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Starred Review. Herbert (1924–1998) lived to witness his hometown of Lwów, Poland, occupied by the Soviets in 1939, the Nazis in 1941, and the Soviets again in 1944. This exposure to systematic and violent oppression awakened in Herbert a protective and motivating skepticism that pervades all his poetry: "If you put trust in your five senses/ the world contracts into a hazelnut." This impeccably, newly translated and edited volume finds Herbert, strongly anticommunist throughout his life, determined to resist the reduction of the human to anything easily measured, manipulated and forgotten, even if history keeps reminding us that "only our dreams have not been humiliated." Tender, wary, melancholy and wry, the poems visit ideas of redemption as one might visit a grave site, i.e., knowing that what you seek can only be experienced in the heart and mind. If one attempts through poetry to "offer to the betrayed world / a rose," Herbert's world-weary, tragicomic alter-ego, Mr. Cogito—one of last century's most memorable poetic personages–warns us that the gesture will probably go unnoticed, especially in an age when even "the temple of freedom/ has been turned into a flea market." Finally, the work of this powerful master of 20th-century literature is all in one place. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Anthony Cuda
For over three decades, many American poets have recognized Polish-born Zbigniew Herbert as one of the most innovative, penetrating and original poets of the post-WWII era. But with much of his work untranslated or out of print, he has remained a secret pleasure, overshadowed by the acclaim of his compatriot, Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz. Now after years of copyright quarrels and delays, the new, gorgeously bound Collected Poems, 1956-1998 promises to prove him not merely the best Polish writer in recent memory but one of the most impressive poets of the later 20th century.
In a 1984 interview, Herbert discussed what distinguishes him from contemporaries like Milosz: "Writing -- and in this I disagree with everybody -- must teach men soberness," he said, adding emphatically: "to be awake." For Herbert, who knew along with Goya that the sleep of reason produces monsters and tyranny, "to be awake" means to refuse the witchcraft of reduction and rhetoric and to seek instead the beguiling magic of the mundane and close to hand:
The pebble
is a perfect creature
equal to itself
mindful of its limits. . . .
I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth
-- Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye
(from "Pebble")
This is quintessential Herbert: His sparse punctuation, understatement and delicate irony always take priority over ostentatious imagery or verbal acrobatics. Far from maudlin hyperbole, his remorse arises from a grave awareness of how the imagination always transforms and often distorts the objects of its attention.
In one of Herbert's magisterial prose poems -- which boast the same wry wit, inventiveness and relentless tenderness as his verse -- he considers the decline of armchairs, which he claims "were once noble flower-eating creatures." "The despair of armchairs," the enchanting parable concludes, "is revealed in their creaking." When asked in 1968 how he could write about chairs and trees in so terrible an age, Herbert responded, "And what if the trees are unhappy?" In their stubbornness and vulnerability, Herbert's objects -- lamps, pens, trees, clouds -- aim to awaken us to the myriad betrayals of the everyday and inconsequential. "At last," he says elsewhere, "the fidelity of things opens our eyes."
Despite having witnessed systematic oppression in Poland under Nazi and Soviet occupation, Herbert aims his political critique not at regimes or ideologies but at the blindness and corruption that disfigure human intimacy. His only enemy, as Joseph Brodsky aptly suggested, is the vulgarity of the human heart. Even his own failings do not escape censure; instead, they are the most bitter to recall.
so now I sit in solitude
on a sawed-off tree trunk
in the exact center point
of the forgotten battle
gray spider I spin
bitter meditations
on memory too large
and a heart too small
(from "A Small Heart")
Herbert's most compelling poems are poised midway between his dedication to courage and justice and his profound sense of humility and imperfection. They repeatedly affirm the paradox that the mind frees itself, if at all, only by submitting to its own fragility. "There are those who grow/ gardens in their heads," he writes in "A Knocker":
my imagination
is a piece of board
my sole instrument
is a wooden stick
I strike the board
it answers me
yes -- yes
no -- no
Alissa Valles's translations seem quite commendable, if at times antiseptic in comparison to previous versions, such as those by Milosz and Peter Dale Scott, which this volume also includes. Her stringency, however, is more fitting than the turgidity of Adam Zagajewski's preface, which revels in precisely the sort of vagueness (Herbert "studied classical authors" and "loved the past"), cliché and watery overstatement ("the unfathomable secret of a great artist") that Herbert so assiduously refused. Zagajewski is a fine poet in his own right and should have done better.
Herbert's most memorable poems enchant us by the candor and clear-sightedness with which they face failings and disappointed desires. They console by refusing to fawn or flatter. The "Elegy of Fortinbras" ridicules Hamlet but nonetheless longs for his starry-eyed idealism:
. . . This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy
It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell
we live on archipelagos
and that water these words what can they do
what can they do prince
Elsewhere, Herbert regrets the circuitousness of metaphor -- its necessary indirections and digressions. But metaphor, he also admits, is one of the ways that we make the world intelligible by relating it to what we already know. It is a mirror that reflects our own desires, losses and frailties:
and just to say -- I love
I run around like mad
picking up handfuls of birds
and my tenderness
which after all is not made of water
asks the water for a face
The new Collected Poems leaves no doubt about the place of Herbert's work in 20th-century letters, which rivals that of W. H. Auden or Elizabeth Bishop in its originality, imaginative breadth and humane vigilance.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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