Synopses & Reviews
I love to swim in the sea, which keepstalking to itself
in the monotone of a vagabond
who no longer recalls
exactly how long hes been on the road.
Swimming is like prayer:
palms join and part,
join and part,
almost without end.
--from "On Swimming"
Without End draws from each of Adam Zagajewski's English-language collections, both in and out of print--Tremor, Canvas, and Mysticism for Beginners--and features new work that is among his most refreshing and rewarding. These poems, lucidly translated, share the vocation that allows us, in Zagajewski's words, "to experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for a long moment or two." Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov in 1945. His previous books include the poetry collections Tremor (1985), Canvas (1992), and Mysticism for Beginners (1998), and the essay collections Two Cities (1995) and Another Beauty (2000). He lives in Europe.
Clare Cavanagh is a professor of Slavic languages at Northwestern University, and has translated the poetry of Wyslawa Szymborska.
Renata Gorczynski is an essayist, a literary critic, and a teacher of journalism. She lives in Gdynia, Poland.
Benjamin Ivry is a poet ("Paradise for the Portuguese Queen"), biographer (of Ravel, Poulenc, and Rimbaud), and translator.
C. K. Williams has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry. He teaches at Princeton University. This selection draws from each of Adam Zagajewski's English-language poetry collections, both in and out of print, including Tremor, Canvas, and Mysticism for Beginners. It also includes work from his early books, Communiqué and Butcher Shop, as well as some sixty pages of new poems that are among Zagajewski's most refreshing and rewarding. Meditating on both human frailty and vigor, this new poetry is keenly imagined, of great clarity of thought, and scrupulous in its attention to the natural world.
Featuring lucid and graceful translations by Clare Cavanagh, Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry, and C. K. Williams, Without End: New and Selected Poems allows us to view the whole arc of this master poet's career thus fara career that might be seen as an ongoing attempt to, in Zagajewski's words, "experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for a long moment or two." "Zagajewski's poems pull us from whatever routine threatens to dull our senses, from whatever might lull us into mere existence. This is an astonishing book."Philip Boehm, The New York Times Book Review "[Zagajewski's poetry] is the quiet voice at the corner of the immense devastations of an obscene century, more intimate than Auden, yet as cosmopolitan as Milosz, Celan, or Brodsky . . . [Without End is a] stirring and profound and delightful collection."Derek Walcott, The New Republic
"Zagajewski's variety of tone is remarkable . . . Recognizing [the influence of other poets in his work] clearly enriches our reading of Zagajewski's poems, but their force is by no means weakened if we do not, just as missing a coded homage to Beethoven hardly prevents us from feeling the power of Brahms. Zagajewski's work does, in fact, display a Brahmsian richness of color, intricacy of rhythm, and the occasional use of ambiguous tonalityall in the service of an inward urgency, powerfully captured in these translations . . . These renderingsby Clare Cavanagh and Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry, and C. K. Williamshave their own enchanting music, and the translators have consistently chosen elegant solutions for difficult passages . . . Zagajewski's poems pull us from whatever routine threatens to dull our senses, from whatever might lull us into mere existence. [Without End] is an astonishing book, worth standing hours in line for, a book to sneak into the workplace or smuggle abroad, to ship to relatives."Philip Boehm, The New York Times Book Review
"Seldom has the muse spoken to anyone with such clarity and urgency as in Zagajewski's case."Joseph Brodsky
"Zagajewski's poems put us in the presence of great mysteries. They deliver us to something deep and strange and perhaps even unlimited within ourselves . . . [They] are everywhere shadowed by death, and extremely conscious of human cruelty . . . Yet [they] are also filled with splendid moments by spiritual lucidity . . . Zagajewski has never forgotten the importance of addressing communal concerns, the necessity of civitas, and yet he has also learned the fundamental value of privacy, of the morality of speaking only for oneself . . . He is in some sense a pilgrim, a seeker, a celebrant in search of the divine, the unchanging, the absolute. His poems are filled with radiant moments of plentitude."Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post Book World
"Zagajewski's newest collection marks a major literary event. Zagajewski is a poet of the world, and one of its finest. He is one of those rare poets who writes of art, philosophy, travel, history, and aesthetics without pretension or posture, with knowledge and understanding that is not labored but intrinsic. His work reveals an expansive and contemplative citizen, sober with learned yet compassionate wisdom. Everywhere in his poetry we find Western culture presented to us anew. Whether he's writing about Hegel or Heraclitus, Chopin or Schopenhauer, always he connects us to the beauty and sadness of our relationship to Art."The Christian Science Monitor
"Poet Zagajewski has inhabited the realms of shadow and light for a number of years. Without End, a generous selection of his work in English translation, presents him above all as an elegiac poet . . . His strongest poems come out of the sense of loss . . . The few samples of Zagajewski's early work included in Without End already reveal the essential aspects of his artistic idiom: the anchoring of the poem in contemporary reality, the preference for straightforward yet somewhat detached commentary, cutting irony complemented by skepticism . . . The later work reveals him increasingly as a true if belated humanist, a proclaimer of restrained hope, a muted affirmationist. He doesn't shun such old-fashioned concepts as Beauty, Truth, Presence, the Self, and the Soul, an attitude which somehow tempers his irony and skepticism, on occasion leaving the reader with the impression that his poems could have been written in the first decades of the twentieth century . . . If Milosz is a visionary who occasionally reveals himself to us as a human being, Zagajewski is the reverse: an ordinary man capable of piercing insights that will not last and will not save us. Zagajewski tends to be wary of poses. His speaking persona is ascetic, economical, understated. He travels across time and space, a contemplative chronicler of European and occasionally of American culture. He readily loses himself in meditation on natural beauty, on human intellect, on artistic creation. Philosophical, historical, and literary references serve as starting points for whole poems: here one can find pieces about a weeping Schopenhauer, Franz Schubert at a press conference, Vermeer's teenage model, or Shoah watched 0 on television in a hotel room in America. Zagajewski's poems reveal a subtle intellect and an abundant sensibilityneither of which is lost in these elegant translations."Piotr Gwiazda, Times Literary Supplement
"Not only a worthy introduction but also a broad, breathtaking o
Review
"[Zagajewski's poems] transport us into a realm that is majestic, boundless and unknown." Edward Hirsch,
The Washington Post Book World"Poems [that] celebrate those rare moments when we catch a glimpse of a world from which all labels have been unpeeled." --Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books Eoin Colfer - John Farris - David Hagberg - W. Michael and Kathleen O' Neal Gear - Lincoln Child - Stephen Coonts - Marilyn Stasio - Wed Lukowsky - Janet Maslin - Harlan Coben, author of No Second Chance - Andrew Klavan, author of True Crimes - Robert B. Parker, author of Back Story - Nelson DeMille, author of Up Country - Lisa Scottoline, author of Dead Ringer - Daniel Silva, author of The Confessor - Ronnie H. Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson - Kirkus - Martin Arnold - Page Traynor - Brian Lehrer, host of On the Media, National Public Radio - James McBride, author of The Color of Water and Miracle at St. Anna - Kevin J. Anderson - Dorothy Allison - Philip Lopate - Clive Cussler - Jon Winokur - Tony Hillerman - Jonathan Kellerman - W.E.B. 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Review
"[Zagajewski's poems] transport us into a realm that is majestic, boundless and unknown." —Edward Hirsch,
The Washington Post Book World"Poems [that] celebrate those rare moments when we catch a glimpse of a world from which all labels have been unpeeled." --Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books
Review
"No reader, not even poetry-phobes, should miss the bright revelations of Nobel laureate Szymborska. [...] Syzmborska is sharply ironic and lithely philosophical, pondering the phenomenal precision of dreams and the elusiveness of meaning. The neat, prancing lyrics collected in this slender, piercing book are delectable and profound." --Booklist
Synopsis
I love to swim in the sea, which keepstalking to itself
in the monotone of a vagabond
who no longer recalls
exactly how long hes been on the road.
Swimming is like prayer:
palms join and part,
join and part,
almost without end.
--from "On Swimming"
Without End draws from each of Adam Zagajewski's English-language collections, both in and out of print--Tremor, Canvas, and Mysticism for Beginners--and features new work that is among his most refreshing and rewarding. These poems, lucidly translated, share the vocation that allows us, in Zagajewski's words, "to experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for a long moment or two."
Synopsis
The best work of one of Poland's greatest younger poets
I love to swim in the sea, which keeps
talking to itself
in the monotone of a vagabond
who no longer recalls
exactly how long he's been on the road.
Swimming is like prayer:
palms join and part,
join and part
almost without end.
--from "On Swimming"
This selection draws from Adam Zagajewski's English-language collections, both in and out of print; it also includes work from his early books, Communiqué and Butcher Shop, as well as new poems that are among Zagajewski's most refreshing and rewarding: meditations on human frailty and vigor, they are vividly imagined, of great clarity of thought and scrupulous attention to the natural world. In Clare Cavanagh's lucid, graceful translations these poems share the vocation that allows us, in Zagajewski's words, "to experience astonishment and to stop still in that astonishment for a long moment or two."
Synopsis
A collection of poems from Nobel Prize-winner Szymborska.
Synopsis
An exciting collection of poems by Wislawa Szymborska. When
Here was published in Poland, reviewers marveled, “How is it that she keeps getting better?” These twenty-seven poems, as rendered by prize-winning translators Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, are among her greatest ever. Whether writing about her teenage self, microscopic creatures, or the upsides to living on Earth, she remains a virtuoso of form, line, and thought.
From the title poem:
I cant speak for elsewhere,
but here on Earth weve got a fair supply of everything.
Here we manufacture chairs and sorrows,
scissors, tenderness, transistors, violins, teacups, dams, and quips . . .
Like nowhere else, or almost nowhere,
youre given your own torso here,
equipped with the accessories required
for adding your own children to the rest.
Not to mention arms, legs, and astonished head.
About the Author
WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA (1923–2012) was born in Poland and worked as a poetry editor, translator, and columnist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996.
CLARE CAVANAGH, professor of Slavic and comparative literature at Northwestern, has received a PEN Translation Award for her work, with Stanislaw Baranczak, on Szymborska's poetry.