The Collected Poems Read online

  Translated and Edited by ALISSA VALLES

  With Additional Translations by

  CZESLAW MILOSZ and PETER DALE SCOTT

  Introduction by ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

  THE

  COLLECTED

  POEMS

  1956–1998

  ZBIGNIEW

  HERBERT

  CONTENTS

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  INTRODUCTION by ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

  CHORD OF LIGHT (1956)

  HERMES, DOG AND STAR (1957)

  STUDY OF THE OBJECT (1961)

  INSCRIPTION (1969)

  MR COGITO (1974)

  REPORT FROM A BESIEGED CITY (1983)

  ELEGY FOR THE DEPARTURE (1990)

  ROVIGO (1992)

  EPILOGUE TO A STORM (1998)

  ZBIGNIEW HERBERT: A CHRONOLOGY

  INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  OTHER BOOKS BY ZBIGNIEW HERBERT

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  NOTES

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

  THE PRESENT BOOK contains the nine collections of poetry that Zbigniew Herbert published during his lifetime, from his late debut, Chord of Light, which appeared in 1956, to Epilogue to a Storm, the collection that appeared a few months before Herbert’s death in July 1998. Unpublished or uncollected poems from the poet’s archive have not been included; Herbert’s English-language readers will have to wait until a definitive edition of Herbert’s poetry exists in Poland before a “collected” in the most literal sense can be assembled in English. Nevertheless, this book does gather together the main body of his published poems for the first time, preserving the order of the individual collections as they initially appeared.

  With the exception of the last, which Herbert was already too ill to edit properly, these collections were solidly constructed as unifed wholes. Throughout his writing life, Herbert fought against considerable odds to retain basic control over the form in which his work was sent into the world. He was constantly confronted with the problems of a writer working under varying degrees of censorship. J. M. Coetzee, in an essay in the collection Giving Offense, has aptly described this struggle as one in which building for “the test of the classic”—that of endurance—was also Herbert’s best strategy against the “figure of the censor” in literary culture. He combined a singular sensitivity to the drama of power with a desire to thwart those who would trim the body of his work to fit any ideological—or ideal—order.

  Collected Poems reprints the seventy-nine poems chosen and translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott, and published as Selected Poems in the Penguin Modern European Poets series in 1968, under the editorship of A. Alvarez; these poems have been inserted into the sequence of the original Polish collections. These fine translations were Herbert’s first extensive introduction to the English-speaking world. They have been retained here unchanged—with one exception. In any circumstances I would be hesitant to “revise” others’ translations, and I was particularly reluctant to tamper with Scott’s and Milosz’s well-known versions. For this reason, and because it may throw some light on Herbert’s poetry as a whole, I will add a few words on the one small change I made.

  In the poem “Apollo and Marsyas” the fourth stanza reads in Polish:

  tylko z pozoru

  glos Marsjasza

  jest monotonny

  i sktada sięz jednej samogtoski

  A

  Milosz and Scott originally translated this as follows:

  only seemingly

  is the voice of Marsyas

  monotonous

  and composed of a single vowel

  Aaa

  I chose to remove the “aa” added, restoring the simple ‘A” of Herbert’s poem. To my sense it is crucial that though this poem is “composed” around a cry of pain, Herbert does not explicitly sound it in the poem, but points to it and portrays it in a series of metamorphoses—a landscape, a choir, a petrified nightingale. To translate it into a cry is to remove animating ambiguities in the poem: Who perceives this sound, and as what? What, if anything, does the sound “express” or indicate? Who is it who describes the body’s landscape in the poem’s indented section—is this Apollo’s aestheticized reading of Marsyas’s pain, or is the poet showing us a mortal beauty hidden from the god because he is immortal? What is the nature of this “real duel” between god and silene—and what would constitute victory?

  From Herodotus’ Histories via Plato’s Symposium, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dante’s invocation to Apollo as the flayer of Marsyas in the opening canto of the Paradiso, and Titian’s famous The Flaying of Marsyas, right up to Anish Kapoor’s 2002 installation Marsyas, exhibited at the Tate Modern in London, this myth itself metamorphoses throughout history, growing and shedding aesthetic, moral, political, and religious meanings. Herbert’s poem defies any attempt to pin its terms to a stable set of metaphors; rather, the poet reintroduces the knot of rival meanings the story accrued over centuries and makes them reverberate at the core of the poem, provoking questions about the relation between human and non-human sounds, between pain and creation, art and compassion, eros and disgust.

  For Herbert the sphere of myth is an intensification and complication of reality, never a refuge. Myths are treacherous, subject to all sorts of manipulation for political advantage, as in the prose poem “Cernunnos.” Sometimes it is not myths that fail man but man who shows himself too petty to inhabit them, slipping through their structure like plankton through a net—as in Herbert’s rewriting of the Biblical story of Jonah. Frozen into a solid form, on the other hand, myths are deadly; perhaps this is why “Apollo and Marsyas” closes with a scene of petrification: the exact opposite of Ovid’s version of the story, which ends in the transformation of the creature Marsyas into the name of a clear river.

  In my reading, this is a truly inexhaustible poem and, in its attempt to push past the confines of modernism, one of the most important in postwar European poetry. It resonates strangely with a poem published in the same year, 1961, but arising in a very different personal and literary context: Paul Celan’s “Die Silbe Schmerz” (“The Syllable Pain”), a poem that also relies on the tension between articulate speech and inarticulate pain to probe the mysteries of world creation. I consider it a translator’s job in such a case to retain the fullest possible range of complexity; the difference between “A” and “Aaa” may seem small, but seen in the light of Herbert’s deep participation in the aesthetic and philosophical quandaries of modernity, it marks an abyss.

  I OWE A considerable debt to previous translators of Herbert, notably to John and Bogdana Carpenter—who not only acted as Herbert’s translators over many years but contributed much to his reception and recognition in the English-speaking world—but also to all those who produced versions of individual poems for anthologies: Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, Adam Czerniawski, and Robert Mezey, who included a translation of the poem “Sequoia” done in collaboration with Jacek Niecko in a recent Library of America Poems of the American West. There may be others of whom I am unaware. Great poets deserve many translators, and I hope existing translations will continue to be read and new translations emerge, throwing a new light on the poems and ensuring their continued life in English.

  I’m deeply grateful to all the friends and colleagues who read my versions over several years, and especially to James Leigh, who read them all with a musician’s ear; to Dan Halpern for having confidence in me; to Millicent Bennett of Ecco for her hard work and solidarity; to Henryk Citko of the Herbert archive in Warsaw for patient and painstaking assistance with textual, visual, and biographical materials; to Marysia Dzieduszycka for her passionate devotion and
practical intelligence; to Leonard Gardner for lugging the weight; to Robert Hass for good counsel; to Krystyna and Ryszard Krynicki for an unstinting supply of books and textual first aid; to Gabriel Leigh and Ria Loohuizen for staunch moral support; to Jessy Kaner and Derek Miller for a quiet flat to read proofs; to Maya Wodecka and Adam Zagajewski for aiding and abetting the project in myriad ways; and, above all, to Katarzyna Herbert, for the good humor, generosity, and grace with which she responded to inquiries and gave warm and unfailing encouragement.

  Alissa Valles

  Warsaw

  May 2006

  INTRODUCTION

  by ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI

  WHERE DID HERBERT come from; where did his poetry come from? The simplest answer is: We don’t know. Just as we never know where any great artist comes from, irrespective of whether they are born in the provinces or in the capital. Yet here we cannot merely content ourselves with our mystic ignorance!

  American readers undoubtedly deserve a short biographical sketch: Zbigniew Herbert, born in Lwów in 1924, led a life that especially in his youth was full of adventure and danger, though one is tempted to say that he was created rather for a quiet existence between museum and library. There are still many things we do not know about the wartime period of his life—to what extent he was engaged in the resistance, or what he experienced during the occupation. We know that he came from what is called in English the “middle classes,” and in Polish is known as the intelligentsia. The relative, or perhaps truly profound, orderliness of his childhood was destroyed once and for all in September 1939 by the outbreak of war. First Nazi Germany, then seventeen days later the Soviet Union, invaded the territory of Poland. At that time Wehrmacht units did not make it as far as Lwów; the city, which was filled with refugees from central Poland, was occupied by the Red Army—and by the NKVD, the secret police, who immediately set about arresting thousands of Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians. The sudden leap from the last pre-war vacation to Stalin’s terror must have been unbelievably brutal. Many elements of Herbert’s poetry undoubtedly originated from this experience.

  In the last days of June 1941 the Soviet occupation of Lwów ended and the Nazi occupation began. Distinguishing between the two occupations is a matter for academics. Of course, one major difference was that now the persecutions were aimed mostly, though not exclusively, at Jews.

  When the war ended and Lwów was incorporated into the territory of the Soviet Union, Herbert was one of thousands of young people living in abeyance, trying to study, and hiding their underground past. Hard as it will be for a western reader to believe, the new authorities imposed by Moscow persecuted former resistance fighters simply for having fought in their various ways against the Nazi invader. Their crime was to have been connected—often without fully being aware of it, since they operated at a local level and mostly carried out specific, small-scale assignments—with the Polish government in exile in London rather than the communist partisan movement. The new government applied to them a policy that was the exact opposite of the American GI Bill, putting obstacles in their way, sometimes imprisoning them, and sometimes even sentencing them to death.

  The whole time up till 1956, when a political thaw altered the situation for the better, Herbert led an unsettled existence, changing addresses frequently, moving around between Gdansk, Warsaw, Toru?, and Kraków, and taking on various jobs (when he was short of money he even sold his own blood, a painfully accurate metaphor for the life of a poet). He studied philosophy, wondering whether or not he should devote himself to it full time. He was also drawn to art history. For political reasons he was unable to bring out his first book of poetry, but he began to publish individual poems and book reviews; the periodical he was most involved with was Tygodnik Powszechny, a liberal-Catholic weekly based in Kraków.

  He was not completely isolated; he had friends in various cities, and lovers; he also had an intellectual mentor. This was Henryk Elzenberg, at the time a professor of the University of Toru?, an erudite philosopher and poet, a tireless researcher of intellectual formulae, and an independent type barely tolerated by the new regime. A volume of correspondence between teacher and student published recently (in 2002) reveals a melancholic professor and a witty student frequently excusing himself before his mentor for real or imagined failures. In these letters Herbert is contrary and obedient, inventive, talented, no doubt aware of his epistolary charms, but still timid, a little afraid of his strict Master, not entirely sure whether he should become a philosopher or a poet, demanding emotion in philosophy and ideas in poetry, averse to closed systems, droll, at once ironic and warm.

  The year 1956, as I mentioned, changes almost everything for Herbert. His debut, Chord of Light, is enthusiastically received. Suddenly, thanks to the thaw, the borders of Europe are open to him, to some extent at least; he can visit France, Italy, London. From this moment there begins a new chapter in his life, one that was to last almost to his final months—he died in July 1998. A truly different chapter—yet if one looks at it closely, it is oddly similar to the preceding one. Now, admittedly, Herbert travels amongst Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles, and Warsaw; the length of his journeys is much greater than before, and he becomes a world-famous poet. But the fundamental unrest and the underlying instability (including financially) are still there. In addition there is an encroaching illness. Only the surroundings are more beautiful; they include the greatest museums of the world, in which breathless tourists can see a Polish poet diligently and calmly sketching the works of great artists in his notebook. For once again he has masters: Henryk Elzenberg’s place has now been taken by Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Piero della Francesca, and also the “old masters” from the magnificent poem in Report from a Besieged City.

  He also had mentors and teachers in poetry. He learned a great deal from Czeslaw Milosz, with whom he was friends (they had met for the first time in Paris in the second half of the 1950s). He was thoroughly familiar with the Polish romantic poets and with old and modern European poetry. He certainly read Cavafy. He studied the classical authors—studied them the way poets do, unsystematically, falling in and out of love, jumping from period to period, finding the things that were important for him and discarding those that interested him less; in doing so he acted quite differently from a scholar, who moves like a solid tank of erudition through the period he has selected. He also read dozens of historical works on Greece, Holland, and Italy. He sought to understand the past. He loved the past—as an aesthete, because he was fascinated by beauty, and as a man who quite simply looked in history for the traces of others.

  EVERY GREAT POET lives between two worlds. One of these is the real, tangible world of history, private for some and public for others. The other world is a dense layer of dreams, imagination, fantasms. It sometimes happens—as for example in the case of W. B. Yeats—that this second world takes on gigantic proportions, that it becomes inhabited by numerous spirits, that it is haunted by Leo Africanus and other ancient magi.

  These two territories conduct complex negotiations, the result of which are poems. Poets strive for the first world, the real one, conscientiously trying to reach it, to reach the place where the minds of many people meet; but their efforts are hindered by the second world, just as the dreams and hallucinations of certain sick people prevent them from understanding and experiencing events in their waking hours. Except that in great poets these hindrances are rather a symptom of mental health, since the world is by nature dual, and poets pay tribute with their own duality to the true structure of reality, which is composed of day and night, sober intelligence and fleeting fantasies, desire and gratification.

  There is no poetry without this duality, though the second, substitute world is different for each outstanding creative artist. What is it like for Herbert? Herbert’s dreams are sustained by various things—travels, Greece and Florence, the work of great painters, ideal cities (which he saw only in the past, not in the future, unlike many of his contemporaries). But they are also susta
ined by the knightly virtues of honor and courage.

  Herbert himself helps us to understand his poetry in “Mr Cogito and Imagination.” Because Mr Cogito:

  longed to fully comprehend

  —Pascal’s night

  —the nature of diamonds

  —the melancholy of the prophets

  —the wrath of Achilles

  —the madness of genocides

  —the dreams of Mary Queen of Scots

  —the Neanderthal’s fear

  —the despair of the last Aztecs

  —the long dying of Nietzsche

  —the joy of the Lascaux painter

  —the rise and fall of an oak

  —the rise and fall of Rome

  Achilles and an oak, Lascaux and a Neanderthal’s fear, the despair of the Aztecs—these are the ingredients of Herbert’s imagination. And always “rise and fall”—the entirety of the historical cycle. Herbert sometimes likes to assume the position of a rationalist and so in his beautiful poem he says of these unfathomable things that Mr Cogito longed to “fully comprehend” them, something that is of course (fortunately) impossible.

  But for Herbert the matter is even more complicated. In him we find two central intellectual problems—participation and distance. He never forgot the horror of war and the invisible moral obligations he incurred during the occupation. He himself spoke of loyalty as a leading ethical and aesthetic yardstick. Yet he was different from poets such as Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, the great bard of the wartime generation, who died very young (in the Warsaw Uprising), and whose poems were imbued with the heat of burning metaphors. No, Herbert is not like that at all: In him the level of wartime horror is seen from a certain distance. Even in the direst circumstances the heroes of Herbert’s poems do not lose their sense of humor. And in the poems and essays the tragic poet steps out alongside the carefree Mr. Pickwick, who does not imagine that he has deserved such a great misfortune. It may be here that there lies the particular, indefinable charm of both Herbert’s poetry and his essays—this tragicomic mixing of tones, the fact that the utmost gravity in no way excludes joking and irony. But the irony mostly concerns the character of the poet, or that of his porte-parole Mr Cogito, who is by and large a most imperfect fellow. While as concerns the message of this poetry—and it is poetry with a message, however obscure—the irony does not affect it whatsoever.