The Collected Poems

T
HE PRESENT BOOK contains the nine collections of poetry that Zbigniew Herbert published during his lifetime, from his late debut,
Chord of Light,
which appeared in 1956, to
Epilogue to a Storm,
the collection that appeared a few months before Herbert's death in July 1998. Unpublished or uncollected poems from the poet's archive have not been included; Herbert's English-language readers will have to wait until a definitive edition of Herbert's poetry exists in Poland before a “collected” in the most literal sense can be assembled in English. Nevertheless, this book does gather together the main body of his published poems for the first time, preserving the order of the individual collections as they initially appeared.

With the exception of the last, which Herbert was already too ill to edit properly, these collections were solidly constructed as unifed wholes. Throughout his writing life, Herbert fought against considerable odds to retain basic control over the form in which his work was sent into the world. He was constantly confronted with the problems of a writer working under varying degrees of censorship. J. M. Coetzee, in an essay in the collection
Giving Offense,
has aptly described this struggle as one in which building for “the test of the classic”—that of endurance—was also Herbert's best strategy against the “figure of the censor” in literary culture. He combined a singular sensitivity to the drama of power with a desire to thwart those who would trim the body of his work to fit any ideological—or ideal—order.

Collected Poems
reprints the seventy-nine poems chosen and translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott, and published as
Selected Poems
in the Penguin Modern European Poets series in 1968, under the editorship of A. Alvarez; these poems have been inserted into the sequence of the original Polish collections. These fine translations were Herbert's first extensive
introduction to the English-speaking world. They have been retained here unchanged—with one exception. In any circumstances I would be hesitant to “revise” others' translations, and I was particularly reluctant to tamper with Scott's and Milosz's well-known versions. For this reason, and because it may throw some light on Herbert's poetry as a whole, I will add a few words on the one small change I made.

In the poem “Apollo and Marsyas” the fourth stanza reads in Polish:

Milosz and Scott originally translated this as follows:

I chose to remove the “aa” added, restoring the simple ‘A” of Herbert's poem. To my sense it is crucial that though this poem is “composed”
around
a cry of pain, Herbert does not explicitly
sound
it in the poem, but points to it and portrays it in a series of metamorphoses—a landscape, a choir, a petrified nightingale. To translate it into a cry is to remove animating ambiguities in the poem: Who perceives this sound, and as what? What, if anything, does the sound “express” or indicate? Who is it who describes the body's landscape in the poem's indented section—is this Apollo's aestheticized reading of Marsyas's pain, or is the poet showing us a mortal beauty hidden from the god because he is immortal? What is the nature of this “real duel” between god and silene—and what would constitute victory?

From Herodotus'
Histories
via Plato's
Symposium,
Ovid's
Metamorphoses,
Dante's invocation to Apollo as the flayer of Marsyas in the opening canto of the
Paradiso,
and Titian's famous
The Flaying of Marsyas,
right up to Anish Kapoor's 2002 installation
Marsyas,
exhibited at the Tate Modern in London, this myth itself metamorphoses throughout history, growing and shedding aesthetic, moral, political, and religious meanings. Herbert's
poem defies any attempt to pin its terms to a stable set of metaphors; rather, the poet reintroduces the knot of rival meanings the story accrued over centuries and makes them reverberate at the core of the poem, provoking questions about the relation between human and non-human sounds, between pain and creation, art and compassion, eros and disgust.

For Herbert the sphere of myth is an intensification and complication of reality, never a refuge. Myths are treacherous, subject to all sorts of manipulation for political advantage, as in the prose poem “Cernunnos.” Sometimes it is not myths that fail man but man who shows himself too petty to inhabit them, slipping through their structure like plankton through a net—as in Herbert's rewriting of the Biblical story of Jonah. Frozen into a solid form, on the other hand, myths are deadly; perhaps this is why “Apollo and Marsyas” closes with a scene of petrification: the exact opposite of Ovid's version of the story, which ends in the transformation of the creature Marsyas into the name of a clear river.

In my reading, this is a truly inexhaustible poem and, in its attempt to push past the confines of modernism, one of the most important in postwar European poetry. It resonates strangely with a poem published in the same year, 1961, but arising in a very different personal and literary context: Paul Celan's “Die Silbe Schmerz” (“The Syllable Pain”), a poem that also relies on the tension between articulate speech and inarticulate pain to probe the mysteries of world creation. I consider it a translator's job in such a case to retain the fullest possible range of complexity; the difference between “A” and “Aaa” may seem small, but seen in the light of Herbert's deep participation in the aesthetic and philosophical quandaries of modernity, it marks an abyss.

I
OWE A
considerable debt to previous translators of Herbert, notably to John and Bogdana Carpenter—who not only acted as Herbert's translators over many years but contributed much to his reception and recognition in the English-speaking world—but also to all those who produced versions of individual poems for anthologies: Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, Adam Czerniawski, and Robert Mezey, who included a translation of the poem “Sequoia” done in collaboration with Jacek Niecko in a recent Library of America
Poems of the American West.
There may be others of whom I am unaware. Great poets deserve many translators, and I hope existing translations will continue to be read and new translations emerge, throwing a new light on the poems and ensuring their continued life in English.

I'm deeply grateful to all the friends and colleagues who read my versions over several years, and especially to James Leigh, who read them all with a musician's ear; to Dan Halpern for having confidence in me; to Millicent Bennett of Ecco for her hard work and solidarity; to Henryk Citko of the Herbert archive in Warsaw for patient and painstaking assistance with textual, visual, and biographical materials; to Marysia Dzieduszycka for her passionate devotion and practical intelligence; to Leonard Gardner for lugging the weight; to Robert Hass for good counsel; to Krystyna and Ryszard Krynicki for an unstinting supply of books and textual first aid; to Gabriel Leigh and Ria Loohuizen for staunch moral support; to Jessy Kaner and Derek Miller for a quiet flat to read proofs; to Maya Wodecka and Adam Zagajewski for aiding and abetting the project in myriad ways; and, above all, to Katarzyna Herbert, for the good humor, generosity, and grace with which she responded to inquiries and gave warm and unfailing encouragement.

Alissa Valles
Warsaw
May 2006

W
HERE 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 Lwów 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 Lwów; 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.