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Encounters with Polish Literature is a video series for anyone interested in literature and the culture of books and reading. Each month, host David A. Goldfarb will present a new topic in conversation with an expert on that author or book or movement in Polish literature. More about the Encounters with Polish Literature series and the timeline.

In honor of the centennial of the birth of poet and essayist, Zbigniew Herbert (Oct. 29, 1924 – July 28, 1998), the Polish Sejm (parliament) has proclaimed 2024 the Year of Zbigniew Herbert. Born in Lwów (today Lviv, Ukraine), like Stanisław Lem, Adam Zagajewski, and Żanna Słoniowska, whom we have discussed on “Encounters with Polish Literature,” Herbert studied economics and philosophy and joined the resistance during the Second World War. Herbert for the most part sat out the era of socialist realism in Poland and made his major debut in 1956 with the collection String of Light. He is best known for his works that reflect on the politics of the twentieth century from a historical, aesthetic, or philosophical distance, cast in the interior monologues of his alter-ego, “Mr. Cogito,” as a Dutch chronicler in “Report from the Besieged City,” or as a traveler reporting on European art and architecture in his essays collected in Still Life with a Bridle and Barbarian in the Garden.

In this episode, we discuss these aspects of Herbert’s life and work and attempt to illuminate the poet’s particular posture of epiphany in spite of the horrors of history.

Zbigniew Herbert in English Translation:

Barbarian in the Garden. Tr. Michael March and Jarosław Anders. New York: Harvest Books, 1986.

The Collected Poems: 1956-1998.Tr. and ed. by Alissa Valles, with Additional Translations by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott. Intro. by Adam Zagajewski. New York: ecco, 2008.

The Collected Prose: 1948-1998. Ed. and intro by Alissa Valles. Preface by Charles Simic. New York: ecco, 2010.

Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems. Tr. Barbara and John Carpenter. New York: ecco, 1999.

The King of the Ants. Tr. John Carpenter. New York: HarperCollins, 1999.

Mr. Cogito. Tr. Barbara and John Carpenter. New York: ecco, 1993.

Reconstruction of the Poet: Uncollected Works of Zbigniew Herbert. Tr. and ed. by Alissa Valles. New York: ecco, forthcoming Aug. 13, 2024.

Report from the Besieged City. Tr. Barbara and John Carpenter. New York: ecco, 1985.

Still Life with a Bridle: Essays and Apocryphas. Tr. Barbara and John Carpenter. New York: ecco, 2020.

Bożena Shallcross is professor of Polish literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Core Faculty of the Institute on the Formation of Culture at the University of Chicago. She authored several monographs, edited, or translated volumes, and numerous articles. Her last monograph entitled The Holocaust Object in Polish and Polish-Jewish Culture (2011) also appeared in Polish and Russian translations. Most recently she published “Anamnesis of Joy” in Fabrica Litterarum (2024);“War and Violence: How to Rescue a Wartime Artifact” in The Cambridge Handbook of Material Culture Studies (2022) and “Scandalous Glass House: On Modernist Transparency in Architecture and Life” in Centering the Periphery: Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital (2022).