|
Book Review: Asymmetry by Adam Zagajewski (Trans. Clare Cavanagh)
Adam Zagajewski, born in Lvov in 1945, is one of Poland’s most distinguished contemporary poets. His previous books include Tremor; Canvas; Mysticism for Beginners; Without End; Eternal Enemies; Unseen Hand; Solidarity, Solitude; Two Cities; Another Beauty; A defense of Ardor; Slight Exaggeration; and Without End: New and Selected Poems. He lives in Krakow.
Clare Cavanagh is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University. Her most recent book, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. She is currently working on an authorized biography of Czesław Miłosz. She has also translated the poetry of Wisława Szymborska. |
Review
|
A Review of Adam Zagajewski's Asymmetry (Trans. Clara Cavanagh)
Adam Zagajewski’s Asymmetry brings to the reader poems of cosmopolitan relevance and urgency. In the reality of fast communication and fast food, we run through life, like “marathoners… proud and exhausted,” heroes of one event flashing “countless” selfies to commemorate the fleeting day only to see it replaced by another; “[w]e live, but don’t always know what that means. / So we travel, or just open a book at home.” Thus, in search for meaning, we become tourists, like Zagajewski’s lyrical persona. Asymmetry dives into the “wild water” of loss, memory, and identity, through language rich in allusions, parallels, epigraphs, and philosophical and ekphrastic references. In “Nowhere,” we find ourselves walking the streets of Hyde Park as the lyric “I” mourns the loss of his father. The poem functions as a point of departure for the collection. “Where are you from?” asks a cashier. The grief-stricken “I” cannot answer the question. He cannot remember where he is from because the loss of the father results in a loss of direction, a liminal moment: “a day between two continents,” belonging “nowhere,” feeling lost, like the Wanderer of the Old English elegy, free with an orphan’s unwanted freedom. “Where are you from?” requires a conversation about one’s past: the places and people, the language, and the stories that not only have shaped who we are, but also serve as a bedrock in times of crisis. Time and space are crucial in Asymmetry. Each line moves us from left to right, a continuation of the previous line; each poem stems from another poem, another experience, or memory. The movement never ceases: panta rhei, “a philosopher bows to the wild water;” the poet and the reader together experience the transient nature of life and death, memory, and oblivion. As in the “Poets Are Presocratics,” Zagajewski’s poets “understand nothing. / They listen to the whispers of broad, lowland rivers / They admire birds in flight…” Poets wander the streets of cities—"on the road that “has no end”—like tourists, who reappear throughout Asymmetry, temporary like shadows, “absentminded,” offering but a “glimpse of the sun.” Poets are unreliable guides, “they know nothing,” they map out the places and ideas, make note of the present, but leave the sense-making to us. In “Summer ’95,” Zagajewski’s unsettling diction paints an image of the Mediterranean vacation, with its “slant light,” “the buzz of trifling conversations,” and the “daily explosion of noon.” The striking language calls us out of self-absorption, brings our attention to the forgotten, “amphoras lying / for thousands of years on the sea bottom, in darkness, / in solitude.” Zagajewski dares to disturb the “azure water” of a summer memory to recall the atrocities that had happened at the same time in Srebrenica. Thus, Zagajewski goes back to the bardic traditions: his lyrical persona, expressed as “I” or “we,” walks through the streets of Gliwice, Krakow, Venice, New York, and “our northern cities,” at once a tourist and a witness. This bard seeks truth in awareness, but promises no explanation to senseless tragedies, pain, or fear. Where Zagajewski the son “wept … and … couldn’t say anything / and still can’t” about his mother, Zagajewski the poet “bid[s] the dead farewell,” breaks the long silence, and sings the song of remembrance. Asymmetry abounds in breathtaking ekphrasis of musical pieces. “Chaconne,” dedicated to the Spanish philologist Jaume Vallcobra, reverberates the notes of “joy and sorrow / (since it’s all we’ve got)” that flow “swiftly, violently” both from Bach’s and Zagajewski’s experience. Flawlessly conveyed into English by Clare Cavanagh, Zagajewski’s evocative language and sense of pace resonate with the musical pieces he describes. Like Bach in “Chaconne,” Zagajewski and Cavanagh achieve in language the organic, truth-telling “acquiescence, its rapture, its trembling,” and the release that one longs for in times of mourning. Zagajewski’s intimate, extensive knowledge of the world’s literary and philosophical traditions infuses his poetry but does not provide certainty—the poet remains a humble seeker of truth. To live in the moment and to know its meaning is impossible: Give me back my childhood, Aware of the human weakness to take life for granted, Zagajewski’s poems express the longing for lost people and places, but at the same time unflinchingly probe memories for the overlooked truth. “Senior Dance,” like other poems about his mother, begins in medias res. The poem seizes a memory before it flits away but instead of nostalgia, it offers bold introspection to reveal a human error—he calls this error “asymmetry,” the imbalance of how, in that moment, the son saw his mother through the strong bias of over-confident youth, and how the memory of embarrassment remained with him for years. Asymmetry obstructs “truth’s sharp light”—truth that is “unattainable” without the knowledge of the past.
Emotionally charged, intellectually energizing, Asymmetry guides us through the contemplation of “what came to pass, and what’s gone. What lives.” Where are you from? echoes in our mind as we turn the last page to find that we, too, have a past that we live in, “our northern cities” that we are “forbidden to abandon” or betray. Through the effort of remembering, the initial “nowhere” becomes our now and here, urging us to make sense of our reality, to keep watch, and to call out when necessary. |
|
Kasia Wolny is a senior at Lewis University majoring in English Literature with creative writing minor. She is the fiction, creative nonfiction, and copy editor at the Jet Fuel Review. She serves as a Vice-President of Sigma Tau Delta. International English Honor Society, Rho Lambda Chapter. She lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband, two children, and a golden doodle pup. She and her family recently established the Wolny Writing Residency for Lewis faculty, students and alums.
|