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Michael Hofmann
- Selected Poems by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh, Renata Gorczynski and Benjamin Ivry Buy this book
- A Defence of Ardour: Essays by Adam Zagajewski
For twenty years, since I first read the first poem, ‘To Go to Lvov’, in his first English-language book, Tremor (1985), I have had a happily unexamined admiration for the work of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. Hence, perhaps, the inordinate difficulty – even for me, with my sluggishness and resistances – in approaching it now in a spirit of . . . let’s call it serious holism. And yet it was something I very much wanted to do, and something about Zagajewski’s poetry – the joyful flavours of it – seemed to me to elicit (or elicit from me) something like its dialectical opposite: something austere, grinding, agnostic, judicious.
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Michael Hofmann’s translation of Irmgard Keun’s novel Child of All Nations is out from Penguin this month. His Selected Poems are out from Faber.
Other articles by this contributor:
Slowly/Swiftly · Michael Hofmann praises James Schuyler
His Own Prophet · Read Robert Lowell!
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