Where Have You Been? (23 page)

He was rolling down steep slopes, sometimes

he was climbing up. He would come back tangled, and be silent.

Never will he return to the sweet throne of her knees.

The stretched-out hands are alight in the darkness

like an old town.

“Knees” is masterly, at beginning and end. “Preserve him” is endlessly more appropriate and feeling than “shelter it.” The strange-sounding imperfect I think is a good idea, for time in the wilderness. The little inversion in line 7 could make you cry. The awful twanging of the Valles version is gone. The poem is suddenly bigger, gentler, softer.

In the hands of the Carpenters, we have seen that everything—be it an article or a tense or an “of”—can become an expressive resource deployed in Herbert's cause, with Valles, it's a potential liability. Reading her is an awful instruction in how even a great poet can be humbled by carelessness and thoughtlessness. She doesn't write even passably good English (and while you might be able to write a good poem by accident, I don't think you can make a good translation). She has such things as “the heel on the other hand,” “some time off / outside of time.” She uses “gingerly” (the care for oneself) as though it meant “carefully” (care for others), “convoluted” for “complicated,” “syringe” for “injection.” She has “downstream” in a poem about the sea, and the baffling “royal apple” for “orb.” Her formulations are not strange and provoking but muzzy and nonsensical: “lanky shoulders,” “immeasurably regular rings,” “the fury of mass murderers,” “the true bride / of real men,” “lacks all dimension,” “mundane / and slightly banal.” Her writing is full of dreary prefabricated terms: “subjected to torture,” “failed marriages,” “riddle wrapped in a mystery,” “quality poet,” “mood swing.” On occasional—redemptive—flights into a grander vocabulary, she makes a fool of herself: “indifferent plenitude” where the Carpenters—knowing or wisely sensing that Herbert demands a mixing of English and Latin—have “indifferent fullness”; “Mr. Cogito's Eschatological Premonitions” where they have “Eschatological Forebodings”; “detritus of an epic” where they have “scraps of a poem.” Valles's version of “Damastes Nicknamed Procrustes Speaks” ends (it sounds rather like something from
Star Trek
): “I live in the undying hope that others will assume my task / and will bring a labor so boldly initiated to its completion”; “and bring the task so boldly begun to its end” is the Carpenters' version. Part of Herbert, it seems to me, is disdain for conventional poetic effects; as he puts it in “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination” (in the Carpenters' version), “the piano at the top of the Alps / played false concerts for him.” Such things are literally and punningly “phoney.” He shouldn't therefore come out sounding like Assonance 101: “laboratories of sorrow,” “clumsy bumblebee,” “irksome as eczema,” “too shallow to swallow,” “rebellion's wellspring,” “more than able—docile stable,” “step separately.” There is no dignity in any of these, and there can be no dignity around them. How can a poem begin “In the life of Mr. Cogito / illustrated supplements / were a vital supplement”? How can one end “with the terrible consciousness that life is momentous”? How can you have an “abbess” in a poem, and an “abyss” in the next line, which is also the last, and the poem not be terminally silly? How can you ask God for “ability” in one strophe and “agility” in the next? How can you have “cut” as a verb in one line and as a noun in the next: “a plain cut across by a red stone quarry / like a holiday cut of meat”? How can you praise God for his “fathomless goodness,” and two lines later comment on the “unfathomable bellows” of a donkey's lungs without being a sort of atheistical pendant to Hopkins?

Alissa Valles's Herbert is slack, chattersome, hysterical, full of exaggeration, complacency, and reaching for effect. The original (I'm quite sure) is none of those things. This
Collected Poems
is a hopelessly, irredeemably bad book. The only solution to its problems would be a bulk reinstatement of the old translations. These things matter so much; it would be nice if they made a difference.

 

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

For twenty years, since I first read the first poem, “To Go to Lvov”—in his first English-language book,
Tremor
—I have had a happily unexamined admiration for the work of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. Hence, perhaps, the inordinate difficulty—even for me, with my sluggishness and resistances—in approaching it now in a spirit of let's call it serious holism. And yet, I very much wanted to do it. Something about Zagajewski's poetry—the joyful flavors of it—seemed to me to elicit (or elicit from me) something like its dialectical opposite: something austere, grinding, agnostic, judicious.

I suppose what I always liked about Zagajewski's poetry is the sense of the poet as companion, as fellow reader and traveler, sharing his notes on books and places, in four books of essays and four collections of poems, without very much to tell them apart. (Though I've only met him half a dozen times at most, his voice is one of those I can hear absolutely at will.) The poems ramble woolgatheringly, and the essays are yet more aimlessly beautiful affairs than the now slightly old-fashioned-sounding label suggests; rarely do they have anything either forensic or brutally argumentative about them. There is something enviably light-footed, alert, intense, and momentary about all the writing. It is adventitious, unplanned, follows its nose, goes very often sideways. It has a feline quality and puts me in mind of Zagajewski's curled purr (I don't know for a fact, but I don't have the slightest doubt he's a cat lover). Like a companion, you see it from the side as you amblingly read, its marked profile. (In addition to those essays, Zagajewski has written at least one novel, which I read in German, about a Polish painter in Berlin. The book was called
Der dünne Strich
[“The Thin Line” or “The Fine Line”], which is its protagonist's nickname: it might stand for Zagajewski himself). He teaches a term a year—a confrère!—in the States, and after living in Paris for twenty-five years has recently gone to live in Cracow, where he studied philosophy.

Somewhere, the poems are one poem, and the prose one prose—or they are even, all together, one writing. The names of poets—and, still more, of philosophers and composers—occur as naturally and profusely in the poems as the names of trees, or relatives, or types of fruit in the prose. Someone's sonatas or
pensées
are set next to a church or a square in a town, or a painting, or the scent of some flower or bush. The world—including great parts of the human-made world—is there for our study and our delectation. And amid these stimuli, sipping, musing, modestly disclaiming all forms of industry, proficiency, or diligence, sometimes mildly remonstrating with himself (“I haven't written a single poem / in months. / I've lived humbly, reading the paper, / pondering the riddle of power / and the reasons for obedience”), and sometimes voicing something more like a prayer (“Give us astonishment / and a flame, high, bright”) is an engaging private “I” (“Herr Doktor, Herr Privatdozent”), bookworm, globetrotter, noticer, who seems very close to the poet himself.

The experience of reading them is very different, but the unselfconscious way Zagajewski handles this “I” brings to mind Frank O'Hara. Certainly, it wouldn't be easy to say which is the more charming, and charm is very much the issue. The difference is that in O'Hara, the “I” (as in “I do this, I do that”) is the repository of all charm—the poems are, you might say, in Norman someone's phrase, “advertisements for myself”—in Zagajewski, the charm is that of all the world, and it is a little mysterious why no one else has noticed it first. One is solar, one is lunar. O'Hara, straightening his eyelids, throwing a couple of tangerines in an overnight bag, is personally and actively and often spectacularly eccentric; Zagajewski—if such a thing can be imagined—passively and haphazardly and rather demurely so. “Do you mean to say this has never occurred to you?” his poems seem to say, “Where have you been? What do you spend your time doing?” “I wasn't in this poem, /” he writes, “only gleaming pure pools, / a lizard's tiny eye, the wind / and the sounds of a harmonica / pressed to not my lips.” And that's the poem.

Like O'Hara's, Zagajewski's poems often follow no marked or discernible plan. The poems are not particularly situated or directed. Their identity is more often collective than individual. Some—like “I Wasn't in This Poem”—are short, others are two or three pages, but generally speaking, it would be easy to move lines or blocks from one to another: “September approaches; war, death,” “The sun, the opulent sun of September,” “September kissed the hills / and treetops like someone leaving,” “Peace, thick nothing, as full of sweet / juice as a pear in September.” This requires, I think, the reader's assent to a sort of poetic carousel, where things come round repeatingly or blurred. It is a question both of mood—something about the cusp of feeling and thought particularly and almost dependably excites Zagajewski, even though he's not a poet of great feeling or profound thinking, and you could hardly get him more wrong than by claiming, say, that the essays “think,” and the poems “feel”—and of a set of properties. Whether deliberately or not, a Zagajewski poem is like a holiday. It has a sense of leisure, of an optional or even a privileged agenda (a café, a museum, a friend or spouse, the meaning of life), it is not in a suit and tie, and it carries no briefcase. There is the holiday air of feeling more purely, as it were, more vividly, alive, but also the statistical improbability (two weeks in fifty-two?) of being there at all. Intensity or relishing of experience comes paired with a certain air of hovering. It is lifted out, suspended, musing (“A Morning in Vicenza”):

The sun was so fragile, so young,

that we were a little scared; a careless move

might scratch it, just a shout—if anyone

had tried—might do it harm; only the rushing swifts,

with wings hard as cast-iron,

were free to sing out loud, because they'd spent their brief,

uneasy childhoods in clay nests

alongside siblings, small, mad planets,

black as forest berries.

This looping through sensation, through layerings of metaphor and whimsy, this tracing of delicate aerial patternings, this speeding instability is what you get in Zagajewski. Contraries—hard and soft, timidity and boldness, silence and noise, light and darkness—are effortlessly fused together. It is a poetry not of manipulation but of adhesion: it is like a rodeo, but with swifts in lieu of mustangs or bulls.

A great many of Zagajewski's poems are—as here—dramas of presence and absence. “A Morning in Vicenza” goes on to become an elegy to two admired friends, Joseph Brodsky and Krzysztof Kieślowski, but it could have gone anywhere (I quoted the first of its three stanzas). This unpredictability, storylessness, geographical unattachment is a feature of Zagajewski; the
Selected Poems
(cut down from a somewhat longer American selection called
Without End
) might be subtitled “one hundred and sixty-three looks at the world.” In
Two Cities
of 1995, the best of his prose books, Zagajewski writes: “If people are divided into the settled, the emigrants, and the homeless, then I certainly belong to the third category, although I understand it very soberly, without a shadow of sentimentality or self-pity. […] To be homeless […] means only that the person having this defect cannot indicate the streets, cities, or community that might be his home, his, as one is wont to say, miniature homeland.” Zagajewski was a few months old when the Polish population of Lvov (reassigned to the Ukraine and called Lviv) was moved to Gliwice (the German Gleiwitz, whose inhabitants were similarly relocated), where he grew up in a haunting atmosphere of denial, make-believe, and shallow-rooted provisionality, utterly at variance with the grand, perduring, instaurational claims of communism. Some inhabitants out of protest never left their flats, others talked obsessively to the young Zagajewski of the beauty and the layout of their former city, others again specialized in collecting derelict “post-German” goods of rather superior workmanship. It is this drama, personal and collective, that fuels “To Go to Lvov,” his longest poem (it is almost three pages) and for me still unsurpassed (but that's no disgrace: it's one of the outstanding poems of the past forty years):

To go to Lvov. Which station

for Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew

gleams on a suitcase, when express

trains and bullet trains are being born. To leave

in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September

or in March. But only if Lvov exists,

if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just

in my new passport, if lances of trees

—of poplar and ash—still breathe aloud

like Indians, and if streams mumble

their dark Esperanto, and grass snakes like soft signs

in the Russian language disappear

into thickets. To pack and set off, to leave

without a trace, at noon, to vanish

like fainting maidens. And burdocks, green

armies of burdocks, and below, under the canvas

of a Venetian café, the snails converse

about eternity.

(That's the beginning: it hurts to stop quoting.) What I might call the “variorum infinitive” continues throughout the poem, to its very last half line, the finite-infinite: “It is everywhere.” Plangency is transmuted into abundance, inaccessibility into a ubiquity of ghostly detail, inert substance into atomized fragrance.

Nothing thereafter has quite the clarity, the attack, the conviction, the purpose, the monumentality of “To Go to Lvov”—but then there are many poems to be written, and many ways of writing them. It reads almost like the first poem of someone beginning to write—which God knows it wasn't—such is its headlong, heedless speed, its bold impossibilist loveliness. But again, this happens: there is only one “Prufrock,” one “Provincia Deserta,” one “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.” Later poems exhibit a certain frugality, prudence, anxiety, patience, pacing, routine. They somewhat deliberately settle beside one another. Poetry becomes a habit—even “I haven't written a single poem / in months” becomes a habit—and one makes the best of it, as reader, or writer. The issue of Zagajewski's “homelessness,” while hardly ever again as explicitly—Edenically—addressed as in “To Go to Lvov,” nevertheless informs all his writing. It is there in the fullness and equability of his responses, the ungrammatical or unhierarchical speed—not grammaticized or hierarchized by belonging in any particular place—of his perceptions, “seeking the spot / where silence suddenly erupts in speech,” whether in verse or prose (“A Small Nation Writes a Letter to God” in
Two Cities
):