JAYZUS if you get through all this commendations!!!
5 December 2011
ENGL 211x
Lesson 14: Literary Analysis Research Paper
The Carnal City
Czeslaw Milosz states in his essay “The Captive Mind” that “a poet does not merely arrange words in beautiful order. Tradition demands that he be a 'bard,' that his songs linger on many lips, that he speak in his poems of subjects of interest to all the citizens” (qtd. in Cavanagh 16). At least, it is the province of the poets of Central and Eastern Europe that they write with an eye to the social movements of the time, especially in the case of Poland, where poets often speak as a kind of “second government” (Cavanagh 16) for the people. They observe the actions of those in power and provide salient commentary and response with a humanitarian bent to whatever actions are taken. In this case, Polish poets write keeping a social consciousness in mind, and keeping a careful eye on the actions of their government.
Adam Zagajewski is one such Polish poet and social commentator, who, through contemplative lyrics, offers commentary on events of the wider world. His poem “To Go to Lvov” takes a stance against the hard-lined, dehumanizing forces of history to write a paean to the power of the imagination, which creates a luscious and humanized 'safe space' that allows for regeneration from the, at times, oppressive review of history's deprivations and cruelties.
Zagajewski, one of the Polish poets born in the generation at the end of World War II, took his responsibility as one of Poland's lyrical watchdogs seriously in his essays and poetry. However, in the eyes of some observers, as his poetic voice matured, he withdrew from his role as a moral guide and voice for the dissatisfied people of Poland and retreated into abstract contemplation and lyricism. “He has brought the world to a standstill in order to commune with mute material,” (qtd. in Cavanagh 17) writes one critic, asserting that Zagajewski has withdrawn from the pressing, omnipresent concerns of corruption and injustice around him to simply observe the world. In this light, the poem “To Go to Lvov,” though beautiful, would stand as a withdrawal from the demands of the world into a poetic dreamland. Some critics conceive that this withdrawal creates poetry that is nostalgic and self-indulgent, in the sense that such poetry ceased to deal with the political and moral struggles Polish citizens faced, instead becoming self-centered and merely a vehicle which the poet could use to navel-gaze. Such individualism would seem a betrayal of the general movement of Polish poetry where poets comment on society, call citizens to action, and criticize problems.
Does Zagajewski's movement away from more direct social commentary via his poetry remove moral imperative from his works? According to Zagajewski himself, “The aesthetic value of an apt description becomes in some imperceptible way an ethical value as well” (qtd. in Cavanagh 17). We may gather that, at least from his own perspective, his later works that outwardly concentrate more on luscious representations of places and moments in time do not eschew moral stands at all.
How is morality represented in “To Go to Lvov,” and where does it appear? Essentially, “To Go to Lvov” is a poem written to praise and celebrate a lost homeland, or at least a homeland which has changed form: even in its translation into English, the town changed form, from being written as Lwow to being written as Lvov. This chance occurred because Polish has no “v.” Either way, Zagajewski builds a dream of Lvov, writing of the city as it once existed. Then he tears it down, before reviving the town once again at the end of the poem. Though Zagajewski writes of experiences that are clearly painful, he never really condemns the people enacting that pain. His focus is always on the town itself, the experiences of its inhabitants, and the constant assertion that Lvov exists, even after its destruction, and, in fact, that Lvov “is everywhere” (Zagajewski 81). The tone exhibited in “To Go to Lvov” is not one of condemnation. Rather, the poem is relentless in its efforts to praise the town and bring it back to life. In essence, the poem wishes to revive all of the aspects of Lvov that were forgotten in the history books but which made living in the town a pleasure. Magdalena Kay writes that “history is an imperialist force” (20). In this interpretation, the events of history interpreted in the history books can become dehumanizing, as they remove characteristics we can relate to from events. Human experience of resettlement, for instance, is reduced to accounts of shifting borders; the deaths within a concentration camp become a statistic so terrible as to be incomprehensible. “To Go to Lvov” insists on forcing a human, personal space that celebrates beauty and joy into the crushing loss of loved ones and homeland. The poem asserts that in spite of the transience of beauty and the struggle to maintain identity, that beauty can be found without fail, universally, and a homeland can never be wholly lost, though it might be changed or damaged. “To Go to Lvov” is a fierce effort of praise in a world where it is sometimes difficult to see what is still good.
The poem itself heavily relies on different kinds of imagery. Zagajewski presents aspects of Lvov as if they are snapshots taken one after another, using sentences with many clauses, often with the different clauses containing images that do not seem to relate to each other. The poem at times reads like a written game of poetic free association, where one image leads to another in a way that can seem random to observers. “To Go to Lvov” has no strict rhyme scheme, written rather in free verse. It is also not separated into stanzas. Rather, eighty-three lines come out in one long rush of a stanza, with the lack of breaks contributing to the eager pace of the poem. The tone of the poem changes twice: the beginning of the poem is jubilant and eager, celebrating the existence of Lvov. At line 58, the tone changes to become sorrowful and longing as the speaker describes the destruction of Lvov, and then at line 79 the tone changes again to offer a glimpse of hope at a Lvov that rises from the destruction to assert its presence.
An example of Zagajewski's use of visual imagery within the poem appears straightaway. We are informed that the poem begins at dawn, a time of fresh starts and new beginnings, and dew “gleams on a suitcase,” offering an image associated with travel, light, and bright, reflective surfaces, as things that gleam are usually polished (79). In another instance of visual imagery employed in the poem, Zagajewski writes of “white napkins and a bucket / full of raspberries standing on the floor,” (79) where the white of the napkins contrasts with the red and gold raspberries we imagine piled in a bucket. The sheer mention of raspberries also provides substance for imagery utilizing taste and smell, as many readers are likely familiar with the flavor and scent of raspberries. Zagajewski mentions color often in this first part of the poem, first in the “green armies of burdocks,” then in the “white” napkins, the implied color of the raspberries, the “amber” of cherries, and the “yellowed” forsythia that grows next to the window (79-80). Color never appears again as a descriptor for the rest of the poem, but the accumulated images Zagajewski presents to us of Lvov give the readers an idea of a town rich with color and life.
Zagajewski also makes good use of auditory imagery within this early part of the poem,
In discussing his own poetry with Lance Larsen, Zagajewski states, “I think the basso continuo for poetry is praising, but it is a complicated praising. This world has probably always been mutilated, not clean or innocent” (4). He admits that this is one of the central themes of his poetry: “this combination of praising the world, but also feeling that the world as I have known it has always been mutilated” (4). In these lines he might address, particularly, his well-known poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” but “To Go to Lvov” also exhibits both a deep appreciation for the beauty humans can create as well as a keen awareness of the pain that occurs as borders change and humans are crushed beneath the front lines of progress. Still, Zagajewski writes to recreate the moments of beauty, where humans reach enlightenment and experience an ideal. In keeping with this theme, “To Go to Lvov” is a poem that contrasts both the ugliness that history encloses and the beauty that humans can create in spite of that ugliness. To this end, the poem sets up a journey, allowing the reader to accompany the speaker to Lvov.
The speaker in “To Go to Lvov” is probably very close to Zagajewski, although not a direct transplant of his authorial voice. Zagajewski held a great deal of nostalgia for Lvov, imparted to him by his family. He was born there and yet the family was forced to move away before he could form any solid memories of the place, and his life afterward was shaped by the intense nostalgia his family felt for the town. Benjamin Paloff states that to Zagajewski, Lvov represents the lost homeland, which one always travels towards but can never reach. The speaker in “To Go to Lvov” reflects a sense of yearning, so much that he even reaches backwards into the past when he “wasn't born yet” (Zagajewski ) to return to the lost town.
Kay writes that the poem “shows the prehistory of the self” (21). The speaker may adopt many of Zagajewski's characteristics, including his longing for Lvov, but said speaker also exists on an imaginary plane. The speaker moves freely through time and space using his imagination, drinking in the sights of Lvov and exploring scenes he could never actually have seen. An instance of this imaginary construction of the past appears within the lines “my aunts couldn't have known / yet that I'd resurrect them, / and lived so trustfully; so singly” (Zagajewski ). Here, we see that though the speaker reaches for Lvov, he is not fully present: the aunts do not know him; they must be resurrected through his poetry.
This is one instance of many in which we may observe that though the speaker is imaginative and makes a fierce effort to assert the existence of Lvov against a forbidding world, he is not all-powerful. Kay states that “he cannot dominate even his own imaginative space, as history intrudes on the present and the quotidian intrudes on the exalted” (21). She points out that two of the images that complete the destructive arc in the poem are of a forest and a church both in danger: “trees / fell soundlessly, as in a jungle, / and the cathedral trembled” (Zagajewski 81). In this case, both the pristine forest and the holy cathedral are threatened by the destruction of Lvov. The speaker's voice becomes more desperate as Lvov is threatened further over the course of the poem, but it only echoes how at the beginning, Lvov's existence was not certain either. Zagajewski employs two infinitive phrases at the beginning of the poem: “to go to Lvov” and “to leave in haste for Lvov” (79). Kay writes that these infinitives create “an abstract, postulated world, neither proven to exist nor decisively experienced,” carrying on to clarify that “the infinitive looks forward to what could happen, to the future” (20). From the start, then, the poem begins with the possibility of a journey, the hopeful existence of Lvov, and not with any certainties.
Thus, the poem begins with a sense of motion. However, even the moment when the trip shall actually be taken is uncertain, as the journey may start during “night or day, in September / or in March” (Zagajewski 79). Indeed, Lvov might not be extant at all: the trip can take place “only if Lvov exists, / if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just / in my new passport,” (Zagajewski 79). This quality of Lvov's being real and not real, there and not there, persists throughout the poem to the very end, where the speaker reconciles Lvov's destruction with its rebirth and concludes that Lvov “is everywhere” (Zagajewski 81). Yet, throughout the beginning of the poem, Lvov is constructed as a town dreamlike but possessing elements of the universal.
One dreamlike element is in how Lvov's borders expand, first hinted at through Zagajewski's use of implied metaphors near the beginning of the piece. In this case, the features the speaker passes on the way to Lvov are not simple objects. They have elements from the wider world. For instance, the trees passed are not merely trees, but living things, which “breathe aloud like Indians.” (Zagajewski 79). Likewise, streams “mumble their dark Esperanto,” (Zagajewski 79) and snakes are “like soft signs in the Russian language” (Zagajewski 79). These international images contained within the country of Poland, where Lvov is situated, indicate how during the years after World War II, the boundaries of Poland were redrawn. Lvov and surrounding eastern Polish lands were given over to the Soviet Union and incorporated into the Ukraine, while parts of Germany were given to Poland, and inhabitants of previously Polish Lvov were forced to move onto new lands that had once been German. The move was not a happy one, and Lvov became, in the works of Zagajewski and his contemporaries, “the crucial role in defining homeland” (Stanczyk 59). Poems and essays idealized the town and fought to symbolically reclaim it, and Lvov became a symbol for the suffering experienced by the displaced Polish people.
The lines “To pack and set off, to leave / without a trace, at noon, to vanish / like fainting maidens. And burdocks, green armies of burdocks,” serve as an apt example of the fragmented style that characterizes the poem (Zagajewski 79). Rather than making the piece choppy, the short verses that offer brief snippets of impression contribute to the pacing of the poem: when read aloud, the fragments urge the reader to hurry along, leaping eagerly from phrase to phrase like someone breaking into a run as he or she has seen his or her goal at last. The fragmented observations contribute to a sensation that the speaker is hurried, catching brief impressions of many different things, and though there is seemingly only one speaker, the brief sentences offer a multitude of different observations and perspectives. This multiplicity is appropriate given the worldly scope of the poem and Zagajewski's oeuvre: Clare Cavanagh writes, “Zagajewski invites us to see all history, whether past or passing, not as a matter of data and vast, unfathomable numbers but as a fabric woven of countless other unique, irreplaceable human beings” (Cavanagh 19). Thus, Zagajewski uses a stylistic device that seems to shift the perspective and impressions of the poem as though it collected images from a number of people in “To Go to Lvov.” The device blends the boundaries of imagination and reality, and makes it seem as though a town encompasses a world.
“To Go to Lvov” shifts the borders of Lvov beyond the forced changes politics inflicted in the mid-twentieth century to bring the wider world into the lands surrounding Lvov and to extend Lvov into the world. The poem redefines the loss of the town, making Lvov universal and in this way leading the reader to realize that Lvov was not actually lost at all. We can see this universalizing of the town taking place in these lines: “There was so much of the world that / it had to do encores over and over, / the audience was in a frenzy and didn't want / to leave the house” (Zagajewski 80).
The love for the town is exemplified in these lines, as they refer to the enthusiasm of the audience, in love with the world, demanding repetition “over and over” again. The word “world” can also be conflated with the use of the word “house,” implying that the greater world is the home. However, simultaneously, this home is centered in the town of Lvov; Lvov is where people reach these raptures of joy. These lines serve as an example of how Zagajewski expands Lvov's boundaries within the poem, the same way in which the boundaries of Poland originally shifted. The universality of Lvov is implied throughout the poem, using implied metaphors. That Lvov is everywhere in the world is hinted at throughout the poem, and explicitly stated in the last lines. However, to arrive in Lvov, one must still journey, and, in the first part of his poem, Zagajewski takes us through Lvov in a rush of brief, contrasting images, using short sentences.
The poem is not all happiness, however. Before the resolution at the end of the poem, where the speaker seems to attain peace with himself and the world, Lvov is destroyed, its destruction beginning with the line “there was too much of Lvov, and now / there isn't any” (Zagajewski 80). The loss of Lvov culminates in a sorrowful proclamation that again brings in international elements to the poem: “people bade goodbye / without handkerchiefs, no tears, such a dry / mouth, I won't see you anymore, so much death / awaits you, why must every city / become Jerusalem and every man a Jew” (Zagajewski 81). The statement that “every city” becomes Jerusalem makes an indirect comparison of Jerusalem with Lvov, playing off both the importance that Lvov had for the Polish people as well as making Lvov alike to an element from the outside world once more. However, this comparison also makes the destruction Lvov experienced alike to the destruction Jerusalem experienced, and states that eventually, every city will experience that suffering. The suffering contained within Lvov's history is unique in its particulars, as are the joys experienced by those inhabitants of Lvov. However, the suffering felt by the citizens of Lvov is also something held in common with people around the world: people in every city, everywhere, have experienced pain or will come to experience pain, eventually. Only the particulars of the situations are different.
The painful contrast between the suffering that comes along with the passage of time and the beauty that once existed is what the speaker must reconcile within the poem. The second turning point within the poem, at line 79, marks where Lvov's destruction reverses, seemingly instantaneously. The transition is swift: from equating Lvov to Jerusalem, Zagajewski leaps to writing “now in a hurry just / pack, always, each day, / and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all / it exists, quiet and pure as / a peach. It is everywhere” (Zagajewski 81) The development leading to this point of the poem, where Lvov rises from destruction like a phoenix and comes back into being, seems a complete surprise until we recognize all the hints of universality that appeared earlier in the poem. The simile comparing Lvov to a peach implies that the town is sweet and fresh, as well as explicitly stated to be pure. At this point, the city cannot actually be lost, nor is it difficult to reach. The speaker can go to Lvov “each day.” Reality, which was plunged into a state of being “obscure and chaotic,” has been realigned so that the speaker has an “impression of harmony” (Shallcross 236). Of note is that “tailors, gardeners and censors” were the ones who destroyed the wild beauty of Lvov (Zagajewski 80). The most unfamiliar of these three is the censor, who has the job of examining books, plays, news reports, and so on, so that pieces with morally or politically lacking content can be suppressed. In this case, the censor erases the voice of Lvov, cutting off the town's identity as what once was a Polish city is given to the Soviet Union. In the context of the poem, gardeners, tailors and censors all become destroyers, who prune, trim, erase, and redirect Lvov until the way in which people there once lived and the identity the town formerly held have disappeared. To recover Lvov, the town must have freedom again to grow into the sprawl of impressions and sensations that Zagajewski presented to the reader at the beginning of the poem.
Zagajewski makes Lvov the site of a struggle between the forces of history, which seek to create explanations and rationalize interpretations of events, against the forces of the imagination, which can break free from the bounds of time and reinterpret historical facts which seemed inescapable. Lvov is a space of contact between cultures as well as a source of contention for Polish poets who long for their lost homeland. Through writing, poets and essayists fight to reclaim their town; they attempt to “domesticate” the home they once knew, which creates a power struggle between the forces which seek to remove humanity from history by divorcing historical facts from their emotional import, and those forces who seek to explore history using emotionalism (Stanczyk 62).
Throughout the beginning of the poem, religious presence is evident in Lvov: the cathedral rises as “straight / as Sunday;” churches have a unique silence; Jesuit priests bless even the flora; an uncle writes a poem “dedicated to the Almighty,” and Lvov as a whole seems to “read the new Testament” (Zagajewski 80). God is present, fluid, and powerful within the town, but the divine only reappears after the town is revived once more.
The repeated references to divinity and holy presence are important within the poem, for although Zagajewski is not an overtly religious poet, the presence of a spiritual force within the town invigorates it with something eternal. Lvov is shown to be transient in some regards: it is possible for it to be mutilated, after all. Yet ultimately, the town and the ideal home it offers both persist. According to Kay, the concept of Lvov that can be found everywhere means that it is “both transient and eternal. It is the site of momentary delight and it dwells in the realm of eternal ideas” (21). The town connects to a specific location but then loses influence to have a universal power. It is through the vitalizing power of imagination that Lvov lives again beyond the finite site it originally claimed.
Baron Wormser writes that “imagination creates history as much as history creates imagination” (417). By this statement he means that human interpretation (imagination) can create trends and make predictions from history that were not evident at the time, and that history can have an influence on how people think and what conclusions they draw in return. In the case of human interpretation creating history, a historian can select certain items of evidence to create trends that were not necessarily evident at the time, and these trends are printed into textbooks to influence schools of thought into a vision of the past which is, at times, misleading: because although historians strive to be unbiased, the causes and repercussions of events can be interpreted differently from historian to historian. Movements did not necessarily exist consciously, and revolutions might have been lucky breaks coinciding at once. In this way history creates imagination. However, imagination has its own power to reinterpret history, which may allow a victory to be wrung out of the grasp of defeat, or turn the common interpretation of a course of events in an entirely new direction. In this way, Zagajewski grasps the revival of Lvov: “wait till warm June / comes with soft ferns,” he urges, “boundless fields of summer, i.e. the reality” (Zagajewski 80). Summer, a time of warmth and growth, is the reality, not the harsh deprivations of winter, and in spite of its suffering, Lvov is still as “pure as / a peach,” a luscious, ripe fruit, pristine and tempting (Zagajewski 81). He spits in the face of history books that declared Lvov as belonging to the Soviet Union and forced Polish citizens to relocate from their homeland, though he does not cry out that Lvov should be reclaimed by force. He insists that it exists and is available to be appreciated everywhere already, in spite of the years of loss suffered by those forced out of the town. In fact, the time of pain, perhaps, is what makes the reclamation of Lvov all the sweeter.
Andrew Krivak writes that “what we learn from Zagajewski's poetry is the dynamic of harmony and struggle, beauty and pain.” (14) “To Go to Lvov” is not a poem that makes condemnations of any particular group of people, though it expresses pain at the actions taken by some. Nor does Zagajewski seek to prescribe a course of action that people should take. Rather, the poem constructs a safe space, where the reader can share some of the pain of the dispossession of the Polish people, a pain shared by other displaced refugees, perhaps shared by anyone who has lost something precious and feels it is beyond his or her grasp forever, but the reader can also feel hope in tandem with realizing the negative parts of history. Krivak writes that Zagajewski's poetry often ends “with a sense of not so much the ambiguity between what is done and what is yet to be done, as the simple reality that, in spite of ambiguity, we endure” (14). Zagajewski acknowledges pain but insists that hope still exists; as Cavanagh puts it, he “invites us to join in his efforts to confront the world's large-scale sufferings and - more difficult still - to praise its small, ephemeral joys.” Kay writes that Zagajewski presents a “form of idealism that does not crystallize an ideal in a single image but allows for movement and change” (22).
Essentially, what Zagajewski rejects in “To Go to Lvov” is the concept that historical events have only one interpretation, that there is no power of imagination or freedom of interpretation that an individual can bring to events, and that humanity is enslaved to the course of events as they have passed. Combating this idea of an already-determined and interpreted past, Zagajewski plays with the passage of time and space in his poem and makes equivalent one lost city to the entire world. Then, he turns the statement around, insisting that what made Lvov special was not lost after all: that, indeed, it can be found everywhere.
“To Go to Lvov” reminds us of the human element of history: that everywhere, there are people. Zagajewski is, in a sense, humanitarian in his poetry, in that he always demands empathy from the reader by removing the events of history from being simply abstract facts to human lived experience. The massive numbers that tell of those victimized by historical processes become incomprehensible in their vastness; we might understand that we should feel pain for those numbers, but it is difficult to empathize with no point to make an individual connection. Zagajewski's poetry creates a powerful individual voice and places emphasis on the value of human experience. If creating empathy and facilitating understanding through sharing words and experience can be described as a moral stance, then “To Go to Lvov,” which places paramount value on individual experience of a place, takes a moral stance, reminding the reader of the pains and hopes that accompany the events that eventually become history.
Works Cited
Cavanagh, Clare. “Lyric and Public: The Case of Adam Zagajewski.” World Literature Today 79.2 (2005): 16-19.
Kay, Magdalena. “Place and Imagination in the Poetry of Adam Zagajewski.” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 79.2 (2005): 20-22.
Krivak, Andrew. “The Language of Redemption: The Catholic Poets Adam Zagajewski, Marie Ponsot & Lawrence Joseph.” Commonweal 130.9 (2003): 12-16.
Larsen, Lance. “Interview with Adam Zagajewski, 24 January 2003.” Literature and Belief 26.2 (2006): 1-10.
Paloff, Benjamin. Personal interview. 3 October 2011.
Shallcross, Bozena. “The Divining Moment: Adam Zagajewski's Aesthetics of Epiphany.” The Slavic and East European Journal 44.2 (2000): 234-52.
Stanczyk, Ewa. “Polish Contact Zones: Silesia in the Works of Adam Zagajewski and Tomasz Rozycki.” Slovo 21.2 (2009): 50-63.
Wormser, Baron. “Meeting the Agony: Three Poems of the Twentieth Century.” Sewanee Review 116.3 (2008): 411-427.
Zagajewski, Adam. “To Go to Lvov.” Without End: New and Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. 79-81.
ENGL 211x
Lesson 14: Literary Analysis Research Paper
The Carnal City
Czeslaw Milosz states in his essay “The Captive Mind” that “a poet does not merely arrange words in beautiful order. Tradition demands that he be a 'bard,' that his songs linger on many lips, that he speak in his poems of subjects of interest to all the citizens” (qtd. in Cavanagh 16). At least, it is the province of the poets of Central and Eastern Europe that they write with an eye to the social movements of the time, especially in the case of Poland, where poets often speak as a kind of “second government” (Cavanagh 16) for the people. They observe the actions of those in power and provide salient commentary and response with a humanitarian bent to whatever actions are taken. In this case, Polish poets write keeping a social consciousness in mind, and keeping a careful eye on the actions of their government.
Adam Zagajewski is one such Polish poet and social commentator, who, through contemplative lyrics, offers commentary on events of the wider world. His poem “To Go to Lvov” takes a stance against the hard-lined, dehumanizing forces of history to write a paean to the power of the imagination, which creates a luscious and humanized 'safe space' that allows for regeneration from the, at times, oppressive review of history's deprivations and cruelties.
Zagajewski, one of the Polish poets born in the generation at the end of World War II, took his responsibility as one of Poland's lyrical watchdogs seriously in his essays and poetry. However, in the eyes of some observers, as his poetic voice matured, he withdrew from his role as a moral guide and voice for the dissatisfied people of Poland and retreated into abstract contemplation and lyricism. “He has brought the world to a standstill in order to commune with mute material,” (qtd. in Cavanagh 17) writes one critic, asserting that Zagajewski has withdrawn from the pressing, omnipresent concerns of corruption and injustice around him to simply observe the world. In this light, the poem “To Go to Lvov,” though beautiful, would stand as a withdrawal from the demands of the world into a poetic dreamland. Some critics conceive that this withdrawal creates poetry that is nostalgic and self-indulgent, in the sense that such poetry ceased to deal with the political and moral struggles Polish citizens faced, instead becoming self-centered and merely a vehicle which the poet could use to navel-gaze. Such individualism would seem a betrayal of the general movement of Polish poetry where poets comment on society, call citizens to action, and criticize problems.
Does Zagajewski's movement away from more direct social commentary via his poetry remove moral imperative from his works? According to Zagajewski himself, “The aesthetic value of an apt description becomes in some imperceptible way an ethical value as well” (qtd. in Cavanagh 17). We may gather that, at least from his own perspective, his later works that outwardly concentrate more on luscious representations of places and moments in time do not eschew moral stands at all.
How is morality represented in “To Go to Lvov,” and where does it appear? Essentially, “To Go to Lvov” is a poem written to praise and celebrate a lost homeland, or at least a homeland which has changed form: even in its translation into English, the town changed form, from being written as Lwow to being written as Lvov. This chance occurred because Polish has no “v.” Either way, Zagajewski builds a dream of Lvov, writing of the city as it once existed. Then he tears it down, before reviving the town once again at the end of the poem. Though Zagajewski writes of experiences that are clearly painful, he never really condemns the people enacting that pain. His focus is always on the town itself, the experiences of its inhabitants, and the constant assertion that Lvov exists, even after its destruction, and, in fact, that Lvov “is everywhere” (Zagajewski 81). The tone exhibited in “To Go to Lvov” is not one of condemnation. Rather, the poem is relentless in its efforts to praise the town and bring it back to life. In essence, the poem wishes to revive all of the aspects of Lvov that were forgotten in the history books but which made living in the town a pleasure. Magdalena Kay writes that “history is an imperialist force” (20). In this interpretation, the events of history interpreted in the history books can become dehumanizing, as they remove characteristics we can relate to from events. Human experience of resettlement, for instance, is reduced to accounts of shifting borders; the deaths within a concentration camp become a statistic so terrible as to be incomprehensible. “To Go to Lvov” insists on forcing a human, personal space that celebrates beauty and joy into the crushing loss of loved ones and homeland. The poem asserts that in spite of the transience of beauty and the struggle to maintain identity, that beauty can be found without fail, universally, and a homeland can never be wholly lost, though it might be changed or damaged. “To Go to Lvov” is a fierce effort of praise in a world where it is sometimes difficult to see what is still good.
The poem itself heavily relies on different kinds of imagery. Zagajewski presents aspects of Lvov as if they are snapshots taken one after another, using sentences with many clauses, often with the different clauses containing images that do not seem to relate to each other. The poem at times reads like a written game of poetic free association, where one image leads to another in a way that can seem random to observers. “To Go to Lvov” has no strict rhyme scheme, written rather in free verse. It is also not separated into stanzas. Rather, eighty-three lines come out in one long rush of a stanza, with the lack of breaks contributing to the eager pace of the poem. The tone of the poem changes twice: the beginning of the poem is jubilant and eager, celebrating the existence of Lvov. At line 58, the tone changes to become sorrowful and longing as the speaker describes the destruction of Lvov, and then at line 79 the tone changes again to offer a glimpse of hope at a Lvov that rises from the destruction to assert its presence.
An example of Zagajewski's use of visual imagery within the poem appears straightaway. We are informed that the poem begins at dawn, a time of fresh starts and new beginnings, and dew “gleams on a suitcase,” offering an image associated with travel, light, and bright, reflective surfaces, as things that gleam are usually polished (79). In another instance of visual imagery employed in the poem, Zagajewski writes of “white napkins and a bucket / full of raspberries standing on the floor,” (79) where the white of the napkins contrasts with the red and gold raspberries we imagine piled in a bucket. The sheer mention of raspberries also provides substance for imagery utilizing taste and smell, as many readers are likely familiar with the flavor and scent of raspberries. Zagajewski mentions color often in this first part of the poem, first in the “green armies of burdocks,” then in the “white” napkins, the implied color of the raspberries, the “amber” of cherries, and the “yellowed” forsythia that grows next to the window (79-80). Color never appears again as a descriptor for the rest of the poem, but the accumulated images Zagajewski presents to us of Lvov give the readers an idea of a town rich with color and life.
Zagajewski also makes good use of auditory imagery within this early part of the poem,
In discussing his own poetry with Lance Larsen, Zagajewski states, “I think the basso continuo for poetry is praising, but it is a complicated praising. This world has probably always been mutilated, not clean or innocent” (4). He admits that this is one of the central themes of his poetry: “this combination of praising the world, but also feeling that the world as I have known it has always been mutilated” (4). In these lines he might address, particularly, his well-known poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” but “To Go to Lvov” also exhibits both a deep appreciation for the beauty humans can create as well as a keen awareness of the pain that occurs as borders change and humans are crushed beneath the front lines of progress. Still, Zagajewski writes to recreate the moments of beauty, where humans reach enlightenment and experience an ideal. In keeping with this theme, “To Go to Lvov” is a poem that contrasts both the ugliness that history encloses and the beauty that humans can create in spite of that ugliness. To this end, the poem sets up a journey, allowing the reader to accompany the speaker to Lvov.
The speaker in “To Go to Lvov” is probably very close to Zagajewski, although not a direct transplant of his authorial voice. Zagajewski held a great deal of nostalgia for Lvov, imparted to him by his family. He was born there and yet the family was forced to move away before he could form any solid memories of the place, and his life afterward was shaped by the intense nostalgia his family felt for the town. Benjamin Paloff states that to Zagajewski, Lvov represents the lost homeland, which one always travels towards but can never reach. The speaker in “To Go to Lvov” reflects a sense of yearning, so much that he even reaches backwards into the past when he “wasn't born yet” (Zagajewski ) to return to the lost town.
Kay writes that the poem “shows the prehistory of the self” (21). The speaker may adopt many of Zagajewski's characteristics, including his longing for Lvov, but said speaker also exists on an imaginary plane. The speaker moves freely through time and space using his imagination, drinking in the sights of Lvov and exploring scenes he could never actually have seen. An instance of this imaginary construction of the past appears within the lines “my aunts couldn't have known / yet that I'd resurrect them, / and lived so trustfully; so singly” (Zagajewski ). Here, we see that though the speaker reaches for Lvov, he is not fully present: the aunts do not know him; they must be resurrected through his poetry.
This is one instance of many in which we may observe that though the speaker is imaginative and makes a fierce effort to assert the existence of Lvov against a forbidding world, he is not all-powerful. Kay states that “he cannot dominate even his own imaginative space, as history intrudes on the present and the quotidian intrudes on the exalted” (21). She points out that two of the images that complete the destructive arc in the poem are of a forest and a church both in danger: “trees / fell soundlessly, as in a jungle, / and the cathedral trembled” (Zagajewski 81). In this case, both the pristine forest and the holy cathedral are threatened by the destruction of Lvov. The speaker's voice becomes more desperate as Lvov is threatened further over the course of the poem, but it only echoes how at the beginning, Lvov's existence was not certain either. Zagajewski employs two infinitive phrases at the beginning of the poem: “to go to Lvov” and “to leave in haste for Lvov” (79). Kay writes that these infinitives create “an abstract, postulated world, neither proven to exist nor decisively experienced,” carrying on to clarify that “the infinitive looks forward to what could happen, to the future” (20). From the start, then, the poem begins with the possibility of a journey, the hopeful existence of Lvov, and not with any certainties.
Thus, the poem begins with a sense of motion. However, even the moment when the trip shall actually be taken is uncertain, as the journey may start during “night or day, in September / or in March” (Zagajewski 79). Indeed, Lvov might not be extant at all: the trip can take place “only if Lvov exists, / if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just / in my new passport,” (Zagajewski 79). This quality of Lvov's being real and not real, there and not there, persists throughout the poem to the very end, where the speaker reconciles Lvov's destruction with its rebirth and concludes that Lvov “is everywhere” (Zagajewski 81). Yet, throughout the beginning of the poem, Lvov is constructed as a town dreamlike but possessing elements of the universal.
One dreamlike element is in how Lvov's borders expand, first hinted at through Zagajewski's use of implied metaphors near the beginning of the piece. In this case, the features the speaker passes on the way to Lvov are not simple objects. They have elements from the wider world. For instance, the trees passed are not merely trees, but living things, which “breathe aloud like Indians.” (Zagajewski 79). Likewise, streams “mumble their dark Esperanto,” (Zagajewski 79) and snakes are “like soft signs in the Russian language” (Zagajewski 79). These international images contained within the country of Poland, where Lvov is situated, indicate how during the years after World War II, the boundaries of Poland were redrawn. Lvov and surrounding eastern Polish lands were given over to the Soviet Union and incorporated into the Ukraine, while parts of Germany were given to Poland, and inhabitants of previously Polish Lvov were forced to move onto new lands that had once been German. The move was not a happy one, and Lvov became, in the works of Zagajewski and his contemporaries, “the crucial role in defining homeland” (Stanczyk 59). Poems and essays idealized the town and fought to symbolically reclaim it, and Lvov became a symbol for the suffering experienced by the displaced Polish people.
The lines “To pack and set off, to leave / without a trace, at noon, to vanish / like fainting maidens. And burdocks, green armies of burdocks,” serve as an apt example of the fragmented style that characterizes the poem (Zagajewski 79). Rather than making the piece choppy, the short verses that offer brief snippets of impression contribute to the pacing of the poem: when read aloud, the fragments urge the reader to hurry along, leaping eagerly from phrase to phrase like someone breaking into a run as he or she has seen his or her goal at last. The fragmented observations contribute to a sensation that the speaker is hurried, catching brief impressions of many different things, and though there is seemingly only one speaker, the brief sentences offer a multitude of different observations and perspectives. This multiplicity is appropriate given the worldly scope of the poem and Zagajewski's oeuvre: Clare Cavanagh writes, “Zagajewski invites us to see all history, whether past or passing, not as a matter of data and vast, unfathomable numbers but as a fabric woven of countless other unique, irreplaceable human beings” (Cavanagh 19). Thus, Zagajewski uses a stylistic device that seems to shift the perspective and impressions of the poem as though it collected images from a number of people in “To Go to Lvov.” The device blends the boundaries of imagination and reality, and makes it seem as though a town encompasses a world.
“To Go to Lvov” shifts the borders of Lvov beyond the forced changes politics inflicted in the mid-twentieth century to bring the wider world into the lands surrounding Lvov and to extend Lvov into the world. The poem redefines the loss of the town, making Lvov universal and in this way leading the reader to realize that Lvov was not actually lost at all. We can see this universalizing of the town taking place in these lines: “There was so much of the world that / it had to do encores over and over, / the audience was in a frenzy and didn't want / to leave the house” (Zagajewski 80).
The love for the town is exemplified in these lines, as they refer to the enthusiasm of the audience, in love with the world, demanding repetition “over and over” again. The word “world” can also be conflated with the use of the word “house,” implying that the greater world is the home. However, simultaneously, this home is centered in the town of Lvov; Lvov is where people reach these raptures of joy. These lines serve as an example of how Zagajewski expands Lvov's boundaries within the poem, the same way in which the boundaries of Poland originally shifted. The universality of Lvov is implied throughout the poem, using implied metaphors. That Lvov is everywhere in the world is hinted at throughout the poem, and explicitly stated in the last lines. However, to arrive in Lvov, one must still journey, and, in the first part of his poem, Zagajewski takes us through Lvov in a rush of brief, contrasting images, using short sentences.
The poem is not all happiness, however. Before the resolution at the end of the poem, where the speaker seems to attain peace with himself and the world, Lvov is destroyed, its destruction beginning with the line “there was too much of Lvov, and now / there isn't any” (Zagajewski 80). The loss of Lvov culminates in a sorrowful proclamation that again brings in international elements to the poem: “people bade goodbye / without handkerchiefs, no tears, such a dry / mouth, I won't see you anymore, so much death / awaits you, why must every city / become Jerusalem and every man a Jew” (Zagajewski 81). The statement that “every city” becomes Jerusalem makes an indirect comparison of Jerusalem with Lvov, playing off both the importance that Lvov had for the Polish people as well as making Lvov alike to an element from the outside world once more. However, this comparison also makes the destruction Lvov experienced alike to the destruction Jerusalem experienced, and states that eventually, every city will experience that suffering. The suffering contained within Lvov's history is unique in its particulars, as are the joys experienced by those inhabitants of Lvov. However, the suffering felt by the citizens of Lvov is also something held in common with people around the world: people in every city, everywhere, have experienced pain or will come to experience pain, eventually. Only the particulars of the situations are different.
The painful contrast between the suffering that comes along with the passage of time and the beauty that once existed is what the speaker must reconcile within the poem. The second turning point within the poem, at line 79, marks where Lvov's destruction reverses, seemingly instantaneously. The transition is swift: from equating Lvov to Jerusalem, Zagajewski leaps to writing “now in a hurry just / pack, always, each day, / and go breathless, go to Lvov, after all / it exists, quiet and pure as / a peach. It is everywhere” (Zagajewski 81) The development leading to this point of the poem, where Lvov rises from destruction like a phoenix and comes back into being, seems a complete surprise until we recognize all the hints of universality that appeared earlier in the poem. The simile comparing Lvov to a peach implies that the town is sweet and fresh, as well as explicitly stated to be pure. At this point, the city cannot actually be lost, nor is it difficult to reach. The speaker can go to Lvov “each day.” Reality, which was plunged into a state of being “obscure and chaotic,” has been realigned so that the speaker has an “impression of harmony” (Shallcross 236). Of note is that “tailors, gardeners and censors” were the ones who destroyed the wild beauty of Lvov (Zagajewski 80). The most unfamiliar of these three is the censor, who has the job of examining books, plays, news reports, and so on, so that pieces with morally or politically lacking content can be suppressed. In this case, the censor erases the voice of Lvov, cutting off the town's identity as what once was a Polish city is given to the Soviet Union. In the context of the poem, gardeners, tailors and censors all become destroyers, who prune, trim, erase, and redirect Lvov until the way in which people there once lived and the identity the town formerly held have disappeared. To recover Lvov, the town must have freedom again to grow into the sprawl of impressions and sensations that Zagajewski presented to the reader at the beginning of the poem.
Zagajewski makes Lvov the site of a struggle between the forces of history, which seek to create explanations and rationalize interpretations of events, against the forces of the imagination, which can break free from the bounds of time and reinterpret historical facts which seemed inescapable. Lvov is a space of contact between cultures as well as a source of contention for Polish poets who long for their lost homeland. Through writing, poets and essayists fight to reclaim their town; they attempt to “domesticate” the home they once knew, which creates a power struggle between the forces which seek to remove humanity from history by divorcing historical facts from their emotional import, and those forces who seek to explore history using emotionalism (Stanczyk 62).
Throughout the beginning of the poem, religious presence is evident in Lvov: the cathedral rises as “straight / as Sunday;” churches have a unique silence; Jesuit priests bless even the flora; an uncle writes a poem “dedicated to the Almighty,” and Lvov as a whole seems to “read the new Testament” (Zagajewski 80). God is present, fluid, and powerful within the town, but the divine only reappears after the town is revived once more.
The repeated references to divinity and holy presence are important within the poem, for although Zagajewski is not an overtly religious poet, the presence of a spiritual force within the town invigorates it with something eternal. Lvov is shown to be transient in some regards: it is possible for it to be mutilated, after all. Yet ultimately, the town and the ideal home it offers both persist. According to Kay, the concept of Lvov that can be found everywhere means that it is “both transient and eternal. It is the site of momentary delight and it dwells in the realm of eternal ideas” (21). The town connects to a specific location but then loses influence to have a universal power. It is through the vitalizing power of imagination that Lvov lives again beyond the finite site it originally claimed.
Baron Wormser writes that “imagination creates history as much as history creates imagination” (417). By this statement he means that human interpretation (imagination) can create trends and make predictions from history that were not evident at the time, and that history can have an influence on how people think and what conclusions they draw in return. In the case of human interpretation creating history, a historian can select certain items of evidence to create trends that were not necessarily evident at the time, and these trends are printed into textbooks to influence schools of thought into a vision of the past which is, at times, misleading: because although historians strive to be unbiased, the causes and repercussions of events can be interpreted differently from historian to historian. Movements did not necessarily exist consciously, and revolutions might have been lucky breaks coinciding at once. In this way history creates imagination. However, imagination has its own power to reinterpret history, which may allow a victory to be wrung out of the grasp of defeat, or turn the common interpretation of a course of events in an entirely new direction. In this way, Zagajewski grasps the revival of Lvov: “wait till warm June / comes with soft ferns,” he urges, “boundless fields of summer, i.e. the reality” (Zagajewski 80). Summer, a time of warmth and growth, is the reality, not the harsh deprivations of winter, and in spite of its suffering, Lvov is still as “pure as / a peach,” a luscious, ripe fruit, pristine and tempting (Zagajewski 81). He spits in the face of history books that declared Lvov as belonging to the Soviet Union and forced Polish citizens to relocate from their homeland, though he does not cry out that Lvov should be reclaimed by force. He insists that it exists and is available to be appreciated everywhere already, in spite of the years of loss suffered by those forced out of the town. In fact, the time of pain, perhaps, is what makes the reclamation of Lvov all the sweeter.
Andrew Krivak writes that “what we learn from Zagajewski's poetry is the dynamic of harmony and struggle, beauty and pain.” (14) “To Go to Lvov” is not a poem that makes condemnations of any particular group of people, though it expresses pain at the actions taken by some. Nor does Zagajewski seek to prescribe a course of action that people should take. Rather, the poem constructs a safe space, where the reader can share some of the pain of the dispossession of the Polish people, a pain shared by other displaced refugees, perhaps shared by anyone who has lost something precious and feels it is beyond his or her grasp forever, but the reader can also feel hope in tandem with realizing the negative parts of history. Krivak writes that Zagajewski's poetry often ends “with a sense of not so much the ambiguity between what is done and what is yet to be done, as the simple reality that, in spite of ambiguity, we endure” (14). Zagajewski acknowledges pain but insists that hope still exists; as Cavanagh puts it, he “invites us to join in his efforts to confront the world's large-scale sufferings and - more difficult still - to praise its small, ephemeral joys.” Kay writes that Zagajewski presents a “form of idealism that does not crystallize an ideal in a single image but allows for movement and change” (22).
Essentially, what Zagajewski rejects in “To Go to Lvov” is the concept that historical events have only one interpretation, that there is no power of imagination or freedom of interpretation that an individual can bring to events, and that humanity is enslaved to the course of events as they have passed. Combating this idea of an already-determined and interpreted past, Zagajewski plays with the passage of time and space in his poem and makes equivalent one lost city to the entire world. Then, he turns the statement around, insisting that what made Lvov special was not lost after all: that, indeed, it can be found everywhere.
“To Go to Lvov” reminds us of the human element of history: that everywhere, there are people. Zagajewski is, in a sense, humanitarian in his poetry, in that he always demands empathy from the reader by removing the events of history from being simply abstract facts to human lived experience. The massive numbers that tell of those victimized by historical processes become incomprehensible in their vastness; we might understand that we should feel pain for those numbers, but it is difficult to empathize with no point to make an individual connection. Zagajewski's poetry creates a powerful individual voice and places emphasis on the value of human experience. If creating empathy and facilitating understanding through sharing words and experience can be described as a moral stance, then “To Go to Lvov,” which places paramount value on individual experience of a place, takes a moral stance, reminding the reader of the pains and hopes that accompany the events that eventually become history.
Works Cited
Cavanagh, Clare. “Lyric and Public: The Case of Adam Zagajewski.” World Literature Today 79.2 (2005): 16-19.
Kay, Magdalena. “Place and Imagination in the Poetry of Adam Zagajewski.” World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma 79.2 (2005): 20-22.
Krivak, Andrew. “The Language of Redemption: The Catholic Poets Adam Zagajewski, Marie Ponsot & Lawrence Joseph.” Commonweal 130.9 (2003): 12-16.
Larsen, Lance. “Interview with Adam Zagajewski, 24 January 2003.” Literature and Belief 26.2 (2006): 1-10.
Paloff, Benjamin. Personal interview. 3 October 2011.
Shallcross, Bozena. “The Divining Moment: Adam Zagajewski's Aesthetics of Epiphany.” The Slavic and East European Journal 44.2 (2000): 234-52.
Stanczyk, Ewa. “Polish Contact Zones: Silesia in the Works of Adam Zagajewski and Tomasz Rozycki.” Slovo 21.2 (2009): 50-63.
Wormser, Baron. “Meeting the Agony: Three Poems of the Twentieth Century.” Sewanee Review 116.3 (2008): 411-427.
Zagajewski, Adam. “To Go to Lvov.” Without End: New and Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. 79-81.