How exactly did Adam Zagajewski, the Cracovian exile from postwar Lvov, become the “Poet of 9/11”, as Newsweek hailed him on the tenth anniversary of the infamous terrorist attack? And why has the poem lingered on in the years that follow, comforting readers in the aftermath of all kinds of disasters, private and public, natural and manmade? This essay traces the history behind the poem’s debit in English translation on the final page of the New Yorker magazine’s first issue after the attack. It follows its subsequent afterlife as one of the best-known contemporary poems in the English language, as witnessed by its countless appearances in everything from anthologies to sermons, pop songs, and personal websites in the last eighteen years.

This article deals with the issues of the creative process explored by Adam Zagajewski in his writings, especially in his poems forming the cycle of Autoportraits. Indeed, he revisited the subject on numerous occasions, pointing to the importance of inspiration, which, he regretted, received too little attention in today’s world. Be it as it may, in the end it all comes down to the question about how he actually wrote his poems. This article is the first attempt to reconstruct the methods of Zagajewski’s creative work; it also retraces the process of writing a single poem from a poetic note to its final version.

This article deals with the rise in the Polish literature of 1970s of a new type of biographical novel, associated with the fi rst post-war generation of writers like Bohdan Zadura, Julian Kornhauser, Adam Zagajewski, Henryk Lothamer, Stanisław Piskor and Donat Kirsch. Their work is subsumed here under the label ‘new fi ction’ primarily because of its literary context, i.e. the late-modern fears and uncertainties culminating in the assumption that literature reached the state of exhaustion. The article argues that the ‘new fi ction’ acquired its distinctive character from a preoccupation with the biographical narrative and a sense of generational identity. The writers who defi ned themselves in these generational terms saw their prospect of following their aspirations and building up authentic lives weighed down by the constricting realities, and, as the article claims, resigned themselves – at best not entirely – to this sad conclusion.