In memoriam Paola Malavasi
September 2005, we came back from vacation,
sat down at the kitchen table
covered in green oilcloth.
Suddenly Nicola calls, asking, do you know
that Paola Malavasi died
suddenly, in the morning,
on Sunday, at a hotel in Venice.
No, I hadn’t heard—those two words,
died and Paola, met then
for the first time.
Paola had
just turned forty,
a pretty, smiling woman.
She taught Latin and Greek at the high school,
she wrote and translated poems.
The word died is much older
and never smiles.
Some months have passed,
and I still don’t believe in her death.
She studied life and poetry,
antiquity and today.
Nothing speaks to her death.
The weather is fine in the photographs,
her face is defenseless and open.
Her face still summons the future,
but the future, distracted,
now looks the other way.
—Adam Zagajewski
(translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh)
Adam Zagajewski, who lives in Krakow and Chicago, is the author of Tremor, In Defense of Ardor, and other books of poetry and prose. This poem is part of the volume Unseen Hand, due out in 2011 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Clare Cavanagh, his translator, is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University.
