“The poet of 9/11” – this is what Adam Zagajewski was called after the US magazine “The New Yorker” wrote one of his poems “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” for the last page of his Special edition on the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. “You saw the refugees going nowhere, you heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world,” says the poem Zagajewski wrote months before the fall of the Twin Towers in New York.
In 1945 he was born in Lemberg / Lwów, which was then still Polish, which fell to the Ukraine after the war and became Lwíw. Zagajewski’s family had to relocate, the writer grew up in Gliwice (formerly Gleiwitz), studied philosophy and psychology in Krakow (Krakow) and sought contact with civil rights activists and dissidents at an early age.
His works were temporarily banned in Poland
The poet joined the poet formation “Nowa fala” (New Wave), who wanted to break with traditional conventions. In 1975 he was one of the signatories of an open letter in which numerous intellectuals spoke out against planned constitutional changes by the communist government.
Adam Zagajewski (l.) 2013 at the poetry festival in Berlin
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When the writer was banned from publishing, he went to West Berlin in 1979 as part of the artist program of the German Academic Exchange Service and then to Paris in 1982. In 1988, Zagajewski received a visiting professorship for “Creative Writing” at the University of Houston / Texas. After the victory of the democratic movement and the end of the communist regime, he returned to Poland and settled in Krakow again in 2002. As a commuter between his homeland and the USA, he taught literature at the University of Chicago from 2007 onwards.
History, philosophy, music, painting
In view of his autobiographical novel “Ich schwebe über Krakau” (2000), the Neue Zürcher Zeitung stated: “His oeuvre is rich in associations and allusions. History and philosophy, music and painting form, so to speak, his cantus firmus, over which the author floats. ”
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The volume of poems “Die Miesen von Burgund” (2003), a poetic exploration of Europe and one’s own career, also lives from ambivalences.
Zagajewski received numerous awards, including the Heinrich Mann Prize, the Eichendorff Literature Prize and the “Pour le mérite” order for science and the arts. The poet, who was at times considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, had been a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry since 2015.
Adam Zagajewski died on Sunday evening in Krakow, as the PAP news agency reported, citing its publisher A5.
His death was a “great loss for Polish literature,” wrote Poland’s President Andrzej Duda on Twitter.
se / ack (afp, dpa, munzinger)
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