Poet

Adam Zagajewski 1945

country: Netherlands
Pools

werd geboren in Lwów en studeerde filosofie in Kraków. Vanaf de jaren ’70 groeide hij uit tot één van de bekendste dichters van Polen. Over zijn poëzie schreef vertaler Gerard Rasch: ‘Het gaat hem altijd om de vertolking van hetgeen schuilgaat achter de tegenstrijdigheid en onverenigbaarheid van de zichtbare werkelijkheid, de 'niet-voorgestelde wereld', om inzicht ook in het onzegbare van de schoonheid.’

Donderdag 12 juni, 21.45 uur, Grote Zaal

Links
Lyrikline
poets.org
Poetry Foundation, London
Poetry International Web

once was a young, angry poet to whom everything seemed clear-cut. Someone reading a single line from Adam Zagajewski's newer poetry, will find it hard to imagine him as a young, angry poet to whom everything seemed clear-cut: 'Get up, open the door, undo the ropes,/ free yourself from the web of nerves [...] and tell the truth, that's what you're for; in your left hand / you hold love, in your right hand, hate'. In 1972, when he wrote these lines, Zagajewski had joined what was called the 'New Wave', a group of poets, born around 1945 and first published around 1970, who strove to expose the true nature of communist doctrine and communist society, be it in existential rather than political terms. But it soon turned out that politics was not his element. In the late 1970s his poetry became more lyrical and personal in character, a poetry of culture and the metaphysics of everyday experience. Poetry needs the diversity of real life. 'The poem grows on contrast, but does not overgrow it,' he wrote in 1980. Solidarity with the oppressed limits the poet; it is only in the solitude of one's own mind that the abundance of the world may be approached.
In 1982 Zagajewski emigrated to Paris, for personal reasons. Here his full talent finally came to fruition. His poetry became what Czeslaw Milosz described as 'a meditation on the flowing of time in which the historical and the metaphysical meet'. It is rich in concrete detail, averse to abstraction, and in unexpected associations often links the past and the present; time becomes multilayered. Zagajewski tries to express what underlies the conflicts and inconsistencies of tangible reality, what I conveniently referred to above as the 'metaphysics of everyday experience'. Zagajewski himself calls it 'mysticism for beginners': probing everything which, being visible and tangible, cries out to be expressed, but can only be approached, or hinted at. Reality does not reveal its true meaning, which remains hidden in myth. Because, as Zagajewski says in his short poem 'The Voice': 'That which sings, is that which does not speak.'

Author: Gerard Rasch

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