Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People | Adam Zagajewski - Writing is my element (25/50) @webofstories | Uploaded April 2019 | Updated October 2024, 14 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: [L] Did you already have a clear idea that poetry was the path you'd take and if so, who was your master – was it Herbert or Miłosz or someone else?
Well, in a certain sense, the decision that I was the one who was going to be writing was already formed when I was 12 years old when I was spending those winter evenings reading Verne and other authors; I thought then that books were the best thing in the world. That this was something I wanted to do. Yet I didn't write anything for a long time because I felt I needed to prepare myself, that I had many years ahead of me in which I could prepare. I went to university in Kraków to write and the psychology course was something of an excuse. Later, I studied philosophy along with psychology. I found philosophy more interesting that psychology, but I knew I wasn't a philosopher. I'll always remember how I used to go to libraries, to either one or another and I'd order... I'd take a few textbooks to my desk – two or three that were set reading for my university course, and two or three for pleasure. I rarely managed to resist the temptation of reading the books I'd take out for pleasure – I read essays, I read poetry. At the very end, I rushed through the set reading.
I mean, I didn't know if I was going to be a poet or a prose writer. Initially, I thought more about prose, stories. I wrote all kinds of stories which I very nearly didn't publish. I wrote... actually what was published was poetry. The first volume, the next published work, the second, the third they were all poetry. Then came reviews and literary sketches. It wasn't until some years later, not many but a little later that my first stories came out. I then wrote a story called 'Ciepło, Zimno' ['Hot and Cold']. It came out when I was 30, and I still wasn't quite sure if I was... I mean, I had no doubts that writing was my element – that I wanted to write, that I wasn't taking anything else into consideration. Yet the choice between prose and poetry wasn't quite so clear-cut initially and it wasn't until few years later that I began to understand that I could express myself better and more powerfully through verse than through narrative prose. Essays, on the other hand, and literary sketches remained as an additional element, as something that accompanied the writing of poetry.
So Kraków... well, Kraków was the place for me where I wrote right from the start, and I knew, I somehow felt that I would have friends there who... and friends appeared. The first, most important friend was Julian Kornhauser, then came Jerzy Kronhold who is from Cieszyn and who lives there still. As so it carried on, this establishing of a certain kind of community followed by my attempt to escape from it, but that's a topic for another time.
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: [L] Did you already have a clear idea that poetry was the path you'd take and if so, who was your master – was it Herbert or Miłosz or someone else?
Well, in a certain sense, the decision that I was the one who was going to be writing was already formed when I was 12 years old when I was spending those winter evenings reading Verne and other authors; I thought then that books were the best thing in the world. That this was something I wanted to do. Yet I didn't write anything for a long time because I felt I needed to prepare myself, that I had many years ahead of me in which I could prepare. I went to university in Kraków to write and the psychology course was something of an excuse. Later, I studied philosophy along with psychology. I found philosophy more interesting that psychology, but I knew I wasn't a philosopher. I'll always remember how I used to go to libraries, to either one or another and I'd order... I'd take a few textbooks to my desk – two or three that were set reading for my university course, and two or three for pleasure. I rarely managed to resist the temptation of reading the books I'd take out for pleasure – I read essays, I read poetry. At the very end, I rushed through the set reading.
I mean, I didn't know if I was going to be a poet or a prose writer. Initially, I thought more about prose, stories. I wrote all kinds of stories which I very nearly didn't publish. I wrote... actually what was published was poetry. The first volume, the next published work, the second, the third they were all poetry. Then came reviews and literary sketches. It wasn't until some years later, not many but a little later that my first stories came out. I then wrote a story called 'Ciepło, Zimno' ['Hot and Cold']. It came out when I was 30, and I still wasn't quite sure if I was... I mean, I had no doubts that writing was my element – that I wanted to write, that I wasn't taking anything else into consideration. Yet the choice between prose and poetry wasn't quite so clear-cut initially and it wasn't until few years later that I began to understand that I could express myself better and more powerfully through verse than through narrative prose. Essays, on the other hand, and literary sketches remained as an additional element, as something that accompanied the writing of poetry.
So Kraków... well, Kraków was the place for me where I wrote right from the start, and I knew, I somehow felt that I would have friends there who... and friends appeared. The first, most important friend was Julian Kornhauser, then came Jerzy Kronhold who is from Cieszyn and who lives there still. As so it carried on, this establishing of a certain kind of community followed by my attempt to escape from it, but that's a topic for another time.
