Zagajewski,
Adam,
1945–2021, Polish poet, b. Lviv, Jagiellonian Univ. (B.A., 1968;
M.A., 1970). He and his family were forcibly repatriated to Poland when Lviv
was ceded by Poland to the USSR, and he was raised in Silesia, later moving
to Kraków, where he graduated from Jagiellonian Univ. Passionally
opposed to the ruling Communist regime, Zagajewski was the best-known figure
in the “Generation of 1968,” a group of politically dissident
young poets. He continued to rage against the government until the late
1970s, when he largely abandoned defiant political poetry for more lyrical
and meditative verse concerned with philosophical and personal themes. In
1982 he moved to Paris, where his mature work flowered and he produced poems
that were often concerned with his own past, with the individual and
history, and with the nature of reality and art. Over the following
decades, he taught at several US universities, including the Univ. of
Houston and Univ. of Chicago. His collections in English translation include
Tremor (1985), Canvas (1991),
Mysticism for Beginners (1997), Another
Beauty (2000), the anthology Without End
(2002), Unseen Hand (2011), and Asymmetry
(2018). Among his books of essays are Solidarity, Solitude
(1986, tr. 1989), Two Cities (1991, tr. 1995), and
Poetry for Beginners (2018). Zagajewski has also
written several novels. He was honored with several awards, including the
Prix de la Liberté, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature (2004),
and Spain’s top humanities award (2017), and a Guggenheim Foundation
fellowship (1992).
See his memoir (2000); B. Shallcross, Through the Poet’s Eye: The Travels of
Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky (2002).
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