Name: John Maynard Smith - The story of Haldanes last words (34/102) @webofstories
Uploaded: 2024-10-22T08:17:00-05:00
Duration: 8 min 17 s
Description: John Maynard Smith - The story of Haldanes last words (34/102)

John Maynard Smith - The story of Haldanes last words (34/102)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2024-10-22 | John Maynard Smith - The story of Haldanes last words (34/102)

Joan Feynman - My work and career: The NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (18/18)

Joan Feynman - My work and career: The pleasure of finding things out (17/18)

Joan Feynman - My work and career: Smart people in science (16/18)

Joan Feynman - My work and career: The importance of the Sun (15/18)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-11-06 | To listen to more of Joan Feynman’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwoLHwaKDx9oOReqjwdUa9S

Joan Feynman (1927-2020) is an American astrophysicist. She has made important contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields, sun-Earth relations and magnetospheric physics. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes, Alexander Ruzmaikin; date recorded: 2019]

TRANSCRIPT: [CS] This was your main contribution to so-called space weather. But I want to go to take you back to history of aurora and the visit of corona in Sweden. When you reported why there was no aurora at that time, it was because the solar activity was at the minimum of Centennial Cycle.

Yes. No, everybody knows about the 11 years cycle of the sunspots. They go... they're a few or no sunspots for a year or two and then they gradually go up to a maximum, then down again. And it takes 11 years for them to go through one cycle. That's the sunspots. But they... if you take two sunspots, say, if you took the one at the center of a cycle, in 1900 it was very small. The next one was a little bigger, but it went down to zero and then it wakes and so on. It turns out there's an 88-year cycle in the sunspot and solar wind business which is solar... something in the sun, and I don't think that to this day we know what it is. But I quit two years ago.

That's used to predict the interplanetary condition in planning a spacecraft, you know when it's going to fly, and you could calculate what... from the knowledge now what the interplanetary medium is going to be like. So you can design your... your spacecraft systems so that they can stand that... the way it's going to be without getting knocked out or failing and so on. So that's very important for the solar weather people that they can plan ahead 10 years, 15 years and design their spacecraft and all of its parts to last okay for that time. In the early days they had to overdesign everything. They just made it too heavy too safe and not get as much information as they would now.

We had been observing the solar wind particles and fields for a long enough time to be able to make reasonable predictions. It involves an enormous amount of data and analysis of it. And it's a basis of... I believe it's still the basis of predictions for spacecraft design.

The sun has a hot corona, I believe and there are particles that come from it. The particles that come from it depend on the organization of the magnetic field on the surface of the sun. So that in some places it's weaker, which allows more particles to come out and some places stronger, so there are fewer particles and the sun's rotating all the time. So what you get at earth would be variable because of that. But more important perhaps is that the sun has flares, solar flares which are events, which at the sun... there's a sudden reorganization of the magnetic field. So that if it was in two arches before, it's now in one larger arch and the solar wind is much stronger and... so that the danger of being upset by the solar wind becomes more important. And that also has to be dealt with by a process of having observed long enough to understand what's going to happen in the next ten years. And that's a thing which I worked on with many... several other people. And I'm sure that since I left it's still being worked on. It has to be kept up to date because the sun doesn't repeat itself every 11 years. Is that what you're talking about?

[CS] Why is this important?

This is important because when you design an experiment, you have to know that the implement that you're putting up there is one that can measure that. Which means that if it's high fluxes you are interested in, you have to design a spacecraft which has instruments which safely observe higher fluxes than you expect to get. Otherwise, you'll never find the maximum. So depending on what it is you're interested in and why, the spacecraft has to be designed so it will last and work throughout the entire project.

Now, there are many projects now that are trying to get closer to the sun where the particles are... much more of them and are hotter and more dangerous, but they can't be measured in the other way. And so this is a thing which has been hanging around about the sun for a long time. And I think they have plans to do it again, is that right? Yes, they want to get closer because there's a region in there that we've never been able to send instruments into. That we have to guess from what we have been able to send the instruments and figure out how it goes from one place... how it influences the different areas outside the sun or in the solar atmosphere.

There are so many people working in this that it's very hard to say exactly what the situation is. For instance, I wrote a paper in 1973 about the helium abundance in the sun. [...]

Read the rest of the transcript at webofstories.com/play/joan.feynman/15

Joan Feynman - My work and career: How is an aurora formed? (14/18)

Joan Feynman - My work and career: Mans influence on his surroundings (13/18)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-11-06 | To listen to more of Joan Feynman’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwoLHwaKDx9oOReqjwdUa9S

Joan Feynman (1927-2020) is an American astrophysicist. She has made important contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields, sun-Earth relations and magnetospheric physics. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes, Alexander Ruzmaikin; date recorded: 2019]

TRANSCRIPT: One of the things I do to get interesting problems to work on is to notice something curious that I don't understand and to find out more about it and to find out whether it's understood or not. And the last one I did so far has to do with the origin of agriculture.

I went once on a trip for pleasure. And we went to the coast of France, where they... there are caves which have been... which have pictures drawn in them. 40,000 years ago, human beings in a dark cave drew pictures of the animals that were there. There were about six horseheads, one below the other, so beautifully done. So clearly... horses... so clearly that the man or woman who did the painting understood art. And so you get an idea of what this person was. He was not an ape. He was not half an ape. He was a human being doing beautiful work. So you look at that and you think, okay, these were intelligent people. They had no agriculture. The question then is, when was agriculture invented? Agriculture was invented 11,000 years ago, separately in about four or five places within a span of 2,000 years. So from 33,000, what is this? They weren't apes and they didn't have agriculture. Now, what happened? Why?

But we now have data which gives us information about climate for 40,000, 50,000 years, 60,000 years in ice and that is a continual... it varies at times. At different periods, some of them are 100 years. It's going like that. Some of them are further but we have the whole... it's available to any scientist who wants it. It's this complicated thing, but there are methods of finding out what the frequencies and the variations were, which that guy did because his wife suggested it. But he did it. I don't know how to do those things.

[CS] Your husband?

My husband, yes.

[CS] You did this together?

Yes, this is together. And if you do it you can get for all this time the variation of the climate. And you find that throughout the last – I don't know, we can look up the dates later – it varies very rapidly until 12,000 years ago where it becomes a Holocene, which is flat. Climate doesn't change until yesterday. I don't mean yesterday, I mean it's... there are frightening evidence that we're going back into a period of time when the climate is changing rapidly. It's not determined yet, but there's lots of evidence that it's clobbered again.

This period when the climate got quiet, agriculture developed in various places like China and Middle East and Mexico and so on and so forth. Within a short time, within 1,000 or 2,000 years, but in this... that's a short time. And that, I think, it was a great discovery of ours. And it was just taking two pieces of data, which looked to be totally unconnected and discovered there were important connections between them. It didn't take fancy theories or anything like that.

He used to tell me that 30,000 years ago, human beings were smart, were capable of doing agriculture because they were certainly capable of it if you see those paintings. But they didn't have agriculture for another 20,000 years, which is no small length of time. So there had to be a reason why there was no agriculture. And the reason was... we found in the climate data that we have for that long. So there's nothing complicated or amazing, except that we've got the data. And the data shows the only way you can put those two things together is it really wasn't possible to make agriculture 30,000 years ago, because if you look at the record that we have of the climate, it's too variable. You know, if it's... it's got to be reasonable that the weather is such that if it grew last year that it had some chance of growing 100 years after that, otherwise you can't base a civilization on it.

We've been living in the Holocene with developing civilizations for a long time. But we're having a lot of trouble now. The insects are disappearing. The weather is weird. Now, it has to remain for a long time until we have to understand it yet, but it's quite, to me, quite distressing because we're not trying to do anything about it. We're not trying to hold it. It's not going to hold itself, that the present apparently...

The climate data is obtained from ice, looking at ice. The ice near the poles and near the tops of high mountains is thousands of years old. [...]

Read the rest of the transcript at webofstories.com/play/joan.feynman/13

Joan Feynman - My work and career: On becoming a woman scientist (12/18)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-11-06 | To listen to more of Joan Feynman’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwoLHwaKDx9oOReqjwdUa9S

Joan Feynman (1927-2020) is an American astrophysicist. She has made important contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields, sun-Earth relations and magnetospheric physics. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes, Alexander Ruzmaikin; date recorded: 2019]

TRANSCRIPT: The stars were in the sky and in one place we lived... he [Richard] was in college but he took me up to the flat roof of the building whenever he was home and showed me the stars and told me about the individual ones. It was this one, this was very... was a red giant and that one was such and such and so on. So it was constant. My father was constantly at it, too. So there was never a time when I discovered science. It was always around me. And then my mother told me women's brains couldn't do science and I sat and cried for quite a while with that information.

My brother was in graduate school, and it was my birthday – maybe 12, 13th birthday – and he left a book when he went back to school. And I saw it and I picked it up. I said, 'Richard left the book on astronomy'. And I opened it up and it had my name and then 'happy birthday'. And it was a book for a science class. And I said to him, 'How do I read this? It's a difficult book'. He says, 'It's easy. You start at the beginning and you read it until you don't understand it anymore. Then you start at the beginning and you read it till you don't understand anymore and you'll find you're further along and you keep going. You keep doing that until you can understand the whole book'. And I kept doing that. And on page, God only knows what, I still have the book right here. It's had a picture, an illustration of a spectrum of a star, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was the name. And Cecilia was a woman's name and Payne-Gaposchkin suggested she was married. So I knew the secret was out. Women could do physics and science. And so ever after that I didn't hesitate. If Payne-Gaposchkin could get her thing in a textbook, then it was possible. And I didn't worry about it anymore.

Oberlin College at the time I went to it was the college that had the largest number of graduates who went to graduate school after college. Now, we claimed that that was because we didn't learn very much at Oberlin so we had to go on to the next school, but it wasn't. It had a very excellent reputation. I don't remember much in the way of prejudice against women in Oberlin. It was the first school in the United States to have really... It admitted women in 1837 which was the earliest of any college in the United States that admitted both men and women. So I picked it partly for that.

I got a call from another group that was working. They wanted my advice on something. This was at a time when I was elected secretary as a part of the science. I would come and give my opinion.

So I got permission to go. I went to the building. The building was a press building or something. And I walked in and I started to go up the stairs and whoop!, someone says, 'Women are not allowed upstairs'. I assumed that women could only be allowed upstairs for certain reasons, but I didn't assume it then. To reiterate, I said, 'What?' And then they said, 'No, you can go with a man in the cafeteria but not upstairs'. Well, this is a big famous place in New York. So I called the head of our organization and said, 'I am not permitted to go upstairs because I'm a woman'. So he talked to the guy who let me go upstairs and went and took care of it. Then I came back. And since I was already a member of a governing part of the American Geophysical Union, I introduced a suggested rule that the American Geophysical Union would not hold any meetings in any organization that did not allow equal admission for all of the people in the American Geophysical Union. That was passed unanimously. And a major... at least one major meeting had to be cancelled because they didn't admit somebody or another and I felt very proud with that.

I did several things like that. For example, I looked at the meeting... the programme, the meeting for ten years and not a single woman had been asked to chair a single leading section or to give an invited paper. You could give a contributed paper for 15 minutes, but you never could get an invited paper or to chair. So I just talked to people. They were arranging things. I said, 'Did you know that no woman was ever invited to give a paper or to chair a session?' And they said, 'No' – I mean, the guys – 'No, we didn't know'. And it was the case with ten years or something, and it was the end of that. Women got invited to give invited papers. There was no argument once it was discovered that this was going on. And I feel very good about that because nobody was angry at me. Nobody was trying to do anything. It was just a custom.

Joan Feynman - My work and career: Schooldays (11/18)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-11-06 | To listen to more of Joan Feynman’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwoLHwaKDx9oOReqjwdUa9S

Joan Feynman (1927-2020) is an American astrophysicist. She has made important contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields, sun-Earth relations and magnetospheric physics. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes, Alexander Ruzmaikin; date recorded: 2019]

TRANSCRIPT: When Richard went to MIT, they decided he was so well prepared that none of the kids from Far Rockaway High School had to present any exams to get in.

When you apply to a college, most colleges you apply you want to be a scientist, you want to be an artist, they give you an examination to see if you're up to what they want in their university that they think they can train you. And MIT used to give exams in math to people who were graduating from Far Rockaway High School and wanted to go to MIT. But when he got to MIT, they decided he was so well prepared that they didn't have to give exams from anybody from Far Rockaway. I don't know how long that lasted.

[CS] Are you saying that Far Rockaway High School was very special?

I guess so. How many Nobel laureates did we have, six?

[CS] I know three, Blumberg, Richter, Feynman.

There were a couple more.

[CS] And a couple more. And Bernie Madoff.

Don't say that. You know that name?

[CS] Yes, the crook.

A great thief.

[CS] Yes, the great thief.

Whatever they were, they were good at it.

When I went to it, most of the kids were from Jewish towns like mine. And on Jewish holidays, they sent a notice around of who was at school, not who was not at school because it was a sensible thing to do. The area also had big areas of black students, which meant that they were often two different kinds of classes, one, mostly white and the other mostly black. Because apparently, the black parents didn't care much about whether their kids did well in school or not so they didn't, but they did very well in baseball and things like that. That was their culture. This was when I was in high school. Let's see, I was 15. I'm now 92. So we're talking about ancient things that should not be believed to continue. And occasionally, there was a black student.

So there were two classes. So when I say there was a black class and a white class, that indicates there were the same number of black kids in the big areas as there were white kids. And the black kids would try to tease the white kids, but not me. Because when I was a kid in kindergarten and we had to go down to the bathrooms... The kindergarten that I was in was all white except three little girls. And I noticed that one little girl had nobody to take their hand. So I got in line next to her and took her hand and she was so pleased and so were all the other black kids.

So all through my grammar school, I would hear people say, 'She's okay with black kids. She's okay'. So that was nice.

[CS] Far Rockaway High School, was it a good school?

Depending on? It was a good school. It was a public school. It was as good as the students who came to it. And what was it we did? We had a principal for a while who decided we should not wear galoshes and raincoats to go to school. And we should not wear slacks, the girls should wear dresses. Well, it's raining there. So we took it for a while and then we quit going and she had to change the rules. We either quit going or everybody came in slacks or something like that, but we revolted.

OK. I had some very good teachers. It really did that... It was during the Depression, the '30s Depression, and so a lot of people couldn't find jobs. And they found jobs in high schools teaching where they had PhDs. And so yes, there were some very good teachers. Besides the gang of gangs which was in high school.

There is, by the way, a street now in Far Rockaway called the Feynman Way in honor of Richard Feynman. It goes from where we live to the high school.

Joan Feynman - My brother, Richard: Brother and sister relationship (10/18)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-11-06 | To listen to more of Joan Feynman’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwoLHwaKDx9oOReqjwdUa9S

Joan Feynman (1927-2020) is an American astrophysicist. She has made important contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields, sun-Earth relations and magnetospheric physics. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes, Alexander Ruzmaikin; date recorded: 2019]

TRANSCRIPT: I can't think of any miserable stories where anybody did anything miserable to me. Except, I guess when I was very small, my parents left me alone for a few hours... an hour or two while they went somewhere and then they came back. When they came back, put the key in the door and opened the door, there was clanging and banging and eerie... And my brother jumped up in bed and said, 'It works, it works!' He had put an alarm. He was still very young. And he was just delighted that it worked.

My brother showed me other very interesting things. We lived on Long Island, which is an island on the other side of this country. And in Long Island, we had very frequent – in the summer time – very frequent thunder and lightning storms. And you'd see a flash and then you'd hear the lightning. And my brother told me, 'You want to know how far away that lightning...?' You know, he told me they really took place together at the same time, the lightning and the thunder. So he taught me to count the difference in time where I was because light travels with the speed of light and thunder travelled with the speed of sound. And there was a difference. And he taught me to count from one to the other. So we'd know how far away it is. So even now if I see lightning, I say, 'One hippopotamus, two hippopotamus, three hippopotamus, four hippopotamus...', because my brother had carefully measured what word to use so that it was a second. So that was my brother teaching me physics.

I was his lab assistant. He had a lab. This... we're not living in the big house anymore. We're living in a small house and he had an electronics lab and there were all sorts of switches to pull and so on, to make noises and have shocks and he wanted to show that to his friends. And so he had boxes around for me to stand on and he would set everything up and I would stand there and he would say, 'Okay, go'. And I go like that and my other finger being in the... I would get a shock. I guess I put my foot finger in and then did this and got a shock in me. But I was used to that. And I knew I was going to get paid a penny a shock. So that was very, very nice.

And the other thing I could do, I don't know. I remember something that I did where my reward was getting to pull my brother's hair. He had nice hair. And I would pull it as hard as I could, which since I was very small, was not very hard. But he always made this face, which looked like he was in terrible pain. And I enjoyed that.

And he used to ride me on his bicycle. You know, there's a bar on the bicycle, and you can put your little sister sitting on that bar. And he was very careful. The whole time he was riding me around town he sang, 'Keep your foot out of the... wheel, keep your foot out of the wheel, keep your foot out of the wheel'. And I never stuck my foot in the wheel. So that worked out okay too. So you get the idea that we were a happy family. There were money troubles sometimes, but that was the Depression. It was not that somebody was doing something they shouldn't, and that's the way it was.

When I first got my first interesting job that I really thought I'd like, it had something to do with the interaction of the earth's... particle from the sun on the earth's magnetic field. I always call it Aurora but Aurora is only one aspect of it. So I was feeling very happy about that. I thought, I'll tell my brother. Then I thought, wait a minute – did I tell you this story? – wait a minute, my brother is a very smart man. If I tell my brother what I'm working on, he is going to tell me the answer and I will have no fun. So I went to my brother and explained to him – please keep... we'll divide up. I said, 'How about you and I divide nature into two things? I'll take anything that has to do with the earth-sun relationship and you can take the rest'. And he said, 'Okay'.

So one day he went to a lab which did a lot of work on the earth-sun relationship and the head of the laboratory, a guy named Akasofu, asked Richard... he showed him around and showed him all the interesting things and said, 'Wouldn't you like to work on this?' And Richard said, 'Yes, but I have to ask my sister'. So he came home and he asked me and I said no. So he had to report to Akasofu that no, he was not allowed to do that. And a lot of people thought it was a joke. But it wasn't a joke. I wouldn't have any fun, you know, if every time I found something interesting it took him a half hour to tell me the answer. [...]

Read the rest of the transcript at webofstories.com/play/joan.feynman/10

Joan Feynman - My brother, Richard: A sad love story (9/18)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-11-06 | To listen to more of Joan Feynman’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwoLHwaKDx9oOReqjwdUa9S

Joan Feynman (1927-2020) is an American astrophysicist. She has made important contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields, sun-Earth relations and magnetospheric physics. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes, Alexander Ruzmaikin; date recorded: 2019]

TRANSCRIPT: My brother when he was still quite young used to say to me all the time, 'Women are no good, women are no good, women are no good'. So one day I had done something stupid in my opinion. And I said to him, 'You know Richard, you're right. Women are no good'. He got this glassy look in his eyes. He said, 'No, I met a wonderful woman last night'. So okay, all right. Well, that was Arline. And if you would walk down the beach in Rockaway, you would see Arline sitting with braided hair. So they met and were attracted to one another. And by the time Richard was going to MIT... When he left for MIT, my mother and father had invited her to his graduation from high school and then he was leaving for MIT. And so she was at our house, she left from our house. And when Richard left, he kissed his family around, including Arline who must have been about 16 or 17 at the time. But it was clear they were going to get married. And she was accepted as part of the family at very young. For example, she played the piano, so she was hired to teach me to play the piano. She... she and I went for long bike rides together. She went painting with my father because she liked to paint and she went to cooking classes with my mother. Now, that's the whole family, you understand. So she was beloved by all of us.

And then we had some trouble one year when all of members of my family got pneumonia. So when we all got better, we thought it would be nice if we took a vacation. So we went to Atlantic City and Arline came with us. And Arline and I shared a room. My brother and Arline would walk on the boardwalk behind me singing in a loud voice, 'She walks...' – to me, behind me – 'she talks, she crawls on her belly like a reptile'.

That visit to Atlantic City... my father noticed that Arline had a bump on her back of her neck and she wasn't feeling well. The doctors didn't know what the bump was. But she got sicker and sicker.

And then Richard felt that she wasn't getting the proper care and that the only way she could get the proper care was if he married her and therefore became responsible for what care she would get. But by that time, we knew she had tuberculosis and also at the time there was no known cure for it. They're actually... they were close to it, but it wasn't general knowledge. And my mother was afraid she was going to lose her son to tuberculosis and so she was very upset.

But after a while, she came to realize that nothing else could be done. So she gave her and my father's permission and they took Arline out of bed in her home, put her in an ambulance and took her to the river between New York and New Jersey where there were ferries going across. The ferries have captains and captains can perform marriages. So they went to New Jersey and were married on the ferry and then she went directly into another hospital.

She was a lovely girl. She was very sweet to everyone. She was very careful with people. I mean, she didn't insult anybody. Everybody loved Arline.

They moved to Albuquerque where Richard was in Los Alamos. And she had all kinds of lovely ideas despite of being so sick. For example, she thought it would be nice if they had a barbecue when Richard came down on the weekends. So she bought him a barbecue outfit with all the trimmings and a barbecue. And he had to barbecue the supper outside her window of the hospital and then they had the barbecue. And she also ordered for his birthday a bunch of pencils. Now his pet name for her was 'pootsie', and the pencil says, 'I love you, pootsie'. And she gave him that and insisted he not take that off but use it.

So they did the best they could but she did die of tuberculosis. Richard, her father was there but her mother didn't want to go. And I was a freshman in high school... in college. And I was very, very sad because she was so much a member of the family. She wasn't just his fiancée. She was a member who had a strong relationship to every member of our family.

Somebody – a friend of Richard's – got the idea that there should be memorial steps to great scientists. So they worked on it and worked on it, and finally the United States government decided okay, so they took four great scientists, I think it was. My brother, of course was one of them.

Joan Feynman - My brother, Richard: My first teacher (8/18)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-11-06 | To listen to more of Joan Feynman’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwoLHwaKDx9oOReqjwdUa9S

Joan Feynman (1927-2020) is an American astrophysicist. She has made important contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields, sun-Earth relations and magnetospheric physics. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes, Alexander Ruzmaikin; date recorded: 2019]

TRANSCRIPT: I had a brother who was interested in science. I had a father who was interested... was always asking my brother a lot of questions. I had a mother who had no objection to it. My brother's room was always a laboratory. It was a town where people were interesting. We lived in an apartment house and each apartment had a storage bin, which was big enough to make into a little lab. And one of the boys, he was my age... he had a storage bin that was a chem lab. And I wanted to... to get one and my mother said no. I didn't understand at the time, but she... in her mind there were dangerous men who would attack a little kid in a lonely cellar pouring things in one another. So then my brother was at Princeton. And he said, 'Well, why don't you make a telescope?' So I said, 'How am I going to do that?' He said, 'I'll buy the glass. I'll give you the directions. You send it to me in Princeton and we'll check the measurements and so on'. But somehow I never did. I don't know why I never did. Probably, I was lazy. That was probably it. You sort of need companions when you're a kid to do something like that.

I discovered science at home. My brother showed me all kinds of neat things. My brother also... he also babysat for me. And once I went to bed I was supposed to stay in bed. So I would call to him, 'Richard, I'm thirsty'. So he would come in with a glass of water and stand there and go like this with a full glass of water, and the water, of course, stays in the glass if you do it fast enough. Well, one night he missed, the whole glass of water went soaring through the room and hit the wall. And... so that was the end of that particular trick.

My mother ran an orderly house, not like me. And if you went to bed, you were in bed. And one night when I must have been five or six, Richard got permission to wake me up in the night and take me to the golf course because there was an aurora on the golf course. And that was the first aurora. I saw it was pretty good compared to any I've seen since. But that's the story of the aurora. So he showed me and he told me what it was as best as he knew and I was fascinated. I have a picture of it, you know, huge green moving things up above the sky. So Richard was very interest... We were very close when we were kids.

Arithmetic came very early. He would give me a couple of numbers like one and three or one plus three and I had memorized four and that was correct and so I got a little reward, which was pulling his hair and he'd go like that. But I didn't learn until very recently that it doesn't hurt when you pull the hair. So, you know, science was always there.

My brother, you know, has all sorts of teachers' prizes while I was the student. For the beginning student, he loved to tell me about nature and to show me little experiments like if you have... You know those old-fashioned Victrolas where you had a record that you put on a plate and then you turned it on and it went around. He used to put marbles at different places and we'd watch the marble go out, because it was considered angular momentum.

When he [my brother] was in high school, they used to have contests with other schools and he normally won them. So he was the best in five states or something like that, so my mother was very proud of that. But on... one of her best friends said to her, when my mother told her that, 'Lucille, does Richard have any other sports?'

Joan Feynman - My brother, Richard: How he came to be so smart (7/18)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-11-06 | To listen to more of Joan Feynman’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwoLHwaKDx9oOReqjwdUa9S

Joan Feynman (1927-2020) is an American astrophysicist. She has made important contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields, sun-Earth relations and magnetospheric physics. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes, Alexander Ruzmaikin; date recorded: 2019]

TRANSCRIPT: My father believed that every household that had a child should have an Encyclopaedia Britannica in it because then they could take any... anything that came up, they could read in the encyclopedia. So we had an Encyclopaedia Britannica. And one of the things we liked to do... my father liked to do was just take a volume and open it at random and read what was there out loud. And then sometimes he'd hand it around and read some other article that caught our eye. So that was one of the things.

My father was interested in science but didn't have the money to go to college. But Richard was from the beginning interested in numbers. My mother tells a story she had him in a... in a little tricycle. She was going to take him to buy some things. And they passed a place that was building a new house and their horses were going down into the hole and coming up with the dirt to make the... And my mother said, 'Look, Richard, horses'. And my brother looked at them and said, 'Two horses down and one horsey up, it's three horses'. So it came along with Richard, I think.

Instead of telling Richard all the things about science that he could or getting him chemistry sets or things like that, my father played a game with him which he invented, which I think was very useful in Richard's career. Richard was still a baby. My father bought some tiles from... They used to sell... when there was a fire, they used to sell the stuff that remained to everyone around. My father got some blue tiles and some white tiles for bathroom floors. And then he would sit with Richard and he would take a white tile and put it down then he'd put another white tile then he'd put a blue tile and another blue tile. And Richard was always supposed to put the next one. So he learnt to recognize patterns and numbers. And I think that at such a young age, being rather advanced operation of your brain. I think that was could very well have been involved. But nobody... It surprises me. Everybody agrees that Richard was unusually smart except Richard, of course. But nobody asks anything about how he was educated. What was done to make this kid smarter so they could try it, at least. They're just okay, he was a no ordinary genius. But yes, he was just a smart guy and I think that game must have been very useful because that's a high thing that the brain does, recognize patterns. And in science, it's enormously important because you notice that if this happens that happens, if this doesn't happen that doesn't. If this doesn't happen, this doesn't happen or sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it does. But all those patterns are things that I at least when I'm trying to do some science, look for those patterns and try to understand why they're there. And that it's proven quite useful. I got a medal, exceptional contributions to cosmic rays and disturbances in space. I'll find out what it says.

My father was very smart, I think, but he had no education. And he had high blood pressure which meant that at a young age he was ill. But he was interested in all kinds of things of nature. The boys were educated so they could make a living, the women didn't work in those days, so there was no reason why they should be. She [my mother] worked and she's one of the reasons I had the courage to do so.

Joan Feynman - My family history: Living in New York (6/18)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-11-06 | To listen to more of Joan Feynman’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwoLHwaKDx9oOReqjwdUa9S

Joan Feynman (1927-2020) is an American astrophysicist. She has made important contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields, sun-Earth relations and magnetospheric physics. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes, Alexander Ruzmaikin; date recorded: 2019]

TRANSCRIPT: New Your City had five boroughs... New York's obviously a big city and had five boroughs which were pieces of land. And Far Rockaway was in Queens and that was on the Atlantic Ocean. And there was this narrow place which was a peninsula, along the sea that is the bay which was behind it. I had a stupid problem because you learnt in school that the ocean was to the east. But where we were, the ocean was in the wrong direction so I never could figure out the directions. But anyway. So in the summer time, the people in New York City if they were any acquaintance of yours, they would come out in the train for the weekend. So my mother had towels, pot... huge piles of towels for the people that came out in the summer. And I had them for several years. I didn't buy towels after I got my own house.

And... but in the wintertime, it was terribly afar to... You see, the people in Manhattan believe that Long Island was cooler than Manhattan, which wasn't true. Long Island was on an ocean, and so in the summer, the ocean which had... was less easy to change the temperature, the ocean made it cool and in the winter it made it warm.

Well, the people that lived in Far Rockaway... there were two kinds of people. There was a railroad that went down the middle of the peninsula. The Jews lived on one side and the blacks lived on the other side. And the blacks were household help. All over, there was no place where a black person could get a decent job. I mean, it's just the way it was. The black people that... the black women that worked for us, we were very friendly with them.

If you know what the Jewish... what the Jews do when somebody dies... No. Well, they're supposed to be buried within a day unless the day is Saturday, in which case it's two days. But the family sits in the house – it's called shiva – and all the friends come and commiserate with them and somebody takes care of... When my father died, my mother went back into their room and didn't come out and talk to people for a while, but our cleaning woman came to visit. And my brother Richard was operating things. And he took the cleaning woman back to see my mother and said to the assembled people, 'A friend of the family'. She was black and old. But then that how we treated it. She was a friend of the family.

He [my father] used to paint and he met a painter who was standing out and nobody wanted his work. So my father decided he would get a portrait of me. And I was about 13. So week after week after week, I sat for this guy. And in between sittings, he took out what he had done before Christmas and it was no good. So after a while, we just stopped that. But that was the view.

And there was a... the women in town watched for things like kids going to school, shoes and they... they played bridge for money. And the money was put in a... in a pot and when they got enough money, they bought shoes for the kids or they bought coal for somebody they like. So they were being very useful for the town. And no shame for anybody being hard up.

In my house, a favorite game was... his favorite occupation was... We had Encyclopaedia Britannica and my father would take a book out and open it and say, 'Look at this' and then read it. And then read another or look up something else connected. And we liked to do that. It was... it was fun. But now looking back on it, I suppose it was an odd way for teenagers to have fun, but we did. It was our family that liked to do that. And my brother used to read the encyclopedia in math and he would make notes. I swear to God, he would make notes. And then we moved around and the encyclopedia went to a cousin. And then the cousin wanted more room in her bedroom, then the encyclopedia... and she wanted to get rid of it. And I said, 'Well, let's try to sell it to somebody'. Richard's got things in it and we couldn't find them. I don't know why we couldn't find them. But those things now, if we still had that encyclopedia with the things that Richard had written, now they would... I have a thing here now from a guy who sells these things and the prices they get – hundreds of thousands of dollars for little things. We'd all be wealthy as could be, but we threw out the encyclopedia because we couldn't... you know...

Joan Feynman - My family history: How we were educated (5/18)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-11-06 | To listen to more of Joan Feynman’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwoLHwaKDx9oOReqjwdUa9S

Joan Feynman (1927-2020) is an American astrophysicist. She has made important contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields, sun-Earth relations and magnetospheric physics. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes, Alexander Ruzmaikin; date recorded: 2019]

TRANSCRIPT: I went to kindergarten and in kindergarten... it was during the Depression. And one of the things that Roosevelt did to help was he bought... they bought the milk from the farms that couldn't sell it because people didn't have the money to buy it. And then they gave the milk to the schools so that the kids in the schools drank the milk and they somehow or other got cookies to go with it. So the cookies were round cookies about that big and they were half chocolate and half vanilla, and I was in kindergarten. Well, I was shy. So when the kids got the cookies, I always got the vanilla and somebody else got the chocolate. And I was very sad about that happening for a week or two. And I asked my mother, 'What can I do? They won't give me the chocolate'. She says, 'Well, cut it the other way so each piece was half and half'. I was so impressed, so impressed by this great idea of my mother's. I've used it ever since.

In kindergarten, there were black and white kids. There were two kindergartens because there were too many kids in school so there was a kindergarten that was supposedly smarter than the other kindergarten. The other way of putting it is that there was one white kindergarten, one black kindergarten.

There were couple of... there were three black girls in the white kindergarten. And when we went... we had to go to the bathroom once or twice a day, all of us. And we were supposed to take the hand of somebody and go two by two down into the basement, which was a stinking mess and we hated it. It was never cleaned. It was nauseating. It was horrible. It was because the roof leaked... and the floor... and the floor leaked below that and so on. They cleaned the other places but they never cleaned the toilets apparently, so we hated it.

But anyway, we lined up and I realized there were two little black girls holding each other's hands and there was nobody holding the other one's when she was walking behind the two. So I went in ethical culture and took her hand. And she looked so surprised and so delighted. It was so easy to do that... I remember it still, obviously, how nice it was to do something so simple as so recognize she was a human being.

When I went to kindergarten, another thing started which was throughout my life. There were two teachers. One was behind the piano and the other was teaching. The one behind the piano came out one day and said, 'Are you Richard Feynman's sister?' And I said, 'Yes'. And she said, 'Are you as smart as he is?' And I said, 'No, few people are'. So it started early.

So I said I wasn't as smart as Richard. But later on when I got to be six... probably around 10, I was... I worked in the office of the school. And I noticed that there were these drawers where they kept their records and I realized there were all kinds of records in there, including IQ records. So I went to see what my IQ was and I found that my IQ was 123. Then I looked up my brother's IQ, it was 122. So I was smarter than my brother!

OK, how we were educated, not how we went to school. Well, my father... my father was very interested in science. He didn't go to college because people didn't go to college in those days. So he was always reading about it and so on. And he took us for walks in the woods and things like that. And he turned over a rock and under the rock there was usually an ant... ant nest or whatever it is. And the little ants when that happened, they somehow immediately grabbed an egg and then carried it out of the nest. And so that was one of our things that we watched. And we watched... everywhere we went, we watched for something in nature or something.

Joan Feynman - My family history: Being brought up the German way (4/18)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-11-06 | To listen to more of Joan Feynman’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwoLHwaKDx9oOReqjwdUa9S

Joan Feynman (1927-2020) is an American astrophysicist. She has made important contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields, sun-Earth relations and magnetospheric physics. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes, Alexander Ruzmaikin; date recorded: 2019]

TRANSCRIPT: Well, my earliest memory... I was a little kid and I got roller skates for my birthday. And as was the usual way of doing it, you just get the kids skates and you let them skate. And of course, that has some peculiar results, you know, the two knees that have scabs on them from frequent falling.

We lived in a big house. My grandfather, who came over with only 50 cents in his pocket. My grandmother was in millinery. My grandfather had some successful business and he built houses and they were lovely houses and big. And we lived in one of them: my mother, my father, my brother and I, my aunt and uncle, their two kids and two people who were... servants, oddly enough.

The way it was done in those days was if you wanted to get servants, you went down to the docks. I mean... There wasn't any other way. You went down to the docks and you talked to people there. And what the deal was, your family spoke English and they spoke only German, so how are they going to get a decent job in their line of work if they don't speak their language? So they say, 'Okay, you come to our house, we also speak German flawlessly'.

And they worked for us and spoke German and taught us German. I was too little. But it was a good deal for everybody. But they were... they were very German and they didn't think we were being brought up correctly. So what they decided was to teach me how to speak correctly to adults. And I remember standing at the top of the stairs to the... and them saying, 'Now when you speak to adults, it's feet together, hands at your sides and then you can speak properly to them'. And so I did that to the help. I put my feet together, stood up straight and spoke very German. But then when we were eating supper, we had a big table with all these people at it. And in the middle of the table there was... on the floor there was a bell which you could touch to inform the servants that they should come out and deliver the food. And the kids... four kids, I was too small, three of the four kids had developed an excellent ability to look as if nothing was happening on the top, but they were managing to push the button all the time and it always ended in laughing. So that was a good game, too.

The only thing that nobody taught me was how to cook. I never understood that. But we had a big kitchen, my mother cooked in it and my aunt cooked in it and the woman who was... They cooked, cooked and... And one day I stood watching them cook and a mouse came out of the cabinet. The mouse came scurrying across and the other two women dropped what they were doing and screamed, 'A mouse, a mouse!' And I was sitting on a high thing, I couldn't get off. There I was in the big kitchen with a mouse running. I didn't know what a mouse was except it was a little thing... So I sat there and said, 'They left me alone with a mouse'. And they came in and they were so upset because they had left me alone with a mouse without telling me it was not a dreadful creature.

My father also helped teach me to read because we had Alice in Wonderland. And Alice in Wonderland had already been read once to me and so I loved it. You know the little stories in Alice in Wonderland which are about grandma and things like that? Like the Red Queen says, 'We have a jelly every other day, marmalade every other day'. And Alice says, 'I would like some marmalade'. And the Red Queen says, 'I said marmalade every other day. This is not every other day. Every other day is tomorrow or yesterday, but it's never... never today'. So my father enjoyed that and I enjoyed it. So I got a lot of reading of Alice in Wonderland which was learning things about logic and so on.

As I grew up, I had need for money of my own, of course. So they... my father decided to give me an allowance. So the allowance was one cent a day. One cent a day. Okay, it's seven cents a week, I believe. Yes. So... One day he asked me, 'Would you rather have five cents a week or a penny a day?' So I said to him, 'Do I have to ask for it?' That was his rule. I didn't get the penny until I asked for it. He said, 'Yes, you have to ask for it'. And I said, 'Then I'll take five cents a week'. And he said, 'Why?' He looked a little worried. And I said, 'Well, if I have five... seven days to ask for it, I'll manage to remember to ask for it and get five days, but I'll never remember every day to ask for it and get a penny'. So okay, I got five cents a week for quite a while. [...]

Read the rest of the transcript at webofstories.com/play/joan.feynman/4

Joan Feynman - My family history: Our sense of humor (3/18)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-11-06 | To listen to more of Joan Feynman’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwoLHwaKDx9oOReqjwdUa9S

Joan Feynman (1927-2020) is an American astrophysicist. She has made important contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields, sun-Earth relations and magnetospheric physics. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes, Alexander Ruzmaikin; date recorded: 2019]

TRANSCRIPT: It was a custom we went every Sunday, I guess or Saturday once week, we went to my grandmother's, my father's mother's house for dinner. And my father had another brother who was somewhat stupid and three sisters and their spouses and so on. And my grandmother used to make a special dish for each of her sons or sons-in-law, never for the daughters-in-law, just for the sons and sons-in-law. And then she would sit at the bottom of the table with my father at the top because he was the oldest male. And she would sit there like this and say, 'It isn't as good as usual, it isn't as good as usual' and it never was as good as usual.

And she had tea which she served in the Russian fashion in a glass with a spoon. And somehow you were supposed to drink it, but I couldn't. You weren't supposed to take the spoon out. But I never could get it. I still don't get how you do it.

My father sat at the head of the table and my mother sat at the other side. I sat on one side and Richard when he was at home, on the other side. And we didn't have servants at that time so my mother would run with the food. We just talked usually. We didn't talk about politics at the table. We tried to keep it cheerful. It was in fact one of the dinners at that era that my mother and brother made me laugh so hard, I fell on the floor. That wasn't fair.

There was one thing about the systems. If you could make somebody laugh very hard so they were very uncomfortable, that's what you were allowed to do. I had a cousin who came to us very often to eat, a very good dear cousin, and she would... Richard would stare at her without turning his eyes and stare at her, and stare at her. And all the while she just starts giggling and giggling harder and giggling harder until she had to leave the table. So we had ways to make people uncomfortable by making them laugh.

My mother... My mother always insisted that she had a little door in her head. And as soon as a number was mentioned, the door slammed, and she did not want to know what we were talking about so she never came into the mathematical games. But she was a very jolly woman, funny when she tried to be. I remember one night my brother, my father, my mother and I were sitting at the table and I must have been about 12. And my mother and my brother had a dreadfully difficult sense of humor to deal with, so they were going back and forth going back and forth. And my father and I were miserable. We were laughing so hard. He said, 'We can't eat, we can't eat'. And they just kept going till I fell on the floor that they stopped, very nice of them.

The kind of sense of humor was very carefully... it never was... you never told a story which made fun of anybody. You never told a story how stupid somebody was. The stories were all just funny things that happened, sort of like are happening now. I haven't told you about my brother... anything, except that you can laugh at without hurting anybody's feelings, without being mean in any way. And that was the rule. It's been through my life. I never tell stories about damn fools. It's too easy. No, it isn't. That is too easy. It's not funny for the person that you're talking about. So it is not funny. So that's the rule. And my whole family does it that way, which makes it much easier to laugh. You're not hurting anybody.

Joan Feynman - My family history: The values we lived by (2/18)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-11-06 | To listen to more of Joan Feynman’s stories, go to the playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwoLHwaKDx9oOReqjwdUa9S

Joan Feynman (1927-2020) is an American astrophysicist. She has made important contributions to the study of solar wind particles and fields, sun-Earth relations and magnetospheric physics. [Listeners: Christopher Sykes, Alexander Ruzmaikin; date recorded: 2019]

TRANSCRIPT: My mother was sent to two schools. The first school was a German school because her mother thought the Germans were wonderful people. So it was dreadful because they had lunch every day, it was always the same lunch and it was a brown bean soup served in a soup plate and then the rest of the meal was served in the soup plate without washing it. So they had to finish all of the soup.

Then the second school they sent her to was the... Fairview School which still exists. And that was around 1900 when there was a – I may have mentioned this – there was a... some new thinking of the Jewish religion. And they made a new religion called ethical culture which was not concerned with the deity, but just with how you're supposed to live life. And that was the religion in the house where I was brought up. We did do some Jewish things like have Passover and things like that. But the major thing was ethical culture.

I found out some interesting things to me. I was in Egypt, and we were going to see some pyramids. And we were in a little cart with a donkey or a mule, and the guy was hitting the donkey or mule to get him to go faster. And I said to him, 'Wait a second. I cannot, because of my religion, ride in a car with animals being hit. So just stop and I'll get out and walk'. And he said, 'No, I'll stop hitting the animal'. And he was so pleased. And that really surprised me and pleased me that what they were doing, they didn't want to do that. So I found that more people were kind than it was obvious.

My parents believed that – like any sensible person – that life was hard, so the only thing that you could do about it was laugh. And so they laughed a lot and we all laughed a lot. So it was a good... a good way to deal with it.

My father went painting every Saturday, watercolors and in the summertime it was outside at... whether it was a house by the beach or something like that. In the winter time he got... bought flowers from a florist who was very good at arranging them and he had the flowers.

My father always wanted me to stay home with him on Saturday. But I tried a couple of Saturdays and it took him 15 minutes to get to sleep, to sleep all afternoon. So my mother said, 'You don't have to stay home.'

I normally saw him when I was a child at supper times, because he came home he worked in Manhattan and we lived in Far Rockaway which was about an hour's train drive away. And it was a family rule when he came home, knocked on the door, rang the doorbell that everybody in the family rushed to the front door to welcome and kiss him. That included the dog. The dog would come running. And the dog was always trying to be first.

He wasn't home very much except at supper and on weekends he was painting. But he was a vegetarian. He was a vegetarian because he did not think it was ethical to kill an animal to eat it. We don't need to eat animals. So that was a thing which was rare about him. Even when he went to restaurants they would say, it's only a little gravy on this. No, no, jello is not vegetarian. It's made from hooves. And so he wouldn't need it.

And he was a sick man from a very young age, with high blood pressure. He was one of the... He finally went to Mayo Clinic. You know Mayo Clinic? He finally went to Mayo Clinic and they put him on a new diet that had been invented. No salt, in fact, nothing but fruit and rice. And that brought his blood pressure down. So for a few months he felt better but then he died. They told him when he was at the clinic that a man in his condition had not long to live.

Joan Feynman - My family history: Arriving in America (1/18)

Adam Zagajewski - Poetry readings: Try to Praise a Mutilated World (48/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Writing is my element (25/50)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-04-25 | 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.

Adam Zagajewski - A new climate dawns (10/50)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-04-25 | 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: Well, for a child, which is what I still was, these political issues didn't yet figure. Following the October eruption, which it was impossible not to notice because it was on such a grand scale and was so important, every conversation between adults reflected this. The radio changed, we'd listen to 'Music and News' which became ever more interesting. And so life became more interesting after that October. Of course, I was too small to... too small and also that Silesian provincialism played a part. If we – I mean my family – if we had lived in Warsaw I would probably have seen these things sooner. And if, like Adam Michnik, I had been the son of politically-minded and politically active parents, that would have accelerated my civic development even more.

But this isn't how it was. There were books, there was school where I got on pretty well. In both schools, I mean in my primary and my secondary schools – by then we had a two-step system of education as we have now, we've reverted to it thanks to positive changes – in neither of these schools was there a single teacher whom I could have admired. I mean later... because at first, you don't think about things like that. I had no master at school, no one who could have... because I've read about, well, quite a few people who later in life did something, wrote something or recorded something who often recalled someone even from their schooldays, a teacher, who prompted them to follow a particular direction. For example, in a book I recently read of conversations with Wiesław Juszczak, an eminent art historian, philosopher of art, he speaks extensively about a secondary school teacher who was crucial in forming his mind, in arousing his curiosity. I had nothing of the kind, no one at school like that. My grandfather, who studied humanities and German, was a little like that, but even he wasn't... I mean my grandfather didn't talk to his grandson about humanities, only about everyday family things, or only to the point where I knew there was such a thing as... that there were these mysterious things that attracted me.

For instance, my grandfather had a tiny reproduction at home of the painting by Rembrandt, 'The Night Watch' as it was called then – now, it has a new title because historians came to the conclusion that it no longer depicts 'The Night Watch' moving out. In any case, the painting has remained the same, only the title has changed. And this drew me in. I knew that my grandfather knew something about art, he'd occasionally tell me things, not much. I knew that before the war, he'd been a modest collector of art, that he had a few Polish paintings and that he'd sold them all, or almost all of them, when our family had had to leave Lwów. And I never understood whether it was an economic necessity or – surely it wasn't economic because he must have sold those paintings for pennies – this moment leading up to their departure, when thousands of people were leaving Lwów the price of everything must have dropped because a great many people were selling off their belongings. So this... aura of humanities is a little from my grandfather's side although mostly, it's from reading books.

Adam Zagajewski - Kraków – the city of my dreams (16/50)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-04-25 | 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: Following my matriculation there was a great change, namely, I moved to Kraków. I had been waiting for this, it was my dream. I wonder why that was because my family was a good family – it wasn't like I had to get away from my parents. And yet, I did have to get away from them. I felt somehow that if I was to do anything of my own, I had to leave. The provinciality of that town – which I've probably referred to four times already – was suffocating me. So Gliwice, Kraków – that's a distance of about 100, 105 kilometres. Today, it's a little further – closer by car but the train takes a very long time so the distance shrinks and expands.

I arrived in Kraków and that first Autumn there when I was studying psychology... I chose psychology and not, for example, Polish or History or History of Art – in fact, to this day I don't really know why I chose psychology. I think that at the time, what I really cared about was not what I'd be studying but just being in Kraków because it had become this mythical place where there was wonderful theatre, music, Wyspiański had walked here – it was the place of giants, where giants lived. And I've described all of that somewhere, how that first Autumn I walked a great deal, how on those first cool Autumn evenings, I would go walking, looking into the lighted windows of apartments and I was utterly certain that – often, I could glimpse books, shelves full of books in these apartments – and I was convinced that in each one of these homes, there was a genius living there, an artist, a writer, a composer, a painter. Because there was nothing like this in my poor Gliwice, almost nothing. I had suddenly found myself in a truly magical place where I saw – I had enough of an education to know how rich Kraków's tradition and contemporary life was because when you think about it, that was a good time for Kraków and for theatre and for literature. You could pass [Wiesława] Szymborska on the street, [Tadeusz] Kantor. For a long time, I was living right next door to Kantor who... every other day, I'd see him dressed all in black take the tram into town where he'd confer with his friends and his troupe of actors. I knew who this was, I knew it was Kantor and I used to observe him. He didn't know this because I was just an anonymous, very shy student. I was very shy, you'd have thought... well, I was very shy. I had already begun to write but I hadn't yet published anything – nobody knew what or who I was. I think that any young artist or writer who is just starting out is driven to despair by this sense of total anonymity. For instance, observing Kantor I got the impression that he was somebody who mattered. I found the way he dressed in his black clothes a bit ridiculous, although I didn't tell anyone this. I attended my lectures and my seminars. I was hugely disappointed by the psychology I was studying – I hadn't anticipated that this was going to be my future profession, but it gave me an opportunity to find myself, as I've said, in Kraków.

Adam Zagajewski - Poetry readings: Truth (45/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Gliwice – a provincial but vibrant town (8/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Why I like Kraków (44/50)

Adam Zagajewski - The inscrutable world of radio transmitters (5/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Circle of Young Writers collective is formed (22/50)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-04-25 | 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] But by then you were already involved in – or am I mistaken? – you were already part of a group of young poets, young writers. You belonged to a group of young people who were at the start of their literary careers?

No, in March '68, I was still innocently solitary. By that I mean that all of my work, my writing, my publications was all being done just by me. I would go the editorial office of 'Życie Literackie'. Earlier, I'd met Wisława Szymborska; my first published work had been a poem published in June '67. Wiesława Symborska agreed to publish it as she was also involved with 'Życie Literackie' at that time. And this was, of course, a huge event in my life although I suspect that no one noticed that first poem. That's how it is when you're very young and even the smallest event is a huge experience and yet you're the only one for whom this is so. But it was thanks to this that I came to know Szymborska then.

Well, after this, as I've mentioned, I started to write reviews and my first literary sketches all of which were then for 'Życie Literackie'. I met other literary contemporaries after March. It wasn't long after and there wasn't any causal connection, but it was after March that I started to attend meetings of the Young Writers' Circle; I think there was one in every larger Polish city wherever there was a branch of the Polish Writers' Union, and their politics were reasonably decent. They certainly had nothing to do with the Party's agenda. They were like literary workshops populated by young poets, prose writers and dramatists. And this was, for me and I imagine for many others, the first opportunity to meet with people of a similar age to mine. By then I was 23 years old so I wasn't a total child. But it was only then that I suddenly met friends and the group, Teraz, which played a huge role in my life, began to gradually form. It figures quite prominently in the history of Polish literature. That's where I met Julian Kornhauser whom I've already mentioned. There were other poets, too: Jerzy Kronhold, Stanisław Stabro, translators.

This Circle of Young Writers already existed. It was situated on Krupnicza Street where the office of the Polish Writers' Union used to be and the House of Writers where quite a number of Kraków's literary folk resided. There was a hall downstairs where meetings, debates and literary evenings were held. Today, there's a vegetarian restaurant there which I think is a very good metaphor for the historical changes that have taken place. And that's where the Circle of Young Writers would meet every Friday, or nearly every Friday, and this is how it came to have a collective dimension. Suddenly, I could see that I wasn't alone with my – I mean, I knew, I read the literary publications and I knew I wasn't alone. Suddenly, I could see the faces of my contemporaries and so gradually this group began to take shape, and we'd meet at the Klub pod Jaszczurami. The place on Krupnicza wasn't really suitable and besides, it was already being used by the ZLP... this was a time when on the one hand... it was a pseudocommunist part, but in fact culture was blossoming in Poland. Not much is said about this now and those who are in favour of the good change, believe it was a desert but it wasn't. This was in the late 50s and early 60s. It was the time when Polish culture was beginning to make a global impact thanks to poets like Herbert. Miłosz turns up a bit later paradoxically considering he was much older.

Adam Zagajewski - The magic of reading (9/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Family life prior to the outbreak of war (12/50)

Adam Zagajewski - The Flying University (32/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Martial law puts an end to dreams (34/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Poetry is not theory (26/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Losing Lwów, gaining Gliwice (3/50)

Adam Zagajewski - My American episode (39/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Gomułkas big rally (7/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Praise versus extoll (41/50)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-04-25 | 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: There's one more anecdote which presents me in a bad light because it shows my imperfect grasp of English. The English title of my poem is 'Try to Praise the Mutilated World'. At some point, my translator, Clare Cavanagh, used the verb 'praise' which in Polish means to laud and in English, there is no good, literal translation of the word, 'opiewać'. There's only 'praise' which has quite a broad meaning. But then she said that perhaps there's another verb – 'to extoll'. 'Try to Extoll the Mutilated World'. So then I thought perhaps 'extoll' was a better word because 'praise' was such an everyday word that got used all of the time. 'Extoll' somehow sounded more interesting to me. Then I had an email from The New Yorker asking me if it was to be 'praise' or 'extoll'. So I said, 'extoll'. This was followed by a short silence after which I had a series of emails from 'The New Yorker' begging me to keep the word 'praise'. Alice Queen prefaced it, although it was obviously fabricated and it had come from an editorial team at 'The New Yorker', demanding that 'extoll' be replaced with 'praise'. And then I understood my own limitations in my knowledge of English because for a native speaker of English, 'praise' is a Biblical word which has a deep and ancient meaning whereas 'extoll' is a superficial word which is less profound. I think, although this isn't the place for a lecture, that the English language has two parts. One is the ancient Anglo-Saxon with a concise lexicon, but since we know that England was conquered by the Normans, they brought French with them and introduced a multitude of French words which has made English a strange conglomeration of the original Anglo-Saxon vocabulary with one that's referred to as Latin, namely words that were brought over predominantly by the French. And 'extol' is one of these novelty words – I mean, a 1000-year old novelty, but still a novelty. Whereas 'praise' is an archaic word and… I'm not so bad that I was going to stick stubbornly to 'extoll' although, theoretically, I could have. However, I understood that this was the limit of my involvement, and they were right – 'praise' was a better word. And this poem is still circulating – I was even told that when Trump came to power, people unearthed this poem because they were so horrified by what was happening in America, that it's a poem for those dark, bad days. There's a lot of coincidence here because if Alice Queen hadn't been reading my poems that day, this would never have happened. Also, they're very careful about this, had that poem already appeared in some other publication, 'The New Yorker' would not have been able to use it since they follow certain principles: it had to be unpublished. The poem was unrestricted. It had been written much earlier. This was also something I was often asked about: had I written it on the day… had I written this poem on September 11? No, I'd written it a year-and-a-half before then.

Adam Zagajewski - Inspiring masters I have known (49/50)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-04-25 | 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: I think that every poet, and prose writer, too, would say that there are two types of masters. There are the older writers or poets whom we have met personally and the effects of whose writing is strengthened or goes deeper because we know that person, we knew him. This could, of course, have the reverse effect – we might be deeply disappointed in them and then this detracts rather than adds to our experience. However, in my case, it was a positive thing. A first master, although not chronologically, because chronologically, the first was Tadeusz Różewicz. He was certainly the first poet whom I consciously – Polish poet, because I was reading poetry in translation at the same time. Of the Polish poets, Różewicz, as I've mentioned, lived in the same town and his presence as an author as a poet was ubiquitous. But I hardly knew him and I never really got to meet him properly. He was both present and absent because I never spoke with him although I knew he lived nearby and that we breathed the same not very healthy Silesian air. Then there was Herbert who would come to my school as I've mentioned. This was a friendship which took a long time to develop because I was 17 when he visited us so of course an acquaintance or friendship was out of the question, but it grew slowly. He was in Berlin, that's where he lived and that's where we'd meet, then later in Paris. He became very dear to me and I'd visit him when he was ill, when he was suffering because it was a two-fold illness somewhere between depression and mania causes great suffering even though externally, it all seems like a pantomime, but it isn't. Then there was Miłosz. Miłosz – he was hugely important in my life. I knew him, too, we became friends although I was closer to Herbert. We used the informal 'you' which in Polish is very significant. With Miłosz, we never passed to that stage. But these are the poets. And Wisława Szymborska whom I also knew very well and liked a great deal. There was a kind of good fortune in this that in this generation before me – because not everyone belonged to this generation – there were these great poets. And it was my good fortune that I was able to meet them, hear their voices, their jokes, that I could live among them, know what they wrote about and be privy to their thoughts and their reflections.

Adam Zagajewski - A humanities man through and through (13/50)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-04-25 | 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: Gliwice was also where my secondary school was where again I had no outstanding teachers. I had very correct teachers and I did learn something. But, when I look back, I see that a great disappointment for me was my teacher of Polish who should have impressed me somehow, opened my eyes to something, but that didn't happen, although he did have his own favourite [authors]. I think one of them was Maria Dąbrowska, 'Noce i dnie' ['Nights and Days'] so at the time, to spite him, I didn't read it. In fact I only read 'Noce i dnie' a few years ago. I have to say, I did find it interesting but not back then. What was interesting was that after October – and this went on for several years – there was a huge influx of Western literature. Suddenly, Kafka appeared and TS Eliot and Faulkner and Hemingway and Thomas Mann, Rilke. And so a secondary school pupil who, like me, already suspected that books contained all manner of wonders, will of course immerse himself in... someone like Dąbrowska seemed to be a decent Polish author, whereas the genius was Kafka. I'd already had a Kafka period, a lot of my contemporaries were experiencing Kafka's writing as an absolute revelation: incisive, allegorical writing, uniquely original. But it wasn't just Kafka – there was a whole host of Western literature. At the time, there was this anecdote that some young people in East Germany, in the GDR, were learning Polish so they could read Kafka in the Polish translation because Kafka was banned in East Germany and so they were learning Polish. Another account, which isn't an anecdote but is a confirmed fact is that young Russians were learning Polish so that they could read Polish translations of Western literature because Poland was the only country in that bloc of peoples' democracies where these books were permitted. So my secondary school years were a time when I educated myself mostly by reading all of these… well, maybe not all but I did read these new titles from the West. I was a member of the library and I read all of the books they had there including all of the great classics: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gombrowicz – his Ferdydurke was published in the PPR after '56. I also read the older classics, but that was mainly because of school – Kochanowski who… not Dr Kochanowski but the poet and our Romantics etc. But mainly it was my own reading which I guarded jealously. I didn't want… at the time, I believed that books were something intimate and that there was no need for others to know about what I was reading – not that I was afraid of anything because it was all allowed. These books had been published officially, but I wanted to keep them for myself.

Perhaps I also felt this way because I could foresee the conflict that was coming with my parents. As my matriculation exams drew nearer and I had to choose what I wanted to do after my exams, my parents were convinced that I would go to the polytechnic. My father was a professor there and I, of course, would go there too, following in his footsteps. I said I wouldn't, and brought on a very serious conflict with my parents which lasted for six months – a very serious battle. They sent me to have extra lessons in maths to show me that I would have no problem with maths. But I knew one thing for sure – that I was a humanities man and that these issues with the polytechnic didn't interest me at all and so I decided that no, I wouldn't give in. And I didn't.

Adam Zagajewski - The French reject my poetry (36/50)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-04-25 | 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.

Adam Zagajewski - Tremor (38/50)

Adam Zagajewski - The sense of seclusion in Berlin (30/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Anti-Semitism raises its ugly head (21/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Living my dream (18/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Family life in Silesia (2/50)

Adam Zagajewski - The decline of communism (33/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Goodbye to a career in engineering (15/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Born in dichotomous times (1/50)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-04-25 | 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: I'll begin at the beginning. I was born on 21st June, the longest day of the year and the most beautiful. It was 1945. I mention this since when I think about that moment today, I find it fascinating that there is a great dichotomy in this. On the one hand, it is the longest day of the year, the peak of summer. It's true that the days will start to grow shorter after the longest day, but it is still a moment of a brief triumph of light over darkness. But I was born in a city, in Lwów, whose population was, for the most part, condemned to exile. By that I mean that I was born in a city where people were packing their suitcases and, weeping, were preparing to leave. I don't know the precise statistics, but a huge part of Poland's population was forced to leave. Theoretically, staying was an option, but one that few people chose because according to what my parents told me, people were weighing up their choices and foresaw that life in Poland would after all be a little better than life in the Soviet Union.

I was born in my grandfather's house. My parents were living there then – they'd spent the whole of the occupation in that house in Łyczakowo, Lwów. When I think about it now, the atmosphere must have been exceptionally dismal because they were having to leave. For that entire family it was a beloved city, it wasn't some chance stopping place, but the city they loved and which they had lived in for years for several generations. Now, it seems to me that this in some way defined my life, this contradiction between the longest day of the year and the despair at having to leave. It's not that I had exactly the same feelings, but that kind of life lived as a dichotomy is something I'm familiar with. The contrast of those two things. I even feel that there's a similar juxtaposition, contrast in my writing. On the one hand, there are moments of ecstasy, of joy while on the other, there is shadow, a very profound shadow. It would, of course, be foolish to say that everything has its roots in those first few weeks or days of my life. Of course it doesn't and yet, at what moment... astrologers know very well that we are governed by the stars, and here it wasn't just the stars but the extraordinary correlation between a beautiful, long day and an uncertain future. Because, after all, they didn't know what would happen.

Adam Zagajewski - Protest poetry and me (29/50)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-04-25 | 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: Perhaps I ought to say something about Halina Mikołajska here – unfortunately, she's long since dead. She was a great actress who was very well known and admired in Poland. I think at the time, everyone knew who Halina Mikołajska was and she was probably one of the first people to join the opposition. And, sadly, actors are soon forgotten so there probably aren't many people left who remember her other than the older population, of course. And here, I'm confronted by a certain dilemma because there were the years of participating in the underground which I recall as something wonderful mainly because I met a great many exceptional people. That opposition movement before Solidarność, before the Gdańsk Shipyard was characterised by... this was later by which time I was mostly abroad... but the late '70s was a huge festival of friendship because the opposition was where you'd meet students, professors, workers, people from all kinds of social strata. This led to a great many new friendships, new meetings so I remember it as a time of exceptional animation – animation of friendships.

At the same time, it presented me with difficulties in the sense of writing because this opposition movement demanded nothing, of course, but there was a silent expectation that if you're a poet and you've joined our cause, you will write political protest poetry voicing your opposition. I wrote a few poems of that kind, but I didn't feel it was my emploi as they say in France. This wasn't the direction I wanted to take, this wasn't it, I wasn't able to entirely identify with it aesthetically. I'm amazed at Staszek Barańczak, really amazed and this isn't a snide remark, but Stanisław Barańczak, my contemporary from Poznań who rose to the challenge and wrote wonderful poetry in response to this expectation. But his work was of a very high calibre, they were agitprop but proper poetry. But time marches on relentlessly and now years later, these poems which he wrote and which almost everyone was quoting have faded and he's become dated as you say in English. They belong to those political times, and rarely survive outside of the moment of their conception. Whereas I – not because I wanted to write poetry that would last for all eternity because that's not something that I've considered yet or at all, but I felt that wasn't for me and so I was a bit stifled. I mean, on the one hand, I was enthralled by this movement and participated in it enthusiastically, but on the other, I felt stifled as a poet because I wasn't able to satisfy these expectations. That's when I was invited to go to West Berlin on an annual grant. In principle, I shouldn't have accepted this offer if I had been a genuine oppositionist who knew his duties – that my place was here, that this was where I ought to be and carry on giving seminars at the Flying University. Young people would come to my house and we'd talk about the black-listed books; that was when I was on the editorial board of 'Zapis'. But I felt uncomfortable as an author, as a poet and that was why I accepted the invitation thinking that this would give me time to consider, to understand who I am – not as a private individual or a biological entity or a citizen, but as an author and a writer – in other words, what direction should I be taking.

Adam Zagajewski - Zbigniew Herbert makes a lasting impression (14/50)

Adam Zagajewski - Inspiring masters that I never met (50/50)

Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People 2019-04-25 | 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: The second sphere are masters who died many years before, centuries before whom I would never be able to meet. And this begins with poets whom we read at school, Kochanowski whom I considered to be wonderful from the very start. I'll never forget Kochanowski's 'Treny'. I'm not going to list all of the classic Polish poets, but to this day, Mickiewicz is for me an extraordinary poet who writes with a wonderful clarity. For instance, when you read Mickiewicz, not all of his poetry, but for example, 'Do Matki Polki' or other works, his poetry is so direct it could have been written yesterday. You can see the things he writes about, it's a very concrete language with wonderful clarity. So with in Polish poetry there's always a kind of conflict between Mickiewicz and Słowacki which has lasted 200 years. I have to say that I'm on the side of Mickiewicz. It's not that I consider Mickiewicz to have been the better man, he probably wasn't, but Słowacki resorts to a haziness, poetic mists. Mickiewicz is sharply defined and concrete. And this appeals to me very much. Then, there's Norwid who, too, is very concrete and ironic, hugely intelligent, with a sense not so much of humour as of a melancholic humour and tremendous irony. There's also Gałczyński towards whom I have ambivalent feelings. On the one hand, I'm irritated by his opportunism evident before the war in the slightly fascist tone of his anti-Semitic poems, while after the war, he virtually becomes a communist. This is irritating but he's a virtuoso, an exceptional virtuoso so you need to forgive him everything, unfortunately. After that comes a whole host of foreign language poets, for example... Mandelstam who was a uniquely significant poet. I read his works sometimes in Russian, sometimes in Polish and sometimes in English. Mostly, however, I read him in Russian and Polish although I have to admit I predominantly read him in Polish. But he, too, is a poet with a great sense of humour. His personal tragedy, which he talks about, never extinguishes his humour. German poets like Hölderlin are years old, centuries old. They're turn of the 18th-19th century. Then there are the contemporary poets. There's Gottfried Benn who died in '56. Vladimir Holan, the Czech poet who made a huge impression on me. There are the French poets, not Mallarmé but rather Apollinaire. I unfortunately don't know any Spanish poets although there is Antonio Macheto whose name appears in the poem, 'Autoportret' ['Self-portrait']. He's a wonderful poet, very down-to-earth and wonderfully lyrical. If someone were to ask me what I was looking for in these masters, I don't think I'd be able to... I'm looking for unusual connections – connections between humour and metaphor, a certain element of surprise, for instance Vladimir Holan the Czech poet who's lived in Prague all of his life and is bordering on the surreal. He's full of surprises, ambushing us with images but also belongs to... In short, I look for poets who are down-to-earth but who don't avoid... have a vision of life which expresses itself, is distilled in metaphors. So it can't be just concrete, that's not enough, there needs to be more, some kind of vision but neither can it be just the vision on its own because it needs something concrete, too. So these are the contradictions from the very day I was born right until today.