The Collected Prose Read online

  The Collected Prose

  1948–1998

  Edited and with an Introduction by Alissa Valles

  Preface by Charles Simic

  Translated by Michael March and Jarosław Anders John and Bogdana Carpenter and Alissa Valles

  Zbigniew Herbert

  Contents

  Preface by Charles Simic

  Introduction by Alissa Valles

  Barbarian in the Garden

  Lascaux

  Among the Dorians

  Arles

  Orvieto’s Duomo

  Siena

  A Stone from the Cathedral

  Albigensians, Inquisitors, and Troubadours

  Defense of the Templars

  Piero della Francesca

  Memories of Valois

  Still Life with a Bridle

  Essays

  Delta

  The Price of Art

  The Bitter Smell of Tulips

  Gerard Terborch: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

  Still Life with a Bridle

  The Nonheroic Subject

  Apocryphas

  The Mercy of the Executioner

  The Captain

  Long Gerrit

  Portrait in a Black Frame

  The Hell of Insects

  Perpetuum Mobile

  Home

  Spinoza’s Bed

  Letter

  Epilogue

  The King of the Ants

  (According to the Definitive Polish Edition; Krakow, 2008)

  I Black Figure Vase by Eksekias

  II The Gods of the Copybook Headings

  H.E.O.

  Antaeus

  The Infernal Dog

  Triptolemos

  The king of the Ants

  This Horrible Thersites

  Cleomedes

  Narcissus

  Endymion

  The Olympian General

  Securitas

  Atlas

  Prometheus

  Old Prometheus

  Arachne

  The History of the Minotaur

  Achilles. Penthesilea

  Hecuba

  Phya

  Sacrifice

  III Ten Paths of Virtue

  IV From the King of Ants Cycle (unfinished or abandoned)

  Anti-Epic

  The Garden of the Hesperides

  Poseidon’s Retinue

  Pegasus

  Dragon

  Giants

  Introduction to “Atlas” (Autobiographical Note)

  Annex (Variants)

  Narcissus

  Sacrifice—Dionysus

  Labyrinth on the Sea

  Labyrinth on the Sea

  Attempt at a Description of the Greek Landscape

  Animula

  Acropolis

  The Samos Affair

  On the Etruscans

  A Latin Lesson

  Short Prose (1948–1998)

  Poetry in a Vacuum?

  Shield us from the Dark Word…

  Character Sketches

  Hamlet on the Border of Silence

  Request

  Leonardo’s Disquiet

  Guinea Pig, or On the Power of Reason

  A Bitter Rose Petal

  Van Gogh’s Sad Popularity

  Why the Classics

  To Describe Reality

  Monsieur Montaigne’s Voyage to Italy

  The Poet and the Present

  Conversation on Writing Poetry

  The Presence of History

  Quality and Nullity in Mass Culture

  Voice

  Mirror

  The Gordian Knot

  Pact

  Passo Romano

  Sinope

  David

  Altichiero

  For the road

  Thomas

  Evil

  A Word for the Poetry Evening at the National Theater, May 25, 1998

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Other Books by Zbigniew Herbert

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Frontispiece © Michal Kapitaniak

  Preface

  BY CHARLES SIMIC

  ZBIGNIEW HERBERT (1924–1998) was one of the most original and memorable poets of the twentieth century. His Polish compatriots, Czeslaw Milosz and Wyslawa Szymborska, may have received the Nobel Prize, but as the appearance of The Collected Poems, 1956–1998 in English recently demonstrated, he was in every respect their equal. This publication of his complete prose ought to increase his stature even more among those who know Herbert only as a poet and not as the fine prose writer that he was. It will come as a surprise to his readers that in his essays, unlike those by most other poets who write prose, his focus is rarely on poetry. Herbert wrote about painting and architecture. Or rather, he wrote three books about his travels in Greece, Italy, France, and the Netherlands, to see art. The author, he tells us at one point, is not a professional historian, but a story teller, and in truth many of the essays are dedicated to friends and often read like good after-dinner talk. The result is a book about art that is unlike any one has ever encountered, by a man who had lived through some of the most violent and tragic years in modern history and whom one would not expect to take a calm appraisal of our common past.

  Born in Lvov, one of the most dangerous places in the world to be from 1939 to 1945, Herbert survived the occupation of his hometown, first by the Soviet Union and then by the Nazis who transformed the old city with its mixed population of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews into a veritable hell. In 1944, before Lvov was once again taken by the Soviets, Herbert’s family escaped to Kraków where he attended lectures at the university and drawing classes at the Academy of Fine Arts while obtaining a degree in economics at the Trade Academy and eventually a law degree at the Nicholas Copernicus University in Toru. As a member of the anti-

  Communist Home Army during the war, he was regarded as politically suspect and not employable in important positions. He worked as a primary school teacher, an editor of an economic journal, a shop attendant, a timekeeper in a cooperative, an accountant, a bank clerk, and a librarian. Occasionally, he published theatre and music criticism and reviews of exhibitions, but not until 1950 did his poems appear in a magazine, and his first book, Chord of Light, did not come out until 1956 when he was already thirty-two years old. Unwilling to submit to the official party line in literature and write political propaganda, he could not make a living as a writer. One tough year after the war, he had to supplement his income by selling his blood.

  Herbert later attributed his reluctance to fall on his knees before the new masters not to his bravery or strength of character, but to his sense of taste. He found everything about Communism ugly, especially its rhetoric. Aesthetics played a subversive role in his refusal to become one of the corrupted. Philosophy, too, I would imagine, which he studied first in Toru and then at the University of Warsaw where he moved in 1950. “Let words mean only what they mean,” he quotes another writer in one of his essays. In his poems, too, Herbert sought semantic transparency. For him, a bird is a bird, slavery means slavery, a knife is a knife, death remains death. This was a view of language guaranteed to make life difficult for an individual living in a totalitarian country. As for poetry, its task, he wrote as early as 1948, is to render justice to the visible world, justice and beauty. Here’s one of his many fine early poems that does just that. It recounts a complex experience in a language that manages to be both plain and memorable.

  A HALT

  We halted in a town the host

  ordered the table to be moved to the garden the first star

  shone out and faded we were breaking bread r />
  crickets were heard in the twilight loosestrife

  a cry but a cry of a child otherwise the bustle

  of insects of men a thick scent of earth

  those who were sitting with their backs to the wall

  saw violet now—the gallows hill

  on the wall the dense ivy of executions

  we were eating much

  as is usual when nobody pays

  (trans. by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott)

  From the very beginning, Herbert’s poems had one notable quality; many of them dealt with Greek and Roman antiquity. These were not the reverential versions of ancient myths and historical events one normally encounters in poetry in which the poet neither questions the philosophical nor the ethical premises of the classical models, but were ironic reevaluations from the point of view of someone who had experienced modern wars and revolutions and who knew well that true to Homeric tradition only the high and mighty are usually glorified and lamented in their death and never the mounds of their anonymous victims. What drew him to the classics, nevertheless, is the recognition that these tales and legends contain all the essential human experiences. To have a historical consciousness meant seeing the continuity of the past as well as recognizing the continuity and the inescapable presence of past errors, crimes, but also the examples of courage and wisdom in our contemporary lives. History is the balance sheet of conscience. It condemns, reminds, robs us of peace, and also enlightens us now and then. In his view, our predicament has always been both tragic and comic. Even the old gods ended just like us. This is how he describes their decline in an essay called “Sacrifice” in The King of the Ants.

  Stained tablecloths, traces of cigarettes around the small plates on the conference table of Olympus, unchanged napkins wilting flowers in crystal vases, and a monotonous menu, a poor choice of wine—that itself bore witness to the gods’ profound crisis. Gods didn’t turn up or willfully left the conferences, they partook of gods’ gifts unaesthetically (and against the rules), they slept at the table or emitted loud bodily noises. The fate of the world was slipping out of their hands…“We could have foreseen such an end of the world,” Zeus said to Hermes, “we’re not immortal, hélas, but the way this is proceeding is abominable in form; it’s shocking. We will leave nothing behind, not even a fond memory. But not everything in our time was bad—we have to do something about it,” Zeus said to Hermes.

  Herbert claims that even as a youth he did not thirst for originality, which he saw as easier to achieve if you scorn the past and don’t respect either its authorities or its traditions. This positivist theory of “progress,” which lurks in the background of every avant-garde movement in art and literature, he had no use for. He found this attitude alien, even odious. He always wanted to adore, to fall on his knees and bow down before greatness, even if it overwhelmed him and terrified him—for “what kind of greatness would it be if it didn’t overwhelm and terrify”? Nonetheless, Herbert is well aware that history doesn’t know a single example of art or an artist ever exerting a direct influence on the world’s destiny. The conclusion he draws from that melancholy knowledge is that artists, writers, and poets ought to be modest and “conscious of their limited role and strength.” If this sounds like an aesthete’s credo, it is not. Herbert’s wish was to abolish the antagonism between art and life which the Romantics erected and modern poets and painters largely embraced. If this marvelous collection of his essays and short pieces proves anything, it is that art and life are part of the same fabric of human experience.

  There exists a false view, Herbert writes, to the effect that tradition is like a fortune, a legacy which we inherit mechanically, without effort, while in fact every contact with the past requires an effort and a labor from learning about the past to verifying that knowledge through direct contact with its works of art. The task he sets himself in these pilgrimages is to find, after the horrors of war and totalitarianism he had just witnessed, some values worth living for. His essays combine leisurely traveler’s accounts intermixed with descriptions of paintings and churches he sees, towns he visits, their history, the people he encounters, the food he eats, the wine he drinks, and all sorts of other matters of interest to this exceptionally erudite and entertaining man who is our guide. For instance, writing of the Perugian republic, he remarks that “they were vengeful and cruel, artistically refined enough to slaughter their enemies on beautiful summer evenings.”

  Herbert never had much money, but he went everywhere, at one point even having the crazy notion of visiting every cathedral in France. As a foreigner, and a kind of amateur scholar, he sees in these art works what professional academics and natives do not. This is the continuous delight of these essays. We are led by an eye that reacts in a fresh and inspired way to objects and events that do not exist for the practical eye. “There’s no path to the world but the path of compassion,” he says at one point. It surprised me to hear him say that, but after recalling the care he took to get every little detail right of whatever he saw in his travels, I began to understand what he meant, and so will you. This is a rare book, written by a very great poet and very wise man.

  CHARLES SIMIC

  Introduction

  BY ALISSA VALLES

  THE HALF-CENTURY SPANNED BY the essays in this volume began in Poland with the chill of Stalinism settling on the scene of devastation left by the Nazi occupation, and ended at a time when the elation of 1989 and the fall of Communism had been overshadowed by the economic, social and political turmoil of post-Communist reality. Although Zbigniew Herbert was born in 1924 in an independent Polish state, for the greater part of his life he had little cause to believe he would end his life in one, or indeed in any kind of Poland. He led a life of incessant movement, driven by internal and external causes, all of which are in varying measures reflected in his prose. Herbert moved in flight—from armies and repressive authorities, and in pursuit—of freedom, knowledge and beauty, and on occasion, medical care and income. He had before him a long tradition of Eastern European writers who traveled to Western centers of culture—Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, after the war increasingly New York—seeking points of connection with European or Western tradition and an escape from a politically oppressed or culturally oppressive native country.

  But though it was nothing new for Polish poets to dream of an independent homeland while bivouaking in foreign café’s, Herbert’s angle of vision differed significantly from that of many of his (chiefly Romantic) predecessors. Not only had he come of age in a war born in the heart of Europe, seen intellectual, political and physical brutality overwhelm the continent and his own country used as a site of mass slavery and slaughter, but at the very moment that Western nations celebrated the liberation from Nazism and Fascism, they had abandoned the Poles and their exiled government to the mercy of Stalin. The consciousness of that betrayal, most painfully embodied in the story of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, imbued Herbert’s attitude toward the West with a deep ambivalence. From that clash of old veneration and fresh pain sprang the sharp irony that characterized his world view and his writing from the start.

  In 1944, following the retreat of German forces, Herbert fled westward from his birthplace, Lvov, on the eve of its re-occupation by Soviet troops. He, his parents and his sister landed in Kraków, where he studied economics and (on a more casual footing) painting and acting. His parents eventually settled in Sopot on the Baltic Coast, while Herbert worked toward a masters in law at the old university of Toru, where he also pursued graduate studies in philosophy with his first important mentor, professor Henryk Elzenberg. Even after he decamped to Warsaw in 1950, Herbert continued to correspond with Elzenberg, justifying his decision to give up the academic study of philosophy in favor of poetry:

  [In philosophy] I look for emotion. Powerful intellectual emotion, painful tensions between reality and abstraction, yet another rending, yet another, deeper than personal, cause for sorrow. And in that subjective cloud, respectable trut
h and sublime measure are lost, so I’ll never be a decent university philosopher. I prefer suffering philosophy to brooding on it like a hen. I would rather it be a fruitless struggle—a personal cause, something going against the order of life—than a profession.

  During the years when Herbert was publishing his first poems and reviews in periodicals, he reported to Elzenberg on his reading and sent him early unpublished poems, as well as the essay “Hamlet on the Border of Silence,” included in the selection of short prose in this volume. This essay is an initial working-through of the notion that philosophy must be “suffered” or “lived through,” and that one pays for intellectual clarity with heartbreak, humiliation and at dark moments in history, death. The tragedy of Hamlet helps Herbert begin to articulate a stance of tragic humanism which, too uncertain to be a faith, nevertheless constituted a strong frame for his subsequent explorations and aided him in his resistance to the stifling ideological atmosphere of the 50s, when his elected “master” Elzenberg himself, forced into early retirement, became a victim of the side-lining of non-conformist (non-Party) intellectuals.