Summary

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" Without End draws from each of Adam Zagajewski's English-language collections, both in and out of print--Tremor, Canvas, and Mysticism for Beginners--and features new work that is among his most refreshing and rewarding. These poems, lucidly translated, 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."

Author Biography

Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov, Poland, in 1945. He lives in Kraków and spends part of the year in Houston, where he teaches at the University of Houston.

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

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Excerpts

Excerpted from Without End by Adam Zagajewski. Copyright © 2002 by Adam Zagajewski. To be published in March, 2003 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

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 0icy 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: New and Selected Poems by Adam Zagajewski
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.