Adam Zagajewski gave a reading at the University of Chicago in 2008 and I was lucky enough to be in the audience. The best part was the Q&A, when Zagajewski talked about being an old man who loved to fall asleep on trains and wake up and look out the window, not sure where he was. He spoke of the quiet joy to be found looking out the window, in those half-awake moments when the landscape reveals itself.
He read from his new and selected collection called Without End, a book that contains the poem “To Go to Lvov” as well as his famous “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.” These poems are the showstoppers—these are the poems that he’s known for—and coming across these poems in print today, I can still hear his weary voice. As an undergraduate studying poetry, I remember reading “To Go to Lvov” and learning that Lvov [which is what Lviv was called when the Poles governed it] was the city Adam Zagajewski’s family fled, and that the poem itself was meant to be his reconstruction of the place.
Zagajewski’s work helps me to understand the things that exiles can never say to their children. My mother’s family came to the United States from a place called Gottschee, a German-speaking country in what is now considered Slovenia. Gottschee is her Lvov. During the Bay of Pigs invasion, my father and his family fled Cuba. His remembered Havana is a Caribbean variation on Lvov. I’ve always imagined the different lives for myself in the countries my parents left behind. Who would I have been if my father’s family stayed in Cuba or if my mother’s family stayed in Gottschee?
Adam Zagajewski died last year. I wonder what he would say about what’s going on in and around Lvov now. Without End is a romantic, mystical and dreamy book of poetry, but it is also a record of absent presences. What war takes away, poets can reconstruct with language. Lvov exists here, and as our thoughts and prayers increasingly focus on Ukraine, I encourage you to visit Zagajewski’s homeland as he left it for us to find: on the page.
Rena J. Mosteirin wrote Experiment 116 (Counterpath press, 2021), Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) and Nick Trail’s Thumb (Kore Press, 2008). She is the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Mosteirin is an editor at Bloodroot Literary Magazine, teaches creative writing workshops at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire.