Selected Poems by Zbigniew Herbert,
translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott

Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems by Zbigniew Herbert,
translated by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera imagines his fiction in terms of a metaphysics of history. Since nothing repeats itself, nothing really happens – if by "happening" we mean an event of permanent human significance, an event which causes us to weep or rejoice, to feel indignation and anger, as we do in response to the things that touch us nearly in our daily lives. A fiction can be imagined in terms of the German saying, einmal ist keinmal; what takes place in it has no reality, since what happens once has not happened at all. Hitler or Genghis Khan can kill as many people as they want: it is merely one more for the book, and a novelist can re-create in his own devices its lack of significance.

What about a poet? Poetry cannot sound like history. By its very nature it cannot say einmal ist keinmal: if it comes anywhere near doing this it ceases to be itself. T. S. Eliot comes dangerously near it in The Waste Land by his use of the word "unreal," arranged in a pattern of typographic isolation. It was modernism's gesture to the non-event of recent events, but fortunately the rest of the poem redeems this by its impenetrable singularity. W. H. Auden came close to it in "Spain," which is precariously saved by the authenticity of its parts and details, though the poem's facile proclamation of faith would otherwise be a particularly blatant acceptance of historical meaninglessness – meaninglessness in the form of Marxist "meaning." "Today the struggle," like "La lutte finale," is an especially insidious version of einmal ist keinmal.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera contrasts the state of total inner political cynicism in which people live in Eastern Europe, and which supplies the idea behind his title, with the weighty permanence of personal lives, the state of chance relations and events which has brought about commitment and finality. His doomed couple – doomed by the meaningless fact of the fiction, but also, and savingly, by the inevitabilities of any individual life – live for each other and for their dog, who dies agonizingly of cancer. Dogs embody the heaviness of being, and its inescapability, like the pebbles in a poem of Zbigniew Herbert's. Dogs are also powerless, with that powerlessness which is the true fate of the single individual. So are poems, which, as Auden said, make nothing happen. Elias Canetti, in his aphorisms, says that as long as there is one totally powerless person left in the world "I cannot lose all hope." That is both portentous and tiresome, but it links up with Tolstoy's curious observation that freedom consists "in my not having made the laws." The English fancy they are free, said Tolstoy, with that majestic cynicism which often characterized the old man, because they have made their own laws. "But I, in Russia, am truly free, because the laws have nothing whatever to do with me."

The relevance of all this for a poet like Zbigniew Herbert is that it stands on its head the Marxian commandment that freedom is the recognition of necessity. Politics can never recognize necessity; only powerlessness can do so. The paradox today is that this most politically aware poet is also the poet whose works most absolutely reject the unbearable lightness of the political. A. Alvarez, in his introduction to the Carcanet paperback reissue of Herbert's Selected Poems, stresses that this poetry is "unremittingly political," but he does not seem to have asked himself why this should be so, and on what contemporary central European paradox this unremittingness is founded. Alvarez makes a ritual contrast between the poets of the West, with their "cosy, domesticated, senselessly sensible way of life in a mass democracy," creating "worlds which are autonomous, internalized, complete inside their own heads," with the stark poetry of the East which is "continually exposed to the impersonal external pressures of politics and history." But such a contrast is all but meaningless except in so far as it reflects the pleasurable sense of guilt and self-accusation which some critics and commentators always express when implying that artists who have really been up against it must be politically dans le vrai. All poets and their poetry are subject to the "impersonal external pressures of politics and history." The real contrast today is between those poets who have not made the laws and those who have helped to do so, or are at least conditioned to feel that they have helped, and are helping, to do so.

For the latter kind, poetry can make things happen, in a modest way, like any other form of social action. The Ulster poets write poems about the Irish situation which not only give it a cultural status but arguably help to form attitudes, at least among the small minority, perhaps mostly students, who read them. Such poetry is itself a form of social and political discussion, in tone sardonic and reasonable, and all the more effective in its moderate office for not claiming too much. It may be on the side of what Alvarez calls a "cosy, domesticated, senselessly sensible way of life," but it is certainly not "autonomous" and complete inside the poet's head: if it were it might, as poetry, have a greater impact. The autonomous and wholly personal idiom of Auden's early poems has, in retrospect, very much the air of belonging to a poet who has not made the laws, and who has the freedom that comes from being outside them. Yet Auden's idiom seemed precisely that of its age's political anxieties; and so today does Herbert's. Arguably the most "unremittingly" political poetry gets written by poets who are most detached, even – in the special way poets can be – indifferent. Only the powerless really reveal the nature of power; only the nonpolitical understand the nature of politics. This is shown by one of the most "unremitting" political poems ever written – Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman – and also by such poems of Herbert's as "Five Men" and "Preliminary Investigation of an Angel."

"Five Men" records the execution of the men, presumably Poles, by a platoon of soldiers, presumably Germans. It refuses to be moved, or moving, and its weight falls on its own question and reply.

what did the five talk of
the night before the execution

of prophetic dreams
of an escapade in a brothel
of automobile parts
of a sea voyage
of how when he had spades
he ought not to have opened
of how vodka is best
after wine you get a headache
of girls
of fruit
of life

After this the poet does not have to answer his own question.

I did not learn this today
I knew it before yesterday
so why have I been writing
unimportant poems on flowers

The question answers itself. The word "unimportant" disclaims any irony, just as the absence of punctuation – none of Herbert's poems is punctuated – turns all query into statement.

As the tone of "Five Men" resembles exactly the ending of The Bronze Horseman, so that of "Preliminary Investigation of an Angel" resembles the tone of Kafka. The angel sheds his angelic being as the investigation proceeds until from his hair "drops of wax run down / and shape on the floor / a simple prophecy." Angel and candle, points of lights, are inter-metamorphosed, not by Kafka's nightmare but by the spoken and unspoken nature of Herbert's poetic language. Herbert's detachment is of the kind that takes a lot for granted: there is no point in going on about the nature of things. The last poem in the Selected Poems, "Why the Classics," tacitly but significantly takes Thucydides for the poet's hero, and in a sense for his model too. In the fourth book of his account of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides refers briefly to his own minor unsuccessful military assignment to relieve the Athenian colony of Amphipolis before the Spartan general Brasidas got there. He made a quick winter passage with his seven ships but nonetheless arrived too late – an everyday sort of setback for a commander in a war which was fought with dogged persistence rather than strategic brilliance. Herbert is interested in the perfunctoriness with which Thucydides refers to the incident, and contrasts it with the memoirs of "generals of more recent wars" who belittle their colleagues and display everything to their own advantage. The lesson is for art.

if art for its subject
will have a broken jar
a small broken soul
with a great self-pity

what will remain after us
will be like lovers' weeping
in a small dirty hotel
when wall-paper dawns

"Classical" is the word most often used to describe Herbert's poetry, both in Poland and among readers who know his work in the West. The word is necessarily ambiguous. T. S. Eliot often appealed to the traditions of classicism, and implied, as did Ezra Pound in his way, that his own poetry endorsed them. But the interior of Eliot's poetry is deeply personal, full of romantic secrets and intimacies. These are notably lacking in Herbert. Not that Herbert is impersonal: he presents a Horatian simplicity and openness, a temperament like that of a traveler or classical scholar. His collection of essays on European cultural sites, Barbarian in the Garden, contains some of the best travel writing of our time, but is almost disappointing in the way it reveals nothing about the inner life or history of the man himself. One cannot imagine him writing a love poem, or investigating his emotion with the zestful precision of a Robert Graves. His poetry reveals sharply and by contrast how much modern poetry has come to depend on versions of self-pity, and on the way it feeds and builds up the individual interior of a poet's work.

This is not all gain where Herbert is concerned. His poetry can seem flat, formulaic, and predictable. Even in the crisp and impeccable translations of Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott there is a certain sameness about the parallels along which each poem develops that may not show up in the variety and intimacy of its native tongue, where nuances of idiom and cadence would give it a specialness not available in English correspondence. As the translators point out, Herbert is not classical in the sense of using traditional meters or rhymes; his poetry is more like a spare form of conversation, obviously depending a good deal on word order and on the subtle use of cliché. Well-known poems like "Apollo and Marsyas" and "Elegy of Fortinbras" are no doubt much funnier in the original. In English they depend rather too much on the points they make. In "Apollo and Marsyas" the god of restraint, proportion, and clarity, having flayed the faun and cleaned his instrument, departs along "a gravel path hedged with box," leaving his skinless victim uttering one immense howl on a single note, perhaps a new kind of "concrete" poetry. The joke, at the expense both of classicism and of pop art, has a tenderness, but in English the message arrives without the full depth of its implication. No doubt the cruelty of art – even Herbert's own art – arises from the fact that in the very act of creation it necessarily separates itself from human suffering, which cries out from the force and nature of its whole body and blood, and is thus abhorrent to the "god with nerves of artificial fibre."

The impasse left on the English page has no doubt all sorts of sly entrances and exits on the Polish one. The same is probably true of "Elegy of Fortinbras." Fortinbras explains the needs of the world to the dead Hamlet, and tells him that "the rest is not silence but belongs to me."

I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy

On the face of it the poem has too much point to have a proper inside territory; but the contrast between the two characters may well have a greater significance in the original. Hamlet has understood the nature of action: he has in fact "understood," just as a poem does, but what Fortinbras says of Hamlet – "you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe" – is also true of a poem.

A brief preliminary note by the translators is oddly defensive, and yet makes a firm and just point:

Control, conciseness, honesty and soberness are not always to be condemned, least of all when these are qualities of a poet who received a proper European initiation into horror and chaos. In these times sanity may become as much of a corrective to normalcy as the absurd was in an earlier era.

It is indeed a striking thing that so many European poets, who when young went through the full terror of the Second World War, have written in consequence a poetry of extreme simplicity and precision, avoiding any overt expression of emotion, and setting the highest value on the old artifices of logic and reason. Vasko Popa in Serbia was one such, and Czeslaw Milosz is himself another. Man in extremity does not imitate the abyss and its moppings and mowings, but strives rather to detach himself from its absurdity. And it is a paradox that the sort of sounds made by Marsyas proceed, in our day and climate, not from anguish and loss of freedom and fatherland, but from the kinds of boredom and meaninglessness inherent in the affluent society. As Milosz implies, being a Pole connects one, in an intimacy which is almost comfortable, to the unchanging horrors of history. The idea that we live in a very special time that calls for a very special art would cause a Pole to smile. For him it is always the mixture as before, so that the attitudes and practices of classicism represent no arbitrary whim on the part of the poet, but rather the most natural response in art to the imperatives of survival. Herbert's poetry lives in the flow of history, and among the artifacts of European culture, as naturally as a pebble in the bed of a stream.

Herbert's great-grandfather was English, and the bizarre coincidence of his name with that of two English poets sharpens the fact of his wholly European rather than Polish status. The family split into two branches, one Catholic and one Protestant, and Herbert's branch settled in Lvov, in the eastern marches, where Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish cultures made a richly cosmopolitan mix. The east has always been a fertile ground for Polish poetry. Adam Mickiewicz came from Vilna, on the borders of Lithuania, as did Milosz. Herbert's mother was Armenian; his father, a professor of economics, a practising Catholic; his grandmother Orthodox. "And, all around, evidences of Hasidic culture... hence my syncretic religion." Herbert's cousin, son of an Austrian general on the other side of the family, was one of the thousands of Polish officers murdered by the Russians at Katyn in 1940.

Paradoxically, this almost too nutritious background has probably been instrumental in producing the austerities of Herbert's verse. Instead of submerging itself in the past and in its milieu, with all the helplessness of which some modern poetry makes a virtue, Herbert's poetry detaches itself into a thinner air, almost that dimension of logic and mathematics in which recent Polish scholarship has specialized. Many of the poems in Report from the Besieged City employ a persona called Mr. Cogito, a not altogether serious figure (sometimes he becomes "the suckling Cogito") who devotes himself nonetheless to some highly serious and abstract questions – on eschatology, autocracy, or death – varied by encounters with a monster who cannot be seen ("the proof of the existence of the monster / is its victims") or with Maria Rasputin, the historical daughter of that Siberian shaman who exercised his influence in imperial St. Petersburg.

Mr. Cogito "would like to remain faithful to uncertain clarity," and rejects "the artificial fires of poetry."

the piano at the top of the alps
played false concerts for him
he didn't appreciate labyrinths
the sphinx filled him with loathing . . .

he adored tautologies
explanations
idem per idem
that a bird is a bird
slavery means slavery
a knife is a knife
death remains death

Of course, poetry is always rejecting its own devices, and acquiring new ones in the process. But Herbert is not just saying "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"; his equivalents are precise and cryptographic. The poem "September 17" refers to the precise date in 1939 when the Russians invaded eastern Poland, ten days after the German army had struck in the west. But the date is only allowed its precision in and for itself: the poem is saying the opposite of einmal ist keinmal, for in Poland invasion is invasion, a simple and continuous fact and, as Pushkin put it tersely, more than a hundred years earlier and from the eastern side: "The history of Poland is and ought to be a disaster."

knights sleeping in the mountains continue to sleep
so you will enter easily uninvited guest

Herbert is not in the least afraid of the kind of platitude which goes with his simple and perpetual equivalents in history and logic.

My defenceless country will admit you invader
and give you a plot of land under a willow and peace
so those who come after us will learn again
the most difficult art the forgiveness of sins

At the end of the book the title poem, "Report from the Besieged City," explores the same ground and reaches the same conclusion, a conclusion that has none of the brilliance of Milan Kundera's formulation but a great deal more good sense. Since the poet is too old to bear arms

they graciously gave me the inferior role of chronicler
I record I don't know for whom the history of the siege . . .
all of this is monotonous I know it can't move anyone

Nothing can be less exciting than the history of the siege, and once again the conclusion is what anyone might have expected.

cemeteries grow larger the number of defenders is smaller
yet the defence continues it will continue to the end
and if the city falls yet a single man escapes
he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile
he will be the City

Both in relation to Poland and to humanity at large the meaning is as obvious as a syllogism, but it carries its obviousness with the weight and delicacy which makes Herbert so peculiar and so individual a poet.

                                       The Times Literary Supplement, 1986

The Power of Delight:
A Lifetime in Literature: 1962-2002
by John Bayley

W. W. Norton & Company
New York • London

Copyright © 2005 by John Bayley.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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