HAUS FÜR POESIE

Adam Zagajewski (born 1945 in Lviv, died 2021 in Krakow) was one of the last poets of truly pan-European stature. He was called a wandering cosmopolitan, a secular mystic (although he remained, by his own admission, a novice in the field of mysticism). Zagajewski was driven by what he himself called a “vertical longing.” Between 1972 and 2019, he published 14 volumes of poetry, as well as almost as many books of essays. He loved his homeland but remained a skeptic. The Poland depicted in the poems of Germans and Russians was unrecognizable to him; he compared it to a unicorn that feeds on the wool of tapestries.

In his own poetry, he speaks of the deception “in the gentle taste of long summer evenings,” of the dark Esperanto of streams, of Jesus in a “Sunday suit of thorns,” and of the indistinguishability of the living and the dead. Sometimes his texts take on a resigned tone. At one point he writes: “We can truly live only in defeat.” At the end of the same poem: “May victory never surprise us.”

In numerous poems, Zagajewski engages with the great artists of the past: readers encounter Franz Schubert at a press conference and witness a weeping Schopenhauer, whose loneliness trembles like Dutch linen. He wrote an “Ode to Multiplicity” and an “Electric Elegy” about an inherited radio, whose speakers lift the fabric to Chopin’s waltzes. Like Rilke, he loved simple words that rise from darkness and reveal their names: table, chair, salt shaker. In the poem “Self-Portrait” he describes himself as a child of air, mint, and the cello. In his final poems, Zagajewski wrote about the innocence of a beekeeping museum and windless days when the gods doze.

Michael Krüger and the Polish poet Marzanna Kielar discuss Adam Zagajewski’s significance then and now and read his poetry.

The event will be interpreted in Polish and German. A joint event of the Haus für Poesie and the Polish Institute Berlin.

Reading & Conversation Marzanna Kielar, Michael Krüger
Moderation Matthias Weichelt

Das Zitat aus dem Titel stammt aus: Adam Zagajewski, Die Wiesen von Burgund. Ausgewählte Gedichte. Aus dem Polnischen von Karl Dedecius © 2003 Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, München