布罗茨基
黄灿然
1
康斯坦丁•卡瓦菲斯1863年生于埃及亚历山大，70年后在那里死于喉癌。他并无重大事件的一生，应会使最严格的新批评派都感到高兴。卡瓦菲斯是一个富裕商人家庭的第九个孩子，这个家庭的繁荣随着他父亲的逝世而迅速衰落。9岁时，这位未来的诗人前往卡瓦菲斯父子公司设有分公司的英国，又于16岁时返回亚历山大。他是在希腊东正教的宗教背景下长大的。有一阵子，他曾就读于亚历山大一间商校赫尔墨斯学校，有些资料告诉我们，他在那里时，对古典文学和历史研究更感兴趣，而非经商之道。不过，这可能只是诗人传记中的陈腔滥调而已。
1882年，卡瓦菲斯19岁时，亚历山大爆发一场反欧洲运动，酿成颇多流血（至少就那个世纪的标准而言），英国出动海军报复，轰炸该城市。由于卡瓦菲斯与母亲刚于不久前去了君士坦丁堡，因此他错过了目击也许是他一生中发生于亚历山大的惟一重大历史事件的机会。在接下去的三年间，他住在君士坦丁堡——这三年对他的发展很重要。正是在君士坦丁堡，他持续了好几年的重要日记停止了——停止之处写有“亚历山大”。也是在这里，据说他有了第一次同性恋经验
WHERE THE STRESS FALLS
One of the few Americans to manage superbly the dual roles of public intellectual and novelist, Sontag, whose novel In America won a National Book Award in 2000, reaches a big audience even as she divides critics. First and foremost an essayist, Sontag tackles varied interests that are compelling in part for their apparent randomness. This new collection of occasional articles includes punditry on literature, film, photography, theater and her own literary career, among other subjects. Once a champion of then-lesser-known writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Roland Barthes, she now boosts the worthy Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis and Swiss writer Robert Walser. Sometimes her enthused advocacy seems overstated, such as when she argues a little too forcefully for Glenway Wescott as a novelist and for the poet Adam Zagajewski as a prose writer. A sugary memorial for New York City Ballet founder Lincol
Divinity in the Everyday
Another Beauty
Adam Zagajewski
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
ISBN 0374176523
Charlene Caprio
The title of Adam Zagajewski's memoir, W cudzym pięknie (Kraków, 1998), is rendered in the newly published English edition as Another Beauty (2000). A more literal translation, however, would be 'In the Beauty of Another,' which hints at Zagajewski's message that one should not exist in solitude, but rather seek out the beauty of others in order to break through the dullness of day-to-day existence.
To convey this idea, translator Clare Cavanagh includes as a preface a translation of Zagajewski's earlier poem, 'W cudzym pięknie,' which appeared in his collection, Tremor (1985):
In January 1986 I read with him and some other famous poets during the PEN conference in New York, in the Cooper Union Hall, where a huge and enthusiastic audience that consisted mostly, it seemed, of very young poets greeted the readers—what a wonderful audience it was! After that I saw him now and then in Paris, in California, in New York, in Indianapolis... In Houston, where I taught creative writing, I introduced his reading.
Later, in Krakow, I'd visit him many times in his apartment in Boguslawski Street, where he eventually settled down with Carol. I saw him walking—more and more slowly—in the Krakow Old Town, where almost everybody recognized him and looked at him with awe. Given the slow pace of his walks, the awe had enough time to be richly deployed. He was like Goethe in Weimar, though his apartment was so much more modest than the house in Frauenplan—but the centrality of his position in the small world of Krakow and Poland was never questioned. This in itsel
I Can't Write a Memoir of Czeslaw Milosz
Adam Zagajewski
I can't write a memoir of Czeslaw Milosz. For some reason it seems
impossible to me though I had almost no trouble when I wrote about
the late Zbigniew Herbert, for example (but, on the other hand, I
wouldn't envisage writing this kind of essay about Joseph Brodsky
either, someone I knew well). Why is it so? Was Herbert more of a
'unified person'? Not really. All three of them, Milosz, Herbert,
Brodsky—so different as poets and human beings—enjoyed, or
suffered, the complexity of a life divided between the utmost
seriousness of their work and the relative jocularity of what the
other people perceived as their socially visible personalities. All
three enjoyed joking, being with other people, dominating the
conversation, laughing (Milosz's laugh was the loudest, the most
majestic), as if needing a respite from the gravity of their
vocation.
And yet, again, some time ago I was
Bronisław Maj (1953 - )
Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh
I lie with my face low
in the grass, a lark
high above us. An ant drags
a dry stalk across my hand. I see
what it sees: precipitous
pores, a forest of grass, the treacherous
peaks of sand.
Salty sweat floods its eyes
and mine. The lark is already there,
where we
peer from, clinging to the earth: the ant,
the yellow flowers, and I. It soars
still higher, moving toward
the truth. Or farther from it. And if
there are two truths: the ant’s
and the lark’s, the sky’s and the furrowed
hand’s, t
Grzegorz Musiał (1952 - )
extraordinary ego
my master Gombrowicz
smiled, lasted
it seemed the Cos-
mos it seemed the Dan-
dy would never pass
look I process to your grave
at Vence I bring one magnolia blossom
a medal with a ruby
I bring records of Quartetto di Roma
with Elizabeth Schumann and Toscanini
I bring an old edition of Pascal
the Memoirs of St. Simone you liked
I guess
the scent of queer flowers the cruising
at night I bring the only photo I
have: you you and you
mo
Eva Lipska
destiny went mad.
In a crag in a secret path
a dog lied in its teeth.
Fate drowned in swamps
bogs quagmires.
The stock of friends
shrank.
Love was exhausted.
Only tuberculosis
loved him
truly.
Time unleashed
the hunt
deaf critics
(they have left no trace)
hounded his verses.
'Now he is scattered
among a h
Marek Baterowicz
(1944 - )
Translated from the Polish by Ryszard J.
Reisner
MORNING
Stars wrapped in cast of daybreak
disappear into the sponge of clouds
milk laden
I awake on the surface of the light
which blinds my telescope
chasing remains of sleep
God in boundless kindness
once again returns soul to me
playing the flute of my bones
I hear their soft melody
which key do we have today?
Aeolian tune of a shepherd?
Dorian air from the hil
Adriana Szymańska
(1948 - )
Lament - Poem
Literary Review,
by Adriana Szymanska
What do the dead do?
