Friday, December 12, 2008

Zagajewski's inheritance

The contemporary Polish poet Adam Zagajewski (above) has inherited the full eyebrows of Czeslaw Milosz, the late elderstatesman of Polish bards; he also carries on Milosz's crowning poetic achievement: the noble struggle to voice an authentic faith in a "post-religious world." Cynthia Haven, writing recently in a feature for the Poetry Foundation, describes the nature of this spirutal inheritance:

'The death of Milosz in 2004, the year Zagajewski won the Neustadt, effectively marked the passing of the scepter to the younger poet, the crown prince of Polish poetry. “What a joy to see a major poet emerging from a hardly differentiated mass of contemporaries and taking the lead in the poetry of my language,” Milosz had written in a 1985 introduction to his verse, by way of investiture and blessing....

Zagajewski’s quiet, persistent optimism is refreshing in a nation of shallow enthusiasms. What are its roots? Friend and fellow poet Rifenburgh has an insight: “I personally think he believes in a ‘world without end’ and the eternality of the spirit. I think he believes death as a finality would be too easy: it’s not that simple.”

Expressing such a vision is not that simple, either. Milosz once said that “we are in a largely post-religious world.” He recounted a conversation with Pope John Paul II, who commented upon Milosz’s work, saying, “Well, you make one step forward, one step back.” Milosz replied, “Holy Father, how in the 20th century can one write religious poetry differently?”

Zagajewski concurred: “I don’t want to be a New Age vague religious crank, but I also need to distance myself from ‘professional’ Catholic writers. I think poets have to be able to find fresh metaphors for old metaphysical objects and longings. I’m a Christian, a sometimes doubting one (but this is almost a definition of a Christian: to doubt also). In my writing I have to be radically different from a priest. My language must have the sheen of a certain discovery.”

His view is a counterpoint to the current fashion of irony, which he decries. “I adore irony as a part of our rich rhetorical and mental apparatus, but not when it assumes the position of a spiritual guidance,” he said. “How to cure it? I wish I knew. The danger is that we live in a world where there’s irony on one side and fundamentalism (religious, political) on the other. Between them the space is rather small, but it’s my space.'

2 comments:

maybe said...

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