Poetry, myths, Europe: Zbigniew Herbert

Zbigniew Herbert could be called a conciliator. Not because he was a great prophet of peace, a missionary for togetherness, but because in his works he united so much contradiction or at least remoteness that you would think that it had always belonged together: ancient myths and the modern world of the 20th century, martial law in Socialist Poland and universal human values, sincerity and irony, Polish poetry and the Suhrkamp-Verlag … well, the publishing house also had some influence on the last two. Who was this Pole who ranks not just among the most important authors of this German publishing house, but among the greatest in Polish literature in recent decades?

Even before Herbert was born there on 29 October 1924, Lwów was a city which was also contradictory, troubled, cosmopolitan and, unfortunately, shaken. So the parallels with the life and work of one of its famous sons are obvious. Did this somehow dictate the path that Herbert took? When the poet was born, the town was called Lwów, because it was Polish and no longer Habsburg German. Today, it lies in the west of the Ukraine and is called Львів (Lviv). It was an important centre of Austrian, Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish life and yet was so far in the East that it was almost an outpost of Europe.

Zbigniew Herbert was still in school when Hitler and Stalin virtually divided Poland up amongst themselves. First, Eastern Poland fell under Soviet occupation in 1939, and with it Lwów. In 1941, Herbert then lived through the capturing of the city by the Wehrmacht. Despite this, he still managed to achieve his school-leaving certificate in 1943, but underground. He also completed his studies ‘underground’, studying Polish philology, and it is possible that he was also active in the Polish Home Army, Armia Krajowa or AK, of the Polish resistance. This went on until the Red Army recaptured his home town in 1944 and the Polish town was moved a little closer towards the West. Herbert’s academic career led him to Kraków and Toruń where he studied subjects, such as economics, law and philosophy. But one constant in his life remained his mistrust of politics.

The would-be saviour is not always a friend – there is a reason why Herbert’s début work “Struna Światła” (“Chord of light”) did not appear until 1956, three years after Stalin’s death. During this “thaw period”, the state censorship controlled by the Soviet government was eased. And although they were not explicitly ideological or concerned with everyday politics, Herbert’s poems aroused the suspicions of the authorities in the Socialist state. Later critics accuse the poet of having sold out to socialist realism, the state-approved from of artistic expression. And although Herbert did travel a lot, he never completely turned his back on his home country, like Czesław Miłosz, Nobel prize winner and Herbert’s friend. Others say he skilfully outplayed the censors and conveyed humanity.

What was also left over from the horrors of the war was his mistrust of Germany. Or of the Germans? In 1991, he wrote a poem for his “beloved mortal enemy“ – his translator Klaus Staemmler, authors and friends, such as Horst Bienek, Michael Krüger and Sibylle von Eicke, the publishing editor Günther Busch. The Austrian translator Oskar Jan Tauschinski is also mentioned. “The path from the trenches to the ale house was long", wrote Herbert – which is a little surprising since his international renown was due in a large part to his success and his patrons in Germany.

During his lifetime, Zbigniew Herbert was already classed as one of the “great modern” writers of Polish literature, alongside Wisława Szymborska and Czesław Miłosz. Right up to the end of his life, he was also considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature which, unfortunately, in contrast to the other two authors, remained out of his reach. (It is largely assumed that the Socialist Polish secret police Służba Bezpieczeństwa, SB, were partly responsible for the poet and essayist not receiving this highest award.)

But Herbert was also one of the most important authors with Suhrkamp, the German publisher that publishes the “great, important, serious” literature in Germany. In 1959, just three years after it was first published in Poland, they published “Chord of light”. Heinrich Kunstmann, lecturer in Slavic studies at the Munich University, translated Herbert’s radio plays that were broadcast on German radio between 1959 and 1964. During this time, his works were also translated and published in England, in “Encounter”, “Observer” and on the BBC, to name but a few. But his breakthrough came with “Poems” in 1964 (translated into German by Karl Dedecius) and a selection of his work “Barbarzyńca w ogrodzie” as a German edition, translated by Walter Tiel, entitled “Ein Barbar in einem Garten” (Barbarian in the garden) in 1965. Herbert was brought to the attention of the new head of the publishing house, Siegfried Unseld, by the Slavist Kunstmann. Unseld was excited by Herbert’s poems and a friendship soon developed between the publisher and the poet.

In the beginning, he did not get very much money from Suhrkamp. But over time, the publisher financed Herbert’s trips and study visits, not just in West Germany but throughout Europe as well. Herbert enjoyed Mediterranean culture. His “Im Vaterland der Mythen” (In the fatherland of myths) was created especially for the German market – a literary travel guide or travel report through Greece. Herbert had always been impressed by the ancient world. He came back to these Greek myths time and again and knew how to transport them to the here and now in his verses and his prose.

The “poet between cultures“ deconstructed these myths and legends. He took away the sublime and showed it to be the excess. What remained was human. He sympathised with the minotaur. “Nike is at her most beautiful, when she hesitates,” he wrote. He always thought about those who are marginalised, forgotten. When he visited Gothic cathedrals, he appreciated their beauty, but the emotional admiration was foreign to him. Instead, he remembered the people in the stone quarries without whom these structures would not be possible, and he remembered their suffering “There is no other path to the world than the path of compassion.”

For many people, it is the splendour and grandeur in the stories of Gods and heroes from ancient times that attracts them. The German author Jan Wagner calls Herbert a “poet addicted to truth”, but that does not meant that he did not appreciate the myths and legends. He was fascinated by them because he considered the “Gods and sagas as petrified experiences of mankind”. And in this way, he found the reconciliation between these two sides of human existence, the myth and the truth.

He seems to have found his own personal reconciliation with Germany long before 1991. It is said that (West) Berlin was his favourite city. During a three-year stay there from 1967 to 1970, he was an active member of the - German-speaking - cultural scene. In 1970, he was a guest on a German talk show on the subject of “Great days? 22 June 1941 – The invasion of the Soviet Union by German troops”. He fell out with the literary critic Walter Höllerer when he defended a piece by Martin Walser. Herbert travelled through Italy, the Balkans, the Netherlands, England and Austria, which was particularly important to his career. He was also a guest lecturer at the renowned University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The second time Herbert came to Germany was at the invitation of the Inter Nationes association, an organisation whose mission was to disseminate German cultural heritage abroad, a kind of Goethe Institute (with which the association actually merged in 2000). The association was close to the Federal Press Office. The fact that the Polish poet was invited in the middle of 1966 is remarkable because the official turning point in the Federal Republic’s Poland policy under Willy Brandt was not to come into effect until December 1966. During this time, Herbert Günter got to know Grass, Günter Kunert and Ernst Jandl. In the years that followed, Herbert himself was to become a cultural mediator. He supported his publishing house in the search for Polish authors and translated Max Frisch’s drama “Triptych” into his mother tongue.

When he was awarded the City of Münster prize for European Poetry in 1997, his travelling days were well behind him. Jurek Becker accepted the prize for him because the poet was suffering from severe asthma. On the occasion of this prize, Herbert wrote: “I don’t really care if you bestow this honour on me as a European. I never stopped being a citizen of this bloody peninsular which – with a few exceptions – is so full of a lack of freedom, tyranny, suffering, exploitation, hypocrisy, pyres and wars.” Of course, Becker did not read these lines out at the prize ceremony. They are also an astonishingly harsh judgement of Europe. Otherwise, he would not have had this prize awarded – and today would not generally be considered by many as a Polish poet, but as a European poet from Poland.

Durs Grünbein, a well known author from Dresden, wrote in an open letter about how he followed the call of Herbert’s books and travelled to Orvieto and Amsterdam to see the works of art of Italian and Dutch masters. Is it not the enthusiasm, the respect, the curiosity for the shared and yet foreign history and culture in Europe that sums up this Europe? Then every Grünbein that travels is a success. But what is success anyway? This could be a question posed by “Mr Cogito”. Mr Cogito is a recurring figure in Herbert’s work. As a type of lyrical alter ego of the author, Mr Cogito reflects on a whole range of things which - typically - appear contradictory but yet do actually belong together: life as a Pole 30 years after the Second World War and fundamental existential questions; cowardice, suffering and death on the one hand and his relationship with his parents on the other.

“Ultimately, Cogito’s ‘weaknesses’ – his inability to have abstract thoughts, his rejection of dogmatism, his very human, petty fears and anxieties, his feelings of inadequacy and the associated self-irony - become his greatest strengths and virtues.” This is how the American literary critic R. K. Wilson summarises what makes Herbert Zbigniew’s poems so human and consequently so important.

In spite of his many international awards, the man from Lemberg remained a sociable person. Many of his companions from Germany, Poland and America highlight his charming nature. One biographer claims that he was also a bon vivant at times who was not averse to romance.[1]

Zbigniew Herbert died in Warsaw (Warszawa) on 28 July 1998 . He was posthumously awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Order Orła Białego, the highest civilian honour in Poland. In 2008 and 2018, i.e. ten and twenty years after his death, Poland created the Zbigniew Herbert years to remember him, with events being held in Austria as well. In 2010 the Herbert Foundation (Fundacja im. Zbigniewa Herberta) was founded which has awarded an international prize for literature every year since 2013 (in 2020 to Durs Grünbein already mentioned). His works have been translated into 38 languages (which puts him in fifth place on the list of Polish authors) – and into English several times. They are still published today and read and critiqued by literary scholars.

 

Marek Firlej, January 2021

 

Sources
 

Bodin, Per‐Arne: The barbarian and the mirror. An analysis of one poem in Zbigniew Herbert’s poetical cycle Pan Cogito, in: Scando-Slavica 27 (1981), p. 15–25. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00806768108600787 (no free access)

Chojnowski, Przemysław: Herbert i jego tłumacz, in: Postcriptum polonistyczne 9 (2012), p. 235–241. http://www.postscriptum.us.edu.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/ps2012_1_25.pdf

Fait, Ricarda: Zbigniew Herbert und seine liebgewonnenen Todfeinde, in: DIALOG FORUM | Themen aus Deutschland und Polen, as at: 29 May 2019, https://forumdialog.eu/2019/05/29/zbigniew-herbert-und-seine-liebgewonnenen-todfeinde/.

interia.pl / RMF.FM: Herbert i Gombrowicz nie dostali Nobla przez SB?, in: wydarzenia.interia.pl, as at: 21 January 2021, https://wydarzenia.interia.pl/polska/news-herbert-i-gombrowicz-nie-dostali-nobla-przez-sb,nId,857034.

Poetry Foundation: Zbigniew Herbert, in: Poetry Foundation. as at: 21 January 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/zbigniew-herbert.

Grünbein, Durs: An und über Zbigniew Herbert: Bei lebendiger Dichtung verschwinden, in: FAZ.NET, 21 January 2021. https://www.faz.net/1.7073998

Kraszewski, Charles, Review: Joanna Siedlecka, Pan od poezji: o Zbigniewie Herbercie [Lord of Poetry: About Zbigniew Herbert], in: The Polish Review 47 (2002), 416–420. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25779351

Levine, Madeline G. / Baranczak, Stanislaw: A Fugitive from Utopia: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert, in: The Slavic and East European Journal 32 (1988), p. 675. https://www.jstor.org/stable/308793 (no free access)

Literarisches Colloquium Berlin: Ontologie aus einfachen Dingen. Zbigniew Herbert wiedergelesen. With documentary footage from the sixties., in: Literarisches Colloquium Berlin, as at: 2019, https://lcb.de/programm/zbigniew-herbert-wiedergelesen-tomasz-rozycki-jan-wagner-dorota-stroinska/.

Możejko, Edward: Review: Zbigniew Herbert. Das Land, nach dem ich mich sehne. Michael Krüger, ed. Karl Dedecius et al., trs., in: World Literature Today 63 (1989), p. 131. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40145208?refreqid=excelsior%3A99859b2c44c81a9303fb7e3f131ed135 (no free access)

Sobolewska, Justyna: Polscy pisarze i ich sukcesy za granicą, in: Polityka.pl, as at: 6 September 2011, https://www.polityka.pl/tygodnikpolityka/kultura/1518984,1,polscy-pisarze-i-ich-sukcesy-za-granica.read.

Wagner, Jan: Im Königreich der Dinge. Insbesondere über Zbigniew Herbert. 3. Bamberger Poetikvortrag (Bamberger Poetikvorträge). Berlin: Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpfWmJ1AAHc

Wilson, R. K.: Rezension: Zbigniew Herbert. Pan Cogito, in: Books Abroad 49 (1975), p. 355. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40129420?origin=crossref (no free access)

Zajas, Paweł: Barbarzyńca w ogrodzie Suhrkampa. Zbigniew Herbert i jego niemiecki wydawca, in: Teksty Drugie 5 (2015), p. 386–410. http://rcin.org.pl/publication/81056/edition/64953/barbarzynca-w-ogrodzie-suhrkampa-zbigniew-herbert-i-jego-niemiecki-wydawca-zajas-pawel?language=pl