Asymmetry

by Adam Zagajewski, Clare Cavanagh (Translator)

Overview

A stunning new collection from Poland’s leading poet

Give me back my childhood,
republic of loquacious sparrows,
measureless thickets of nettles
and the timid wood owl's nightly sobs.

One of the most vibrant voices of our time, Adam Zagajewski is a modern master of the poetic form. In Asymmetry, his first collection of poems in five years, he revisits the themes that have long concerned him: the enduring imprint of history, the beauty of nature, the place of the exile. Though as sanguine as ever, Zagajewski often turns to elegy in this deeply powerful collection, remembering loved ones he’s lost: a hairdresser, the philosopher Krzystzof Michalski, and, most poignantly, his parents. A moving reflection on family, the sublimity of everyday life, death, and happiness, Asymmetry is a magnificent distillation of an astounding poetic voice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374715267
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/20/2018
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	1 MB

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; Eternal Enemies; and Unseen Hand—all published by FSG. He lives in Kraków, Poland.

Clare Cavanagh is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University. Her book Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. She is currently working on an authorized biography of Czeslaw Milosz. She has also translated the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska.

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

CHAPTER 1

NOWHERE


It was a day nowhere just after I got back from my father's
  funeral,
a day between two continents; lost, I walked the streets of Hyde Park catching shreds of American voices.
I belonged nowhere, I was free,
but if this is freedom, I thought, I'd rather be a good king's, a kindly emperor's, captive;
leaves swam against red autumn's current,
the wind yawned like a foxhound,
the cashier in a grocery store, nowhere,
couldn't place my accent and asked "Where are you from?"
but I'd forgotten, I wanted to tell her about my father's death, then thought: I'm too old to be an orphan; I was living in Hyde Park, nowhere, "Where fun comes to die,"
as college students elsewhere said, a little enviously.
It was a faceless Monday, craven,
vague, a day without inspiration, nowhere, even grief didn't take a radical shape; it strikes me that on such days even Chopin would commit himself at best to giving lessons to wealthy, aristocratic pupils;
suddenly I remembered what Doctor Gottfried Benn,
the Berlin dermatologist, said about him in one of my favorite poems:
"when Delacroix expounded his theories,
it made him nervous, he for his part could offer no explanation of the Nocturnes,"

these lines, both ironic and tender,
always filled me with joy,
almost like Chopin's music itself.
I knew one thing: night too needed no explanation, likewise pain, nowhere.


POETS ARE PRESOCRATICS

Poets are Presocratics. They understand nothing.
They listen to the whispers of broad, lowland rivers.
They admire birds in flight, calm suburban gardens,
High-speed trains rushing breathlessly ahead.
The scent of fresh, hot bread drifting/wafting from a bakery stops them in their tracks,
as if they'd just remembered something vital.
A mountain stream murmurs, a philosopher bows to the wild
  water.
Little girls play with dolls, a black cat waits impatiently.
The quiet above August fields, when the swallows fly away.
Cities too have their dreams.

Poets stroll along dirt roads. The road has no end.
Sometimes they prevail, then everything stands still
— but their reign is short-lived.
A rainbow appears, and fear vanishes.
They know nothing, they jot down isolated metaphors.
They bid the dead farewell, their lips move.
They watch as green leaves overtake old trees.
They're long silent, then they sing and sing until their throats
  burst.


SUMMER '95

It was summer on the Mediterranean, remember,
near Toulon, a dry summer, self-absorbed,
speaking some incomprehensible dialect,
so we caught only scraps of salty words,
it was summer in evening's slant light, in the pale stains of stars, when the buzz of countless trifling conversations had died out and only silence waited for a sleepy bird to speak,
summer in the daily explosion of noon, when even the cicadas fainted, that summer, when the azure water opened, welcoming, so welcoming that we forgot completely about amphoras lying for thousands of years on the sea bottom, in darkness,
in solitude; it was summer, remember,
when the privet leaves, always green, laughed,
it was July, when we first befriended that little black cat who seemed so intelligent to us,
it was the same summer when, in Srebrenica,
men and boys were being killed;
and there were countless dry shots,
and no doubt also heat and dust,
and cicadas, mortally afraid.


MARATHON

Marathoners, just after the race, proud and exhausted,
in capes blazoned with the name Bank of America
congregate on Chicago's main street like ancient heroes,
parade before Sunday strollers,
pose happily for photos, countless flashes illuminate the air.

Then evening falls,
heroics slowly evaporate,
the good moon returns,
benign as always.
Purple clouds in the sky can tell us nothing.
Once more the world hushes.


SUITCASE

Krakow was overcast that morning, the hills steamed.
It was raining in Munich, in valleys the Alps lay hidden and heavy as stones.

Only in Athens did I glimpse the sun, it turned the air, the whole air,
the whole immense flotilla of the air to trembling gold.

As the religious writers say: I suddenly became a new man.

I'm just a tourist in the visible world,
one of a thousand shadows drifting through airports' vast halls —

and my green suitcase, like a faithful dog, follows me on little wheels.

I'm just an absentminded tourist but I love the light.


MR. WLADZIU

Mr. Wladziu was a barber (haircuts, men's and women's, on Karmelicka Street). Short and slight.
Interested in one thing only: angling.
He liked to talk about the ways of fish,
how drowsy they become in winter, when the cold is biting, murderous, almighty,
how you must respect their sleep. They rest then, lie in the dense water like clocks,
like new arrivals from another planet. They're different.
Mr. Wladziu even represented Poland once or twice in angling,
but something went wrong, I don't remember what,
too hot, or maybe rain, or low-lying clouds.
By the time he got to the doctor, it was too late.
Karmelicka Street didn't notice his departure:
the trams shriek on the curve,
the chestnuts bloom ecstatically each year.


MANDELSTAM IN THEODOSIA

Let me go; I wasn't made for jail.
— OSIP MANDELSTAM
(arrested in Theodosia in 1920)

Mandelstam was not mistaken, he wasn't made for jail, but jails were made for him, countless camps and prisons waited for him patiently, freight trains and filthy barracks, railroad switches and gloomy waiting rooms kept waiting till he came, secret police in leather jackets waited for him and party hacks with ruddy faces.
"I will not see the famous Phaedra,"
he wrote. The Black Sea didn't shed black tears, pebbles on the shore tumbled submissively, as the wave desired,
clouds sailed swiftly across the inattentive earth.


FULL-BLOWN EPIC

Each poem, even the briefest,
may grow into a full-blown epic,
it may even seem ready to explode,
since it conceals everywhere immense stores of wonder and cruelty patiently awaiting our gaze, which may release them,
unfold them, just as a highway's bow unfolds in summer —
but we don't know what will prevail, if our imagination can keep pace with its rich reality,
and so each poem has to speak of the world's wholeness; alas, our minds are elsewhere, our lips are thin and sift images like Molière's miser.


THE EARTH

Some spoke Polish, others German,
only tears were cosmopolitan.
Wounds didn't heal, they had long memories.
Coal shone as always.

No one wanted to die, but life was harder.
Much strangeness, strangeness didn't speak.

We arrived like tourists, with suitcases —
we stayed on.

We didn't belong to that earth,
but it received us openheartedly —
it received you both.


KINGFISHER

As kingfishers catch fire ...
— G. M. HOPKINS

I saw how the kingfisher in flight just above the sea's surface,
a flight as straight as Euclid's life, straight and violent,
exploded suddenly into every color, I saw how the world's wild
  light seized its wings, but not to kill it, just to make certain that this iridescent bullet safely strikes the rocky shore, the nest that's hidden there,
a flame, so it seems, may also be a shelter, a dwelling, in which thoughts ignite but are not destroyed,
a prison that frees us from indifference,
a mighty oxymoron,
sometimes a poem too,
almost a sonnet.


ABOUT MY MOTHER

I could never say anything about my mother:
how she kept saying, you'll be sorry someday,
when I'm not around anymore, and how I didn't believe in either "I'm not" or "anymore,"
how I liked watching as she read bestsellers,
always flipping to the last chapter first,
how in the kitchen, convinced it's not her proper place, she made Sunday coffee,
or, even worse, filet of cod,
how she studied the mirror while expecting guests,
making the face that best kept her from seeing herself as she was (I take after her in this and other failings),
how she went on at length about things that weren't her strong suit and how I stupidly teased her, for example, when she compared herself to Beethoven going deaf,
and I said, cruelly, but you know he had talent, and how she forgave it all and how I remember that, and how I flew from Houston to her funeral and they showed a comedy in flight and I wept with laughter and grief, and how I couldn't say anything and still can't.


GRAZYNA

Back then Gliwice had a cinema, Grazyna,
christened in honor of another cinema —
in Lvov, on Sapieha Street —
and Coldwater Street, named in honor of faded maps, now vanished,
still runs along the oily, black river
(runs, or maybe just walks calmly);
other efforts to change this town into that one were also undertaken,
countless bold experiments that never worked,
the alchemists labored late into the night,
the philosopher's stone was sought,
spirits and places were summoned up,
powers were invoked, both high and low,
but forgetting triumphed in the end,
forgetting, round as a ball,
sweet as a strawberry, final as judgment.


WE KNOW WHAT ART IS

We know what art is, we recognize the sense of happiness it gives, difficult at times, bitter, bittersweet,
sometimes only sweet, like Turkish pastry. We honor art,
since we'd like to know what our life is.
We live, but don't always know what that means.
So we travel, or just open a book at home.

We recall a momentary vision as we stood before a painting,
we may also remember clouds drifting through the sky.
We shiver when we hear a cellist play Bach's suites, when we catch a piano singing.
We know what great poetry can be, a poem written three millennia ago, or yesterday.

But we don't know why a concert sometimes fails to move us. We don't see why some books seem to offer us redemption while others can't conceal their rage. We know, but then we
  forget.
We can only guess why a work of art may suddenly close up, slam shut, like an Italian museum on strike (sciopero).

Why our souls also close at times, and slam shut, like an Italian museum on strike (sciopero).
Why art goes mute when terrible things happen,
why we don't need it then — as if terrible things had overwhelmed the world, filled it completely, totally, to the
  roof.
We don't know what art is.


VENICE, NOVEMBER

Venice, November, black rain, Piranesi in San Giorgio Maggiore still dreams his terrifying dreams, which have long since come to pass and today seem to bore young visitors a bit. They'd prefer other nightmares, long for new fears, unexpected horrors.

The black rain still falls and Venice,
bent, stooped, uncertain,
dressed in the tattered fur of Mauritanian façades and lace,
slowly slips into winter like a medic who keeps knocking softly,
persistently on the palace chapel door.


NORTHERN SEA

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free
— ELIZABETH BISHOP


But maybe we just pretended to know nothing.
Maybe that was easiest, considering the vastness of experience,
and suffering (others' suffering usually).
Maybe there was even a touch of laziness,
a hint of indifference. Maybe we thought:
we're better off being Socrates' distant epigones than admitting that we know a thing or two.
Maybe on long walks, when the earth and trees loomed, when we began to understand,
our daring frightened us.
Maybe our knowledge is bitter, too bitter,
like the gray cold waves of the northern sea that has swallowed up so many ships,
but stays hungry.


PLAYING HOOKY

But the kingdom of the dead may be right here,
I thought; this was by the Vistula,
among weeds and dandelions and crushed Coca-Cola cans,
which must have suffered much,

in March, when young, reckless shoots of grass set out trustfully along an endless road and schoolboys playing hooky drink cheap wine in first, chaotic ecstasy.

So I thought then, but now I don't know how to end this poem.
There is another kingdom, after all,
to which we belong,

visible and friendly,
the vast kingdom of the living,
but we're unable to see it —

because it's in us,
because it's infinite and elastic.

And it holds alarm clocks, which sob,
and jazz records made of vinyl,
buttons, gooseberries,
and black lilac.


RACHMANINOFF

When I listened to the Third Concerto then,
I still didn't know that experts considered it too conservative (I hadn't realized that art contains not only art, but also hatreds, fanatical debates, curses worthy of religious wars),

I heard the promise of things to come,
omens of complex happiness, love, sketches of landscapes I would later recognize,
a glimpse of purgatory, heaven, wanderings, and finally maybe even something like forgiveness.

As I listen now to Martha Argerich play the Third Concerto, I marvel at her mastery,
her passion, her inspiration, while the boy I once was labors to understand what came to pass, and what's gone. What lives.

CHAPTER 2

CHILDHOOD

Give me a childhood again
— JOHN BURNSIDE


Give me back my childhood,
republic of loquacious sparrows,
measureless thickets of nettles and the timid wood owl's nightly sobs.

Our street, empty on Sunday,
the red neo-Gothic church that didn't take kindly to mystics,
burdocks whispering in German,

and the alcoholic's confession before the altar of a white wall,
and stones, and rain, and puddles in which gold glistened.

Now I'm sure that I'd know how to be a child, I'd know how to see the frost-covered trees,
how to live holding still.


1943: WERNER HEISENBERG PAYS A VISIT TO HANS FRANK IN KRAKOW

It was a difficult visit, though elementary particles never commented on current events.
Hans Frank, a subtle connoisseur of art, a murderer,
had been his older brother's classmate.
What they shared was a love of music.
You don't choose your brothers, or their friends.

He couldn't quite see why Frank had picked the royal castle for his residence in Krakow.
The passersby struck him as sad,
they moved like black puppets,
above, the clouds were ominous, violet,
below, the city like a frosted mirror.

It was December, a frosted month.
The elementary particles never spoke.
He gave a lecture (just for Germans).
He couldn't understand those clouds,
that mirror; fortunately other matters soon absorbed him: his homeland was in flames.
Those dark streets were not his homeland.

Those leafless trees, that chill, the women wrapped in shawls and scarves — it must have been a dream.
He skipped this episode in his memoirs,
insignificant, after all. What goes unsaid should stay unsaid. So he thought.


CONVERSATION

There, where you can see the Earth may actually be round: a narrow path between idyllic fields outside of town,
on the horizon, a sliver of church tower mercilessly sliced by a distant hill,

alders above a muddy stream,
in the water Canadian thyme
(which is an invasive species)
and the porcelain shards of a plate,

I sometimes walked there with my father (my mother,
as we knew, didn't go on longer expeditions),
in the fall or spring, when trees were momentarily content.

Only now, or so I think,
do I approach the proper tone,
only now could I talk with my parents,
but I can't hear their answers.


CHACONNE

FOR JAUME VALLCORBA

We know, everyone knows, that he spoke with the Lord in countless cantatas and passions, but there's also the chaconne from the second partita for solo violin:
here, perhaps only here, Bach talks about his life,
he suddenly, unexpectedly, reveals himself,
swiftly, violently casts out joy and sorrow
(since it's all we've got), the pain of losing his wife and children,
the grief that time must take everything,
but also the ecstasy of hours without end when, in some dim church's musty air,
lonely, like the pilot of a plane delivering mail to foreign countries, he played the organ and sensed beneath his
  fingers its pneumatic acquiescence, its rapture, its trembling,
or when he heard the choir's single, mighty voice as if all human strife were gone for good
— after all, we dream about it too,
telling the truth about our life,
and we keep trying awkwardly,
and we'll go on trying, but where are they,
where can our cantatas be, tell me,
where is the other side.


SENIOR DANCE

Or how, before the senior dance, my mother went to the meeting where we discussed the evening's "artistic program"
and how her ideas struck us as feeble, old-fashioned,
as if she, not we, were taking the final exams she'd already passed before the war,
with honors, as I remember,
and also the war, all signs suggest she passed it pretty well too, and how then,
during that meeting, she embarrassed me —
whereas I couldn't admire her during the war for different reasons, completely different,

and how that asymmetry, that strong asymmetry,
for many years, for decades,
didn't permit me to see her in truth's sharp light,
sharp and complex,
complex and just,
just and unattainable,
unattainable and splendid.


SHELF
JERZY HORDYNSKI (1919–1998)

He was a poet of bitterness and rapture (more bitterness).
I think he was a very good poet.
I found one of his books in the Regenstein Library:
Selected Poems. This was why he'd been chosen.
He left poems chosen by others.

His biography: a bow drawn between Lvov and Rome.
Three years in a Soviet camp, several decades near Campo dei Fiori.

From Rome he kept going back to Krakow,
and then from Krakow back to Rome.
I didn't know him, though I once spotted his laughing face in a crowd of writers,
and remembered it.

If you accept the minimalist definition,
he was happy — he died in his own bed.
Now he lives on a library shelf like a hiker bivouacking in high mountains.

A faded cover hides bitterness and experience.
A faded canvas cover: a neighboring volume,
smaller scale, has left its dark trace upon it — so much tenderness in the touch of two unread books.

(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Asymmetry"
by .
Copyright © 2014 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

TITLE PAGE,
COPYRIGHT NOTICE,
I,
NOWHERE,
POETS ARE PRESOCRATICS,
SUMMER '95,
MARATHON,
SUITCASE,
MR. WLADZIU,
MANDELSTAM IN THEODOSIA,
FULL-BLOWN EPIC,
THE EARTH,
KINGFISHER,
ABOUT MY MOTHER,
GRAZYNA,
WE KNOW WHAT ART IS,
VENICE, NOVEMBER,
NORTHERN SEA,
PLAYING HOOKY,
RACHMANINOFF,
II,
CHILDHOOD,
1943: WERNER HEISENBERG PAYS A VISIT TO HANS FRANK IN KRAKOW,
CONVERSATION,
CHACONNE,
SENIOR DANCE,
SHELF,
JULY,
UNDERGROUND TRAINS,
NIGHT, SEA,
THAT DAY,
SANDALS,
REHEARSAL,
WHITE SAILS,
RADIO STREET,
MY FAVORITE POETS,
III,
MOURNING FOR A LOST FRIEND,
JUNGLE,
RUTH,
MANET,
A TRIP FROM LVOV TO SILESIA IN 1945,
HIGHWAY,
WAKE UP,
PUBLIC SPEAKING CONTEST,
PENCIL,
KRZYS MICHALSKI DIED,
BERTOLT BRECHT IN ETERNITY,
RUE ARMAND SILVESTRE,
NOCTURNE,
ORANGE NOTEBOOK,
COUSIN HANNES,
OUR NORTHERN CITIES,
ALSO BY ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI,
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATOR,
COPYRIGHT,

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/01/2018
In his new collection of poems, Polish poet Zagajewski, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award, explores the tension between freedom and captivity in time and space, as well as in relationships. His mother appears frequently, a specter he experiences more palpably in her absence than her presence, and his desire to make language physical recurs throughout the poems: he captures "only scraps of salty words" and witnesses silences that lasts until poets' "throats burst." There are Wordsworthian longings here, yet the poet retains a clear grasp on the real difficulties of childhood ("Now I'm sure that I'd know/ how to be a child"). As a self-proclaimed "tourist in the visible world," Zagajewski guides his readers through everyday fears, yearnings, and repulsions so that ultimately the asymmetries of the title are the things, that until we have to look them straight on, we stop ourselves from seeing. VERDICT For all poetry readers.—Emily Bowles, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison

Library Journal