A Mix of Crying and Laughing: Adam Zagajewski On National Traumas

With the ten year anniversary of 9/11 looming, Newsweek (aka The Daily Beast) ran a feature on Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, perhaps most well-known in this country for his poem "Try To Praise The Mutilated World", which, while published a year and a half before the attacks, still spoke to the tragedy.

Polish poets have long thought of themselves as national bards, called to engage with the harsh world around them. “Polish poetry is one of the marvels of 20th-century literature,” wrote former U.S. poet laureate Charles Simic, who cited its “one rare virtue: it is very readable in a time when modernist experiments made a lot of poetry written elsewhere difficult.” Zagajewski says some critics see “something barbarian” in Polish poetry’s emphasis on meaning over syntax or style. “I’ve heard some French poets say Polish poetry is just journalism, because you can understand it.”

Zagajewski, who often purrs his words and speaks slowly, rejects any suggestion that trauma ennobles Poland or any society. Yet thinking of 9/11 and further back, he notes a change in our response to trauma. In “the past in general and not only in Europe,” he says, “the rule was to forget, to move on. There’s a relatively new idea that you have to work on it—that you have to keep everything in our memory. Which I like. It’s changing us. I don’t think people in the mid–19th century were going back to the Napoleonic wars and thinking, ‘We have to work on it.’?”

And, later, Zagajewski discusses hope, humor, his new collection and living in both America and Europe:

In Zagajewski’s poetry, cruelty mingles with humor, optimism, and a keen appreciation of nature. “Well, why not,” he says. “You write a poem. You are alive. You don’t want to be a humorless person. I think that when you write poems you aspire to something whole that’s bigger than simply lament. In poetry I think you try to reconstruct what’s humanity. Humanity is always a mix of crying and laughing.”

Since the late ’80s, Zagajewski has split his time between Europe and America. These days he teaches literature at the University of Chicago. He sounds pessimistic about Europe and finds the vibrancy of American life, literary and otherwise, alluring. “I would still rather live in Europe, but I feel this lack of energy,” he says. “Here [in the U.S.] people have a fuller life, in terms of being ready to take risks. Even the fact that America is waging wars. It’s not a political [statement], but anthropologically speaking, there’s a fullness of life. In Europe you have a feeling that history is over. Europe is this wonderful museum.”

The poet continues to publish prolifically, including Unseen Hand, which came out in translation this summer. The collection strikes wistful notes for the passage of time and the death of his father and mother. In “About My Mother,” Zagajewski writes, “I could never say anything about my mother:/ how she repeated, you’ll regret it one day,/ when I’m not around anymore, and how I didn’t believe/ in either ‘I’m not’ or ‘anymore,’ ... how she forgave it all/ and how I remember that, and how I flew from Houston/ to her funeral and couldn’t say anything/ and still can’t.” Zagajewski says he finds “something new, more tenderness” in his response to personal trauma. “These are typical subjects for American poets,” he says. “I am becoming, in a way, a more American poet.”

(For more on 9/11 and poetry's response to it, here's Philip Metres essay "Beyond Grief and Grievance," our feature this week.)