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Overview
One of the most gifted poets of our time, Adam Zagajewski is a contemporary classic. Few writers in poetry or prose have attained the lucid intelligence and limpid economy of style that are the trademarks of his work. His wry humor, gentle skepticism, and perpetual sense of history's dark possibilities have earned him a devoted international following. This collection, gracefully translated by Clare Cavanagh, finds the poet returning to the themes that have defined his career—moving meditations on place, language, and history. Unseen Hand is a luminous meeting of art and everyday life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466884250 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 10/28/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| Sales rank: | 942,029 |
| File size: | 216 KB |
About the Author
Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov in 1945. His previous books include Tremor; Canvas; Mysticism for Beginners; Without End; Solidarity, Solitude; Two Cities; Another Beauty; A Defense of Ardor; and Eternal Enemies—all published by FSG. He lives in Chicago and Kraków.
Adam Zagajewski (1945–2021) was born in Lvov, Poland. His books include Tremor; Canvas; Mysticism for Beginners; Without End; Eternal Enemies; Unseen Hand; Asymmetry; Solidarity, Solitude; Two Cities; Another Beauty; A Defense of Ardor; and Slight Exaggeration—all published by FSG. He lived in Chicago and Kraków.
Read an Excerpt
Unseen Hand
By Adam Zagajewski, Clare Cavanagh
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2009 Adam ZagajewskiAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8425-0
CHAPTER 1
NEW HOTEL
KRAKOW
In February the poplars are even slimmer
than in summer, frozen through. My family
spread across the earth, beneath the earth,
in different countries, poems, paintings.
Noon, I'm on Na Groblach Square.
I sometimes came to see my aunt
and uncle here (partly out of duty).
They'd stopped complaining about their fate,
the system, but their faces looked like
an empty secondhand bookshop.
Now someone else lives in that apartment,
strange people, the scent of a strange life.
A new hotel was built nearby,
bright rooms, breakfasts doubtless comme il faut,
juices, coffee, toast, glass, concrete,
amnesia — and suddenly, I don't know why,
a moment of penetrating joy.
CAFÉ
BERLIN
The café in a strange city bore a French writer's
name. I sat reading Under the Volcano,
with less enthusiasm now. Time to be healed,
I thought. I'd probably become a philistine.
Mexico was remote and its enormous stars
did not shine for me. The day of the dead dragged on.
Holiday of metaphors and light. Death played the lead.
A few people at neighboring tables, various fates.
Prudence, Sorrow, Common Sense. The Consul, Yvonne.
It was raining. I felt a little happiness. Someone entering,
someone leaving, someone had finally discovered the perpetuum mobile.
I was in a free country. A lonely country.
Nothing was happening, the cannons slept.
The music favored no one, pop seeped
from the speakers, lazily repeating: many events coming soon.
No one knew what to do, where to go, why.
I thought about you, our closeness, the scent
of your hair when autumn starts.
A plane rose from the airport
like a zealous pupil who believes
what the old masters told him.
The Soviet cosmonauts claimed they didn't find
God in outer space, but did they look?
VITA CONTEMPLATIVA
It may already be September. I drank tasteless coffee
in a café garden on Museumsinsel
and thought about Berlin, its dark waters.
These black buildings have seen much.
But peace reigns in Europe, diplomats doze,
the sun is pale, summer dies serenely,
spiders weave its shining shroud, the dry leaves
of plane trees write memoirs of their youth.
So this is the vita contemplativa.
The Pergamon's dark walls, white sculptures inside.
A bust of Greek loveliness. So this is it.
An altar before which no one prays.
So this is the vita contemplativa.
Happiness. A moment without an hour, in the words
of the poet killed in Lublin by a bomb. So this is it.
And what if, in this or another city, the vita activa
burst forth once more, what would Artemis,
fourth century B.C.E., do? Narcissus? Hermes?
Pergamon faces watch me with envy
— I still make mistakes, they can't.
Comparing day and night; so this is it.
Dream with waking, world and mind. Joy.
Composure, focus, the heart's levitation.
Bright thoughts smolder in dark walls.
So this is it. What we do not know.
We live in the abyss. In dark waters. In brightness.
FIRST COMMUNION
GLIWICE, PIRAMOWICZ STREET
Dark gray houses and triangular bay windows,
near a little park with German statues
(pseudo-baroque from the thirties).
Mrs. Kolmer took my picture there
right after my First Communion
against the backdrop of a freshly laundered sheet:
I'm that chubby child. Earnest,
upright, candle in hand.
I'm a beginning Catholic,
who struggles to tell good from evil,
but doesn't know what divides them,
especially at dawn and dusk, when
for a long moment the light wavers.
The poplar leaves in the garden are black,
the light is black, the homes are black,
the air's transparent, only the sheet is white.
Color photos will come later
to mute the contrasts and perhaps permit
an ordinary life, splendid holidays,
even a second communion.
LUXEMBOURG GARDENS
Parisian apartment houses fear neither wind nor imagination —
they're solid paperweights,
the antithesis of dreaming.
White boats race the river, packed with crowds
demanding greetings from the shore-bound;
their champagne mood liquidates the past.
A pair of wealthy tourists emerges from a cab
in gleaming outfits; waiters serve them
wearing frock coats whose cut is untouched by fashion.
But the Luxembourg Gardens grow empty now,
and become a vast, quiet herbarium;
they don't recall all those who once
strolled their avenues, who haven't noticed that they're dead.
Mickiewicz lived here, and over there August Strindberg
sought the philosopher's stone
he never found.
Dusk falls. Sober night approaches from the east,
taciturn and troubled.
Night comes from Asia, and asks no questions.
Foreignness is splendid, a cold pleasure.
Yellow lights illuminate the windows on the Seine
(there's the real mystery: the life of others).
I know — the city no longer holds secrets.
But there are plane trees, squares, cafés, friendly streets,
and the bright gaze of clouds that slowly dies.
OUT WALKING WITH MY FATHER
GRUNWALD SQUARE, GLIWICE
My father remembers next to nothing. With slight exceptions.
Do you remember fixing transmitters for the Home Army?
Of course I remember. Were you afraid?
I don't remember. Was mother afraid? I don't know.
The garden on Piaskowa Street? Sure.
The scent of linden blossoms? No.
Do you remember Mr. Romer? Sometimes.
Skiing on Czantoria Mountain? I guess not.
Do you remember infinity? No, I don't.
But I'll see it soon. (He could say that.)
JOSEPH STREET IN WINTER
FOR JOACHIM RUSSEK
In winter Joseph Street is dark,
a few pilgrims flounder through wet snow
and don't know where they're going, to which star,
and maybe they stop short
like the gardener, who leans
against his shovel handle, dreaming,
and doesn't see that war
has unexpectedly erupted
or that the hydrangea has bloomed.
THE LOVELY GARONNE
FOR AGNÈS AND PATRICE MOYON
Because you didn't flow through my childhood.
Because I didn't swim in your currents.
Because even now, beneath the archaeologist's hand
the same helmet grows, and the ancient swastika
of a worse Rome. Because you might have been
my sister, my prison, my
salvation, the happiness of a summer day.
Because you are memory, and your
vowels sing a song
that we don't want to understand.
I DREAMED OF MY CITY
WRITTEN WHILE ATTENDING A HERBERT CONFERENCE IN SIENA
I dreamed of my distant city —
it spoke the language of children and the injured,
it spoke in many voices, rushing
to shout one another down, like simple people suddenly admitted
to the presence of a great official:
"There is no justice," it cried; "All
has been taken from us," it wailed loudly;
"No one remembers us, not a soul";
I saw feminists with dark eyes,
petty nobles with forgotten family trees,
judges wearing togas sewn of nettles
and devout, exhausted Jews —
but slowly, relentlessly
the gray dawn drew near and the speakers faded,
dimmed, submissively went back to their barracks
like legions of toy soldiers,
and then I heard completely different words:
"Still there are miracles, not everyone believes,
but miracles do happen ..." And waking, slowly,
reluctantly departing the dream's bunker,
I realized that the arguments continue,
that nothing has been settled yet ...
PIANO LESSON
I'M EIGHT YEARS OLD
Piano lesson at the neighbors', Mr. and Mrs. J.
I'm in their apartment for the first time,
which smells different from ours (ours has no smell,
or so I think). Everywhere carpets,
thick Persian carpets. I know that they're Armenians,
but don't know what that means. Armenians have carpets,
dust wanders through the air, imported
from Lvov, medieval dust.
We don't have carpets or Middle Ages.
We don't know who we are — maybe wanderers.
Sometimes I think we don't exist. Only others are.
The acoustics are great in our neighbors' apartment.
It's quiet in this apartment. A piano stands in the room
like a lazy, tamed predator — and in it,
at its very heart, dwells music's black ball.
Mrs. J told me right after the first
or second lesson that I should take up languages
since I showed no talent for music.
I show no talent for music.
I should take up languages instead.
Music will always be elsewhere,
inaccessible, in someone else's apartment.
The black ball will be hidden elsewhere,
but there may be other meetings, revelations.
I went home, hanging my head,
a little saddened, a little glad — home,
where there was no smell of Persia, only amateur paintings,
watercolors, and I thought with bitterness and pleasure
that I had only language, only words, images,
only the world.
DEFENSELESS
IN MEMORIAM PAOLA MALAVASI
September 2005, we came back from vacation,
sat down at the kitchen table
covered in green oilcloth.
Suddenly Nicola calls, asking, do you know
that Paola Malavasi died
suddenly, in the morning,
on Sunday, at a hotel in Venice.
No, I hadn't heard — those two words,
died and Paola, met then
for the first time.
Paola had
just turned forty,
a pretty, smiling woman.
She taught Greek and Latin at the high school,
she wrote and translated poems.
The word died is much older
and never smiles.
Some months have passed,
and I still don't believe in her death.
Paola studied life and poetry,
antiquity and today.
Nothing speaks to her death.
She seems serene in the photographs,
her face is defenseless and open.
Her face still summons the future,
but the future, distracted,
now looks the other way.
FAMILY HOME
You come here like a stranger,
but this is your family home.
The currants, the apple and cherry trees don't know you.
One noble tree readies
a new brood of walnuts in peace,
while the sun, like a worried first-grader,
diligently colors in the shadows.
The dining room pretends it is a crypt,
and doesn't give out one familiar echo —
the old conversations haven't lingered.
There, where your life doubtless
began, someone else's television stutters.
But the cellar's been collecting darknesses —
all the nights since you left
are snarled like the yarn of an old sweater
in which wild cats have nested.
You come here like a stranger,
but this is your family home.
MUTE CITY
Imagine a dark city.
It understands nothing. Silence reigns.
And in the quiet bats like Ionian philosophers
make sudden, radical decisions in mid-flight,
filling us with admiration.
Mute city. Blanketed in clouds.
Nothing is known yet. Nothing.
Sharp lightning cleaves the night.
Priests, Catholic and Orthodox alike, rush to shroud
their windows in deep blue velvet,
but we go out
to hear the rain's rustle
and the dawn. Dawn always tells us something,
always.
SELF-PORTRAIT IN AN AIRPLANE
IN ECONOMY CLASS
Crouched like an embryo,
crushed into the narrow seat,
I try to remember
the scent of fresh-cut hay
when wooden carts descend
in August from the mountain meadows,
lurching down dirt roads
and the driver cries out
as men always do when they panic
— they screamed that way in the Iliad
and have never fallen silent since,
not during the Crusades,
or later, much later, near us,
when no one listens.
I'm tired, I think about what
can't be thought — about the silence that reigns
in forests when the birds sleep,
about the coming end of summer.
I hold my head in my hands
as if shielding it from annihilation.
Seen from outside I doubtless
seem immobile, almost dead,
resigned, deserving sympathy.
But it's not so — I'm free,
maybe even happy.
Yes, I hold my heavy head
in my hands,
but inside it a poem is being born.
LEONARDO
He lives in France now,
calmer and much weaker.
He is the jewel in the crown. Favored
with the monarch's friendship.
The Loire rolls its waters slowly.
He considers the projects
he left unfinished.
His right hand, half-paralyzed,
has already departed.
His left would also like to take its leave.
And his heart, and his whole body.
Islands of light still
stand sentry.
ON A BENCH
KRAKOW, PLANTY GARDENS
You sit on a bench, leafing through Benn's poems
— noisy streets around you, an airplane overhead,
the president-elect smiles uncertainly (it's just a poster).
Children play in the sandbox,
someone draws water from a rusty well
(a rowan tree on the lawn — farther off the Art Exhibit Bureau).
You turn pages scored with black lava
and await the signal — who's won, the living city
or the shadow of the poet long since gone,
but at last silence comes, calmness —
unexpectedly, from unknown quarters, there appears
that je ne sais quoi you know so well.
JUNE IN SIENA
— we shall never be in touch with something greater than ourselves
— RICHARD RORTY
Flat days came to pass, when doubt governed,
days of obvious accord.
Summer cried loudly like vegetable sellers
in Parisian markets.
Lovers, spliced together on benches, began to tally
future gains and losses,
months of happiness and contention.
June in Siena: on every small square the boys
practiced their kettledrums before the Palio —
the brown city quivered like troops before a battle.
Dry lips waited for rain.
WHEN FATHER HIKED
When father hiked through the mountains, tireless,
patient, sometimes for hours in the rain,
under his cape, like bygone pilgrims
trudging toward Spain, I thought
that yes, of course, he'd cross the mild slopes
and come one day to the other side,
but I failed to account for sudden
shifts in the terrain, the treacherous drops
that always accompany
the trails dotted with signposts for tourists,
white, sky-blue, or red;
the chasms have no color,
shadows dwell there, and blackberries grow,
sweet only in autumn.
IMPOSSIBLE
5414 S. BLACKSTONE, CHICAGO
It's so hard, trying to write, be it
at home, on a plane above the ocean,
over a black forest, in the evening stillness.
Always starting fresh, reaching
full speed and fifteen minutes later
giving up, in reluctant surrender.
I hope that you at least can hear me,
— since, as you know, the theoreticians remind us
insistently, almost daily, that we've missed
the point, as usual we've skipped
the deeper meaning, we've been reading
the wrong books, alas,
we've drawn the wrong conclusions.
They claim: poetry is fundamentally impossible,
a poem is a hall where faces dissolve
in a golden haze of spotlights, where the fierce
rumblings of an angry mob drown out
defenseless single voices.
So what then? Fine words perish quickly,
ordinary words rarely persuade.
All the evidence suggests silentium
claims only a handful of adherents.
Sometimes I envy the dead poets,
they no longer have "bad days," they don't know
"ennui," they've parted ways with "vacancy,"
"rhetoric," rain, low-pressure zones,
they've stopped following the "shrewd reviews,"
but they keep speaking to us.
Their doubts vanished with them,
their rapture lives.
JANUARY 27
Frosty day. A winter sun. White breath.
But on this Friday we didn't know
what to celebrate and what to mourn —
it was Holocaust Memorial Day
and Mozart's birthday.
Our memory was perplexed.
Our imagination lost its way.
The candle on the windowsill wept
(we'd been asked to light candles),
but the gentle music of young Mozart
reached us from the speakers, rococo,
the age of silver wigs and not the gray hair
we knew from Auschwitz,
the age of costumes, not of nakedness,
hope and not despair.
Our memory was perplexed,
our imagination grew lost in thought.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Unseen Hand by Adam Zagajewski, Clare Cavanagh. Copyright © 2009 Adam Zagajewski. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
TITLE PAGE,COPYRIGHT NOTICE,
I.,
New Hotel,
Café,
Vita contemplativa,
First Communion,
Luxembourg Gardens,
Out Walking with My Father,
Joseph Street in Winter,
The Lovely Garonne,
I Dreamed of My City,
Piano Lesson,
Defenseless,
Family Home,
Mute City,
Self-Portrait in an Airplane,
Leonardo,
On a Bench,
June in Siena,
When Father Hiked,
Impossible,
January 27,
3 Arkonska Street,
The Revolution Has Ended,
II.,
The Botanic Garden,
Lost,
Joseph Street,
Corridor,
And the Lovely Garonne,
The Last Stop,
Now That You've Lost Your Memory,
Self-Portrait in a Little Museum,
Music of the Lower Spheres,
The Great Poet Has Gone,
Like the King of Asini,
September Evening,
Ravenna,
About My Mother,
Small Self-Portrait (June),
Next Spring,
Piano Tuner,
Metaphor,
Wall,
Not Thinking About Aesthetics,
Falling Asleep over a Volume of Cavafy,
Poets Photographed,
Impassive,
Swifts Storming St. Catherine's Church,
Faces,
III.,
Unwritten Elegy for Krakow's Jews,
Improvisation,
It Was a Holiday,
Also Vita contemplativa,
If I Were Tomaz ?alamun,
I Look at a Photograph,
Writing Poems,
The Green Windbreaker,
Wandering,
Silhouettes,
K.I.G.,
The Rhône Valley,
Paintings,
My Father No Longer Knows Me,
Cloud,
In Valleys,
Kings,
Self-Portrait,
May, the Botanic Garden,
Carts,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
ALSO BY ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI,
COPYRIGHT,