„Try to praise the mutilated world”: Adam Zagajewski and the poetry of 9/11

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.