A slight exaggeration, Zagajewski's most personal work, is not an ordinary autobiography, but a digressive, aphoristic text, a sort of diary without chronological order in which the poet shares with the reader episodes of his personal history — from the Second World War and the deportation of his family after the occupation of Poland to the funeral of Joseph Brodsky in Venice — intertwined with impressions on European history, war and ideology, as well as the literature and art that have most marked his trajectory. “'A slight exaggeration' is, in fact, a good definition of poetry […] Poetry is a slight exaggeration as long as we don't make it our home, because then it becomes reality. And then when we abandon it — because no one can abide in it forever — it becomes a slight exaggeration again. " And it is that, for Zagajewski, poetry is that slight displacement of reality that allows ...read more
