Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz

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To listen to more of Adam Zagajewski’s stories, go to the playlist: • Adam Zagajewski (Poet) • Adam Zagajewski (1945-2021) was a Polish poet, novelist, translator and essayist. He is considered as one of the leading poets of the Generation of '68 or the Polish New Wave (Polish: Nowa fala) and is one of Poland's most prominent contemporary poets. [Listener: Andrzej Wolski; date recorded: 2018] • TRANSCRIPT: Incidentally, I also received a letter from that publisher, Farrar, Strauss Giroux, asking for my permission and whether this interested me. At the time, I had no idea of what kind of publisher this was so I don't know why I thought, oh this is just some tiny, provincial publisher and so I didn't reply to their letter because I thought, why should I? It's not that I was proud or being arrogant, but I just didn't believe in this. It wasn't until later that Kot Jeliński – Konstanty Jeliński who was a very eminent literary critic living in Paris – told me, 'Listen, Adam, this is the best publisher in America'. So then I wrote back to them straight away and it wasn't too late so the book was published and was well-received. Sometime after this, I was invited by the University of Texas which taught a creative writing course – and this wouldn't have been possible without this book because of course nobody knew who I was – and that maybe it was worth giving it a try. So this marked the start of the next era – the American era which became part of… I mean, I never lived in America permanently, I would just travel there for a semester. Every year, for 18 years, I would go to Houston each spring – it was spring in Texas but still winter in Paris – usually leaving in the last days of January and coming back at the start of May. When I think about it now, that was a perfect combination, Paris-Houston. There was a film by Wim Wenders called 'Paris-Houston' [sic: 'Paris-Texas'] and my life was like the title of this film. According to Wenders, Paris-Houston. Eight months in Paris, four in Texas.

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