If I were Tomaž Šalamun,
I’d always be happy, I think.
I’d dance on the Small Market Square until all hours to a melody no one could place.
I’d play Mahler’s Fifth gaily on the accordion.

What’s the use, I’m an introvert,
who returns books late to the library
and sometimes envies life’s heroes—
the bronzed lifeguards on August’s beaches.
I could go on.

But one thing is certain: I’m not Tomaž Šalamun.
Tomaž came blessed with two imaginations,
Slovenian and Mexican, and he juggles them
with heart-stopping swiftness,

while I’m an eternal student of stenography,
struggling to understand how death enters the
   house
and how it leaves, and then returns,
and how it is defeated by a small freckled girl
reciting Dante from memory

—though I also seek the flame of rapture
pretty much everywhere, even in the budget
   theater,
the train, and almost every café
(but that more unites than divides us).

If I were Tomaž Šalamun,
I’d ride wild on an invisible bicycle,
like a metaphor sprung from a poem’s cage,
still not certain of its freedom,
but making do with movement, wind, and sun.

(I remember how someone called to us,
I guess in Münster, “Courage, poets
of the Slavic tongues, only time will defeat you!”
and you winced, as if saying,
Hold on, isn’t it too late?)

By Adam Zagajewski, in Unseen Hand, his ninth
book to be published in English translation, forthcoming
from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June.
Tomaž Šalamun, born in 1941, is a Slovenian
poet who has published more than thirty collections
of poetry. Translated from the Polish by
Clare Cavanagh.

HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2011