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When, after September 11, The New Yorker published a poem, "Try to Praise the Mutilated World," on its back page—a rare departure from the cartoons and parodies that usually occupy that space—it resonated with many readers. They posted it on their refrigerators, on bulletin boards and websites. The author who helped America heal is Adam Zagajewski, a cosmopolitan poet and essayist who writes in Polish. His most recent collection of poems, in which irony is balanced by wonder, is called Without End. It was published this year by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. In the spring, when Zagajewski was teaching creative writing at the University of Houston, Agnieszka Tennant gave him a call.
You wrote "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" before the terrorist attacks. What occasion inspired it?
No particular occasion, no single event. For me, it's the way I have always seen the world. When I was growing up I saw a lot of ruins in postwar Poland. This is my landscape. Somehow it stayed with me, this feeling that the world is wounded or mutilated. The poem reflects a philosophical conviction more than an event.
Let's talk about this conviction. In the last lines of the poem you speak of "the gentle light that strays and vanishes / and returns," a description that beautifully captures hope. Where does your hope—hope about anything—come from, and what makes you its advocate?
It's a very interesting question—one I never ask myself but I'll try to answer nevertheless. The experience of someone who tries to live and write is very rich and encompasses the register of ecstasy, of joy. Years ago I was with someone in a taxi, and he asked me, "Do you believe in happiness?" and I said, "No, I don't believe in happiness, I believe in joy." I don't believe in happiness as a constant state, but I do believe in joy. Which I always think has to correspond to something.
What does it correspond to in your case?
I am a religious person—a bad Christian, a slightly lapsed Catholic. From the pope's point of view, I'm probably a very bad Catholic.
But maybe not from God's point of view.
[Laughter] This we cannot know. I believe that our mental states are not purely subjective. They correspond to something that's transcendent. We don't produce everything in us. On the other hand, probably not every despair and not every joy is produced by something outside us. Far from that: we can swallow a pill and become this way or another. So it's not an absolute rule.
If you were to name a poetic manifesto—a poem that best captures your approach to life—which one of your poems would it be?
In a way this little poem "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" is a manifesto. But in a way you can say every poem is this kind of manifesto. It would be almost sad if one single poem functioned in this way, because our creeds are mostly multifaceted. So writing poems is perhaps continuous manifesto-writing.
The poems are different articles of the manifesto?
Yes, it's like a constitution—there are many paragraphs.
You were born in Lvov after the Soviets took it from Poland following World War II. You lived and studied in Krakow, Poland. You moved to Paris in 1982. Was it for political reasons?
I was a dissident in my country, but the reason that propelled me to leave Poland was not a political one. I fell in love with a woman. It sounds a little bit goofy, because when I moved, it was a historical moment when many of my compatriots were moving to the West for political reasons.
Whatever happened with that woman?
I married her, and we're still happy together.
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