Adam Zagalewski, Music in the car

[mariapar]

Adam Zagajewski (born 21 June 1945 in Lwów, Ukraine) is a Polish poet, novelist, translator and essayist.
In 1982 he emigrated to Paris, but in 2002 he returned to Poland, and resides in Kraków. His poem "Try To Praise The Mutilated World", printed in The New Yorker, became famous after the September 11 attacks. He is currently a faculty member at the University of Chicago and a member of its Committee on Social Thought. He teaches two classes, one of which is on fellow Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. He was awarded the Bronze Cross of Merit, and twice received the Officer's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. In 1992, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.



Links: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/343

Poems published in Translatum:

— Music in the car

[spiros]

Music in the car

Μusic heard with you
at home or in the car
or even when strolling
didn't always sound as pristine
as piano tuners might wish—
it was sometimes mixed with voices
full of fear and pain,
and then that music
was more than music,
it was our living and our dying.