the still bell of the mezzogiorno
the dense matter of dusk
when pine-trees on the hill covertly signal to the evening
and that terrible silence of the moon and the nightingale
Karpiski knows those voices as does no one else, he uses them both stringently and copiously, at once sentimentally and with classical restraint, for the characteristic mark of the master is god-like equilibrium, and we, imitators, now speak with a mixture of seriousness, frivolity, loftiness and the common things gathered in the meadows, fields, and forests of this world. He is extraordinarily refined, like a queen playing at being a shepherdess in the gardens of Versailles. It is the business of art to reconcile the sublime with the vulgar, the great with the small. And in that speech we do nothing but that, we reconcile the mysterious with the comical.
Goodnight Jacenta,3
and you, virgin mouth,
and eyes so tender,
and paired breasts of down!
After the loss of his fatherland he drags himself from one princely garden to another, crazed and yet conscious, like Reytan in a soldier’s headgear from the time of the Great Principality, with a peacock feather behind his ear and a teardrop which, unable to fall from his nose, shines.
Goodnight Jacenta,
and you, virgin mouth,
and eyes so tender,
and paired breasts of down!
III
JULIUSZ SŁOWACKI WAS ALSO from the farthest outlying territories, namely from Armenia, through his Mother’s Mother. He wanders elegantly around Paris with a red rose in his heart and a pistol loaded with sorrow for the mother from whom he is parted.
He carried verse to unattainable heights
gave it an unparalleled shine and radiant glimmer
a flight like a comet
flung across the sky
he takes ages off mountains
holds abysses in his hands
In a wartime massacre, a little episode, or icon. General Sowiski leaning on the altar on that wooden leg.
In a little old church in Wola4
General Sowiski remained
an old man with a wooden leg
IV
A monument to a wanderer, the very idea of wandering.
I was in the house of Saint Kazimierz in Paris
an institute for orphans and a veteran
for the orphans of all battles
Old
if you can say that of an awkward old man
haughty
if the expression fits an awkward old fellow
always in a fever
always at the mercy of poverty
but nevertheless haughty and proud
which the Russians hated in their younger brothers the Poles
A coat rack on which someone absentmindedly crucified a man.
He always returns late at night, tipsy on cheap Calvados, humming:
C’est une chanson5
Qui nous ressemble
Toi, tu m’aimais
Moi, je t’aimais
One night a nun, whom we will call Gudula, scolds him for his improper behavior. Without a word Norwid dumps a urinal on her head.
“Was it full, do you think?” asks Józef Czapski, my painter friend.
“Sure it was.”
“And how did he dump it, upside down?”
“Sure. He was an honest man, wasn’t he?”
Rich as a polar sunrise the wanderer’s spectrum of color
Hunger
Thirst
Dirt
Fleas
Evangelical poverty
in his heart
Unhappy Love
Vain Journey
On his heart he carries his Vade mecum like a millstone. A philosopher-poet in a country where every thought comes too late.
Norwid’s word
made of fire
iron
artillery guns
sword and armor
the posthumous laurel—the only one worth the labor
Why, Shade, do you depart, hands broken on your shield,6
What is that playing with sparks in your lap, by torchlight?—
The sword green with laurel, bathed in the candles’ tears,
The eagle soars and your horse lifts its feet like a dancer.
V
TADEUSZ GAJCY7. NORWID’S CLOSEST relative, most certainly, that late descendant who does not pass by the written word indifferently. His poetry is the stuff of fiery prophetic dreams.
I write—as a gravedigger chooses a pit8
for a body’s stillness, a hand’s despair
and sometimes a little word rises there
like a cross or a wreath.
VI
The changing of the guard
so near
I feel their breath in my neck
I had to take my place in the relay race
Krzysztof Kamil Baczyski9
A generation stupidly called the Columbus generation.
Although it’s no great discovery—and that’s precisely what they were writing about—this banal discovery of death, when their souls longed for life, adventure, God and truth.
Baczyski comes almost wholly out of the spirit of Słowacki.
A misty world
seen through the bloody dust of battles
painful as glass in the eye
at times too metaphorical
racing on the lathered surface of images
Both of them, Baczyski and Gajcy, fell in August 1944, defending the ruins of Warsaw. On the day of their deaths they were twenty-two years old. Both cadets.
I
survived not in order to live
you have little time,
you must give testimony
And as for me, who invited you to this Kaddish, I would like it to be not a Kaddish but a gift
when the time draws near
I would like to say of myself, always balancing between sublimity and absurdity, after my master Słowacki:
[…]
I’ve left no heir here on earth behind me,10
neither for my lute, nor for my name;
my name passed like lightning and will be
for generations a sound devoid of fame.
[…]
Let my friends gather round at midnight
and burn my heart ceremonially in aloe,
and give it back to the one who gave it—
in ashes: the world repays all mothers so
[…]
I implore the living not to lose their faith
but bear before the people enlightenment’s torch
and when called, may they go to their death
like stones flung by God upon the rampart!…
[…]
I will, however, leave that fateful power,
vain to me in life, a wreath for my temples;
when I die it will work unseen, hour by hour
to turn you, eaters of bread, into angels.
1998
Acknowledgments
MY SINCERE THANKS ARE due to the translators Michael March and Jarosław Anders and John and Bogdana Carpenter, with whom I have the honor to share these pages and who labored for years in often unpropitious circumstances to bring Herbert’s prose to English readers. Herbert’s Polish editors and publishers, Pawel Kdziela, Ryszard Krynicki, and Barbara Toruczyk, with Beata Chmielowska and Marek Zagaczyk, have been an inspiration to me throughout the years of work on this book: not only do my annotations draw extensively on theirs, it is their diligence and devotion that made this book conceivable in the first place.
Work on the translation of Labyrinth on the Sea was done during a residency at the Ekemel Center for Literary Translation (Athens/Paros). I thank the organization for its generosity and the Center’s host, Katerina Ragousi, for her hospitality.
I warmly thank Julie Berriault, Jacob Blakesley, Bill and Gloria Broder, Marysia Dzieduszycka, Teresa Dzieduszycka, Libby Edelson, Katarzyna Jakubiak
, Bill Johnston, Ilya Kaminsky, James Leigh, Ria Loohuizen, Marit MacArthur, Edward Orloff, Benjamin Paloff, Todd Samuelson, Virginia Smith, Tony Sheldon and E. J. Van Lanen—each of whom offered moral, scholarly, or practical support along the way. Leonard Gardner and Katarzyna Herbert, each in their own class of valor and humor, helped this book through storms large and small into harbor. My gratitude to them is immense.
About the Authors
ZBIGNIEW HERBERT was born in Lwów, Poland, in 1924. In his late teens he fought in the underground resistance against the Nazis. Herbert studied law, economics, and philosophy at the universities of Krakow, Torun, and Warsaw. His books include Selected Poems, Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems, Mr Cogito, Still Life with a Bridle, The King of the Ants, Labyrinth on the Sea, and The Collected Poems. He died in 1998.
ALISSA VALLES is a poet and translator who lives in Warsaw. She is the editor and co-translator of Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems (2007) and the author of the poetry collection Orphan Fire (2008). Her work has appeared in the Antioch Review, the Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Verse, and elsewhere.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
ALSO BY ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
The Collected Poems 1956–1998
Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems
Selected Poems
Still Life with a Bridle
Mr Cogito
The King of the Ants
Barbarian in the Garden
Credits
Jacket design by High Design, Nyc
Jacket photograph © Michal Kapitaniak
Copyright
COLLECTED PROSE. Copyright © 2010 by The Estate of Zbigniew Herbert. Introduction and translation copyright © 2010 by Alissa Valles. Preface copyright © 2010 by Charles Simic. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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* Herbert adds at the foot of the page: “When I was visiting my ailing mother.”
* Myth and Reality, 1963.
* There is another method of dating archeological finds. It is based on the measurement of the C14 isotope contained in plant and animal fossils. The analysis of carbon found in the Lascaux caves made it possible to date the origin of the wall paintings to thirteen thousand years B.C. Archeologists, however, move the date back several millennia.
* In fact there is only one donzella, who cleans the rooms, makes the beds, and in the evenings inspects the torn sheets, embroidering sad songs with her voice, thin as a needle. (Herbert’s note.)
* So-and-so many meters taller than the Signoria in Florence, boast the guides. Italians are completely crazy about their spires, just as Americans are crazy about cars. For both it is a matter of prestige. San Gimignano—the Tuscan Manhattan—has sixty spires, though the town could be hidden in a giant’s fist. Florence has approximately one hundred and five spires. (Herbert’s note.)
* Jaufre Rudel writes: “…I have a friend, but I do not know who she is, and, on my soul, I have never seen her…although I love her so much. There is no greater happiness for me than to possess a remote love.”
* Evans had not yet invented the term “Minoan civilization,” but from the very beginning he realized he had found traces of a culture older than the one Schliemann had plundered.
** In Egyptian tombs inscriptions and murals were found which some scientists believe refer to the Minoans. These paintings portray people dressed in non-Egyptian clothes. They carry tribute vases and dishes—whose shape and ornamentation correspond quite exactly with the Cretan ceramics in its later period. One of the inscriptions says: “Great leader from Kefti and the islands (or coasts) of the Green Sea.” But as to whether Kefti means Crete and its inhabitants, not all scientists agree.
* The division and characterization of Minoan ceramics given here are naturally very schematic and do not reflect the whole wealth of this art and craft.
* There are eternal problems with the conversion of the currency of remote historical periods. Drachmas and talents sound abstract to us. We know that 100 drachmas made a mina, and 60 minas one talent. The Athenian drachma weighed a little over 4 grams, and its value is judged to be a fifth of an American dollar. A slave cost 150 to 300 drachmas, and brought in an average annual revenue of 60 drachmas (a slave was hired out for an obol a day). However, I don’t know if these calculations throw any light on what Athenian money could buy.
* Here it is worth adding that the personal estates of Athenians were extraordinarily modest; nothing in comparison with Roman fortunes. The exceptions were a few Athenian “Croesuses” who exploited the Laurion mines—they owned property worth hundreds of talents. In his Lives of the Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius mentions the testament of Plato, a wealthy aristocrat as we know, who besides two small real estate plots left his heirs four slaves and a little over 8 minas in so-called cash, objects of silver, and “capital” which it seems was lent at a percentage.
* Poor Pericles, and this dream of his was only partially fulfilled. The “pan-Athenaia” never became a general Hellenic holiday. The Greeks preferred poor apolitical cities with age-old traditions to Athens: Olympia, Delphi. The holiday that was truly popular was not the too lofty, too stage-managed pan-Athenaia but the lewd, coarse folk holiday of the Great and Small Dionysus, reminiscent in its character to the medieval Fête des fous—that obscene hermetic carnival tolerated by the Church, with its mock Pope and its wagon portraying the triumph of Bacchus drawn by naked Centaurs and Centauresses in the company of Great Pan.
* During the building of the Parthenon, one might add, Sophocles, a friend of Pericles, was the chairman of the financial committee which was occupied with the economy of the League’s treasury.
* We know that Anthony—that unrivaled bon vivant—was in Athens in 39 B.C. and that his vows to Athena were taken then amid great pomp (perhaps on the Acropolis). On that occasion the Roman general tricked the Athenians out of a “statue” worth 4 million sesterces. Pure cynicism or political gamesmanship? Probably the latter, as Anthony also (in accordance with his character) identified himself with Dionysus, at the same time “nicknaming” Cleopatra Aphrodite. These mythological spiels were necessary to the resuscitation of Alexander the Great’s idea: to link Europe and Asia.
* In the
second half of the eighteenth century, toward the end of Turkish rule, Athens counted barely three thousand Turks and five thousand Greeks.
* Here and there one encounters in European museums soldiers’ “souvenirs” from this expedition. So in Copenhagen one finds heads of a Lapita and a Centaur, dragged here by Captain Hartmand.
* The album of Makryannis, contemporary with the events, contains a painted history of the rebels fighting; the album is kept in the museum of the capital with the reverence due to national relics. It is a Greek equivalent of the images d’Épinal33. Naïve, melodramatic narrative painting, which elicits a gentle smile from a modern viewer more than anything else. European Romantic painters, especially the French, took up the theme of the rebellion with unequaled theatrical force, with all their grandiloquence and sense of drama and danger, giving vent to emotion, but also glowing tans and cobalts.
* In the Athenian museum of history and ethnography there are wooden busts of famous men of Antiquity which decorated the prows of rebel ships. Themistocles or Solon with great big noses and menacing bandits’ moustaches have little in common with their classical Greek portraits. They remind one rather strongly of wild Cretan shepherds and pirates.
* “Why the Classics”: see Collected Poems 1956–1998, “Apocryphas: The Mercy of the Executioner”.
1“Si Altamira…”: If Altamira is the capital of the art of wall painting, Lascaux is its Versailles.
The Collected Prose Page 82
