Volume 49, Number 8 · May 9, 2002
The Mystery of Presence
By Charles Simic
Without End: New and Selected Poems
by Adam Zagajewski,translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh, Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry, and C.K. Williams
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 285 pp., $30.00
Another Beauty
by Adam Zagajewski,translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 215 pp., $23.00, University of Georgia Press, 215 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Polish poetry is one of the marvels of twentieth-century literature. As usually happens with work written in one of the less well known languages, its many riches were nearly unknown until fairly recently. Many minor French and Spanish poets were translated before Czesl/aw Mil/osz and Wisl/awa Szymborska became widely read in this country. Long before these two received Nobel Prizes for Literature in 1980 and 1996 respectively, however, there was an anthology, Postwar Polish Poetry, edited by Mil/osz in 1965. The book introduced a number of other fine poets, among them Aleksander Wat, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Tymoteusz Karpowicz, Jerzy Harasymowicz, and finally Zbigniew Herbert, who ranks among the greatest poets of the last century. Polish poetry has one rare virtue: it is very readable in a time when modernist experiments made a lot of poetry written elsewhere difficult, if not outright hermetic. Here's a little prose poem by Herbert to show what I mean:
Review, 3972 words
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