Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, 2017 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, dies

Adam Zagajewski, at his home in Krakow in 2017 LISBETH SALAS

"Wherever one cuts life, always part in two halves."

When the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski was awarded the 2017 Princess of Asturias Award for Letters, that phrase from his biography served to define the existence of the writer, who died today in a hospital in Krakow at the age of 75, as confirmed the

newspaper

Because the life of the author of

(Cliff) is an example of 20th century Europe.

Born in 1945 in Lvov, he now belongs to Ukraine, his childhood was spent in Gliwice, an “ugly and gray place” in German Silesia that joined Poland at the end of the Second World War.

Zagajewski was thus the fruit of the postwar period: first a displaced person;

later, an exile.

In 1982 in Paris he worked as a visiting professor at various American universities.

Two decades later he returned to his native country, with the fall of the communist regime.

He currently lived between France and Krakow.

For Zagajweski, poetry was the business of emigrants, that is, of "those unfortunates who, with a ridiculous heritage, swing on the edge of the abyss, straddling continents."

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The author, who for a time was on the list of possible Nobel laureates, defined himself as follows in an interview with EL PAÍS last July: “I am, in a way, a child of war, although I was not a witness to its horrors.

I would say that, in a certain way, the horrors are, I would not say that in my genes, but they are inside me.

Part of my vocation is not to forget the heart of that war, and, in a way, to remember it.

It is not the only thing I want to do, of course, because I do not consider myself a politician, but it is part of the point of view that I have, that presence.

I always remember that Auschwitz is an hour's drive from where I live [Krakow] ”.

Among his works,

, a volume halfway between the diary and the memoirs, which arrived in Spain in 2003 and published by Pre-Textos.

Two years later, the poet Martín López-Vega prepared for the same publishing house the anthology

, a good gateway to the Zagajewski universe.

The Acantilado publishing house and the translator Xavier Farré are responsible for the bulk of the poetic versions published in Spanish.

In this stamp are poems such as

or

and samples of his brilliant and good-humored prose such as

,

and the essential

.