Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People | Adam Zagajewski - The French reject my poetry (36/50) @webofstories | Uploaded April 2019 | Updated October 2024, 7 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: In Paris, my poetry almost never… two volumes were published in French translation, but what I write and what other Polish poets write although not just Polish poets but poets in general, the majority of European poets, American poets – is not poetry to the French. They have a different aesthetic model which has its origins in Mallarmé, a hermetic kind of poetry which is pure and which under no circumstances reflects politics or history. There's an anecdote which illustrated this very well. Maja had started to translate my poetry into French because she speaks it very well, but she needed someone who would check her translation, a native French speaker. By coincidence, we met a poet who said, 'Fine, give me a few of these translations and I'll cast my eye over them and I'll see if we can work together. We can meet up after a week'. A week went by and we did meet up with him and he said, 'I'm sorry, but I really don't like these poems. They're scandalous'. For instance, there was a poem there called 'Szopenhauer płacze' ['Schopenhauer's Crying'] and the first line of this poem lists the dates when Schopenhauer lived. The French poet said it was absolutely unacceptable for dates to appear in a poem since poetry is immortal and eternal and time doesn't come into poetry as poetry is an antidote to time and that by introducing time, the poem is ruined. He refused to be involved. This was all amusing, it wasn't a tragedy but it showed me that I was in a land in which my poetry wasn't going to be appreciated. But surprisingly, this didn't upset me because these were the first… we were still in the first Parisian years and I was still… I was still working a great deal, going for a great many walks, but then the very prosaic problem arose of how I was to make a living because my poetry wasn't providing me with any income. For a while, I was translating several books from French into Polish for Polonia Books, a publisher based in London which paid quite a decent fee for translations. I translated three books: 'Conversation with Aron', 'Widz i uczestnik' ['The Spectator and the Participant']; a story by Volkoff, Vladimir Volkoff, and – I forget its title – a volume of the diaries of Eliade. These were all translations from French. But, well, these were only temporary solutions, not permanent ones. However, miraculously, by some miracle, a volume of an English translation of my poems appeared in one of the best American publications, and this came about because Józef Brodski liked them. Brodski could read Polish very well, he didn't want to speak it because he made errors but he read without difficulty and he recommended me to his publisher in New York, and after about a year, year-and-a-half, they published a volume which was very well received in the States.
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: In Paris, my poetry almost never… two volumes were published in French translation, but what I write and what other Polish poets write although not just Polish poets but poets in general, the majority of European poets, American poets – is not poetry to the French. They have a different aesthetic model which has its origins in Mallarmé, a hermetic kind of poetry which is pure and which under no circumstances reflects politics or history. There's an anecdote which illustrated this very well. Maja had started to translate my poetry into French because she speaks it very well, but she needed someone who would check her translation, a native French speaker. By coincidence, we met a poet who said, 'Fine, give me a few of these translations and I'll cast my eye over them and I'll see if we can work together. We can meet up after a week'. A week went by and we did meet up with him and he said, 'I'm sorry, but I really don't like these poems. They're scandalous'. For instance, there was a poem there called 'Szopenhauer płacze' ['Schopenhauer's Crying'] and the first line of this poem lists the dates when Schopenhauer lived. The French poet said it was absolutely unacceptable for dates to appear in a poem since poetry is immortal and eternal and time doesn't come into poetry as poetry is an antidote to time and that by introducing time, the poem is ruined. He refused to be involved. This was all amusing, it wasn't a tragedy but it showed me that I was in a land in which my poetry wasn't going to be appreciated. But surprisingly, this didn't upset me because these were the first… we were still in the first Parisian years and I was still… I was still working a great deal, going for a great many walks, but then the very prosaic problem arose of how I was to make a living because my poetry wasn't providing me with any income. For a while, I was translating several books from French into Polish for Polonia Books, a publisher based in London which paid quite a decent fee for translations. I translated three books: 'Conversation with Aron', 'Widz i uczestnik' ['The Spectator and the Participant']; a story by Volkoff, Vladimir Volkoff, and – I forget its title – a volume of the diaries of Eliade. These were all translations from French. But, well, these were only temporary solutions, not permanent ones. However, miraculously, by some miracle, a volume of an English translation of my poems appeared in one of the best American publications, and this came about because Józef Brodski liked them. Brodski could read Polish very well, he didn't want to speak it because he made errors but he read without difficulty and he recommended me to his publisher in New York, and after about a year, year-and-a-half, they published a volume which was very well received in the States.
