The Polish poet Zagajewski offers a model for a world in which contemporary poets perceive this problem but still has no shortage of good qualities: the blind praise of ignoring reality is of course an act of conscience, and complete pessimism is not desirable. Returning to the collection of poems "Asymmetry", the phenomenon of "asymmetry" extracted by Zagaevsky certainly stems from his keen insight into his own writing situation, which clearly transcends simple aesthetic problems and deals with the complex relationship between writing and life based on the criterion of authenticity.
Written by | Cheng Yisheng (poet, critic)
Asymmetry, by Adam Zagajewski (Poland), translated by Li Yiliang, edition: Yazhong Culture | CITIC Publishing Group, October 2021
Zagaevsky is a poet I know well, but I didn't expect to be familiar enough to write a poem of the same name. So seeing his recently published collection of poems, Asymmetry, this overlap made me feel close. Only after reading the entire collection of poems, I did not see the poem of the same name, and the word "asymmetry" appeared only once in the "Graduation Ball":
This asymmetry, this strong asymmetry,
For many years, for decades,
I couldn't stand in the glare of the truth
Meet her...
In this poem, "asymmetry" is replaced by "asymmetry", and since this collection of poems uses it as the title, it obviously has great meaning and needs to be carefully examined. The "she" in the poem refers to "my mom," and the opinions she makes when she attends the party "really surprise us", "embarrass me", and make "me" lament "how weak she is, old-school". It can be seen that the "asymmetry" in this poem deals with epistemological problems, and it is that "my" understanding of "my mother" is asymmetrical with her reality or truth, and it can even be said that it is extremely dislocated. What is touched upon here is the superficial conflict of cognition, even for a person who is extremely familiar with us, our understanding may usually be superficial and not intrinsic, and on certain occasions, when we suddenly recognize the truth of the other party, we cannot help but be surprised like the author.
The world can be explained and unexplained
For a poet, of course, cognition is a big problem, and the lack of understanding or deviation of the things around him, especially the objects of writing, will obviously lead to defects in the work, and one of the symptoms of this is the asymmetry between the reality in the work and the reality in society. It is valuable that Zagaevsky was aware of this asymmetry and showed a tendency to correct the reality in his mind with the reality in society, so it is not difficult for the reader to see the tension between the two in this poem. I tend to think of "asymmetry" as the hidden core of this collection of poems. Here I discuss the tension between the world's explainable and unexplainable, between knowing and not knowing art.
The word "explanation" appears several times in this collection of poems. Obviously, interpretation is a matter closely related to cognition. In general, if there is no correct understanding, there is no correct explanation. The world, or the object of the poet's writing, is often somewhere between the explanatory and the unexplainable. The unexplainable part of the predecessors often belong to fate, or call it mystery, Zagaevsky is different, in many poems, he upholds the attitude of cognition and inquiry to present his encounter with the world one by one, it can be said that many of his poems are generated in the process of emotional cognition. The opening work of this collection of poems, The Nameless Land, is written about the pain of losing a father, but it is extremely restrained, and the author almost turns a mental earthquake into a question of rational inquiry, and it is likely that philosophy originated from this situation. The author, who clearly wanders in Hyde Park, calls it the "Nameless Land" and repeats it in his poems, which in itself is the externalization of an indescribable intense pain. The poet tries to confide in strangers about the loss of his father, but feels inappropriate. Finally, there is comfort in a poem by Gottfried Benn:
When Delacroix expounded his theory,
It made him nervous, as far as Chopin was concerned, he was
Nor can it provide an explanation of those serenades
Benn's statement that Chopin could not explain his own work is easily reminiscent of Kant's theory of genius: "How it came to create its work, it cannot describe it itself or explain it scientifically, but it (genius) gives it laws as nature, and therefore it is a creator of works, which depends on the genius of the author, who himself does not know how ideas are established in his heart, nor is it under his own control, so that he can think of them at will or according to planning, And it is communicated to others in a normative form so that they can create the same work. Kant clearly emphasized the mystique of genius. Zagaevsky, quoting these lines of Benn's poem, wrote: "I know only one thing: the night does not need / explanation, and likewise, suffering is, in the nameless land." It is worth noting that the unexplained works of Chopin are turned here into the unexplained needs of night and pain. If it is impossible to explain because of mystery, the need for explanation means that the subject accepts the object calmly, or the subject's suspension of the object, which means that cognition has reached its limit.
Dealing with one's own suffering in this way also has the difficulty of explaining the lives of others. The Cousin Hannes contains the following verses:
He died suddenly, still very young,
Left with many unexplainable things,
Those things are still hovering above our heads,
Day and night.
The unexplainability here is clearly different from the unexplained nature of the work of genius, which is not a mystery, but a secret, which has been taken away forever by the deceased. Thus, the explanatory and unexplainable nature of the world shows that the interpretation of the world and of the world is asymmetrical.
Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021) was a Polish poet, writer, and representative of "New Wave" poetry. His major works include "Endless", "Two Cities", "Another Beauty", "Defending Passion", "Asymmetry" and so on.
Tireless knowers and inquirers
So, as a poet, can you explain poetry clearly? In the poem "We Know What Art Is", "We know what art is" alternates with "We don't know what art is", which means that we both know and understand art. That is, art and the interpretation of art are also asymmetrical. For the world, including man's own creation, man, as the subject of knowledge, can never fully understand, which actually constitutes the basic situation of contemporary poet writing. Perhaps it should be reminded that Asymmetry is Zagaevsky's collection of poems in his later years, and it presents not the image of a wise man, nor the image of a confused person, but the image of a tireless knower and an inquirer, which I think is very meaningful. An old man is still like a schoolboy, with a calm mind to know the many things around him. As he wrote in Childhood:
Now I'm sure I know
How to be a child, I know
How to look at the frost-covered woods,
How to live and stay calm.
In the state of indefatigable cognition and the knowable and unknowable interweaving of the world (the totality of things) and society (the sum of man), the poet unfolds his writing, which means that the asymmetry between the world and society and the cognition of the world and society is the basic situation of the writer, and constitutes an almost eternal constraint on writing, but the good writer can always overcome or reduce this asymmetry, so that the reality in the word is infinitely close to the objective world or social reality.
Overcoming the asymmetry between reality and writing
Reading Asymmetry, a collection of poems from later years, it is easy to remind me of another collection of poems from later years, Derek Wolcott's The Egret, both of which repeatedly write about the theme of mourning, and all of them are short poems, and Asymmetry does not even have a group of poems, which is more fragmented. How do you present the whole in fragments and overcome the limitations of writing imposed by the asymmetry of the world and its perception of the world? Zagaevsky discussed it in The Mature Epic, arguing that "every poem, even the shortest poem, / may grow into a mature epic", and to do this, "every poem must speak of the whole of the world", which is undoubtedly the point. In a way, to say that the world as a whole means to be symmetrical with the world. But poetry is not a novel, and it is difficult to put together a "reservoir of wonders and cruelty" to form an encyclopedic existence. This leads to the fact that most poetry is necessarily smaller than the world as a whole, i.e. the asymmetry between writing and reality. Therefore, this confident poem at the beginning finally ends up with a helpless sigh. Nevertheless, the poet still has his own explicit poetic outlook, and in a way, The Poet I Like can be seen as his self-portrait:
Sometimes they know
What the world is
And on a soft paper surface
Write down harsh words
Sometimes they don't know anything
Like on the school playground
Like kids...
Such a poem is undoubtedly honest, it admits that the world is a unity of knowable and unknowable, responds to the asymmetry between writing and reality formed by the writer's incomplete cognition of the world, and takes this asymmetry as the starting point of writing, and even takes the process of overcoming asymmetry as the object of writing.
The side of the red T-shirt reveals a green suspender
Asymmetrical, already stereotyped
There must have been a hand
Reach to that side repeatedly
Leave a wavy vortex
Maybe her breasts
It is also asymmetrical and has been trained
The poem "Asymmetry" that I wrote actually stems from a long period of aesthetic teaching, and I have pondered many times about the situation of symmetry, the law of formal beauty, in contemporary art. I think that symmetry is the basic law of classical art, and modern art is often asymmetrical, because modern artists regard true expression as more important than beautifying reality, and the turbulent and agitated emotional collision of modern people has obviously overwhelmed the rational spirit of predecessors. Zagaevsky undoubtedly focused on authentic expression. His masterpiece "Trying to Praise this Crippled World" is first of all a realistic work that confronts reality, he did not beautify the world into a garden, nor narrowed the world into a garden, but bluntly said that the world is broken, but it is the only world on which we depend, so we have no reason not to love it and do our best to improve it.
It can be said that Zagaevsky provides a model for contemporary poets to recognize this problem but still has no shortage of beautiful worlds: the blind praise of ignoring reality is of course an act of conscience, and complete pessimism is not desirable. Returning to this collection of poems, the asymmetry extracted by Zagaevsky certainly stems from his keen insight into the situation in which he writes, which clearly transcends mere aesthetic issues and deals with the complex relationship between writing and life in terms of authenticity. This is the greatest inspiration this book has given me.