EDWARD HIRSCH AND ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI
Robert Faggen:
This evening we're go ing to hear two poets read.
Edward
Hirsch,
who received the National Book Criti cs Circle Award for
Wild
Gratitude
in 1986, in many ways writes in the vein of Milosz. He too
attempts to capture the world and all of its objects, people, and scenery,
and to create a memory of these objects.
Adam Zagajewski
was born in
Lwow, Poland. He tends to create shadows of the past, a past that still
haunts Poland. He has wri tten a wide variety of works, inc! uding three
books of poetry, a book of essays, and one book of prose and poetry.
Edward Hirsch:
It's a great pleasure to be here to honor a poet we all admire
so much. It's also an honor for me to be reading with Adam Zagajewski, whose
poems I val ue deeply. One of the side benefits of this conference is the plea–
sure of having so many American and Polish intellectuals meet. Somewhere,
when I was a teenager in Chicago, it struck me th:1t something like this must
exist, so I am grateful
to
Robert Faggen and Czeslaw Milosz for bringing us
together. Adam and I thought that we might begin by reading a few poems
both in Polish and in English. This poem is call ed "And Yet the Books."
[Reads poem; Zagajewski reads in Polish.]
Today, Bob Hass gently corrected me when I spoke about Milosz's
survivor's guilt to point out that the poems also have something which he
calls "survivor's wonder." That is true. One of the poems exemplifYing this
quality of survivor's wonder is "Encounter." It ends with that extraordi–
nary line, "I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder." It was written in Wilno
in 1936. Milosz had survivor's wonder even before the war. You might even
say that survivor's wonder is a kind of metaphysical state, as well as an his–
torical one. "Caffe Greco."
In the eighties of the twentieth century, in
I~ollle,
via Condotti
We were sitting with Turowicz in the Cafre Creco
And [ spoke in, more or less, these words:
-We have seen much, comprehended Illuch.
States were falling, countries passed away.
Chimeras of the human mind besieged us
And made people perish or sink into slavery.
The swallows of Rome Illade me wake up at dawn
And I feel then transi tori ness, the lightness
Of detaching myself. Who I am , who I was
[s not so important. Because others,
Noble-minded, great, sustain me
Anytime I think of theill. Of the hierarchy of beings.
Those who gave testimony to their faith ,
