{"id":7289,"date":"2022-12-29T18:14:56","date_gmt":"2022-12-29T17:14:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/?p=7289"},"modified":"2024-09-24T14:59:28","modified_gmt":"2024-09-24T12:59:28","slug":"zbigniew-herbert-a-timeless-poet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/instytutpolski.pl\/newyork\/2022\/12\/29\/zbigniew-herbert-a-timeless-poet\/","title":{"rendered":"Zbigniew Herbert, a timeless Poet"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Polish Poetry Unites<\/em><\/strong><\/a> is a video series complementing our Encounters with Polish Literature<\/a><\/strong> series for anyone interested in literature, poetry in particular, history, and reading. In each episode, Edward Hirsch<\/strong><\/a>, a distinguished American poet, and the president of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, will introduce a celebrated Polish poet to American audiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nhttps:\/\/youtu.be\/h7mygZ6OMFw\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ed Hirsch compares Zbigniew Herbert to W.H. Auden<\/a><\/strong> or T.S. Elliot<\/strong><\/a> as a point of reference for American audiences. He says \u201cAmericans should read him because we have such a poor sense of history. But also, because Herbert is interested in universal truths, he\u2019s interested in what he calls universal compassion.\u201d<\/em> He sees Herbert as a timeless poet, an avant-garde classicist, one who searches for moral values in both art and philosophy from all eras of history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Herbert was born in Lviv which was Polish at the time, then Nazis invaded, and after Nazis communists came, so Herbert had to defy two totalitarianisms. During the cold war times, it was extremely difficult for Polish citizens to travel abroad. Herbert, on a shoe-string budget, \u201ddid whatever he could to be able to go and see the old masters. So that he could go to travel to the museums, so that he could go to Lascaux. So that he could go to Orvieto. So he could travel to Holland and see the world that he wanted to see of the Dutch masters. Not just to go and see museums, but to see the country itself. Because he was continually testing what he saw in the present with what he knew from the past.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the video, the landscapes Herbert drew during his travels, as well as ancient Greek art that inspired him, serve as a backdrop to Hirsch\u2019s words. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edward Hirsch says: \u201c[Herbert] invented a figure called mister Cogito, which is based on Descartes, I think therefore I am. and Mr. Cogito is a kind of Polish everyman… In \u201cReport from the Besieged City\u201d there\u2019s a poem called \u201cMr. Cogito and the Imagination,\u201d and there is a moment of found poetry in this poem that I think tells you a lot about Herbert\u2019s project. Because there are things that Mr. Cogito doesn\u2019t know or wants to think about to the very end. Some of those things are historical and personal, like the dreams of Mary Stewart the night before she\u2019s executed, or the dreams of the last Aztecs. That is not only when a person is being destroyed, but when a whole civilization is being destroyed, what do people think about?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Herbert was also a non-fiction writer. Two books of his essays were published during his lifetime in the US: \u201cBarbarian in the Garden\u201d in 1962 and \u201cStill Life with a Bridle\u201d in 1993. Both books were written thanks to his travels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ed Hisch continues: \u201cYou might say that the 17th century Dutch painters are the collective heroes of his imagination. Because they believed in freedom and daily life. And Herbert travels all over the world to these museums to see these Dutch masters. But what he\u2019s also looking for is the view that the Dutch masters saw in contemporary Holland. Which he finds hard to see, but eventually he finds it, the windmills and the wind and the fields of grain, and he knows it exists in the world.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Herbert was deeply influenced by living under Soviet communism, and he searched for beauty and universal truth in history, but also in \u201cthe free world\u201d of Western Europe. \u201cHerbert was an aesthete, an aesthete with moral values. And he just thought everything about the Soviet way of life was contemptuous, and he resisted. And he resisted by holding up a kind of alternative, and the alternative was what he saw from the past. From the great philosophers, from the great works of art, from the great works of literature. And he took these values and compared them to the present, and he found the present wanting. But he also held us, all of us to a higher standard.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second part of this video focuses on the poem \u201cTo Marcus Aurelius\u201d in which in the words of Ed Hirsch: \u201cHerbert compares the present, and the kind of world of tears that he\u2019s living in now, against the world of Marcus Aurelius\u2019 meditations, where the Greek philosopher counsels us to a kind of stoicism. And he finds that it\u2019s almost impossible to share this stoicism but it\u2019s something he seeks, this kind of calmness.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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To Marcus Aurelius<\/em>
by Zbigniew Herbert<\/strong><\/a>
for Professor Henryk Elzenberg<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Good night Marcus put out the light
and shut the book For overhead
is raised a gold alarm of stars
heaven is talking some foreign tongue
this the barbarian cry of fear
your Latin cannot understand
Terror continuous dark terror
against the fragile human land<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

begins to beat It\u2019s winning Hear
its roar The unrelenting stream
of elements will drown your prose
until the world\u2019s four walls go down
As for us? \u2013 to tremble in the air
blow in the ashes stir the ether
gnaw our fingers seek vain words
drag off the fallen shades behind us<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well Marcus better hang up your peace
give me your hand across the dark
Let it tremble when the blind world beats
on senses five like a failing lyre
Traitors \u2013 universe and astronomy
reckoning of stars wisdom of grass
and your greatness too immense
and Marcus my defenseless tears
<\/em>
Translation: Czes\u0142aw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Book Cover: Zbigniew Herbert, 1924-1998. Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs: 2008. Authored by and with foreword by Adam Zagajewski.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n
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Zbigniew Herbert<\/strong>, (born October 29, 1924, Lw\u00f3w, Poland [now Lviv, Ukraine]\u2014died July 28, 1998, Warsaw), one of the leading Polish poets of the post-World War II generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Herbert attended an underground high school during the wartime German occupation of Poland and also took secret military training courses with the Polish Home Army. After World War II he earned degrees in economics, law, and philosophy at various universities in Poland. He published little poetry in 1949\u201354, when Socialist Realism was mandatory in Poland, but in 1955 he began a long association with the literary review Tw\u00f3rczo\u015b\u0107 (\u201cCreation\u201d). Herbert\u2019s first collection of poems, Struna \u015bwiat\u0142a (1956; \u201cChord of Light\u201d), was followed by Hermes, pies i gwiazda (1957; \u201cHermes, a Dog and a Star\u201d), Studium przedmiotu (1961; \u201cA Study of the Object\u201d), and such later volumes as Pan Cogito (1974; Mr. Cogito) and Raport z obl\u0119\u017conego miasta (1983; Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems). After travels in France and Italy between 1958 and 1961, Herbert published the essays inspired by these visits as Barbarzy\u0144ca w ogrodzie (1962; Barbarian in the Garden). From 1975 to 1992, he lived mostly in western Europe, although during that time he returned to Poland for the five years from 1981 to 1986. Then, from 1992 until his death, he made his home in Poland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Herbert\u2019s poetry expresses an ironic moralism in free verse laden with classical and other historical allusions. In reflecting on Poland\u2019s traumatic experiences at the hands of the Nazis and Soviets during World War II and afterward, he uses a sarcastic rhetoric to question the gap between ideal morality and the nightmares of 20th-century totalitarianism. English translations of his poems appear in Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems and in Selected Poems (1968 and 1977). The King of the Ants: Mythological Essays (1999) comprises some of his essays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Herbert\u2019s poetry and his essays evoke the best traditions of antiquity, relating them to modern times in an inspiring way and showing the sources of European civilization reaching back to Greek and Roman mythology as relevant factors of modern philosophy, art, and literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Biography source: Britannica<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Selected writings about Zbigniew Herbert<\/strong> in English:<\/p>\n\n\n\n