Скачать или смотреть Adam Zagajewski's poem Try to Praise the Mutilated World

In Memory of 9/11 Victims

Actor Pawel Szajda reads a poem "Try to praise the mutilated world" by Adam Zagajewski, translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh.

After the 9/11 attack Adam Zagajewski's poem "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" was chosen by "The New Yorker" for the back page of the magazine to commemorate 9/11 victims (the issue of September 24, 2001).

WITHOUT END: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Adam Zagajewski, translated by several translators. Copyright © 2002 by Adam Zagajewski. Translation copyright © 2002 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021) was a leading poet of the Polish New Wave, the generation including figures like Julian Kornhauser, Stanisław Barańczak, Ewa Lipska, and Ryszard Krynicki, younger than poets born before the Second World War like Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, and Wisława Szymborska. He was born in Lwów after the Soviets forced out the Germans (today L’viv in Ukraine) at the very end of the war, and like most Poles in the region that would become Soviet Ukraine, was relocated to the formerly German “recovered territories” annexed to Poland after the Yalta and Potsdam Conferences. Haunted by themes of transience and constant motion and memories of a native city he never really knew, he would become a staunch defender of the search for moments of transcendence in the imperfect world of the everyday. He left his mark on American culture when his poem, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” was published in the last page of the November 24, 2001 issue of The New Yorker, following the tragedy of 9/11.