Without End : New and Selected Poems

by Adam Zagajewski; Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Iv

• ISBN13: 9780374220969
• ISBN10: 0374220964
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2002-02-10
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• More Book Details
• Purchase Benefits

Summary

The best work of one of Poland's greatest younger poets I love to swim in the sea, which keeps talking to itself in the monotone of a vagabond who no longer recalls exactly how long he's been on the road. Swimming is like prayer: palms join and part, join and part almost without end. --from "On Swimming" This selection draws from Adam Zagajewski's English-language collections, both in and out of print; it also includes work from his early books,Communiqueacute;andButcher Shop, as well as new poems that are among Zagajewski's most refreshing and rewarding: meditations on human frailty and vigor, they are vividly imagined, of great clarity of thought and scrupulous attention to the natural world. In Clare Cavanagh's lucid, graceful translations these poems share the vocation that allows us, in Zagajewski's words, "to experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for a long moment or two." Adam Zagajewskiwas born in Lvov in 1945. His previous books include the poetry collectionsTremor(1985),Canvas(1992), andMysticism for Beginners(1998), and the essay collectionsTwo Cities(1995) andAnother Beauty(2000). He lives in Paris and Houston (where he teaches at the University of Houston). National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee This selection draws from each of Adam Zagajewski's English-language poetry collections, both in and out of print, includingTremor,Canvas, andMysticism for Beginners. It also includes work from his early books,Communiqueacute;andButcher Shop, as well as some sixty pages of new poems that are among Zagajewski's most refreshing and rewarding. Meditating on both human frailty and vigor, this new poetry is vividly imagined, of great clarity of thought, and scrupulous in its attention to the natural world. Featuring lucid and graceful translations by Clare Cavanagh, Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry, and C. K. Williams,Without End: New and Selected Poemsallows us to view the whole arc of this master poet's career thus far--a career that might be seen as an ongoing attempt to, in Zagajewski's words, "experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for a long moment or two." "Zagajewski's poems pull us from whatever routine threatens to dull our senses, from whatever might lull us into mere existence. This is an astonishing book."--Philip Boehm,The New York Times Book Review "[Zagajewski's poetry] is the quiet voice at the corner of the immense devastations of an obscene century, more intimate then Auden, yet as cosmopolitan as Milosz, Celan, or Brodsky . . . [Without Endis a] stirring and profound and delightful collection."--Derek Walcott,The New Republic "Zagajewski's variety of tone is remarkable . . . Recognizing [the influence of other poets in his work] clearly enriches our reading of Zagajewski's poems, but their force is by no means weakened if we do not, just as missing a coded homage to Beethoven hardly prevents us from feeling the power of Brahms. Zagajewski's work does, in fact, display a Brahmsian richness of color, intricacy of rhythm, and the occasional use of ambiguous tonality--all in the service of an inward urgency, powerfully captured in these translations . . . These renderings--by Clare Cavanagh and Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry, and C. K. Williams--have their own enchanting music, and the translators have consistently chosen elegant solutions for difficult passages . . . Zagajewski's poems pull us from whatever routine threatens to dull our senses, from whatever might lull us into mere existence. [Without End] is an astonishing book, worth standing hours in line for, a book to sneak into the workplace or smuggle abroad, to ship to

Author Biography

Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov in 1945. His previous books include the poetry collections Tremor (1985), Canvas (1992), and Mysticism for Beginners (1998), and the essay collections Two Cities (1995) and Another Beauty (2000). He lives in Paris and Houston (where he teaches at the University of Houston).

Table of Contents

NEW POEMS
Clare Cavanagh
To See	3	(2)
The Soul	5	(1)
Farewell for Zbigniew Herbert	6	(2)
The Early Hours	8	(1)
Senza Flash	9	(1)
Circus	10	(1)
Europe Goes to Sleep	11	(1)
A Flame	12	(1)
Apartment for Scholars	13	(1)
Stary Sacz	14	(1)
Bakery	15	(1)
Summer's Fullness	16	(1)
Castle	17	(1)
Dead Sparrow	18	(1)
My Aunts	19	(1)
The Churches of France	20	(2)
Where the Breath Is	22	(1)
Speak Softly...	23	(2)
Line Four	25	(1)
Georges Seurat: Factory	26	(1)
The Polish Biographical Dictionary in a Library in Houston	27	(2)
Just Children	29	(1)
A Morning in Vicenza	30	(1)
Europe in Winter	31	(1)
Death of a Pianist	32	(1)
December	33	(1)
Vaporetto	34	(2)
Opus Posthumous	36	(2)
Twenty-five Years	38	(1)
How Clowns Go	39	(1)
How High the Moon	40	(2)
Tarbes	42	(1)
Little Waltz	43	(1)
Sunrise over Cassis	44	(1)
1969	45	(1)
The World's Prose	46	(1)
A King	47	(2)
Smoke	49	(1)
Lindens	50	(1)
Separation	51	(1)
Treatise on Emptiness	52	(1)
Senanque	53	(1)
Barbarians	54	(1)
For You	55	(1)
Ancient History	56	(1)
For Cabriela Munter	57	(1)
Square d'Orleans	58	(2)
Try to Praise the Mutilated World	60	(3)
EARLY POEMS (1970-1975)
Clare Cavanagh
The Name Edmund	63	(1)
The Epicure from My Staircase	64	(1)
Tongue	65	(1)
Truth	66	(1)
New World	67	(5)
How Does the Man Look Who's Right	72	(1)
Twenty-Year-Old Soldiers	73	(1)
Philosophers	74	(1)
Immortality	75	(4)
FROM TREMOR (1985)
Renata Gorczynski
To Go to Lvov	79	(3)
A Wanderer	82	(1)
Ode to Softness	83	(1)
Late Beethoven	84	(2)
Schopenhauer's Crying	86	(1)
Fever	87	(1)
Kierkegaard on Hegel	88	(1)
We Know Everything	89	(1)
In the Trees	90	(2)
A River	92	(1)
He Acts	93	(1)
Life Sentence	94	(1)
Ode to Plurality	95	(3)
Good Friday in the Tunnels of the Metro	98	(1)
Van Gogh's Face	99	(1)
In May	100	(1)
Fire	101	(1)
Fire, Fire	102	(1)
The Self	103	(1)
Lightning	104	(1)
A View of Delft	105	(1)
To...	106	(1)
It Comes to a Standstill	107	(1)
In the Past	108	(1)
The Dark God, the Light God	109	(1)
Don't Allow the Lucid Moment to Dissolve	110	(1)
That Force	111	(1)
Song of an Emigre	112	(1)
Franz Schubert: A Press Conference	113	(3)
Escalator (translated by Clare Cavanagh)	116	(2)
There Will Be a Future	118	(1)
Without End	119	(1)
In the Encyclopedias, No Room for Osip Mandelstam	120	(1)
The Generation	121	(2)
Three Voices	123	(1)
Esprit d'escalier	124	(3)
In the Beauty Created by Others	127	(1)
Over America	128	(1)
Iron	129	(2)
Palm Sunday	131	(1)
Reading Books	132	(1)
Poems on Poland	133	(1)
City Unknown	134	(1)
The Trial	135	(1)
My Masters	136	(1)
Sad, Tired	137	(1)
Your Telephone Call	138	(1)
This	139	(1)
A View of Krakow (translated by Clare Cavanagh)	140	(3)
Moment	143	(4)
FROM CANVAS (1991)
Renata Gorczynski
Benjamin Ivry
C. K. Williams
Lullaby	147	(2)
Anecdote of Rain	149	(1)
Lava	150	(2)
R. Says	152	(1)
Incorporeal Ruler	153	(1)
A Talk with Friedrich Nietzsche	154	(2)
Sails	156	(1)
At Daybreak	157	(1)
The Creation of the World	158	(2)
Morandi	160	(1)
Covenant	161	(2)
Presence	163	(1)
Russia Comes into Poland	164	(3)
Late Feast	167	(1)
Anton Bruckner	168	(2)
Night	170	(1)
Elegy for the Living	171	(1)
Burgundy's Grasslands	172	(1)
Electric Elegy	173	(2)
September Afternoon in the Abandoned Barracks	175	(1)
Matches	176	(1)
The Gothic	177	(3)
Password	180	(1)
The Blackened River	181	(1)
Moths	182	(1)
Vacation	183	(1)
Watching Shoah in a Hotel Room in America	184	(2)
A Fence. Chestnut Trees	186	(1)
At Midnight	187	(1)
To Myself, in an Album	188	(1)
Autumn	189	(2)
The Bells	191	(1)
The Close of Summer	192	(1)
Apes	193	(1)
In Strange Cities	194	(1)
Seventeen	195	(1)
Without Form	196	(2)
Moses	198	(1)
The Light of Lamps	199	(1)
Wind at Night	200	(1)
Wild Cherries	201	(1)
Islands and Towers	202	(1)
A History of Solitude	203	(1)
From the Lives of Things	204	(1)
Cruel	205	(2)
Simone Weil Watches the Rhone Valley	207	(1)
Fruit	208	(1)
Canvas	209	(4)
FROM MYSTICISM FOR BEGINNERS (1997)
Clare Cavanagh
A Quick Poem	213	(1)
Transformation	214	(1)
September	215	(2)
Mysticism for Beginners	217	(1)
The Three Kings	218	(2)
The Greenhouse	220	(2)
Dutch Painters	222	(2)
Postcards	224	(1)
Shell	225	(1)
The Thirties	226	(1)
Referendum	227	(1)
Refugees	228	(2)
Letter from a Reader	230	(2)
I Wasn't in This Poem	232	(1)
For M.	233	(2)
That's Sicily	235	(1)
You Are My Silent Brethren	236	(1)
Out Walking	237	(1)
Vermeer's Little Girl	238	(1)
Tierra del Fuego	239	(2)
Albi	241	(2)
Self-Portrait	243	(2)
December Wind	245	(1)
Traveler	246	(1)
The House	247	(1)
Moment	248	(1)
Blackbird	249	(1)
Elegy	250	(2)
Cello	252	(1)
Degas: The Milliner's Shop	253	(1)
Planetarium	254	(1)
She Wrote in Darkness	255	(1)
Airport in Amsterdam	256	(2)
Night	258	(1)
Long Afternoons	259	(1)
To My Older Brother	260	(1)
The City Where I Want to Live	261	(1)
Persephone	262	(1)
The Room I Work In	263	(2)
Three ``Angels''	265	(3)
From Memory	268	(2)
Summer	270	(1)
Chinese Poem	271	(1)
Holy Saturday in Paris	272	(1)
On Swimming	273	(1)
Sisters of Mercy	274	(2)
Houston, 6 p.m.	276	(2)
I Walked Through the Medieval Town	278	(1)
Index of Titles	279

Excerpts

Chapter One

    TO SEE

Oh my mute city, honey-gold, buried in ravines, where wolves loped softly down the cold meridian; if I had to tell you, city, asleep beneath a heap of lifeless leaves, if I needed to describe the ocean's skin, on which ships etch the lines of shining poems, and yachts like peacocks flaunt their lofty sails and the Mediterranean, rapt in salty concentration, and cities with sharp turrets gleaming in the keen morning sun, and the savage strength of jets piercing the clouds, the bureaucrats' undying scorn for us, people, Umbria's narrow streets like cisterns that stop up ancient time tasting of sweet wine, and a certain hill, where the stillest tree is growing, gray Paris, threaded by the river of salvation, Krakow, on Sunday, when even chestnut leaves seem pressed by an unseen iron, vineyards raided by the greedy fall and by highways full of fear; if I had to describe the sobriety of the night when it happened, and the clatter of the train running into nothingness and the blade flaring on a makeshift skating rink; I'm writing from the road, I had to see, and not just know, to see clearly the sights and fires of a single world, but you unmoving city turned to stone, my brethren in the shallow sand; the earth still turns above you and the Roman legions march and a polar fox attends the wind in a white wasteland where sounds perish.

    THE SOUL

We know we're not allowed to use your name. We know you're inexpressible, anemic, frail, and suspect for mysterious offenses as a child. We know that you are not allowed to live now in music or in trees at sunset. We know--or at least we've been told-- that you do not exist at all, anywhere. And yet we still keep hearing your weary voice --in an echo, a complaint, in the letters we receive from Antigone in the Greek desert.

    FAREWELL FOR ZBIGNIEW HERBERT

At first only cherries and the comic flight of bats, the apple moon, a drowsy owl, the tang of icy water on school outings. The city's towers rise like words of love. Afterwards, long after, Provence's golden dust, fig trees in the vineyards, the lesson of white Greece, obscure museums, Piero's Madonna great with child --in the interim, two occupations, two inhuman armies, death's clumsy vehicles patrol your streets.

Long days spent translating Georg Trakl, "The Captive Blackbird's Song," that blissful first Paris after years of Soviet scarcity and squalor; your sly smile, your schoolboy jokes, the gravitas and cheer you brought to Meaux's little cathedral (Bossuet watched us rather dourly), Berlin evenings: Herr Doktor, Herr Privatdozent, the rice you scattered at friends' weddings like confetti-- but the quiet bitterness of bad months, too.

I liked to imagine your strolls in Umbria, Liguria: your dapper chase, your quest for places where the glaciers of the past melt, baring forms. I liked to imagine you roving through poetry's mountains, seeking the spot where silence suddenly erupts in speech. But I always met you in the cramped apartments of those gray Molochs called great cities.

You sometimes reminded me of life's tragedies. Life seldom let you out of sight. I think of your generation, crushed by fate, your illness in Madrid, in Amsterdam (Hotel Ambassade), even in holy Jerusalem, the hospital Saint-Louis, where you lay one summer with heat melting houses' walls and nations' borders, and your final weeks in Warsaw. I marvel at your poems' kingly pride.

    THE EARLY HOURS

The early hours of morning; you still aren't writing (rather, you aren't even trying), you just read lazily. Everything is idle, quiet, full, as if it were a gift from the muse of sluggishness,

just as earlier, in childhood, on vacation, when a colored map was slowly scrutinized before a trip, a map promising so much, deep ponds in the forest like glittering butterfly eyes, mountain meadows drowning in sharp grass;

or the moment before sleep, when no dreams have appeared, but they whisper their approach from all parts of the world, their march, their pilgrimage, their vigil at the sickbed (grown sick of wakefulness), and the quickening among medieval figures

compressed in endless stasis over the cathedral; the early hours of morning, silence --you still aren't writing,

you still understand so much. Joy is close.

Excerpted from WITHOUT END by Adam Zagajewski. Copyright © 2002 by Adam Zagajewski. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.