ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI ~

 

Figs

Figs are sweet, but don't last long.

They spoil fast in transit,

says the shopkeeper.

Like kisses, adds his wife,

a hunched old woman with bright eyes.

______________________

Adam Zagajewski

True Life

Translated by Clare Cavanagh

Farrar Straus Giroux, 2023

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI ~

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.

July

July, the blackbirds have stopped singing.

I sit on a bench by the bank of a slow river,

I hear the hate-filled quarreling of lovers,

whom I don't know and never will.

Sweaty athletes run along the avenue.

The morning sun shines indifferently

on the calm dark water

that is apathy personified.

A little boy carries a plastic bag

bearing the garish logo Men's Health,

souls almost never meet,

bodies do battle cloaked in darkness.

A rain frail as haiku arrives in the night.

Light bells mumble at dawn.

While we're alive.

Sandals

The sandals I bought many years ago

for twenty eros

in the Greek village of Theologos

on the island of Thassos

haven't work out at all,

they're just like new.

I must have gotten,

quite accidentally,

a hermit's, a saint's sandals.

How they must suffer

carrying an ordinary sinner.

__________________________

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

Asymmetry

translated from the Polish

by Clare Cavanagh

Farrar, Straus and Giroux2018

RYSZARD KRYNICKI ~

My Wife Fights To Protect Man's 
Natural Environment


My delicate wife fights to protect
man's natural environment.
Mornings her slim body vanishes in clouds
of soot and sulphur, on streets giving birth
to cars and hunger, to nooks in skyscrapers
ceaselessly breeding large families,
among mines and mills, in the spastic depths
of a city built from rust and concrete, crawling,
motionless, like a gray glacier. I look for her in vain
— then suddenly I find her, lost, in a train
(am I lost? fleeing myself?)
and through the thick raster I scarcely recognize
her uncertain smile in the group photograph
illustrating a labored feature on new methods
of protecting the environment in the local paper,
which once more promises iron and coal,
a car, a new steel mill, and a Poland of sorts


for every family. Ours too, alas.






Who Isn't


Fear the God

who isn't


in your heart.







Not Much


Our poor dead

gaze at us with their

empty eyes

and see everything to come —

but even they can't help



or warn us,



since neither war nor peace



has taught us much.






Silence


His terrifying fits of rage

*

He worked hard in the forest, he knew how to do everything. He
wanted to teach me everything too, since he believed that only phys-
ical labor would save me when the next war came. Remember, they'll
know you by your hands, he used to say. If your hands are rough, you
go right, if they're delicate, educated, you go left, to the camps or up
against a wall.

  He taught me to plow, to use a scythe, to reap. To tell edible from
inedible plants. Most are edible, you won't starve to death — he said.
He tried teaching me to fish, but quickly gave up; I proved to be a
remarkably stubborn pupil. He showed me how to build a hut, to
dig a shelter. Even how to make a fire, though he'd never managed
it himself.

  He taught me to use an ax. I was a little boy, but I could chop wood
as well as my virtual comrade in misery from The Seven Samurai. And
also from The Magnificent Seven? I don't remember.

  More than anything, though, for reasons I still don't understand
he wanted me to learn to swim and o stay under water as long as I
could. It may save your life when you have to escape — he'd repeat.

  During my next-to-last summer vacation, we worked together in
the woods. He gave me the easiest job, wood barking. We'd leave in
the morning, get back at night. On the way home he liked to take dips
in a woodland lake. One evening he dived in as usual and didn't come
back up. I thought he'd swum across and was waiting for me on the
other side. I circled the lake, not a trace. His stuff had vanished too.
I went around a second time, a third, no luck. I didn't know what to
do. Scared, I couldn't find the road in the dark. I wandered a long
time before I got home.

  He was there, as if nothing had happened. Alone. Mother had
gone out looking for me in the night. He was silent. So was I. I was
afraid to say anything.

  And that's how it stayed.

  I didn't learn much. I would have died in the wilderness. I would
have died trying to escape.

*

When the telegram came, I went straight to the hospital from the
station. He lay in an oxygen tank. He wasn't expecting me, he gazed
at me absently. At last he recognized me. He cried. His right lung,
removed a few days earlier, already journeyed through its uncertain,
crippled afterlife.



————————————

Ryszard Krynicki
MAGNETIC POINT
seleceted poems
translated by Clare Cavanagh
New Directions 2017

ETERNAL ENEMIES ~

STAR


I returned to you years later,

gray and lovely city,

unchanging city

buried in the waters of the past.


I'm no longer the student

of philosophy, poetry, and curiosity,

I'm not the young poet who wrote

too many lines


and wandered in the maze

of narrow streets and illusions.

The sovereign clocks and shadows

has touched my brow with his hand,


but still I'm guided by

a star by brightness

and only brightness

can undo or save me.







RAIN DROP


In the drop of rain that stopped

outside my window, dawdling,

an oval, shining shape appears

and I see Mrs. Czolga again,

stuffing a statuesque goose in her kitchen.

Carts, dark and chthonic, carried coal,

rolling over wooden cobbles,

asking — do you want to live?

But after the great war of death

we wanted life so much.

A red-hot iron pressed the past,

at dawn German blackbirds

sang the poems of Georg Trakl,

and we wanted life and dreams.







NEW YEAR'S EVE, 2004


You're at home listening

to recordings of Billie Holiday,

who sings on, melancholy, drowsy.

You count the hours still

keeping you from midnight.

Why do the dead sing peacefully

while the living can't free themselves from fear?







NO CHILDHOOD


And what was your childhood like? a weary

reporter asks near the end.

There was no childhood, only black crows

and tramcars starved for electricity,

fat priests in heavy chasubles,

teachers with faces of bronze.

There was no childhood, just anticipation.

At night the maple leaves shone like phosphorus,

rain moistened the lips of dark singers.







MUSIC HEARD


Music heard with you

was more than music

and the blood that flowed through our arteries

was more than blood

and the joy we felt

was genuine

and if there is anyone to thank,

I thank him now,

before it grows too late

and too quiet.







POETRY SEARCHES FOR RADIANCE


Poetry searches for radiance,

poetry is the kingly road

that leads us farthest.

We seek radiance in a gray hour,

at noon or in th chimneys of the dawn,

even on a bus, in November,

while an old priest nods beside us.


The waiter in a Chinese restaurant bursts into tears

and no one can think why.

Who knows, this may also be a quest,

like that moment at the seashore,

when a predatory ship appeared on the horizon

and stopped short, held still for a long while.

And also moments of deep joy


and countless moments of anxiety.

Let me see, I ask.

Let me persist, I say.

A cold rain falls at night.

In the streets and avenues of my city

quiet darkness is hard at work.

Poetry searches for radiance.







TWO-HEADED BOY


The fifteen-year-old boy carried a kitten

inside his dark blue windbreaker.

Its tiny head turned,

its large eyes watching

everything more cautiously

than human eyes.


Safe in the warm train,

I compare the boy's lazy stare

to the kitten's pupils,

alert and narrow.


The two-headed boy sitting across from me

made richer by an animal's unrest.



_____________________________

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI
from Eternal Enemies
translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh
(Farrar 2008)