Remembering Adam Zagajewski, 1945-2021

The great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski died on 21 March of this year - which was also World Poetry Day - and it has taken me this long to write about it. The coincidence of the date was a poignant one because I have often thought of and shared his poems on World Poetry Day and similar days for the discovery and appreciation of poetry. He was the ideal poet for the purpose.

A few of my very favourite writers have died in the past year, but this death was perhaps even a little harder to come to terms with as Zagajewski was only 75, relatively young. It's also simply difficult to imagine him gone. Whenever I thought of him, he was somewhere in Central Europe writing outdoors at a café, or reading at some gathering of world poets. 

I think Adam Zagajewski's poems were easy to love, which is no bad thing. When I think of his poems, words such as the following come to mind: humane, gentle, affectionate, clarifying. After 9/11, his poem 'Try to Praise the Mutilated World' became very famous in its English-speaking translation by Clare Cavanagh when it appeared in The New Yorker. Not one of my personal favourites of his poems, I still appreciate it and its immense value in the wake of a huge, world-changing tragedy. It distills what I think Zagajewski did best - the acknowledgement that dark, horrendous things happen but the equal observation that life continues and that the value of light, beauty and faith remains unchanged. 

If there is one contemporary poet who I most clearly see as an influence on my own poetry, it's Zagajewski. I relate profoundly to his vision of things and would aspire to write like him. The curious thing is that, unlike most poets who I consider a major influence on my life and writing, I can't now remember how and where I first encountered him. I did get to go to one of his readings, about five or six years ago at Wilton's Music Hall in east London. It was especially moving when he read 'To Go to Lvov', a very important poem for me which I wrote about here some years ago. I also met him very briefly when he signed a book of his selected poems for me. I thought that he seemed reserved but kind, and when I asked him if he recommended any contemporary Polish poets he suggested Tomasz Różycki (who in my opinion is of the stature of Zagajewski). I dug out the book after I heard that Zagajewski had died, and was touched to discover that he had actually written Różycki's name down for me on a card which I'd kept in the book - probably aware that English speakers tend to find Polish names extremely difficult. 

It's so hard to choose a favourite poem by Zagajewski. When I reread them now, years after first readings, they remind me of emotions and moments in my life, and they take me to places which I've visited or which I hope to visit some day. 'Star' has been a talisman for me for many years. 'Vita Contemplativa' occupies a central place of importance in my pantheon of poems, and lines from it often surface in my mind. 'Poetry Searches for Radiance' is a powerful mission statement for poetry. Whether one of his collections, a selected poems or something randomly found online, his works will reward both casual reading and prolonged engagement. What is much harder than finding the right poem by Zagajewski is accepting that he's not here any more. 

Be sure to read this powerful essay and personal remembrance on Zagajewski by the poet Ilya Kaminsky: https://yalereview.org/article/going-to-lvov 

Photo: "LITERAKTUM 2019-ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI" by DONOSTIA KULTURA is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Another review of Island of Towers

The poet and blogger Chris Edgoose has recently published a wonderful review of my pamphlet Island of Towers on his blog Wood Bee Poet.

You can read the review here: https://woodbeepoet.com/2020/04/02/small-hopes-island-of-towers-by-clarissa-aykroyd/

Chris provided some wonderful insights into the poems, in some cases as individual works, but also how they work together as a whole - "every poem in the pamphlet is a little island in itself, each with its own faint source of light".

I must say that I find it particularly reassuring when readers find that the pamphlet is effective as an entire work, given that the poems were written over several years and in a few cases are quite old. (To go on a bit of a tangent: I recently realised that my pamphlet is in good company as far as having been written over a long period of time, given that the extraordinary and popular recent collections Deaf Republic [Ilya Kaminsky] and In the Lateness of the World [Carolyn Forché] were both written over many years. Not every collection or pamphlet has to be written in a single burst of creativity, folks!)

Anyway, I was particularly struck by this insightful (and poetic) comment from the review: "[I]t feels...as though each poem exists while briefly lit by some central illuminating force (the reader's eyes? the poet's pen?) before disappearing back into the mystery of the unknown." And I was very touched by the concluding comment: "I would recommend this pamphlet above all, in these months during which we are overwhelmed by COVID-19, for the distant lights it provides, the small hopes."

This is the second published review that Island of Towers has received. If you didn't see it before, poet and blogger David Green published a review here: http://davidgreenbooks.blogspot.com/2019/10/clarissa-aykroyd-island-of-towers.html
One of my favourite comments in this review was: "As a translator as much as a poet in English, Clarissa is internationalist in outlook. The world doesn't end at the border of a country and poetry doesn't stop at the borders of language."

A reminder: you can purchase Island of Towers directly from the publishers, Broken Sleep Books, here: https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/clarissa-aykroyd-island-of-towers
I also have copies for sale myself, which can be inscribed. Please get in touch if you'd like one of those - through this blog, or another good way to do so is on Twitter, where my handle is @stoneandthestar

A New Translation of Osip Mandelstam's 'Tristia'

Osip Mandelstam at the time of his arrest in 1934


On 27 December, it was 75 years since the untimely death of the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938). This previously unpublished translation of Mandelstam's 'Tristia' has been kindly contributed by Mark L Mosher, a California-based translator with whom I occasionally correspond about poetry and especially poetry in translation. He has already appeared on the blog as Leif Hendrik, with his translation of Georg Trakl's 'Decline', and he blogs at Nordic Mountain. You can read his translation of 'Tristia' below, as well as the original Russian poem, and Mark's biography.

'Tristia' is a complex, subtle poem beloved of many poets and readers. With its meditation on "the science of parting", it feels very personal, but it is suffused with the uncertainty following the Russian Revolution of 1917. Through its title and subject matter, it also references the Tristia of the Roman poet Ovid, who wrote a series of laments while in exile. The poem contains allusions to traditional Russian divination practices, which took place particularly around New Year's Eve, such as the attempt to see shapes in wax or the future in a mirror. The cockerel, too, could be a reference to such practices, or to the dawning of a new day and life - but the poem is constantly ringed round with uncertainty, like the women's attempts to see the future.

This poem made me think of a comment by poet and critic Ilya Kaminsky: "I don’t think there exists a poet on this planet without a duality. Duality is a mother of metaphors." 'Tristia' is all about duality, which makes me it particularly appropriate for the end of one year and the beginning of another, a time when people naturally look both forwards and back. (January is named after Janus, the Roman god with two faces, who looks ahead and behind.) It reads like a palimpsest - past, present and future overlaid, the ancient Roman setting visible through the contemporary reality of 20th-century Russian political and personal upheaval. All of its times, settings and themes are both ghostly, and real. Science and superstition, women and men, literal and metaphorical death - all are present. "All happened long ago, all will happen again,/Only recognition of the moment is sweet", says Mandelstam. Paradoxically, in the fusion of prophecy and contemplation which comes naturally to poetry, such moments of pure being can emerge. 'Tristia' feels like a moment both peaceful and unsettling, in the eye of the storm.



TRISTIA (Osip Mandelstam, translated from the Russian by Mark L Mosher)


I have learned the science of parting
In bare-headed laments of night.
The oxen graze, the waiting goes on - 
The final hour of vigils in town,
And I honor the rituals of cockerel night,
When, bearing the weight of a journey endured,
Tear-stained eyes gazed into the void
And a woman's cry mixed with singing of the muse.

Who can know, with the word 'farewell',
What kind of separation awaits?
What promise for us in the cockerel's cry,
When fire in the acropolis burns,
And at the dawn of some new life,
When the ox chews lazily in its stall,
Why does the cockerel, herald of new life,
Beat its wings upon the city wall?

And I love the habits of weaving:
The shuttle twists, the spindle hums.
Look, like swan's down,
Barefooted Delia already runs forth!
O, meagre foundation of our life,
How pitiful the language of joy!
All happened long ago, all will happen again,
Only recognition of the moment is sweet.

Thus will it be: a transparent shape
On a clean porcelain plate,
And, like a squirrel's spread-out pelt,
A girl leans over the wax and gazes in.
The Greek Erebus is not for us to divine,
Wax is to woman what bronze is to man.
Our lot falls only in battle,
While for them divination is the death. 

Я изучил науку расставанья 

В простоволосых жалобах ночных. 

Жуют волы, и длится ожиданье — 

Последний час вигилий городских, 

И чту обряд той петушиной ночи, 

Когда, подняв дорожной скорби груз, 

Глядели вдаль заплаканные очи 

И женский плач мешался с пеньем муз. 

Кто может знать при слове «расставанье» 

Какая нам разлука предстоит, 

Что нам сулит петушье восклицанье, 

Когда огонь в акрополе горит, 

И на заре какой-то новой жизни, 

Когда в сенях лениво вол жуёт, 

Зачем петух, глашатай новой жизни, 

На городской стене крылами бьёт? 

И я люблю обыкновенье пряжи: 

Снуёт челнок, веретено жужжит. 

Смотри, навстречу, словно пух лебяжий, 

Уже босая Делия летит! 

О, нашей жизни скудная основа, 

Куда как беден радости язык! 

Всё было встарь, всё повторится снова, 

И сладок нам лишь узнаванья миг. 

Да будет так: прозрачная фигурка 

На чистом блюде глиняном лежит, 

Как беличья распластанная шкурка, 

Склонясь над воском, девушка глядит. 

Не нам гадать о греческом Эребе, 

Для женщин воск, что для мужчины медь. 

Нам только в битвах выпадает жребий, 

А им дано гадая умереть. 

1918

Mark L Mosher is a freelance translator. Beginning with Two Brothers, his translation of a play by Mikhail Lermontov (California State University, 1996), he has published translations from Russian, German, Spanish and Danish. His translation of excerpts from the memoirs of Mikhail Nesterov was published by Atlantis Magazine in 2004. He has participated as a translator in three exhibitions sponsored by the American-Russian Cultural Cooperation Foundation (Washington and Moscow, 1999-2009). His poem 'Doña Alba on the Ranch' recently appeared in 200 New Mexico Poems, an official project of the New Mexico Centennial Commission in cooperation with the University of New Mexico Press. He is currently working on an English translation of Johannes Vilhelm Jensen's Himmerland Stories. He lives in San Francisco, California and writes on topics literary, cultural and personal at www.nordicmountain.wordpress.com



Translation © Mark L Mosher, 2013.

My Favourite Poems Of the Last Few Years...More Or Less

I'm not really one for end-of-year lists. The timing of this list-oriented entry may seem suspicious, but it's (more or less) coincidental; at any rate, it's not a "best of 2013".

While I've often written about classic poems on this blog, I particularly wanted to highlight some of the new (or new-ish) poems that I've discovered and loved since I started The Stone and the Star - or at least, that I've discovered in recent years.

Vague enough? Well, let's say the list that follows includes ten of my favourite poems of the last few years, or at least not too long ago (so if something is five or ten years old, don't write to me in protest). Some of them I've written about already, and where links are provided they should either take you directly to the poem, or to an entry I've written about them (which should contain either the poem, or a link to the poem). Where I haven't yet written about these poets, you may see more of them in 2014 on the blog. The main thing to know is that these poems are a good way to spend some time.


Travel Papers (Carolyn Forché)
Fast Is the Century (Nikola Madzirov)
At Roane Head (Robin Robertson)
Man Praying, King's Cross, 34° (Toby Martinez de las Rivas)
Hennecker's Ditch (Kate Kilalea)
Vita Contemplativa (Adam Zagajewski)
Migration (Karen Solie)
How To Build Your Dream Garden (Kapka Kassabova)
Author's Prayer (Ilya Kaminsky)
Garden Statues (Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi)


The countries represented include the United States, Macedonia, Scotland, England, South Africa, Poland, Canada, Bulgaria, the Ukraine, and Sudan, and three (four?) of the poems are in translation from other languages. This international range was not at all deliberate, by the way, but I think it's pretty interesting. It certainly highlights the fact that my exciting poetic discoveries of recent years have often been international and/or in translation.

Paul Celan on London's Mapesbury Road

I have just started reading Homage to Paul Celan, a collection of essays, translations, poems and miscellania about Celan, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and G C Waldrep. Kaminsky's introduction begins: "If there is a country named Celania - as Julia Kristeva once proposed - its holy texts are filled with doubt, and they overcome this doubt almost successfully, with words of wrenching, uncompromised beauty." Pretty irresistible.

It's a couple of years now since I went to the Celan/Poetry after the Holocaust evening at Southbank, with readings by A S Byatt (among others) and musical settings of some of the poems by the Michael Nyman Band. Around the same time, the Saison Poetry Library had an exhibition about Celan's poem 'Mapesbury Road' but unfortunately I missed this. Mapesbury Road, in Kilburn, is closer to where I used to live in west London but it is not somewhere I ever went. Celan visited his aunt, a Holocaust survivor, there in 1968. There is also a glancing reference to the assassination of Martin Luther King and the attempted murder of the West German student leader Rudi Dutschke, both around the same time in 1968.

The poem can be found on the BBC link below, although sadly the radio episode can't be accessed any more. It is a short poem which balances between violence and tenderness, and pivots around stillness. All in a few brief lines.


MAPESBURY ROAD (Paul Celan)


At work one day some months ago, I took a book order over the phone which was to an address on Mapesbury Road. I was quite transported when the customer gave me their address. So much so, that apparently I neglected to put the book in the envelope. The customer very politely told me a few days later that they had received an empty envelope in the post. This was a lesson to me to not let poetry annihilate practicality in my life. (It was also funny.)

I have not been reading Celan so much recently and I know I have to pace myself with him, but I think Homage to Paul Celan may inspire me to go back yet again.

Ilya Kaminsky's 'Author's Prayer': "The Darkest Days Must I Praise"

I saw/heard Ilya Kaminsky read at Poetry Parnassus and it was definitely one of the outstanding moments of the festival for me. Here is a picture from his reading (as usual, apologies for the unimpressive quality - I promise I'll get a new camera one of these days):

I had only just bought his collection Dancing In Odessa when I realised that he was taking the stage in the Clore Ballroom - the timing could not have been more perfect. He apologised for his strong Russian accent, then launched into his poems. I don't remember for certain which other ones he read, but one of them was definitely 'Envoi':


What ties me to this earth? In Massachusetts,
the birds force themselves into my lines -
the sea repeats itself, repeats, repeats.

(from 'Envoi')


His voice was as though a wave had crashed into the audience; my impression was that people first looked a bit shocked, then amused, then moved. "Passionate" doesn't entirely describe it. Kaminsky, just a couple of years older than I am, lost most of his hearing after an illness at the age of four, and I had a strange sense that this had partially trapped his voice in amber and preserved it in a way that might not otherwise have happened. He has written a long series of poems, Deaf Republic, in part about the experience of deafness.

Kaminsky is originally from Odessa, Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. His family came to the United States when he was a teenager and he started writing poetry in English when he hardly knew the language. His work was soon championed by an incredible array of poets - in the Acknowledgements to Dancing In Odessa, he gives thanks to the likes of Carolyn Forché, John Felstiner, Louise Glück and Robert Pinsky. Dancing In Odessa is an amazingly impressive and passionate collection, with a flow which suggests that it was written almost as a continuous sequence of poems. Kaminsky explores his family's history and identity, immigrant and refugee experience, and the voices of great Russian and Jewish poets. He sees Paul Celan as he might have been: "His face had an imprint of laughter on it, as if no other emotion ever touched his skin." In 'Elegy for Joseph Brodsky', he writes:


We come back to where we have committed a crime,
we don't come back to where we loved, you said;
your poems are wolves nourishing us with their milk.

(from 'Elegy for Joseph Brodsky')


The poem I particularly wanted to write about was 'Author's Prayer', which stands on its own and has become famous:


AUTHOR'S PRAYER (Ilya Kaminsky)


This secular-spiritual prayer immediately made me think of 'poetry of witness', which Carolyn Forché has explored so intensively. The opening lines invoke Yeats:


If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body


In 'Sailing to Byzantium', Yeats wrote of his heart being "fastened to a dying animal". Yeats, with his interest in mysticism, wrote in the Byzantium poems about immortality, the supremacy of art and made things outliving humans, so he may have meant this in a fairly literal manner. However, both Yeats and Kaminsky seem to be touching on a crucial and sensitive area in poetry and art; the negation of self, or at least the diminishing of its importance. Yeats, an incredibly personal poet who constantly drew on his own life experiences in the most explicit way, still created something far more universal than the details of one man's life. His ego and life history became subsumed into something greater and more lasting.

Kaminsky, who writes about speaking for the dead so that "the white flag of their surrender" will not be raised, also explores details of his own life and his family's; but again, this seems to be more about bearing witness than about personal testimony, although there is an element of that, as well. He lives "as a blind man/who runs through rooms without/touching the furniture", and speaks "in a language not mine". All of this entails sacrifice, with the idea that it will allow a breakthrough to something greater, for the author and for the readers, and for all who need witness borne to their experiences.

I met Kaminsky very briefly after his reading and he signed the book for me. There was something very friendly and very warm about his demeanour and I've also had that impression from interviews which I have subsequently read. He seems to appreciate the benefits he has gained from the very difficult experiences he has undergone in his life, especially at a young age. In a Maintenant series interview about a year ago, he said: "I don’t think there exists a poet on this planet without a duality. Duality is a mother of metaphors. And, if coming into a different reality by stepping on a different shore, propels a poet into more duality, a poet should only be grateful."

Poetry Parnassus on Sunday: Turkish 'Hawk In The Rain', Odessa to Kazakhstan, Translated Wonders and Word From Africa

The above picture is the 'World Record' desk in the Saison Poetry Library, where poets had in the course of the week signed their names and hand-written copies of their poems for posterity.

My first Poetry Parnassus event on Sunday was the Ted Hughes Celebration, featuring Christopher Reid, Simon Armitage, David Constantine, Helen Constantine and a Turkish translator whose name I have regrettably forgotten (anyone remember?). I especially loved hearing 'The Hawk in the Rain' in Turkish: the percussive syllables seemed to work really well for that poem. There was much discussion of Ted Hughes's work on Modern Poetry in Translation, which David and Helen Constantine have been editing, and this was a bit beyond my scope but translation was obviously a strong focus of Poetry Parnassus so it was all interesting. I enjoyed hearing Paul Eluard's poem 'Poisson' (Fish) in the original French and then in Hughes's translation. The discussion about Hughes's translation of Ferenc Juhász's 'The Boy Changed Into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets' was totally fascinating; he didn't know Hungarian, but somehow just knew that a previous translation was inadequate, and made his own (again...without knowledge of Hungarian!) which is considered masterful. (Is this hubris, or prophetic poetic vision? Given that we're talking about Ted Hughes, it could easily be either or both).

Before the start of this session, I spoke briefly with Akerke Mussabekova, who was Kazakhstan's poet at the festival and the youngest poetic delegate, and who I'd also met on Friday night when she arrived for Continental Shift with Carmela from Poet in the City, who had recognised me from Poet in the City events (Carmela, I'm very impressed that you remembered me!!). Akerke Mussabekova was a beautiful and tiny woman, a little shy but obviously happy to be there, and judging from her poem in the World Record anthology which accompanies the festival, she is a very talented poet.

After this, the Maintenant reading was drawing to a close in the Clore Ballroom just around when I got there, and I had just bought Ilya Kaminsky's Dancing In Odessa when I realised (completely by coincidence) that he was taking the stage. I sat in the audience and listened in wonder as he read like a wild-eyed sing-song Russo-Ukrainian-American Yeats x 1000. I looked around and saw quite a few others with eyes popping out of their heads and jaws slightly agape. Afterwards, Kaminsky signed the book for me. He had a very warm presence about him.

Subsequently, I caught some or more of the Banipal, Modern Poetry in Translation and Poetry Translation Centre readings. The latter, in particular, really amazed me. Sarah Maguire quite correctly and bravely stated that the white-middle-class-ivory-tower air of poetry in Britain doesn't reflect the vital nature of poetry around the world, and she and others with the Poetry Translation Centre have worked hard to bring African, Middle Eastern and Central Asian poets to a wider audience. Reza Mohammadi's poems totally transfixed me - he writes in Dari (modern Persian) and is originally from Afghanistan. His delivery transported me to somewhere much more remote and magical than the Clore Ballroom (although it was pretty good this past week) - he had the intense eyes and precise yet sweeping gestures of a prophet. It was thrilling to hear the Eritrean poet Ribka Sibhatu, and I was especially excited about the poems of Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi from Sudan, which are exquisitely beautiful. He was also kind enough to sign the chapbook of his poems after the session. We learned that due to current unrest in Sudan, many of his friends have been arrested and if he were in the country, he would probably be in prison as well. It was another sobering reminder of what poets and their ilk may go through in other countries.

Word From Africa was a wonderful conclusion to the festival. Earlier in the week, in the Saison Poetry Library, I had stood a few feet away while a distinguished older African poet recited his poem for a video recording, in French - it was a lovely moment. I found out on Sunday night that this was Paul Dakeyo, who read some more of his work, and who is an African poetic legend from Cameroon. His poems were incredibly beautiful and moving and it was wonderful that I could appreciate the French.

Paul Dakeyo reading during Word From Africa:

There were poets from various African countries, and the Bajan-British poet Dorothea Smartt (pictured above with Paul Dakeyo), and poets of African extraction who'd grown up in Britain, and so on - it gave a fantastic variety to the mix. I was joined by some friends and had a drink with them, so I'm afraid we were a bit distracted at this point, and later we went out to find a pub showing the Spain-Italy Euro 2012 final (which was good fun, though football is not my thing - how Canadian am I?). But we returned in the end for some Afro-Caribbean music by a funky little band (whose name also escapes me - anyone?). There were relatively few poetry/music survivors around at that point, and some of us were very bad dancers, but it was great fun. I longed to see Seamus Heaney suddenly appear and start grooving in front of the stage. I can imagine it happened...

There were too many highlights to name from Poetry Parnassus. As well as some of those I've mentioned, I was delighted to meet Simon Armitage on one of the staircases and to thank him for the hard work he'd done to get this event together. He seemed pleased and said that they were all planning to collapse at the end of the day. Simon, thank you again, and to everyone involved and especially the poets.

This was one of my cultural highlights of my London years and in terms of where my poetry appreciation is at, I don't think it could have come at a better time. I have lots of reading and writing to do!