Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People | Adam Zagajewski - Family life in Silesia (2/50) @webofstories | Uploaded April 2019 | Updated October 2024, 9 hours ago.
To listen to more of Adam Zagajewski’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzyCHpawMfzZc5HzhP38Qz7
Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021) was a Polish poet, novelist, translator and essayist. He is considered as one of the leading poets of the Generation of '68 or the Polish New Wave (Polish: Nowa fala) and is one of Poland's most prominent contemporary poets. [Listener: Andrzej Wolski; date recorded: 2018]
TRANSCRIPT: At the time, my grandfather was retired and my father was a young employee of the Lwów Polytechnic. Not, of course, during the German occupation, only when the Russians arrived for the second time. My mother was a lawyer, but she didn't practise her profession for long; after we'd moved to Silesia, she stopped working. By that I mean she worked from home and did all kinds of things, but she wasn't in full-time employment. My father was an engineer; he'd graduated from the Lwów Polytechnic. He was an engineer but was slightly torn between technical subjects and the humanities because he was deeply interested in history and he read a lot. From what I know, he would always read history books and then tell me about them. He even wrote a kind of autobiography which I asked him to do after my mother died. I asked him to write about his life and so he did, and there he repeated what he had told me earlier that before he decided what he was going to study, he wavered between going to the polytechnic or studying history, and I think that wavering stayed with him. I know that... he lived a long life, he was almost 100 years old and his final years were very difficult because he was losing his memory, but for a long time he was completely alert and he would read... at some point, he abandoned technical literature that dealt with his area of specialisation and read mainly history books. So there was a certain feel for the humanities in our house.
To listen to more of Adam Zagajewski’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzyCHpawMfzZc5HzhP38Qz7
Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021) was a Polish poet, novelist, translator and essayist. He is considered as one of the leading poets of the Generation of '68 or the Polish New Wave (Polish: Nowa fala) and is one of Poland's most prominent contemporary poets. [Listener: Andrzej Wolski; date recorded: 2018]
TRANSCRIPT: At the time, my grandfather was retired and my father was a young employee of the Lwów Polytechnic. Not, of course, during the German occupation, only when the Russians arrived for the second time. My mother was a lawyer, but she didn't practise her profession for long; after we'd moved to Silesia, she stopped working. By that I mean she worked from home and did all kinds of things, but she wasn't in full-time employment. My father was an engineer; he'd graduated from the Lwów Polytechnic. He was an engineer but was slightly torn between technical subjects and the humanities because he was deeply interested in history and he read a lot. From what I know, he would always read history books and then tell me about them. He even wrote a kind of autobiography which I asked him to do after my mother died. I asked him to write about his life and so he did, and there he repeated what he had told me earlier that before he decided what he was going to study, he wavered between going to the polytechnic or studying history, and I think that wavering stayed with him. I know that... he lived a long life, he was almost 100 years old and his final years were very difficult because he was losing his memory, but for a long time he was completely alert and he would read... at some point, he abandoned technical literature that dealt with his area of specialisation and read mainly history books. So there was a certain feel for the humanities in our house.
