Adam Zagajewski

Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov in 1945, a largely Polish city that became a part of the Soviet Ukraine shortly after his birth. His ethnic Polish family, which had lived for centuries in Lvov, was then forcibly repatriated to Poland. A major figure of the Polish New Wave literary movement of the early 1970s and of the anti-Communist Solidarity movement of the 1980s, Zagajewski is today one of the most well-known and highly regarded contemporary Polish poets in Europe and the United States. His luminous, searching poems are imbued by a deep engagement with history, art, and life. He enjoys a wide international readership, and his poetry survives translation with unusual power. Author Colm Tóibín wrote in The Guardian: “With a sensibility damaged by history, a political conscience deformed by totalitarianism, a mind deeply affected by his study of philosophy, it would be easy to imagine Zagajewski writing veiled protest poetry (which he did in his youth) or poems entirely private and runic, bitter in tone and indecipherable in content, or even descending into shrill silence. He has instead been rescued by a fundamental belief in poetry itself, its autonomous and beautiful power in conflict always with its mundane roots in the visible and quoditian universe, ‘the whole coarse existence of the world’, as he puts it. He has been rescued also by the great pull in his work between a tragic conscience and a voice always on the verge of bursting with comic pleasure. He has been greatly assisted by his love of phrases and his talent for making them, and by a well-stocked mind and, most of the time, a glittering imagination.”

Zagajewski’s most recent books in English are Unseen Hand (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2011); Eternal Enemies (FSG, 2008); and Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Zagajewski’s other collections of poetry include Mysticism for Beginners (1999), Canvas (1991), and Tremor: Selected Poems (1985). He is also the author of a book of essays and literary sketches, Two Cities: On Exile, History and the Imagination (1995), and of Solidarity, Solitude: Essays.

In his memoir, Another Beauty (2000), Zagajewski writes about growing up in a country “as dreary as the barracks” and documents the artistic and political ferment that occurred in Poland during his youth. Booklist called it an “elegant scrapbook” and said, “Full of pithy and compelling observations on art and society, of luminous descriptions of Krakow and Paris … this is a book to be read once through and returned to often, wherever one happens to open it or in search of a particular passage or statement.”

When, after September 11, The New Yorker published his poem, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” on its back page — a rare departure from the cartoons and parodies that usually occupy that space — it resonated with many readers. In an interview in Poets & Writers Magazine, Zagajewski said, “Don’t we use the word poetry in two ways? One: as a part of literature. Two: as a tiny part of the world, both human and pre-human, the part of beauty. So poetry as literature, as language, discovers within the world a layer that has existed unobserved in reality, and by doing so changes something in our life, expands somewhat the space of what we are. So yes, it has the power to restore the mutilated world, even if no statistics ever show it.”

Before his passing, Adam Zagajewski spent part of the year in Krakow, the city he lived in during the 1960s and 70s, and taught in Chicago.

On March 21, 2021 – World Poetry Day – we were deeply saddened to learn of Adam Zagajewski’s passing. As illustrated by the tribute above, as well as his captivating, self-effacing reading during the Griffin Poetry Prize festivities, Zagajewski honoured and delighted us with his charming presence and trenchant yet hopeful words when we celebrated him as our 2016 Griffin Lifetime Recognition award recipient. We will miss his voice as we are grateful for the beautiful poetry and prose – simultaneously down to earth and transcendent – he has left us.