New Hotel by Adam Zagajewski

New Hotel

Krakow

In February the poplars are even slimmer

than in summer, frozen through. My family

spread across the earth, beneath the earth,

in different countries, poems, paintings.

Noon, I’m on Na Groblach Square.

I sometimes came to see my aunt

and uncle here (partly out of duty).

They’d stopped complaining about their fate,

the system, but their faces looked like

an empty secondhand bookshop.

Now someone else lives in that apartment,

strange people, the scent of a strange life.

A new hotel was built nearby,

bright rooms, breakfasts doubtless comme il faut,

juices, coffee, toast, glass, concrete,

amnesia—and suddenly, I don’t know why,

a moment of penetrating joy.

(Translated by Clare Cavanagh)