The prose aspect of the essentially poet Zagajewski It also arises from that intention to provide an embellished vision of the world. Whether even in the tragic notion that only poets are able to sublimate towards ethereal guilt and pain.
And of course, one who is more prose than verses always stays with the tightest and most condensed paragraph books. More than with the short lines of the current poem, as beautiful, accurate and capable of approaching eternity as my recalcitrant inability to perceive it.
But Zagajewski has the gift of speech. No doubt. And in his effort to novelize his life, to point to the essay from the experience and to the metaphysics from the memory, he offers us books for those of us who are powerless in the lyric. And then yes that the trova, the tune or the atrophied verse arrives to lash out at the surprised readers of his works.
Top 3 Recommended Books by Adam Zagajewski
In the beauty of others
Beauty is always alien. It is something necessary for the poet that it be so. Because when beauty approaches and becomes your own, you melt everything into mud or it melts into smoke. As time goes by, what has been lived can be idealized in some way for the better, at least to write about what was lost with the undoubted feeling that yes, that beauty left behind will never return.
Memoir book and diary, In the Beauty of Others can be considered, today, the masterpiece of the great contemporary Polish writer Adam Zagajewski. Written in splendid prose by a great prose writer and poet, this is one of those books capable of captivating the reader from the first pages.
Defense of poetry and meditation on history; pictures of lived cities and portraits of famous and anonymous people; small essays on big themes and collection of aphorisms, which can be gleaned here and there in the course of reading; lyrical album in which the author reproduces and comments on some compositions by favorite poets.
Notes in the margin of books read in concentrated reading; impressions aroused by fervent listening to musical works or astonished contemplation of paintings by the great masters: all this ?? and much more ?? en In the beauty of others.
Two cities
The Europe of the XNUMXth century posed strange identity journeys between peoples. Zagajewski's experiences provide a vision of complete strangeness about the ability of the human being to alienate his next person by mere chance.
In 1945, when Adam Zagajewski was four months old, his hometown (Lvov) was incorporated into the USSR and his family forced to move to a former German town (Gliwice) that Poland had just annexed. In a Europe marked by totalitarianism, contradiction and uprooting, those people displaced against their will became immigrants who, nevertheless, had never left their country.
From that experience comes this lucid, truthful and brave reflection, which tries to unite the two poles that these two cities represent: that of a mythical space, although surprisingly domestic, warm and welcoming, and that of a hostile and ungenerous reality, which knows if it is a symbolic representation of poetic tension.
A slight exaggeration
A slight exaggeration, the most personal work of Zagajewski, is not an autobiography to use, but a digressive, aphoristic text, a kind of diary without chronological order in which the poet shares with the reader episodes of his personal history (from the Second World War and the deportation of his family after the occupation of Poland at the funeral of Joseph Brodsky in Venice) intertwined with impressions on the history of Europe, war and ideology, as well as the literature and art that have most marked his career.
Poetry is a slight exaggeration as long as we don't make it our home, because then it becomes reality. And then when we leave it - because no one can abide in it forever - it is again a slight exaggeration. And it is that, for Zagajewski, poetry is that slight displacement of the real that allows life to be transmuted into art.
