Marginal in America, poets in Poland are lionized as authoritiesโnot merely on syntax and scansion, but on political affairs. For Polish poets, all that public respect is both a glory and a burden. Their outwardly focused gaze lends their work a heft that can seem like a blessed anachronism, and in part explains why, over the last three decades, the Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to two Polish poets Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska , arguably should have gone to a now-deceased third Zbigniew Herbert , and is often discussed in connection with a fourthโZagajewski himself.
To have your poetry taken seriously is gratifying, yet the recognition carries a price tag. Grappling on a regular basis with the complex tragedies of Polish history is onerous. And if great events are clanging around you, your clarity of perception can die in the din.
In , Zagajewski, who was in his mid-thirties, left Poland for Germany, seeking refuge not, as you might suppose, from the stifling pressures of the Communist regime but from the intoxicating pull of the opposition. I had two years when I wrote very little. I was happy as a person in the opposition movement, but I was unhappy as a writer.
So he ended up monitoring the birthpangs of the Solidarity trade-union movement and the strike by the Gdansk shipyard workers from the relative distance of West Berlin. When Communism in Poland finally did collapse in , Zagajewski was once again elsewhere. He had moved to Paris at the end of to be with Maya Wodecka, a psychoanalyst, who became his second wife. Back in my country it was so gray and some of my friends were in prison. I was in love with Maya. I had no job. I would wander through this beautiful city.
I had this freedomโI did not belong. But Zagajewski says he resisted the mythologizing. I tried to keep the right proportion. Uprooted from Poland to an unfamiliar land, he found himself. As a Parisian flaneur, he viewed his new world with a detachment that was punctuated by occasional bursts of euphoric epiphany.
