Name Day

Once, when I was still a student, I gave my mother
a book about Brueghel (the father) for her name day
and after a week I took it back, claiming I would
need it for my “work” (she laughed at me).

These days though modernity invades
even cemeteries—not far from her grave
they’ve placed a candlemat, that’s right, a candlemat,
a metal post, a machine dispensing candles,
you just toss two or three obols in the slot.

The name day for Ludwika came again, I went to that city,
not a city now but a tropical forest of memories
and my childhood spoke to me, every street
spoke, sang, maybe even shouted, yes,
shouted, talking about what had been and what
no longer was, and also about those I used to know.

I wasn’t sure how to pray for the dead
in such tumult, in the shriek of recollection.
I placed a pot of small chrysanthemums on the gravestone
and understood only going home
that this had been a prayer, this momentary hesitation.

Then I also realized I hadn’t brought a pen
or pencil, I couldn’t write down
what had happened, luckily I was saved
by the gas station cashier, she made me
a present of a used gold ballpoint pen
and an unused sheet of A4 paper.

I quickly started scribbling and while I scrawled
clumsy sentences my friends appeared out of nowhere,
Charlie Williams and also Tomaž Šalamun—
I thought Tomaž would particularly like
the idea of the ballpoint at the gas station.

I truthfully explained: “but that’s how it was, really,”
and I heard an answer: “really,
what does it mean really?” (they spoke together,
laughing, although I know their aesthetics
had radically differed in the past).

And nothing had changed, nothing had changed;
it was already dark when I got back to Kraków,
the last days of August, but still quite warm,
summer remembered its youth, even the night
was warm and elastic, nothing had changed,
armies of stalactites slowly grew in caves
and satellites stammered surveilling the earth,
and nothing had changed, nothing.

Remembering Adam Zagajewski

“Name Day”: so runs the title of the penultimate poem of what was, not so long ago, Adam Zagajewski’s latest collection and is now his last. I wish I could replace that period with an ellipsis, or at least an empty space, as Adam sometimes did in his later work. I joked once about how what I made for my translations: “Six cents a word and nothing for punctuation!” He gave as good as he got. At a reading in Boston some years back he prefaced his poem “How High the Moon” as follows: “The title’s in English. Why do I pay her?” “You don’t!” I said.

I doubt that my complaint inspired the sui generis punctuation of his recent work. Some poems are punctuated unpredictably. Others have nothing at all. The line spacing changed too. Translators notice these things—and block the occasional editor who tries to fix such idiosyncrasies. Adam’s poetry was still evolving. It seems so wrong that it could be “stopped / just like that / stop.” The lines conclude his poem “We Wait,” from True Life, and they end open-endedly, without a period. I wish I could do the same for Adam.

The poem “Name Day” is strange in ways for which decades of translating Adam had not prepared me. But it grows—obliquely and unexpectedly—from earlier works. The cover of Asymmetry (2018) shows Adam’s parents sideways, in a snapshot he describes in True Life: “My parents / outside Drottningholm Palace / near Stockholm” (“Drottningholm”). Adam was raised, as he writes in Slight Exaggeration (2017), in “the Eastern European school of discretion.” Indirection is a trademark of this school as he practiced it. The first stanza of “Name Day” tells us—obliquely of course—whose name the poem commemorates.

Once, when I was still a student, I gave my mother
a book about Brueghel (the father) for her name day
and after a week I took it back, claiming I would
need it for my “work” (she laughed at me).

He continues the work of mourning his mother that begins in Mysticism for Beginners (1997):

In restaurants you always
studied the menu longest . . .
In our ascetic family
you were the mistress of expression,
but you died so quietly . . . (“Airport in Amsterdam”)

The forgiving mother and obtuse son of “Name Day” make an earlier appearance in Unseen Hand (2011):

. . . she
compared herself to Beethoven going deaf,
and I said, cruelly, but you know he
had talent, and how she forgave it all
and how I remember that, and how I flew from Houston
to her funeral and couldn’t say anything
and still can’t. (“About My Mother”)

The impossible dialogue continues into Asymmetry (2018):

Or how, before the senior dance, my mother went to the meeting
where we discussed the evening’s “artistic program”
and how her ideas struck us
as feeble, old-fashioned . . . and how then,
during that meeting, she embarrassed me . . . (“Senior Dance”)

Or when she told us, for the tenth time maybe,
about the public speaking contest that, as a young
law student, she’d won, nearly won . . .
and how I wish I could hear
her tell the story again . . . (“Public Speaking Contest”)

The poems read like a sequence. But they are pages, sometimes volumes, apart. Adam even mourned obliquely.

But the mother vanishes after the first stanza of “Name Day.” We get only one more detail, the name the poet commemorates. And even this is given elliptically: “Znowu było Ludwiki,” “it was Ludwika’s [day] again.” The trip from Kraków to Gliwice—where Adam’s parents are buried—and back again veers into new territory, strange, dreamlike, as the poet looks for a way to record his experience. He is saved by a gas station attendant who gives him a pen, whereupon he is visited by the spirits of two deceased poet-friends, C. K. Williams and Tomaž Šalamun, who comment on his poem-in-progress.

By the poem’s end “nothing had changed, nothing,” he insists. But of course it has. Some time after Adam’s death, I had the kind of dream I’ve only had about my family and dearest friends. In the dream Adam came to see me at my parents’ house in Los Angeles—Adam in the San Fernando Valley!!—where I was sitting at the kitchen table in a desperate mess of papers. I was behind, as always, and we had a reading or deadline just ahead. But Adam just laughed—he was used to my fluster. And at last I got a chance to introduce him to my sisters. I wish I could tell him that.