Customer Reviews

The King of the Ants

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A short collection of ironic essays by the great poet Zbigniew Herbert. Each essay is an ironic re-telling of a Classical myth or story. Some include allegorical commentary on contemporary events. Generally quite clever and with some intermittently striking language. Not major works but enjoyable.

This is the first of Herbert's books I've read. I should probably have started with one of his more-acclaimed works. The essays in this book are urbane, literate, and ironic, but they're also extremely inconsistent. Though each is centered on a mythological figure, each jumps around a myriad of topics, only very casually touching on any of them.

Often I felt his mythological inversions were facile or far-fetched to the point of being irritating - maybe they had been leavened with a humor that was lost in translation. What remains is a tone that seems academic, ponderous, and occasionally repetitive to me, like a lecturer who likes too well to listen to himself speak, and makes sweeping statements that seem, on scrutiny, to be a load of hooey - "Two gifts that rarely come in pairs and are therefore considered contradictory: beauty and strength. Beauty . . . is content with itself, sure of its own rights, and can ultimately dispense with confirmation, a contest or wreath. The beautiful lead a quiet life and are rarely entangled in dramatic adventures." Prettily put, but you could negate every sentiment and declare the result with just as much authority.