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donate Summary for Zeszyty Literackie 93 (2006)
The Polish literary quarterly Zeszyty Literackie has dedicated its spring issue to the art of travel. Travel has always had something mysterious in it, and the urge to visit various places is one of the abiding traits of human nature. As the Roman proverb goes: "To sail is necessary, to live is not". The quarterly explores the way literature deals with travel. Along with prose by Kurt I. Lewin and Tomas Venclova, there is a major section on travelling by classic authors like Laurence Sterne, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Jerzy Stempowski. The section also features the poem "Auto Mirror" by Adam Zagajewski, "probably the shortest poem on the twentieth-century mania of visiting places", as Czeslaw Milosz once put it: "In the rear-view mirror suddenly / I saw the bulk of the Beauvais Cathedral; / great things dwell in small ones / for a moment."
Andrzej Stasiuk describes a car journey through Hungary and Slovakia. His new prose shows a successful striving for utter colloquialism. He rescues for literature the vulgar, the profane, and the horrible. Stasiuk is a sharp observer and an engaged one.
In In Patagonia, famous travel-writer Bruce Chatwin recalls his childhood. He watched the onset of the Cold War and Stalin's use of atomic power. The sense of participation in nature and history makes for some of Chatwin's most convincing methods. He felt close to inanimate and animate objects.
Zeszyty Literackie also publishes a Polish translation of a fragment of Sandor Marai's novel The Western Patrol. Readers who want to get a sense of Marai's strength should read it. He wrote an intensely personal kind of prose whose manner was quiet. Literature and travel are often allied but Marai tried to resist the temptation to leave Hungary and did not want to seek adventure abroad. However, after a long hesitation, he finally decided to make a journey to London and Paris, where he spent his youth.
Claudio Magris says in his essay that travelling allows us to experience the basics facts of our condition. We are like our fellow men. We want solitariness and do not want it. Love, in its various forms, pervades our activity.
Also to look out for: Adam Zagajewski on Emil Cioran. Cioran proceeded from rapture to disenchantment and always found life less than it might have been. Zagajewski admires Cioran's power to treat philosophical matters in bon mots but deplores his incapacity to affirm.
Published 2006-06-12
Original in English
Contributed by Zeszyty Literackie
© Zeszyty Literackie
© Eurozine
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