ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
Tuyển tập thơ 1956-1998
INTRODUCTION
by ADAM
ZAGAJEWSKI
WHERE DID
HERBERT come from; where did his poetry come from? The simplest answer
is: We
don't know. Just as we never know where any great artist comes from,
irrespective of whether they are born in the provinces or in the
capital. Yet
here we cannot merely content ourselves with our mystic ignorance!
American
readers undoubtedly deserve a short biographical sketch:
Zbigniew
Herbert, born in Lwow in 1924, led a life that especially in his youth
was full
of adventure and danger, though one is tempted to say that he was
.created
rather for a quiet existence between museum and library. There are
still many
things we do not know about the wartime period of his life-to what
extent he
was engaged in the resistance, or what he experienced during the
occupation. We
know that he came from what is called in English the "middle
classes," and in Polish is known as the intelligentsia. The relative,
or
perhaps truly profound, orderliness of his childhood was destroyed once
and for
all in September 1939 by the outbreak of war. First Nazi Germany, then
seventeen days later the Soviet Union, invaded the territory of Poland.
At that
time Wehrmacht units did not make it as far as Lwow; the city, which
was filled
with refugees from central Poland, was occupied by the Red Army-and by
the
NKVD, the secret police, who immediately set about arresting thousands
of
Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians. The sudden leap from the last pre-war
vacation to
Stalin's terror must have been unbelievably brutal. Many elements of
Herbert's
poetry undoubtedly originated from this experience.
In the last days of June
1941 the Soviet occupation of Lwow
ended and the Nazi occupation began. Distinguishing between the two
occupations
is a matter for academics. Of course, one major difference was that now
the
persecutions were aimed mostly, though not exclusively, at Jews.
When the war ended and
Lwow was incorporated into the
territory of the Soviet Union, Herbert was one of thousands of young
people
living in abeyance, trying to study, and hiding their underground past.
Hard as
it will be for a western reader to believe, the new authorities imposed
by
Moscow persecuted former resistance fighters simply for having fought
in their various
ways against the Nazi invader. Their crime was to have been
connected-often
without fully being aware of it, since they operated at a local level
and
mostly carried out specific, small-scale assignments-with the Polish
government
in exile in London rather than the communist partisan movement. The new
government applied to them a policy that was the exact opposite of the
American
GI Bill, putting obstacles in their way, sometimes imprisoning them,
and
sometimes even sentencing them to death.
The whole time up till
1956, when a political thaw altered
the situation for the better, Herbert led an unsettled existence,
changing
addresses frequently, moving around between Gdansk, Warsaw, Torun, and
Krakow, and
taking on various jobs (when he was short of money he even sold his own
blood,
a painfully accurate metaphor for the life of a poet). He studied
philosophy,
wondering whether or not he should devote himself to it full time. He
was also
drawn to art history. For political reasons he was unable to bring out
his
first book of poetry, but he began to publish individual poems and book
reviews; the periodical he was most involved with was Tygodnik-
Powszechny, a liberal-Catholic weekly based in Krakow.
He was not completely
isolated; he had friends in various
cities, and lovers; he also had an intellectual mentor. This was Henryk
Elzenberg, at the time a professor of the University of Torun, an
erudite
philosopher and poet, a tireless researcher of intellectual formulae,
and an
independent type barely tolerated by the new regime. A volume of
correspondence
between teacher and student published recently (in 2002) reveals a
melancholic
professor and a witty student frequently excusing himself before his
mentor for
real or imagined failures. In these letters Herbert is contrary and
obedient, inventive,
talented, no doubt aware of his epistolary charms, but still timid, a
little
afraid of his strict Master, not entirely sure whether he should become
a
philosopher or a poet, demanding emotion in philosophy and ideas in
poetry,
averse to closed systems, droll, at once ironic and warm.
The year 1956, as I
mentioned, changes almost everything for
Herbert. His debut, Chord of Light,
is enthusiastically received. Suddenly, thanks to the thaw; the borders
of Europe
are pen to him, to some extent at least; he can visit Prance, Italy,
London.
Prom this moment there begins a new chapter in his life, one that was
to last
almost to his final month – he died in July 1998. A truly different
chapter-yet
if one looks at it closely, it is oddly similar to the preceding one.
Now,
admittedly, Herbert travels amongst Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles, and
Warsaw; the
length of his journeys is much greater than before, and he becomes a
world-famous poet. But the fundamental unrest and the underlying
instability
(including financially) are still there. In addition there is an
encroaching
illness. Only the surroundings are more beautiful; they include the
greatest
museums of the world, in which breathless tourists can see a Polish
poet
diligently and calmly sketching the works of great artists in his
notebook. For
once again he has masters: Henryk Elzenberg's place has now been taken
by
Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Piero della Francesca, and also the "old
masters" from the magnificent poem in Report
from a Besieged City.
He also had mentors and
teachers in poetry. He learned a
great deal from Czeslaw Milosz, with whom he was friends (they had met
for the
first time in Paris in the second half of the 1950s). He was thoroughly
familiar
with the Polish romantic poets and with old and modern European poetry.
He
certainly read Cavafy. He studied the classical authors-studied them
the way
poets do, unsystematically, falling in and out of love, jumping from
period to
period, finding the things that were important for him and discarding
those
that interested him less; in doing so he acted quite differently from a
scholar, who moves like a solid tank of erudition through the period he
has
selected. He also read dozens of historical works on Greece, Holland,
and
Italy. He sought to understand the past. He loved the past-as an
aesthete,
because he was fascinated by beauty, and as a man who quite simply
looked in
history for the traces of others.
EVERY GREAT
POET lives between two worlds. One of these is the real, tangible world
of
history, private for some and public for others. The other world is a
dense
layer of dreams, imagination, and phantasms. It sometimes happens-as
for
example in the case of W B. Yeats-that this second world takes on
gigantic
proportions, that it becomes inhabited by numerous spirits, that it is
haunted
by Leo Africanus and other ancient magi.
These two territories
conduct complex negotiations, the
result of which are poems. Poets strive for the first world, the real
one,
conscientiously trying to reach it, to reach the place where the minds
of many
people meet; but their efforts are hindered by the second world, just
as the dreams
and hallucinations of certain sick people prevent them from
understanding and
experiencing events in their walking
hours. Except that in great poets these hindrances are rather a symptom
of
mental health, since the world is by nature dual, and poets pay tribute
with
their own duality to the, true structure of reality, which is composed
of day
and night, sober intelligence and fleeting fantasies, desire and
gratification.
There is no poetry without
this duality, though the second,
substitute world is different for each outstanding creative artist.
What is it
like for Herbert? Herbert's dreams are sustained by various
things-travels,
Greece and Florence, the work of great painters, ideal cities (which he
saw
only in the past, not in the future, unlike many of his
contemporaries). But
they are also sustained by the knightly virtues of honor and courage.
Herbert himself helps us
to understand his poetry in "Mr
Cogito and Imagination." Because Mr Cogito:
longed to fully comprehend
-Pascal's night
-the nature of diamonds
-the melancholy of the
prophets
-the wrath of Achilles
-the madness of genocides
-the dreams of Mary Queen
of Scots
-the Neanderthal's fear
-the despair of the last
Aztecs
-the long dying of
Nietzsche
-the joy of the Lascaux
painter
-the rise and fall of an
oak
-the rise and fall of Rome
Achilles and an oak,
Lascaux and a Neanderthal's fear, the
despair of the Aztecs-these are the ingredients of Herbert's
imagination. And
always "rise and fall" -the entirety of the historical cycle. Herbert sometimes likes to assume the position
of a rationalist and so in his beautiful poem he says of these
unfathomable
things that Mr Cogito longed to "fully comprehend" them, something
that is of course (fortunately) impossible.
But for Herbert the matter
is even more complicated. In him
we find two central intellectual problems-participation and distance.
He never forgot
the horror of war and the invisible moral obligations he incurred
during the
occupation. He himself spoke of loyalty as a leading ethical and
aesthetic
yardstick. Yet he was diff rent from other poets such as Krzysztof
Kamil Baczynski,
the great bard of the wartime generation, who died very young (in the Warsaw Uprising), and whose poems were
imbued with the heat of burning metaphors. No, Herbert is not like that
at all:
In him the level of wartime horror is seen from a certain distance.
Even in the
direst circumstances the heroes of Herbert's poems do not lose their
sense of
humor. And in the poems and essays the tragic poet steps out alongside
the
carefree Mr. Pickwick, who does not imagine that he has deserved such a
great
misfortune. It may be here that there lies the particular, indefinable
charm of
both Herbert's poetry and his essays-this tragicomic mixing of tones,
the fact
that the utmost gravity in no way excludes joking and irony. But the
irony
mostly concerns the character of the poet, or that of his porte-parole
M r.
Cogito, who is by and large a most imperfect fellow. While as concerns
the
message of this poetry-and it is poetry with a message, however
obscure-the
irony does not affect it whatsoever.
The need for distance: We
can imagine to ourselves (I like to
think about this) a youthful Herbert, who in occupied Lwow is looking
through
albums of Italian art, perhaps paintings of the Sienese quatrocento,
perhaps
reproductions of Masaccio’s frescoes. He's sitting in an armchair with
a album on
his lap; maybe he's at a friend's place, or maybe at home-while outside
the
window there can be heard the shouts of German (or Soviet) soldiers.
This
situation-the frescoes of Masaccio (or Giotto) and the yells of
soldiers coming
from outside-was fixed permanently in Herbert imagination. Wherever he
was,
however many years had passed since the war, he could hear the soldiers
shouting
outside the window-even in Los Angeles and the (once) quiet Louvre, in
the now
closed Dahlem Museum in Berlin (its collections transferred to a modern
building on Potsdamer Platz) or in his Warsaw apartment. Beauty is not
lonely;
beauty attracts baseness and evil-or in any case encounters them
frequently.
The paradox of Herbert,
which is perhaps especially striking
in our modern age, also resides in the fact that though he refers
willingly and
extensively to existing "cultural texts" and takes symbols from the
Greeks anywhere else, it is never in order to become a prisoner of
those references
and meanings - he is always lured by reality. Take the well-known poem
“Apollo
and Marsyas." It is constructed on a dense, solid foundation of myth.
An inattentive
reader might say (as inattentive critics have in fact said) that this
is an
academic poem, made up of elements of erudition, a poem inspired by the
library
and the museum. Nothing could be more mistaken: Here we are dealing not
with
myths or an encyclopedia, but with the pain of a tortured body.
And this is the common
vector of all Herbert’s poetry; let us
not be misled by its adornments, its nymphs and satyrs, its columns and
quotations.
This poetry is about the pain of the twentieth century, about accepting
the
cruelty of an inhuman age, about an extraordinary sense of reality. And
the
fact that at the same time the poet loses none of his lyricism or his
sense of
humor-this is the unfathomable secret of a great artist.
(Translated
by Bill Johnston)
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