Chekhov's Mistress
Words Without Borders Discussion of Zbigniew Herbert
Blogger, memoirist, novelist, critic, translator and all around man of letters James Marcus will be hosting a discussion of Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems 1956-1998 along with Cynthia Haven at Words Without Borders next week. I’ve made no secret about how thrilled I’ve been about this book, although I’ve failed yet to articulate why – maybe next week’s conversation will help.
I did post one of Herbert’s poems a while back and here are a few comments on Collected Poems from reviewers:
“Herbert’s utter lack of pretension — literary or otherwise — lends his work an authenticity that’s both inviting and authoritative. Gods are thrown from mountains, monuments scorned for their idle display, inanimate objects memorialized for their steadfastness and poets incessantly questioned.”
“From the very beginning, Herbert’s poems had one distinguishing quality. They dealt with complex experiences and ideas in the plainest language. Well aware that he was using an impure tool of expression, banalized and subject to abuse every day, he still strove to make words mean what they mean. For Herbert, a bird is a bird, slavery means slavery, a knife is a knife, death remains death. That makes him easier to translate, of course, than poets who are attracted to rich verbal texture and symbolism. Still, his idiomatic, unpunctuated free verse and his fondness for dramatic monologues as well as his frequent and subtle use of irony do present a challenge.”
“Herbert is sometimes described as a poet of precision and reserve — as if he were interchangeable with the subject of his much-quoted poem “Pebble”: “The pebble / is a perfect creature / equal to itself / mindful of its limits … its ardor and coldness / are just and full of dignity.” There’s some truth to this, but the compression in this poet’s writing can also produce considerable heat. Unlike many poets who focus on morality, Herbert has a powerful sense of right and wrong without a corresponding belief in a system that would make right action more likely. The difficulty of this position gives his work a peculiar, knotted intensity, and leads to the stoicism evident in poems like “Mr. Cogito’s Monster,” in which Herbert’s alter ego, Mr. Cogito, challenges a monster each day that “lacks all dimensions” and exists only as “the flickering of nothingness” (recalling the Nazi and Soviet occupations). Cogito’s quest is hopeless, yet necessary — a vivid symbol of Herbert’s ethical irony.”
“If anybody was ever “stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again,” it was Zbigniew Herbert of Warsaw. His work is suffused with a longing for world culture.”
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