Slight Exaggeration


I won’t tell all regardless. Since nothing much is happening anyway. I represent, moreover, the Eastern European school of discretion; we don’t discuss divorces, we don’t acknowledge depressions. Life proceeds peacefully around me, a gray and exceptionally warm December outside my window. A few concerts. A gifted young singer performed in the Lawyers’ Club. Yesterday we went to a beautiful concert of Shostakovich’s music (they also played the string quartet, Au-delà d’une absence, that his biographer Krzysztof Meyer composed and dedicated to him). I heard another piece for the first time, the Vocal-Instrumental Suite for Soprano, Violin, Cello, and Piano, op. 27, set to seven poems by Alexander Blok. Students from the Music Academy played: brimming with enthusiasm, technically marvelous. The final work, that suite, made a tremendous impression on M. and me. The concert marked the hundredth anniversary of Shostakovich’s birth and so had a special charge, an extra jolt. The students lit candles on the stage and used just a few spotlights. They achieved an extraordinary kind of concentration. It’s often like that when you hear young performers, still unspoiled by routine, by careers, young musicians playing joyfully, with their whole body, their whole soul.

* * *

The sense of joy nearly every time I find myself on Krakow’s main square. In every season, at every time of day, I admire the space’s majesty, the odd, cubistically arranged structures, symmetry and asymmetry conjoined, the airy Italian Cloth Hall set alongside the Marian Cathedral’s Gothic gravity, like gigantic building blocks.

* * *

I’m reading about Gottfried Benn in Poetry magazine. Warsaw’s World Literature just published a hefty selection of his poems, letters, and essays in a thick issue dedicated to Benn and Brecht. Both died in 1956, and the iron law of anniversaries unites them posthumously, fifty years after their deaths—two poets who have absolutely nothing else in common. Benn began to mock the application of Marxist theory to literature early on. His scornful attitude set him apart in leftist, literary Berlin, in the years before Hitler seized power: the unyielding aesthete amid the doctrinaire improvers of humanity … I go back to Benn’s poems every so often, and they almost always electrify me (“Jena vor uns im lieblichen Tale…”); so do bits of his essays and virtually all his letters to Mr. Oelze, the businessman from Bremen. The letters are offhanded, a bit cynical at times, now and then a moment of pure poetry gleams. A petit bourgeois par excellence, Benn led the modest life of a craftsman (although, as we know, he was a doctor, a dermatologist, but he never earned much). In Oelze—whom he idealized, glorified, endowed with a higher social rank than he in fact possessed—he found an audience for his own ideas, observations, provocations, and projects.

* * *

I’ve been reading Karl Corino’s thick biography of Robert Musil. Musil wrote a beautiful speech when Rilke died—he was among those who recognized the poet’s greatness early on. I also found a description of the tragicomic talk Musil gave at the Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris in June 1935. He had no idea that the Congress had been organized by the Communists, and thus only Hitler’s system was open to criticism: the Soviet Union was off-limits. But Musil defended the artist’s individualism and warned against the collectivism emerging in various European nations. He insisted, too, that there was no connection between culture and politics, that culture’s very existence depends upon some delicate, capricious, unpredictable element, hence even a decent political system won’t automatically produce great art. Some participants at that famous Congress even booed him; they’d been expecting propagandistic pronouncements, not considered, objective reflections. Corino also writes a great deal about Musil’s poverty; he even considered suicide in the thirties, when he couldn’t foresee any financial possibilities for him and his wife. Both the Nazis and the Communists attacked him—the very title of his great novel, The Man Without Qualities, must have angered them equally. After all, they labored to create a new man with sharply defined qualities. For both groups, he represented a “bourgeois epoch in decline.” (But of course that bourgeois epoch didn’t decline—or perhaps it declined and then recovered.) Musil spent the last years of his life in exile in Switzerland, where he lived even more modestly, in poverty and isolation. Thomas Mann was an important figure to him; he felt both love and hate, Hassliebe, as the Germans say, for the great writer. Everything turned out for Mann: even emigration wasn’t a disaster. Those who knew Musil described the nervous trembling that overcame him whenever he heard the name Mann mentioned in conversation. Musil’s perfect description of The Magic Mountain: the novel resembles a “shark’s stomach.” Mann’s great novel contains, he meant, undigested fragments of existing European systems of thought, ideologies, and so on. Whereas The Man Without Qualities operates on an entirely different principle; all the references to political and philosophical reality have an intermediate character, they’re mystical, allusive. Musil was captivated by der Möglichkeitssinn, the sense of possibility, by whatever happens exclusively in the conditional. The question remains: maybe, from this point of view, Mann was right to toss thick chunks of actual ideas into The Magic Mountain.

* * *

In Poland, Christmas is the most deeply, consistently familial of holidays. Everyone celebrates at home. Christmas Eve is the pivotal moment. Houses and apartments become bastions of family egotism, family love, if you will. Lone souls must suffer all kinds of tortures if nobody from one family or another thinks to invite them … You can’t count on restaurants, they’re closed. This year Christmas Eve came on Sunday; by morning the streets were silent. On Thursday and Friday I saw dozens of students heading off to the railroad station with their backpacks and bags; Krakow empties out. By 7:00 p.m., the city is a ghost town. The Main Square, which throngs with people every other day (and even night), was dark, deserted, as in the war. M. and I went for a walk, we strolled through the square, we couldn’t get over the eerie silence, darkness, emptiness. The countless restaurants in every storefront of the square were—all!—shut, unlit. We noticed only one spot on the square’s expanse where some enterprising type had set up shop, suspecting that hungry, thirsty people might still turn up. In an improvised wooden shed three cooks fried sausages and chops and reheated cabbage and potatoes. This single warm and well-lit spot drew all the tourists, who certainly couldn’t understand why the normally welcoming restaurants had all closed shop. Why the churches were shut (and would reopen their doors only after midnight mass). They didn’t know that priests, too, were sitting down to dinners including at least twelve courses, that borscht steamed on the tabletops. Japanese, Italian, French, and American tourists lined up for their humble sausages. We sat for a moment at one of the improvised tables, it wasn’t too cold. The tourists alongside us inhaled the scent of cooked meat steaming up from plastic plates. Honey-colored drops of mustard on white trays. An oasis. It was a caricature of Bethlehem, that well-lit place beneath its wooden roof. I told M. I could imagine a play that might capture something of that moment. The silent city and tourists’ hushed talk. So write it. But I can’t.

* * *

I can’t write poems in recent weeks either. It’s not the first time it’s happened. And it’s not worth going on about either. There’s not much to tell. Karol Berger found something Victor Hugo said on the subject—he told me about it as we were walking in Paris, in the 16ème. When someone asked him how hard it was to write poetry, he answered, “When you can write it, it’s easy, when you can’t, it’s impossible.”

* * *

The fall was long, warm, and mild, and I often passed little Boguslawski Street. St. Sebastian Street runs right beside it, a narrow passage transporting you from the Catholic city center to Jewish Kazimierz. At one point you walk along a wall concealing an enormous monastery garden. Then you cross Dietl Street, built where a branch of the Vistula once cut the city of Kazimierz off from Krakow like a moat—and you’re in a different world. I usually pass the yellow-orange building where Czeslaw Milosz lived for some years. A tablet commemorates this. Before, the tablet wasn’t there, but Czeslaw was. And Carol, his wife, who looked after the flowerbed in the courtyard. On the second floor, in an apartment that was first expanded, when they bought the place next door, and then, after his death, divided up again, as part of the estate. Boguslawski Street is empty now. An extraordinary person, an exceptional mind once lived there, someone who defied the tendencies of his time (but who said we should yield to the age’s tendencies?), who tried to synthesize all the events and ideas of his historical moment. He was the only serious intellectual I knew who studied even the Harry Potter series. What for? To find out what children were reading, what draws them, and what it says about a shifting world. He good-naturedly acknowledged Harry Potter; nothing bad in it, he said in his baritone. He was more like Thomas Mann than Robert Musil: only what really existed stirred him, not Möglichkeitssinn, not the sense of possibilities. He didn’t lack for mystical appetites, but his mysticism fed on the yeast of reality. In the long poems he was a shark. And a shark in his reading, devouring theology and philosophy, poetry and history. I think of this when I meet young poets on both sides of the Atlantic. Sometimes they seem to notice only the most recent issue of the trendiest poetry journal. As if poetry weren’t—among other things—a response to the state of a world that shows itself in a thousand different forms, the grief of the unemployed man sitting on a park bench on a lovely April day alongside philosophical treatises and symphonies.

* * *

In November an evening dedicated to the poetry of Stanislaw Baranczak in Manggha, Krakow’s Japanese cultural center. Swarms of people, mainly students, one of those events where you have to get there a half hour early just to find a seat. It was organized by the Publishing House a5; Ryszard Krynicki invited a group of Krakow poets to read a poem each from Baranczak’s newly published Selected Poems. Wislawa Szymborska received the privilege of reading one of Baranczak’s loveliest poems, “She Cried at Night.” I read a poem from Winter’s Journey, his extraordinary variations on the poems Franz Schubert used for his Winterreise. A minor Romantic poet, Wilhelm Müller, wrote the original German poems, which would most likely have vanished if they hadn’t been amplified by Schubert’s marvelous music. In haste, impatient, the music hurries like fate. Its energetic, almost military rhythms contrast sharply with the deceleration winter brings to Northern Europe. Snow, frost, and mist slow life’s tempo; fires crackle in chimneys, smoke rises slowly and uncertainly toward a cloudy sky. Baranczak’s versions are both completely original and a perfect fit metrically for the music. Read separately, as individual poems, the impression they make may not be as great as “She Cried at Night,” for example. Taken whole, though, in all their hallucinogenic melancholy, their thematic hints at modernity (an airplane, an urban street), a certain indefinable symbolism, they are unforgettable. Stanislaw, who suffers from a prolonged illness, couldn’t travel from Boston, where he’s lived for twenty-five years.

* * *

Today in the morning mail a present from Faber and Faber Limited, Ted Hughes’s Selected Translations, edited by Daniel Weissbort. (Daniel Weissbort once drove me to the airport many years ago, early spring, in Iowa.) I begin the day by reading Yehuda Amichai in Hughes’s translation. Amichai’s poems burst with meaning; each line has something to tell us. Poetry involves two opposing kinds of textual “concentration”: poetry as a fabric (where, as in the poetry of Saint-John Perse, the language stays consistently equidistant from a well-concealed center) and poetry as statement. Amichai is a royal representative of this second option, as is Herbert. Born in the same year, 1924, both these great poets have so much to say that they could never follow Saint-John Perse’s lead in creating endless rhetorical epics. A certain resemblance links the two poets, whose imaginations fix on war and love (there’s more love in Amichai) and are tempered by the classics in whom they placed their faith. Amichai read the Hebrew Bible, while Herbert had his Greeks. They must have sensed the kinship: they liked and admired each other. I met Amichai only once, at a festival in Rotterdam in, I think, 1983. He told me over breakfast at the hotel that he cared most about poets and artists born in 1924. I thought then that I’d been born too late. (I don’t think so now.)

* * *

While sorting through my papers (something I should do more often), I came upon a clipping from a local paper, a review, by a young critic, of one of my books. The piece’s title: “Old Wave.” A typical example of disinterested and pointless malice. Since we all have to die someday, even young reviewers.

* * *

I’m reading Gerschom Scholem’s essays, his polemics and intellectual portraits (the portrait of Rosenzweig, a polemic with Buber, and so on). As always when I read an intelligent author who writes with passion about the sacrum, I’m filled with religious yearnings.

* * *

Cioran takes Proust to task somewhere for the role music plays in his great novel. One of the book’s central themes, it weaves and twines around the heroes’ personal adventures. It prompts associations with concrete events from the past—but it doesn’t open up onto something “altogether different.” It’s an intriguing observation. But who makes it? Cioran, who in most of his dazzling aphorisms strives to convince us that this “altogether different” doesn’t exist. Only after hearing a Bach cantata or passion does he momentarily change his mind.

* * *

A poem is like a human face—it is an object that can be measured, described, cataloged, but it is also an appeal. You can heed an appeal or ignore it, but you can’t simply measure its meter. You can’t gauge a flame’s height with a ruler.

* * *

My students and I read the poems of the Swedish writer Göran Sonnevi in Rika Lesser’s translation—in manuscript, since this splendid volume couldn’t find a publisher. In these truly wonderful poems—meditative, linking deeply personal elements with observations derived from physics and biology—music nearly becomes God. My friend in Berlin, the German writer Hartmut Lange, says something similar about music, especially Mahler’s Song of the Earth. I argued with him about it, even though I listen to music constantly and Song of the Earth is one of my favorite works. I argued, since I can’t see identifying music with God … Poets who listen to pop music—their numbers are growing—don’t seem to have the same mystical leanings. The same is true of jazz; I don’t see it leading to idolatry.

* * *

I may be one of the few writers, not counting theologians, who raises now and then the notion of the “spiritual life.” In our time we tend to speak, at best, of “imagination.” It is a marvelous word and encompasses a great deal, but not everything. Some people look at me suspiciously because of this; they see me as a reactionary or at the very least a far-right-winger. I lay myself open to ridicule. Progressive circles rebuke me or else look down their noses. Conservatives don’t understand it either. Poets a generation younger refuse to maintain relations with me. Only one young Spanish poet told me in Barcelona that my essays may signal that ironic postmodernism will someday be vanquished. But what is the spirit, spiritual life? If only I were better at defining things! Robert Musil says that the spirit is the synthesis of intellect and emotion. It’s a good working definition, a bit minimalist. It’s easier to say—as the theologists know—what the spirit isn’t, in poetry, in literature. This approach isn’t psychoanalytic, behavioral, sociological, or political. It’s comprehensive; it reflects, like an astronaut’s helmet, the earth, the stars, and the human face.

* * *

A few days in Paris at the beginning of January. The strangest sensation: I lived here for twenty years and left in 2002, but each time I come back, after half an hour everything seems absolutely familiar, obvious, as if I’d never left. We take the bus from Orly; before us rises a wall of ugly modern apartment buildings and the modest houses of the Parisian suburbs, just after that the Porte d’Orléans, some stadium, empty now, the avenue du Général Leclerc, then the avenue du Maine, then along the place de Barcelone, the work of Ricardo Bofill, a Spanish architect continuing, willy-nilly, the socialist realist tradition, and finally the place des Invalides. The bus stops right beside the Quai d’Orsay, that is to say, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—passersby see only a vast building stretched along the Seine. In the thirties its general secretary was Alexis Leger, known to poetry readers as Saint-John Perse, the author of Anabasis. Few people realize that at that time Alexis Leger may have been the only poet on the globe to have a real say in bona fide political operations—since we won’t count Mao Zedong, who was a monster, or, in a completely different key, Léopold Senghor, who became the president of Senegal decades later. There was admittedly no dearth of poets holding ambassadorial posts—the list would be lengthy—but ambassadors after all have no real power. But Leger was something else: he touched the instruments of power; he was the highest nonelective official in the French ministry. It might seem that the ancient dream of poets ruling the world had come true; one of our own finally wielded influence on the course of events. And what came of it? As it turns out, Leger (we must in this instance scrupulously separate his two names, political and poetic), who spent the war years in Washington as a political emigrant, is held in low esteem by historians of French diplomacy. They see him as an advocate of the soft line toward Hitler’s Germany, one of those who promoted the cowardly Munich Agreement of 1939, that is, one of those who failed to recognize the real nature of the threat. So our emissary to the land of Reality seems to have been a disappointment … Should further efforts be made in this direction? Should future emissaries be sent? Perhaps not.

* * *

Still in Paris: a warm, damp January. In the subway cars, many passengers read thick novels, even at peak hours when the reader’s head is encircled by the crowds of those who couldn’t get seats. Paris is, after all, the capital of the novel. Writing and reading novels is a serious business in this city. Patrons of the subway and the vast suburban railroads require enormous quantities of reading matter monthly. As the publishing houses know full well: they churn out new volumes nonstop. The great bookstores, for example the famous Fnac chain, then erect little shrines devoted to specific novelists, shrines built around a photograph of a given author, which is then encased by stacks of books … As in Proust, who describes Parisian bookstores after Bergotte’s death: he compares the fictional writer’s books to angels with outstretched wings, keeping watch over their maker’s soul. In Proust, though, this is a rare and marvelous moment—but in the Fnac chain it takes place daily, for exclusively commercial reasons. And these novels, written with an eye to subway riders and suburban commuters, are quickly forgotten. New books appear. They’re rarely read twice. The bookstalls by the Seine overflow with thousands of yellowed novels from the last fifty or eighty years, novels that had their brief moment of fame, but must now soak and freeze beneath the naked sky—their fate isn’t much better than that of the clochards. Books of poetry, not to mention the poets themselves, are a different matter in Paris. True, you do sometimes come upon the same posters with brief poems in the subway cars that you find in New York, but hardly anyone seems to notice; they’re engrossed in their thick novels. (Once in Germany, when I presented my theory about easily forgotten novels, my neighbor at the dinner table hissed, “Das ist Kulturpessimismus!”).

* * *

We went to Paris chiefly for the fiftieth birthday of Miquel Barceló, a painter born right by the seaside in Mallorca. He was associated first with Barcelona, and then, after his first major successes, with Paris, but also with Africa, where he often spends time in Mali, painting, drawing, and sculpting. He returns from Mali laden with watercolors. Barceló is one of those artists who can’t not work, although it’s probably hard to separate his work from play, that constant shaping, cutting, drawing, modeling. Barceló’s passion is representing the world—you see in him, in his paintings and watercolors, a childlike joy that shapes exist. He’s an exceptionally sensuous artist. Some of his works, especially the simplest ones, those depicting animals or plants, or the rich submarine world of the Mediterranean (he’s an experienced diver), emit a remarkable freshness, as if someone were seeing for the first time—with a lover’s eyes—an acacia, a dog, a monkey, an octopus, a sea bream. Perhaps the zeitgeist (if it exists) is using Barceló—among others, of course—to put paid to the variety of abstract art whose hyperrationality has become unbearable. The chapel in the Palma de Mallorca Cathedral is one of his masterworks: a sumptuous, baroque complex of ceramics depicting the miracle of the loaves and fishes. It’s an extraordinary festival of existence, a celebration of a life that has achieved the fullness of all its forms, or perhaps even exceeded it, since the fishes, the loaves, and the various creatures seem ready to burst, they’ve reached the line between ripeness and overripeness. Miquel is an avid reader of poetry; that’s how we met, he’d read my poems in Maja Wodecka’s French translations, and then we got to know each other through Rafael Jablonka, who owns a gallery in Cologne.

* * *

I’m reading Czeslaw Milosz’s Final Poems, which were put out by Znak Publishers two years after his death. Even now, Milosz doesn’t lack for opponents in this exceptionally polemical, and often petty, country; his fame and standing guarantee him, in any case, the distaste for greatness that accompanies democracy. His detractors insist that his poetic power declined in later years. But it takes only a few lines of his “Orpheus and Eurydice” to prove his critics wrong:

He sang the brightness of mornings and green rivers

He sang of smoking water in the rose-colored daybreaks,

Of colors: cinnabar, carmine, burnt sienna, blue,

Of the delight of swimming in the sea under marble cliffs

(Second Space, translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass)

Milosz’s Polish opponents fall into several categories. Some simply aren’t interested in poetry; they charge The Captive Mind’s author with treason, since he spent several years in the Communist diplomatic service. (He refused to praise nothingness, though; he didn’t write a single poem suitable for inclusion in anthologies of Stalinist poetry.) And there are those who can’t stomach the poet’s aversion to Polish nationalism. An aversion that is, I must add, entirely justified. Charges arose shortly before Milosz’s funeral that he wasn’t a good Catholic, hence didn’t deserve to rest in the crypt of distinguished Poles at the Paulinist Monastery in Krakow. Whereas those who do read poetry often attack Milosz for his lofty, hymnlike tone. Flat, ironic writing is the order of the day, while awaiting better times ahead.

When I read the line about “the delight of swimming in the sea under marble cliffs,” I recall a conversation I had with Milosz some years back; it was after a vacation M. and I had spent with C. K. Williams near Lucca, in Tuscany. Now and then we’d drive to the seashore at Bocca di Magra, a little town in Liguria (from the autostrada you catch a glimpse of a sign advertising the Hotel Shelley—the poet drowned there). The Magra is a river that enters the sea at this point. When Milosz heard this, he grew thoughtful, remembering times gone by. He’d spent several vacations at Bocca di Magra—in the company of Mary McCarthy, Nicola Chiaromonte, and other friends—he’d gone swimming there, too, and always remembered the white marble cliffs that looked at first like snow-covered mountains—in midsummer! But it’s not snow, just marble, Carrara, a town famed among sculptors, at the foot of white marble peaks. And the sea there is deep blue, warm, salty, with little waves. Dashes and irregular geometric figures appear and quickly vanish on the water’s velvety surface—these are the sea’s papillary lines. Gulls circle above the fishing ships. The coast is rocky here, as a Mediterranean seashore should be, since sandy, level beaches don’t suit the sea’s character; they make it look like the pale, chilly Baltic, it loses its deep cobalt hue.

Milosz died, thinking, working, writing poems almost to the very end—as though he had sailed far out to sea, toward Carrara, toward azure mists and white mountains.

Paul Claudel says somewhere, “Celui qui admire n’a jamais tort” (He who admires is never wrong). I like thinking about this sentence, so hopelessly out-of-date and so easily subject to revision. In a fundamental way, though, it tells us that in a spiritual sense, admiration and enthusiasm are far higher than criticism, sarcasm, a purely ironic stance. In English they call it debunking; we call it demystification, and it’s the very air that newspapers and most books breathe.

* * *

In April 2007, we visited Lvov with C. K. Williams and his wife, Catherine, Georgia and Michael, and Agnès with her camera, among others. We didn’t stay long—just long enough to give me that piercing shiver of mystery I’d experienced on earlier visits to the city. And once again it was June—mild, long, slowly fading evenings, evenings promising so much that no matter what you do with them, you always receive the impression of defeat, of wasted time. Nobody knows the best way to get through them. March straight ahead or maybe sit at home before a wide-open window so that the warm air, saturated in the sounds of summer, may permeate the room and mingle with books, ideas, metaphors, with our breath. No, but that’s not right either, it’s not possible. You can only mourn them, those unending evenings, mourn them when they pass, as the days grow shorter. They can’t be seized. Perhaps these long June evenings can only be perceived by way of regret, remembrance, nostalgia. They can’t be plumbed: you’d need to head for the park, one foot in front of the other, while sitting simultaneously on the terrace and listening to the voices of the city fall still as the last blackbirds sing … But that won’t do either. Birdsong has no form, no adagio, no allegro. In a detailed study of music, a certain philosopher once observed that “nightingales don’t listen to other nightingales sing,” only somewhat exalted people do. Hence you can only tear yourself away when you get bored (let’s be honest here). Whereas a musical composition, subject to the discipline of form, forestalls the moment of our boredom, unless it’s one of Wagner’s operas from the Ring Cycle, marvelous, but a bit too long. A sense of the secret: my family lived here. Here they dreamed their dreams, planned, grieved, fell in love, built their homes, died, visited graveyards. They thought the world was Lvov, only Lvov. They returned here after every trip, which is why this city, set on hills, was their geometric Rome. Here, worried or carefree, they rolled before them the great wheel of the future, which spun throughout the seasons, through January’s brief days, sinking in the snow, and through June’s endless evenings, until at a certain moment it shattered, dissolved into the air, died. And just when it died, I was born. At dusk, in June, that distant life, which no longer exists—except perhaps on old postcards, where it’s diminished, turns into caricature, on postcards where we find, peering out at us, preposterous gentlemen with overripe mustaches and ladies with frantic hats upon which the gardens of Semiramis blossom, so that we can’t see ourselves in them at all. Only on these does it secretly appear anew. If only we could listen more carefully, look more closely … Someday something will happen, the inner reality will stand revealed. At the same time I realize that this sense of mystery, of secrets dwelling in these streets, in this park, is fleeting and hard to defend. If someone were to ask me ironically, “Mr. Zagajewski, what actual mystery do you have in mind?,” I’d be hard-pressed to answer. I also know that there are people, some of them highly intelligent, who can never be brought to acknowledge the postulate of a mystery hidden in a city, or a park, or a quiet street at dusk. No, they’d say, everything can be checked and measured, so and so many bird species make their home in the park, including two subspecies of woodpeckers, along with twelve squirrels, maybe two martens, and five bums. The policemen on duty might easily survey the park and write up an unbiased report conclusively proving that no secrets had been unearthed.

We stayed in the Hotel George, whose name is known by every child in Poland, since it’s become one of Lvov’s symbols, but it could use a little renovating now. As you walk down the hallways, you feel the crumbling floor tiles beneath the carpet that is meant to conceal them from the guests’ eyes. It works well enough, but it can’t deceive the feet, whose sensitivity is well-known. Can symbols be renovated, though? I don’t know.

* * *

Someone asked me not long ago why I don’t write novels. Because I’m not a novelist. There are so many reasons that I wasn’t able to formulate a clear, convincing answer at the time. But now, due to what the French so beautifully call esprit d’escalier, that is to say hindsight, one possible answer comes to mind: I’m not a novelist because, for unknown reasons, I belong to the tribe to whom no one confides petty social secrets. I keep noticing this: in the little world I’ve come to inhabit, in Krakow at the outset of the twenty-first century, there is no dearth of minor scandals, romances not entirely sanctioned by the legal and marital circumstances of those involved. At the same time, information, not always precise, is happily transmitted concerning the personal wealth of certain individuals perhaps located not so much within a given group as on its margins. In a word: gossip, more or less interesting. But no one tells me. For unknown reasons, I find out about such things last, if at all. For similarly unknown reasons all people fall into two camps: those to whom petty secrets are told, and those to whom they are not. Most information, or pseudo-information, of this kind likely never reaches me. So how could I be a novelist without having undergone even an elementary initiation into the life of my larger social circle? I don’t know anything. Do I suffer because of this? Not in the slightest. But this alone suffices to keep me from writing novels, which feed on the secret knowledge of human weaknesses. Of course they are nourished by other talents and gifts as well. But even a writer of historical fiction projects backward a certain vision of the ordinary, everyday, and inalterable disruption of customs, which he comprehends courtesy of the kindly distributors of gossip. After due thought, though, I’m forced to conclude that the matter is in fact more complicated. Some of our greatest novelists, after all, clearly belonged to the ranks of those who are the last to know. To give one example: Thomas Mann kept an enormous distance from others; he reserved first names for only a handful of friends during his long life. Konrad Kellen, also known as Conny, served as Mann’s research assistant for two years in Pacific Palisades; he recalls Mann speaking with his brother Heinrich in such a chilly, conventional, intellectual way that they might have been two professors just making each other’s acquaintance. Certainly no one ever told their secrets to Thomas Mann, he kept himself under lock and key, and even if he hadn’t, nobody would have dared to share some bit of trivial, if appetizing, gossip with that Olympian. But even Thomas Mann got by somehow: his novels and stories abound in major and minor scandals, suicides, bankruptcies, and betrayals. His own family didn’t lack for such scandals, one generation after the next—so his family misfortunes came to his aid …

* * *

An odd moment in Lvov: At dinner on the first day, I suddenly accused my companions of completely misunderstanding the city. They were treating it, I complained, like any free city in Europe, like Liverpool or Bochum. They felt nothing, they scanned the streets and squares with indifferent eyes, as if they were no more than cameras, though this was no ordinary city, it held marvelous, hidden things … They’re partly concealed beneath the coating of Soviet dust that still covers them, agreed, but it takes a certain imaginative effort to break through to them. This isn’t self-evident Florence with its obvious, absolute beauty affirmed in a hundred different guidebooks; it’s not Rome, whose loveliness any idiot can spot; no, this is something completely different, the city hides beneath a layer of vulgarity. It requires exploration, hence sensitive people should get to work and not simply sit back expecting miracles. This crippled city requires not only sight and hearing, but imagination. Imagination, it’s true, bears only upon absent, distant places, as Proust says; we can’t imagine the street on which we’re actually walking, the room in which we’re standing, the person with whom we’re talking. But Proust lived in the classical era, before the disaster; he couldn’t foresee that one day there would be half-abandoned, half-existing cities, cities covered with a tarp of ugliness, cities lost and half-recovered. He couldn’t foresee that in such cities imagination becomes—must be—yet another sense, half imagination and half sensory apparatus, since here the everyday medically and empirically established senses don’t suffice, they must be supplemented by a half-shut eye, intuition … He couldn’t foresee our journey to Lvov, to a city that belongs to no one, not to those who left, nor to those who remain, and thus demands a new type of imagination. I didn’t speak at such length, of course, I couldn’t develop my argument, I was much more abrupt and emotional, clumsier, no doubt. Only now, as I sit in my room listening to music, can I write down what I really meant to say, conquering my eternal esprit d’escalier, I improve the imperfect reality of that evening when we sat in the cellar of that restaurant near Academic Street (the prewar name) in Lvov. Since after all I write this in order to revise my curtness, my clumsiness, to convert my scowls and half thoughts into longer, more convincing sentences.

They stared at me, not comprehending my outburst, but quickly concluded that they were dealing with a slightly abnormal person, a pilgrim to what was, for him at least, an extraordinary place. They understood, and the next day—as it seemed to me—they sensed something of the city’s majesty, its radiance …

* * *

The young Mandelstam—like his fellow Acmeists, from whom he took several key convictions—rejected Symbolism, what he called Symbolist fogginess; he couldn’t tolerate poking around in hazy, dimly lit otherworlds. He favored concreteness, the palpable reality inhabited by humans; he admired architecture as the visual synthesis of inner and external worlds. He also insisted that the poet wasn’t a priest, as some Symbolists claimed, but simply a craftsman, an artist, the intelligent, free master of a middle kingdom and not the emperor of the unseen. In point of fact, though, Osip Mandelstam, like the other Acmeists, was defending moderation, the middle ground, a halfway point between Symbolism, with its passion for otherworldly expanses, on the one hand, and militant Futurism, on the other. The Futurists, with their boundless faith in the glories of a dawning new age, had succumbed to an illusion, as they would soon discover, especially in Russia—but also throughout Europe, unless, like Marinetti, they sided with the victors and took their place at the very edge of the totalitarian wave. This was also an argument about the nature of modernity: the Futurists were addicted to novelty, to the new world, while the Symbolists loathed it, feared it, repudiated it. Only the Acmeists succeeded in fusing precise—sometimes even affectionate—attention to modernity with a patient search for the spiritual vitamins that the new reality lacked. Mandelstam’s chosen perspective and place still retain their value today.

* * *

After our return from Lvov we went to see Aunt Ania, my father’s sister, younger by four years, although also past ninety—we showed her a map of Lvov and asked her where our various family members had lived. She’s the last person alive who might know this. The last conscious person among all her siblings. Whenever I see her, she says, complaining, No one needs me now. And I answer, Of course we do, I need her, only she still remembers that lost reality, all those prewar street names are dead philological terms for everyone but her. She smiles shyly, unconvinced, but she never refuses to answer my questions. I can’t talk with my father anymore, alas, his memory has contracted to the size of a coffee grain, it no longer exists. He doesn’t get out of bed, he no longer knows anything, he only eats and sleeps, he waits for the end without knowing that he’s waiting, maybe long-gone things appear to him in dreams, we don’t know. But his sister still remembers these old things. She remembers everything about Lvov perfectly. She told us about Franciscan Street, about the building of the school, apparently a trade school, where my grandfather, the director, lived with his family before they moved to 10 Piaskowa Street, to their own little house bought with what he’d saved through many years of frugality. We still have my grandfather’s notebooks from the first part of the twentieth century, the account books where he kept track of expenditures—and one rather mysterious heading appeared fairly regularly: luxuries. There weren’t many such luxuries, though; my grandfather seems to have been a thrifty, organized, practical person, and in the midtwenties, he used the money he’d put aside—and that hadn’t been eaten up by luxuries—to purchase the little house at 10 Piaskowa. And Piaskowa is just past Franciscan Street and the trade school. Someone—I don’t know who, it was an anonymous gift—sent me electronically a collective photograph of the students and teachers at the trade school, the standard, conventional group portrait. The instructors (the so-called teaching body) sit in front, including, of course, a priest on my grandfather’s right. The pupils stand behind them in sailor suits. Sailor suits, in landlocked Lvov, with its one little river, the Poltva, confined to an underground tunnel! (Although it should be added that Lvov sits in the middle of a watershed; one stream feeds the Black Sea while the Poltva answers the call of the Baltic.) My grandfather, who must be fortysomething, doesn’t particularly appeal to me in the photo, he seems completely defined by his social position. He doesn’t look like someone I’d like; there’s no trace of the kindly old gentleman I knew and loved after the war. And I kept asking for Lvov addresses. Aunt Busia and her husband, Uncle Joseph, a couple who had to fight for family recognition (since she was Jewish, cursed by her own family when she ran off with a goy, and he likewise defied his family to marry her) lived on Sykstuska Street. Whereas Aunt Berta, my godmother—short, hunched, stern, rather chilly, an old maid, a music teacher; I still remember her from her brief visits to Gliwice—lived on Grottger Street in Lvov (it links Franciscan Street with Lyczakowska). Aunt Berta was also among the deportees; of her modest possessions she kept only the piano, her sole means of support; she hung on to it even through her years of Krakow poverty. At one point—I remember this from my father’s old stories—she lived at a Krakow officers’ complex, in the kitchen of some friends or distant relations, and during the day they often told her to “go for a walk” so she wouldn’t disrupt their domestic routines. She’d already reached retirement age, her hosts must have, too, otherwise they would have headed off to work and she could have stayed in the kitchen … Or, who knows, maybe they only drove her out on Sundays. It’s hard to imagine such cruelty, but that’s clearly how it was, maybe just for a little while, maybe that whole setup didn’t last long, I don’t know for sure and can never find out now. She left the piano to me, her godchild, since I was hurt that she’d never paid me much attention—but how could she fuss over me while pacing Krakow’s streets and waiting to get back to her improvised home? After her death it became abundantly clear that I, her godchild, heir to her modest estate, had no perceptible musical talent whatsoever (nor did my sister), so my father sold the piano and used the profits to buy two bicycles, one for me, the other for my sister. I’ll leave the sensitive reader to assess the symbolic value of this act. In any case, for me this marked the beginning of a passionate love for bicycling, for rides that often led in the direction of what had been a German highway. (Thus, from a Lvov piano to a post-German highway.) I still remember the scent of my first bicycle, the smell of the leather from which the seat was made, and the separate scent of the lacquered handlebars. My first bicycle came from East Germany, while the second, a sports model with gears that I had for many years, was from Czechoslovakia. Bicycles of the fraternal nations. But let’s get back to Lvov addresses: my mother’s family lived off Grodecka Street, Aunt Ania didn’t remember the name of the side street. Grodecka is the long street that still links the suburbs with the once-imposing railroad station, which was built, like most of Lvov’s most majestic structures, under the Hapsburgs, and designed for great, sentimental farewells and heartfelt welcomes. And the Namysl family, I asked, where did they live? That was the family of the husband of my father’s older sister, Aunt Maria, who ran a garden shop after the war; she was a wise, courageous soul whose life was difficult and bitter. The Namysl family lived on Saint Wojciech Street. And finally Aunt Wisia, my grandmother’s sister—who lived to almost one hundred, getting by on little things, small emotions, collecting silver pencils and scissors and postcards from Opatija, humming outdated melodies, heaving sighs in French, recalling balls from before the First World War—lived at 30 Zyblikiewicz Street, along with her mother and brother. Was it really 30? Aunt Ania wasn’t sure. It’s worth noting, though, that only here, with Aunt Wisia, to whom she was tied so closely by intimacies, shared tastes, and an inevitable dislike (they lived beneath the same roof for decades, two old maids; they regularly fought, made up, then fought and made up once more), did she remember the number—though it remained slightly in doubt. We certainly won’t hold it against her.

* * *

How do we keep on living after the deaths of our close friends? But somehow we get by. Our substance must consist partly of indifference, of gray, unfeeling metal, since we manage, even fairly well, after our friends, our close, our closest friends have gone. We laugh, we go to good restaurants, we read the new books that they will never know. The first moment of grief, when we’ve just learned that someone close has died, is terrible. It’s not even grief, it’s pain and protest in pure form; the word grief already contains an element of resignation, of making peace with what has taken place. But in that first moment there are no words, no acceptance, no resignation. It’s as if a hole had been torn in existence. The earthquake reveals an abyss. A moment of tears and rage, and Logos can do nothing here. Logos steps aside discreetly. Then the rift gradually closes, and the drawn-out process of mourning begins, we slowly start crossing the footpath over the ravine, and with time the scar takes on the color of healthy skin. But there are the deaths you never accept. I never accepted, will never accept, the death of my nephew Marek. He was only ten, he didn’t yet know who he was. And we didn’t know who he’d become, what he’d turn into. He was a good-looking, charming boy. Poles are partial to euphemisms, we always say, They’ll be reunited in the afterlife. Or, We’ll meet again on the other side. Or, He’s looking down on us from heaven. As if heaven were a grassy yard we could watch from the kitchen window, checking from the corner of our eye to see that the kids and the dog are playing safely, there’s no danger. We treat the dead like children. An overly domesticated Catholicism lends itself to such carelessness, it resists mysteries exceeding the imagination. I often think of Joseph Brodsky, one of the most extraordinary people I ever met, about his different personae. Sometimes he was the brilliant, arrogant intellectual, whom strangers feared to approach; but at thoughtful, quiet moments, he could be the most considerate of friends. I remember our conversations: he’d launch into great monologues, proclaiming his mad metaphysical theories, while I played the skeptic, pointing out the inconsistencies and incongruities in his arguments. His monologues frequently arose from his work in progress; they were trial runs for the essays in which he elaborated his theories. He often returned to the topic of religion, which would, so he claimed, include more infinity after breaking with the great natural religions. The religions we’d received through family or social traditions held too little infinity, they’d struck bargains with the historical material that packaged them. I objected, I said that you couldn’t build a religion the way that Dr. Zamenhof had constructed Esperanto, and that he, Joseph, was proposing just such an Esperanto when we really needed to sustain the infinity contained in existing religions, to nurture it, just in case, like the embers of a bonfire, stirring it, kindling it, in hopes of raising a greater flame. I think he liked our conversations, he even liked my skepticism, he needed it, he needed opposition, resistance. Once I called him from Houston, just after arriving from Europe, after parting from my family, from M.; the change of place grieved me, and I anticipated a warm, friendly conversation to cheer me in my small-scale melancholy. No such luck: Joseph wanted to find out what I thought of Horace. I suspected that he was writing an essay about the poet, and I was correct. So I had only Horace to console me.

* * *

So there were three children: my father was the middle child, Ania came later. The oldest was Maria, Aunt Maria. An old photograph still hangs in Aunt Ania’s apartment, a genuine sepia photograph, not sepia-tinted, stylized. It shows the whole family out walking somewhere near Lvov, in the forest, on some gentle slope. My grandfather strikes a tour guide’s pose—the family might be out in the woods, but they’re not dark, ominous woods, you won’t get lost. No, they’re on the outskirts of town, and no one’s frightened, least of all my grandfather, an experienced pedagogue, a fearless teacher, who could doubtless daunt even a wolf, if some terrifying, wild wolf was to turn up in that suburban forest. My grandfather would address the wolf so sternly that the beast would slouch groundward and slink back to its dark abode. I know from family legends that Grandfather gave his three children to understand that they were expected to master three subjects: swimming, stenography, and German. Swimming, stenography, and German: Is this really the ideal skill set? It hints at the spirit of enlightenment, the optimism that prevailed after the First World War, that horrific catastrophe after which they started dancing the Charleston. There will still be thoughts and ideas worth taking down, and any number of assemblies and organizations will require a competent stenographer; the ubiquitous tape recorder had not yet made its appearance. There may still be a few (but only a few) ferries or ships to go down, hence the necessity of swimming lessons. People still vividly recalled the Titanic, after all, which went to the bottom in the small hours of April 15, 1912; my father was born on December 16 that same year. But my grandfather’s three commandments must have come later, in the postwar era, when Poland regained its independence. And thirdly, lastly, in this part of Europe, German would always come in handy. I don’t say that my grandfather foresaw the next war and the German occupation. And German didn’t prove particularly useful during the Nazi occupation in any case; only Nazi language helped, and the Poles weren’t permitted to speak it. When my grandfather proposed (or imposed) these three skills, he wasn’t anticipating Auschwitz or the Communists, labor camps or exile. He must have been, in the first part of his life, a man of iron will, bent on survival and even success. A man of the Enlightenment, committed to progress achieved step by step, through minor sacrifices and unflagging effort. I’ve already mentioned his careful calculation of family and personal expenses, the small sums he managed to put by until he was able to purchase a little house. He’d certainly never read Nietzsche; if he’d absorbed those teachings, he wouldn’t have urged his children to learn German. Since if they’d used their German to study Nietzsche’s writings, they would have discovered that nothing exists, that there is no foundation, no ground beneath our feet, that the surface on which we step has no more substance than the clouds floating above us on a summer day. In which case, neither stenography nor swimming serve much purpose. Floating in the clouds was beyond the siblings’ strength. Only art might have brought some relief, but art didn’t inspire them, with the exception of Aunt Ania, who played the piano, who knew and loved music. All three children survived the war and occupation, but my grandfather couldn’t have predicted that any more than he could have known that a second war would follow the first, a far crueler war, and that during this war the German culture he revered, and to which he partly belonged, through his German mother and his studies, would be seized by madness. And if anything helped them, it wasn’t stenography, swimming, and German, but just plain blind luck. Of the three, the oldest, my aunt Maria, stood out for her deep faith. She suffered great misfortunes: the death of her child and the death of her husband. Little Myszka was a charming, cheerful child; I remember her well, her kind laughter, never directed against others. She died of diphtheria. I’ve never stopped mourning her death, such a good-natured, sweet, pretty child; it still hurts my heart to think of her. I imagine what she, Maria, Myszka’s mother, must have suffered after the death of her little girl, who died at the age of seven, what she must have suffered all those years, though she never said a word on the subject. Aunt Maria also lost her husband, Uncle Romek, a man of great charm, exceptionally careless, as is often the case with people of great charm. (Mirrors should be kept from such people so that they won’t perceive their extraordinary appeal.) After his tragic death she had to fight to survive, to help the family—financially, too, since she had to pay all the debts her dead husband had accrued. She ran a small garden shop, which yielded some income, but required slave labor on her part; she rose at dawn, or even earlier, to light the fire in the greenhouse stove (we didn’t yet have those wonderful stoves possessed of the electronic intelligence that permits them to start at a preordained time when commanded weeks or months in advance). She was always tanned, with the brown skin of those who work outdoors and never think of “going to get some sun” in the manner of office workers looking yearningly out the window on bright May days; her palms were dry, with skin worn from the endless handling of plants and flowers, of chrysanthemums on the eve of All Souls’ Day—it was a paradox. Here she was, a woman who’d lost her beloved husband and daughter, making her best money of the year just before All Saints’ Day, when she’d sell vast quantities of white and yellow chrysanthemums, especially since her nursery lay directly en route to the cemetery, along a usually quiet street that once a year, on November 1, drew thousands of people to the cemetery, all of them buying chrysanthemums. Fate was apparently so malicious, so refined, that it contrived to place this woman, whom it had punished so harshly, from whom it had taken her nearest and dearest, conveniently adjacent to the cemetery. I don’t think she ever used hand creams; taking care of her worn palms never crossed her mind. In our family, our typical intelligentsia (but hardly intellectual) family, where everyone, including me, sat at desks, at tables, hurried to offices, to institutes, to schools, only she worked out of doors, only she had a farmer’s skin. Everyone else aspired to life behind a desk; my grandfather’s desk was enormous, adorned with dictionaries and encyclopedias; my father’s was much smaller; while I never had a proper desk, I usually worked at a table, or, as now, in an armchair with a laptop on my knees. All of us, my sister and my mother, too, when she wrote letters, we all fell prey to the workings of some mysterious force that propelled us toward a desk or, at very least, a table. As if a desk were a stronghold, a fortress to shelter you from the wild world’s onslaughts. Except for Aunt Maria. Unlike her father, my grandfather, she belonged not among the Enlightenment’s disciples, but with the deeply religious, the deeply silent. I know she read serious works on theology, I would guess that she knew how to pray (an ability far rarer than it seems), but she was a quiet person, like all in my family—with the exception of my mother and also my grandfather, who talked nonstop, even through the Occupation, he never stopped talking, in the Lvov trams, which was extremely dangerous, and then under Communism, he kept on talking, loudly and emphatically. But everyone else in my father’s family was quiet. Aunt Maria’s silence, it seems to me, grew from her religion—I sensed her conviction that things linked to faith must be left unexpressed, that they’re lost when spoken, they become banalities. I admired her for being different, for the deep devotion that she wouldn’t, couldn’t share with us—she was the opposite of those pious hypocrites who place their religious fervor on public display. She was an antipietist, a brave woman with a splendid sense of humor. I admired her so much, but I couldn’t tell her, I didn’t know how. How could I tell her, in my quiet family? I was part of that taciturn family. I wanted to learn to speak, but I knew it would take many years. Only now can I tell her that. Now I’m talking about her, thinking about her, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, about her suffering and her courage, about how hard she worked, how she battled to survive the deaths of those she loved most, how she kept silent. My father’s silence was rather ethical in nature—he dismissed orators and rhetoric. But his sister Maria kept silent for different reasons. Perhaps those who pray truly and deeply inevitably watch their words around others.

* * *

When the Krakow tram skirts the Planty Gardens and unexpected blocks of churches, palaces, and ordinary buildings abruptly shoot from the close-up shots of trees, bushes, and streets, when, for example, a view of Stolarska Street and the Marian Cathedral’s proud towers suddenly opens for a moment, I feel as though I’m viewing an old-fashioned stereopticon. Beneath my fingers I feel the swells of a living city that combines its medieval origins with the modest modernity of the early twenty-first century.


Copyright © 2011 by Adam Zagajewski

Translation copyright © 2017 by Clare Cavanagh