Eternal Enemies: Poems

by Adam Zagajewski, Clare Cavanagh (Translator)

The highway became the Red Sea.
We moved through the storm like a sheer valley.
You drove; I looked at you with love.

―from "Storm"

One of the most gifted and readable poets of his time, Adam Zagajewski is proving to be a contemporary classic. Few writers in either poetry or prose can be said to have attained the lucid intelligence and limpid economy of style that have become a matter of course with Zagajewski. It is these qualities, combined with his wry humor, gentle skepticism, and perpetual sense of history's dark possibilities, that have earned him a devoted international following. This collection, gracefully translated by Clare Cavanagh, finds the poet reflecting on place, language, and history. Especially moving here are his tributes to writers, friends known in person or in books―people such as Milosz and Sebald, Brodsky and Blake―which intermingle naturally with portraits of family members and loved ones. Eternal Enemies is a luminous meeting of art and everyday life.

Genres: Poetry, Poland, Polish Literature, Literature, 21st Century

128 pages, Hardcover

First published March 18, 2008

About the author

Adam Zagajewski was a Polish poet, novelist, translator and essayist. He was awarded the 2004 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

The Zagajeski family was expelled from Lwów by the Ukrainians to central Poland in 1945.
In 1982 he emigrated to Paris, but in 2002 he returned to Poland, and now resides in Kraków.
His poem "Try To Praise The Mutilated World", printed in The New Yorker, became famous after the 9/11 attacks.

He is considered a leading poet of the Generation of '68, or Polish New Wave (Polish: Nowa fala), and one of Poland's most prominent contemporary poets.

Source: wikipedia.com

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would have hoped for this poet to have a reason to travel to my dark city in December!

I might be wrong, but I think he would have answered phone calls.

I might be wrong, but I think he would not have been t0o busy.

I might be wrong, but I think he might have enjoyed to sign a chair in the Nobel Museum Café.

I am wrong most of the time, but not about him touching me in my modern soul, a long time ago, when I thought I did not like poetry.

I am wrong about many things, but not about the impact of this poet on my understanding of internal exile in an overstimulating world, where pop culture and cheap politics cry out their sales slogans in loudspeakers while this poet of time, of history, of humanity whispers in a language I do not speak, but understand anyway in translation, because the language of the lonely heart in a cold world is universal. I understand the voice of the poet that speaks of the idealist who does not want to follow the road most travelled by, but who is brave enough to go back and check on the past and face earlier selves, identities and choices:

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 of 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"

And my favourite line in the collection, portable in my memory in its short and light message of heavy weight:

"Poems are short tragedies, portable, like transistor radios."

With Szymborska's View With a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, and Heaney's Human Chain one of my favourite modern poets.

His poems tell universal stories in a few strong words. Highly recommended!

How I wish he'd had a reason to travel to my gray city in the dark December night, to spread the brightness that can save or undo.

[Daisy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read good things about this critically acclaimed poet but I think Zagajewski and I just didn’t gel. Though all were readable and suffused with beautiful language there weren’t any that grabbed me so that I re-read them or stayed with me for days after. I found a lot of the similes and metaphors lacked innovation and were quite mundane. Willing to consider it’s perhaps a me problem as there is a lot of referencing the past and looking back which I can find a bit cloying.

My favourite line is from Epithalamium,
“Only in marriage do love and time,
Eternal enemies, join forces.”

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

and now you wonder, can
you return to the rapture
of those years, can you still
know so little and want so much,
*
What do you do all day?” “I remember.
*
Will poetry’s epiphany suffice,

delight in the staccato of past music,
the sight of a river and air entering
August’s warm towers,
and longing for the sea, always fresh, new.
Or moments of celebration and the sense
they bring, that something has suddenly
returned and we can’t live without it (but we can),
do they outweigh the years of emptiness and anger,
months of forgetfulness, impatience—
we don’t know, we can’t know,
if we’ll be saved
when time ends.

[Imen Benyoub · Rating 5 out of 5]

Music heard with you

Music I heard with you was more than music—Conrad Aiken

Music heard with you
will stay with us always.
Grave Brahms and elegiac Schubert,
a few songs, Chopin’s fourth ballad,
a few quartets with heart-
breaking chords (Beethoven, adagia),
the sadness of Shostakovich, who
didn’t want to die.
The great choruses of Bach’s Passions,
as if someone had summoned us,
demanding joy,
pure and impartial,
joy in which faith
is self-evident.
Some scraps of Lutoslawski
as fleeting as our thoughts.
A black woman singing blues
ran through us like shining steel,
though it reached us on the street
of an ugly, dirty town.
Mahler’s endless marches,
the trumpet’s voice that opens the Fifth Symphony
and the first part of the Ninth
(you sometimes call him “malheur!”).
Mozart’s despair in the Requiem,
his buoyant piano concertos—
you hummed them better than I did,
but we both know that.
Music heard with you
will grow still with us.

[Corin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zagajewski speaks from multiple histories that seem to search for a humane world.... or evoke a fragmented and traumatized world in the pieces of today. The book evokes comparisons with Paul Celan, with references to historical trauma of Auschwitz and the struggle to speak after dehumanization. His poetry is invariably small, modest, and personal in nature, not moralistic but ethically concerned, compassionate. Although I have not read much Milosz or Herbert, I believe he was contemporary with both.

I was particularly struck by lines in the poem "Tadeusz Kantor":

Much later, though[...:]
I witnessed systematic dying,
decline, I saw how time
works on us, time stitched into clothes or rags,
into the face's slipping features, I saw
the work of tears and laughter, the gnashing of teeth,
I saw boredom and yearning at work, and how
prayer might live in us, if we would let it,
what blowhard military marches really are,
what killing is, and smiling,
and what wars are, seen and unseen, just or not,
what it means to be a Jew, a German, or
a Pole, or maybe just human [...:]

The poem seems to break through the indifference of world politics and news to the real unacknowledged grief and the suffering of human violence, and implies that the origins of violence are somewhere within an unwillingness or inability to come to terms with the suffering of others, the alienation from childhood, the objectification of humanity. Witnessing means having one's innocence taken away, as one becomes implicated in the machinery of the state's inhumanity.

The weariness and grief in this poem come out especially in its repetition of fragments. Fragments which are parts of a whole which has been shattered when modernity began, out of dehumanization, denial, and depersonalization--"What killing is, and smiling".

"How prayer might live in us, if we would let it" is a slender ray of hope in this prison.


In most of the poems here, the traces of such violence appear in descriptions of things that have traumatic histories, like cracks across a pastoral scene of amnesia.

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of short, gently voiced poems that gathers force as it goes, as if Zagajewski's limpid lines, humility and soft unraveling of the resonance of places, moments and people that preoccupy him here begin to alter somehow the air itself. It's quite a lovely encounter in that way. It IS poetry of a certain kind -- unshowy with its metaphors or leaps of imagery, that lets a memory or a scene gradually reveal itself and its potential, where the idea is always hinged to the plain thing. I most enjoyed "The Church of Corpus Christi," "Was It," "Walk Through This Town," "Subject: Brodsky," "Conversation," "Night Is a Cistern," "Epithalamium," "Balance," "Old Marx (2)," "Organ Tuning," and the final poem, "Antennas in the Rain," which in its style, range of imagery and length differs from the concise attention that characterizes the rest of the book.

[Mir · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can read some of these poems on google books to see if you like them.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sparse, calm, powerfully modest. Rather than speaking of alienation, getting lost in the tangles of looking strictly inward, these poems speak from it, looking outward—toward cities, histories, a flower blossom, a piano chord—reading from it and both the beauty and melancholia of impossibility in this task (“there was little joy—// although a few birds didn’t know this, a few children and trees.”)

[nita · Rating 5 out of 5]

IMPOSSIBLE FRIENDSHIP

For example, with someone who no longer is,
who exists only in yellowed letters.

Or long walks beside a stream,
whose depths hold hidden

porcelain cups—and the talks about philosophy
with a timid student or the postman.

A passerby with proud eyes
whom you'll never know.

Friendship with this world, ever more perfect
(if not for the salty smell of blood).

The old man sipping coffee
in St.-Lazare, who reminds you of someone.

Faces flashing by
in local trains—

the happy faces of travelers headed perhaps
for a splendid ball, or a beheading.

And friendship with yourself
—since after all you don't know who you are.

💔

[Lanew-yorkaise · Rating 4 out of 5]

From http://lanew-yorkaise.com/

Adam Zagajewski is often compared to the Polish poet Czeslaw Miloscz: both write of the proximity of history and memory in their native Poland, and both are seen as the preeminent writers to embody the emotions of that country. But where Milocz’s sensibilities developed during the Nazi occupation of Warsaw and his defection from Poland’s communist regime, Zagajewski was born in 1945, and was still an infant when his family relocated to Western Poland. Too young to remember World War II, Zagajewski matured in a country ruled by communism, his writing marked by his membership in the “Generation of ‘68” or “New Wave” of writers in Poland.

Zagajewski’s earlier work was marked by angry protest, but in Eternal Enemies (translated by Clare Cavanagh, FSG Paperbacks, April 7, 2009, $14) the anger has mellowed to an acceptance of the weighty past that continues to push against the present. For Zagajewski, the past is an electrical current that informs his sensations as he walks the streets of Europe’s once-great cities still reeling from the tremors.

Eternal Enemies covers a lot of ground: the importance of music; musings on Marx, Brodsky, and Milocz; meditative train trips and strolls through a multitude of cities. Yet it is Zagajewsky’s sense of being born too late, of being excluded from the formation of history that stands out most in his writings. This sense of alienation can best be seen in his poem, “In a Little Apartment:”

“I ask my father, ‘what do you do all day?’

‘I remember.’

…in a low block in the Soviet Style

that says all towns should look like barracks,

and cramped rooms will defeat conspiracies…

he relives daily the mild September of ’39, its whistling bombs,

and the Jesuit Garden in Lvov, gleaming

with the green glow of maples and ash trees and small birds,

kayaks on the Dniester, the scent of wicker and wet sand,

that hot day when you met a girl who studied law,



the trip by freight car to the west, the final border,

two hundred roses from the students

grateful for your help in ’68,

and other episodes I’ll never know,

the kiss of a girl who didn’t become my mother,



the fear and sweet gooseberries of childhood, images drawn

from that calm abyss before I was.

Your memory works in the quiet apartment—in silence,

Systematically, you struggle to retrieve for an instant

Your painful century.”



By the time Zagajewski returns to Lvov after his family’s exile, the very buildings weigh on the individual, silencing and smothering protest, echoes of the barracks used to house Poland’s many prisoners of war.

A nostalgia for a past he himself did not experience is evinced by the juxtaposition of the “whistling bombs” to the gleaming green glow of Maples and the sound of sparrows, of life going on in spite of war.

The sense of being apart from history is repeated again and again: “other episodes I’ll never know,” “the kiss of a girl who didn’t become my mother,” “The calm abyss before I was,” and the final, distancing, disowning gesture: “Your painful century.”

It is in this last, accusing phrase, that some of the old anger comes to the surface. The generation of ’68 around the globe felt an insurmountable distance between themselves and the lives of their parents, and this poem is partly a manifestation of this inaccessibility. Yet the very act of recording his father’s memories—which we can assume would otherwise have continued to be replayed in the “quiet apartment,” “in silence”— is a testament to the role of the poet, and the Polish poet in particular. Zagajewski actively inherits the mantle of Milocz, the weight of his country’s history on his shoulders.



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; and A Defense of Ardor—all published by FSG. He lives in Paris and Houston.

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of those Polish poets who deserves the Nobel. Like some of his forebears he is able to write poems that easily include both the personal and the political. Here's a little thing I wrote when he came to town:

Of the poets who have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature during the last quarter century or so, almost all of them are primarily concerned with history and the individual’s place within the historical swirl. Of these poets, a disproportionate number have been from Eastern Europe. This should come as no great surprise; the countries of Eastern Europe have both a long literary tradition and a more recent history of totalitarian oppression. It’s a place where the power and significance of words cannot be denied, ignored, or turned into some kind of ironic aside.

Adam Zagajewski has not (yet) won the Nobel. A Pole born at the end of World War II, he came of age before the collapse of the Wall and to maturity during the rebellions in Poland during the 1980s. Since the early 1990s he has split his time among Krakow, Paris, and various places in the United States where he has held teaching posts, usually for half a year. He writes about great cities where history and myth often clash with the concerns of daily life. Willing to confront large themes, he also has a keen eye for the tiny, luminous detail.

His most recent book in English takes its title, Eternal Enemies, from a poem written to celebrate marriage—”Only in marriage do love and time,/eternal enemies, join forces.” It’s hard to imagine an American poet comfortable with that emotion, that kind of statement, or that level of abstraction. Another poem, “The Greeks,” starts with a large historical and literary allusion, moves into the poet’s personal history of childhood under the dour and fearful presence of Stalin, and then ends on an ecstatic moment that sounds a little bit like William Carlos Williams at his most exuberant:

I would have liked to live among the Greeks,

talk with Sophocles’ disciples,

learn the rites of secret mysteries,

but when I was born the pockmarked

Georgian still lived and reigned,

with his grim henchmen and theories.

Those were years of memory and grief,

of sober talks and silence;

there was little joy—

although a few birds didn’t know this,

a few children and trees.

To wit, the apple tree on our street

blithely opened its white blooms

each April and burst

into ecstatic laughter.



https://annarborobserver.com/articles...

I was fortunate enough to have dinner with him and Anne Carson when he was here. A few months later I found this wonderful poem by Carson in the London Review of Books:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n07/anne-ca...

[Iris · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The territory of truth
is plainly small,
narrow as a path above a cliff.
Can you stick
to it?"
PS: Someone said that reading poetry in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil. I have the feeling that the veil of here was quite thick, and that I would have given the book more points if I had read it in Polish.

[Iris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zagajewski takes your hand, leading you to an effervescent sort of calm place; his poems are spare and warm, intelligent and sensory. A beautiful volume of short voyages (few of these poems surpass one page). Clare Cavanagh finesses the translation.

[Scott Bielinski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eternal Enemies is the incredible confluence of Zagajewski's poetics: The bigness of private moments, lovers driving in a car, likened to the Exodus; or, the terrible intimacy of historic, epoch-shifting moments, like the Holocaust. These poems are about yearning. So, they're like prayers. In them, Zagajewski is trying to call forth the One who stands behind our haunted histories: "Poetry is joy hiding despair. But under the despair - more joy."

One of my favorite stanzas, from "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 the chimneys of the dawn,
even on a bus, in November,
while an old priest nods beside us.

One of my favorite poems, "Small Objects"

My contemporaries like small objects,
dried starfish that have forgotten the sea,
melancholy stopped clocks, postcards
sent from vanished cities,
and blackened with illegible script,
in which they discern words
like "yearning," "illness," or "the end."
They marvel at dormant volcanoes.
They don't desire light.

[Nathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok... hmm... so...
this may not be my favorite Zagajewski collection?
But, I'll just say it: I'm a fan. Really.
This book is quiet. Will not "come after you."
But if you go after it, and if you're willing
to spend the energy, there is gold in here.

Just s l o w d o w n . . .

[Carolin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zagajewski is in my opinion the better and dark version of Szymborska. This collection takes us to different places and accompanies us in a beautiful language. It includes a wide range of poems, all connected to locations and enchanting with the charm of old buildings where the painting already comes down a little and old trams squeaking when turning around a corner.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

although Zagajewski isn't really very well known, I think he is one of the best poets alive. He is clear, precise & always current. His latest collection is filled with poems about cities, places, friends & important poets & writers.

[Amanda Carver · Rating 3 out of 5]

This would be four stars all the way MINUS ABOUT 30 PAGES of not-great poems that couldn't at all stand with the great poems. Seriously, poets--80 pages should be the UPPER LIMIT. 116 is slightly obscene.

[Angelin · Rating 5 out of 5]

a wonderful collection of poetry that I thoroughly enjoyed. every single poem was laced with deep thoughts and meaning that I find simply beautiful. I did not expect myself to be so drawn into his poetry, it is definitely a collection that I'll go back to on good days, bad days... any day.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zagajewski's poems keep me rapt. He write a lot about cities and streets and location is this one, which is kind of his thing, but as always he delivers some amazing poetry.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this one at poetry bookshop in Boston. The saleswoman told me that Polish men are just as inexplicably alluring as the Polish poets.

[Agatha Donkar Lund · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whoever does the collection development for the CHPL's poetry is A+ at it -- I tend to only read poetry off the new books shelf, and there hasn't been a bad collection.

[Simona · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite of his to date. This book felt like such a cohesive whole, a perfectly contained paradigm where I made every leap he wanted me to make.

[Karla Deniss · Rating 3 out of 5]

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?

[Lydia · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Today I want to see your eyes without anger."

"Forgive my silence. Forgive your silence."

"And your love, which you lost and found."

"Poetry is joy hiding despair. But under the despair—more joy."

[Salty Swift · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty moving collection of poems from this Polish guru, who should be enjoying wider recognition....

[Josh Skaggs · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this after Unseen Hand, which I liked better, even when I suspected that these poems might be stronger.

[Jade Capiñanes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Iʼm not sure what to feel about this poetry collection. Except for a few ones, the poems here all sound like:

I went to this city,
and I saw a cat,
and then a train,
and sadness
creeps up on you.

[Ezekiel · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5⭐