The Reemergence of a Modern Master
Zbigniew Herbert's collected work confirms his place as one of the 20th century's best.

By Reviewed by Anthony Cuda
Sunday, April 29, 2007

THE COLLECTED POEMS 1956-1998

By Zbigniew Herbert

Translated from the Polish and edited by Alissa Valles

Ecco. 600 pp. $34.95

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. *

Anthony Cuda is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His reviews of poetry appear regularly in the New Criterion and Field.