Adam Z. (so signed) lives happier the autumns without asking himself the existential question of what kind of individual he is. It happened to him in his Parisian uproar: at the slow pace in which the trees languished, the poet collected written and published books to justify his trade before the French immigration authorities and prove that he was not a thug. It counts in a slight exaggeration (Cliff). That lasted 17 years and many others have been back in Krakow, in whose university he had studied Philosophy and Psychology and that today is his "sentimental" host city, an idea that has nothing to do with the concept of homeland or Heimat. Zagajewski (1945, Lvov, today Ukraine, then Poland) learned to live banished since the four months , when the Postdam agreements massively displaced the citizens of Eastern Europe due to ethnic hygiene issues. Was poetry, the relentless pursuit of beauty, your exercise to survive? «I don't like to label poetry. My poetry are moments of epiphany. One needs that slight exaggeration that is art, but also moments of total sobriety to warn the misery of the world: find a balance between the beautiful and the evil. The 2017 Princess of Asturias Award for Letters came to Barcelona to speak at CaixaForum about the need to rescue classical knowledge in order to escape from the futile nothingness that engulfs us: Between Mick Jagger and Tomás de Aquino .

Should poetry necessarily be a question about the state of things? My idea of ​​poetry has to do not only with the social but with all kinds of vital issues, such as life and death. But what he writes is shorthand? No, it's my illegible handwriting. Ah ... it seems so. Knows? My grandfather forced his children to learn three things: German, swimming and shorthand. Returning to your question, poetry cannot be a prisoner of definitions. It has no rules or functions, it is free. Only in a totalitarian context like that of my youth, the poet feels obliged to become aware of the situation, because silence would be complicit. "Poetry is an extra value in a fainted society," he says. How is it today? I miss some seriousness and interest, yes. The social reformists of the 19th century, such as Ruskin or Marx, were convinced that if one day the working class had time it would run to libraries to be cultured. It never happened. Today people work seven hours five days a week, there is an abundance of public libraries, and it still does not happen. I love going to the library and all I find are students reading by obligation. Some of them finish high school in love with Philosophy, perhaps because they have never known how to formulate fundamental questions before? In Poland, Philosophy has also been banished from the plans of study. This reminds me of a historical fact: when in France they suppressed Latin and Greek from schools, in 1911, do you know what happened? Surrealism arose. Abandoned the classical structures, the fantasy of freedom appeared. And this living running that afflicts us, do we need more spirituality and classical knowledge? Yes, but we do not confuse spiritualism with sectarianism, the surnames that hang on the spirituality. What we need is to live more deeply and art connects us with a free and open spirituality. The contact with the masterpieces of art, meeting Rembrandt, Mozart, Velázquez ..., changes you, the taste for excellence is contagious. But the current moment hates greatness, the only greatness it recognizes are celebrities. Are we aware of the privileged historical moment we live in Europe? We should start to be, because this comes to an end, with the emergence of populisms, catastrophes climatic, etc. Our generation has been the luckiest, the last 70 years in Europe have been the most privileged in history. But fascism is coming back, slowly. I see clear signs, such as those nationalist manifestations or the fact that anyone can say monstrous things about others, as was the case in the 1930s. Despite this, some European peoples feel oppressed. You who lived under the communist yoke, does it sound like a joke that the Catalans consider themselves oppressed? Yes, it sounds like a joke; They will only be oppressed if they cross the line. Adam, how many times in your life have you had to emigrate? The first time you had four months; the borders changed and our city became part of the Soviet Union. My family was forced to leave: one of many ethnic cleansings. But when I left Poland I did it for a woman, nobody forced me. My poetry was silenced, but I published in a small liberal Catholic publishing house, and I made a living translating and editing, and with a stipend that my father awarded me for my anti-communist activity. The emigration drama happens, "men and women packing , pushing their knees in rigid suitcases »... Have we Europeans lost their memory? Yes, especially in countries like Poland, where it is said that migrants bring diseases, so as to scare the population and make them reject them. Forgetting that we were the most numerous emigrants, for so many years, and we were accepted everywhere. After the resistance he derived his poetry towards existentialism. Where is he today? Is it pure search for beauty, even from a deeply human point of view? My poetry has many perspectives, but for any poet one of the views is always his own life. I am 74 years old, objectively I am not young, but I strongly refuse to define myself old and talk about the end of life, because I have a lot to do. And about my writing, it is spontaneous; follow the days, its epiphany moments, the life that surrounds me from a humanistic point of view, yes. When poetry desperately pursues beauty, does it become an exercise in survival? I believe that beauty is not the purpose of poetry, but a happy consequence. The purpose is the truth, the reflection of human life. I distrust the search for beauty for beauty, the aestheticism that ignores suffering. Life is a tension between the evil and the beautiful; Beauty saves us from evil, but it is not enough, because it does not destroy it. Is art a slight but necessary exaggeration? Not everyone will agree with this, but I do believe that we need this slight exaggeration that is art , although at the same time we must have moments of total sobriety. We cannot live constantly fed by beauty, because if you approach how you have done the refugee drama, misery, you cannot do it from that mood, you need to be realistic and sober. And living permanently in a realistic way is too sad, unbearable. We need art as a supplement for the soul.

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