffered greatly during the war. "Lvov is everywhere." Yet moving away from the post-war Poland in which he grew up, he more often readies himself for encounters with uplifting transcendence (amidst the flat dehumanizing drabness of modern societies, little matter the political regime). Taylor, John, "Short Reviews," in Poetry, Vol. By the end of 1990, the Communist regime in Poland had crumbled, and Walesa was elected president. of exile as well as of the patriot who refuses to return to his home. Compare & Contrast Poetry for Students. Zagajewski's work has been published in English, French, German, Swedish, Norwegian, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovenian, Russian, Dutch, and Hungarian. The event might be the date the speaker left his home and traveled to the first in the series of "strange cities" to which he refers in line 3. Not for him wagers or leaps; he is content to see the lineaments of something higher peeking through the things of this world, without forcing it to reveal itself as a coherent structure. It is manipulative because it uses ethics to pull the individual into a historical interpretation of events. At night, an invisible bonfire blazes, the fire which, burning, doesn't destroy but creates, as if it wanted to restore in one moment all that was ravished by flames on various continents…. Give background information on the political topics addressed in the poems. On fall days I am happy with my dying brethren, the leaves. In this interview, Zagajewski discusses his views of the relationship between poetry and the world. Zagajewski in this phase is preparing the ground for post-Communist Polish intellectual life. Our acceptance of the poem's imagistic vocabulary depends upon our belief in the potency of spirit, of the imaginative effort. ", Jacqueline Osherow, in her assessment of the collection for Antioch Review, writes that "it would be impossible to praise this book too highly" and that "the poems seem effortlessly to arrive at the marrow of everything," from "living" to "the intensely experienced present instant." Once the thinker becomes more devoted to his thinking than to his thought, dogma is impossible. Tellingly, however, these moments "know something" we cannot grasp. in the face of the absolute and the infinite, even when they are devoutly desired. Zagajewski has been described by his reviewers as a poet of excess. Zagajewski, Adam, "Self-Portrait," in Mysticism for Beginners, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, pp. The test has been postponed. He returns to his private space as he listens to music or gazes at his wife's face, which can offer him moments of clarity. 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