The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  A. But doesn’t doing that make poetry something cold, abstract, cut off from life? Your explanation of the origin, the cause for “Two Drops” clarifies a lot for me, but what about the reader who doesn’t know the explanation?

  B. It’s not possible, nor is it even necessary, to explain poems by describing the moment that inspired them. That’s why at first I didn’t want to talk about my life. A literary work, like any work of art, has to be independent, stand on its own feet, separate from the experiences that summoned it from the murky realm of images, emotions, intuitions. It has to be captured in language in a way that speaks to the imagination. I’ve just been writing an essay on Minoan culture, which was discovered on Crete seventy years ago and has been troubling scholars ever since. That culture’s discoverer, Evans, and other archaeologists too, passed on to us the ruins of splendid palaces, frescoes, marvelous pottery from three thousand years ago; looking at those masterpieces, one feels admiration and wonder. But we know very little about the lives of the Minoans and how their minds worked, because their script (so-called Linear B and hieroglyphics) has not been deciphered. By that I want to say that only in language can man become fully manifest—his troubles and joys, the values he accepted, his beliefs.

  A. I’d like to return to my question, though. What hampers readers in reading contemporary poetry is—it seems to me—its chilliness, abstractness, and excessive intellectualism. Have you never had that kind of reproach directed at you?

  B. You’re touching on a very crucial question and here in turn we have to clear up some misunderstandings that have grown up around contemporary poetry. I won’t talk about all contemporary poetry, because I can’t, it’s made up of so many trends and for many of them I feel no sympathy. But I’ll talk about how I see these things. However, let me turn our roles around for a moment and ask you a question. What do you think is most important to an author?

  A. Being read, and being read with recognition, or even adoration.

  B. Certainly, but even more important than that is that the reader accepts what I would call the rules of the game. The cardinal principle is understanding the author’s intentions, his aims, his poetics, his world. This has nothing to do with an uncritical attitude to art, but you can’t expect an author to be everything, simultaneously playful and sad, profound and easy, learned and a simpleton. A writer invites a reader to a game, a serious game, a game of the imagination, and he can only be judged on how he carries on the game, that is to say, how he fulfills his promises in the framework of the convention or contract he has proposed. That is the only way to criticize a book. But let’s get back to that darn intellectualism of contemporary poetry.

  A. Why darn…?

  B. Because it’s based on a misunderstanding which I’ll try to clear up. It’s true that the majority of readers like poems that are—let’s say—emotional, that is, poems in which we can easily recognize emotions we know. So you have the sunset and the melancholy feeling that accompanies it, or the mournful thought of someone who has passed away, or the joy of meeting someone dear whom we haven’t seen in a long time. I don’t at all mean to ridicule such feelings…

  A. Especially since in the hands of a Słowacki1 or Kochanowski2…

  B. Exactly. I am downcast, Lord, Lamentations, etc. But returning to myself, I want to say that in my attitude to emotions there is a certain suspicion or reserve, because I’ve seen too many explosions of enthusiasm or explosions of hatred toward persons or things that didn’t deserve them. And then the control of reason is invaluable.

  A. So, you are an intellectual poet.

  B. I don’t like that label, because I don’t know what it means. I only know that I haven’t written a single line to dazzle anybody with my knowledge or erudition. And apart from that I had an experience that I will permit myself to cite here. In the days when I was studying philosophy we were supposed to observe selected children in kindergarten and note down on big sheets which activities were an expression of their will, reason, or emotion. I quickly came to the conclusion that you can’t divide and separate these three spheres of the soul. That goes for adults, too.

  A. But the subject of your poems is not direct experience but rather reflection on the world?

  B. Even if that’s the case, it doesn’t in any way exclude an emotional attitude. After all, one can and even should think passionately.

  A. All the same you’ll agree that certain ideas, their predominance in poetry, can make reading more difficult.

  B. Perhaps. But please understand me rightly: a poem that sounds like a record playing an old tango doesn’t appeal to me. I’d like, and here is my faith in the reader, for him to be my ally, for him to work with me. I think that writers who offer easy entertainment have contempt for their readers. I treat a reader like a partner, with full respect for his difference, his powers of judgment and criticism.

  A. Do you agree with the claim that in your poems content is more important than form, that is, that you put a greater emphasis on “what” is said than on “how” it’s said?

  B. School got us accustomed to a division into content and form; you no doubt remember how teachers used to torment us with exercises based on giving a paraphrase of a poem. Obviously that’s nonsense. It’s only in bad poems that you can separate content from form, noble thoughts from the clumsy expression of those thoughts. The idea that a poet is someone who pours his content in different little bottles of form is completely wrong. One bottle is a sonnet, another is an octave, another is so-called blank verse. In fact, content is inseparable from form from the very beginning of the creative act.

  When I write I’m not trying to astonish a reader with a wealth of similes, with outlandish language or refined rhythms and images. In my poems I’d like words and their configurations to be transparent.

  A. What does that mean?

  B. That means that they shouldn’t catch the reader’s attention, they shouldn’t prompt him to exclaim “What a genuis!”, but they should show reality in the purest and most transparent way.

  A. So your poetic ideal is objective poetry, otherwise known as classical poetry—as distinct from stormy, emotional, subjective Romantic poetry?

  B. Some critics have been inclined to define it that way. But for me the question of the quarrels between various schools, tendencies, or poetics isn’t the most important thing. There’s a quarrel in poetry that’s much more essential, namely that of attitudes.

  A. Could you expand on that?

  B. I think every beginning poet tries to give himself out to himself and to the people he’s close to as an exceptional person, unlike anybody else, tries to demonstrate his incomparable talent. But if a writer persists in the trade or calling after he turns thirty, he is inevitably confronted with the thought—why do I write, in defense of what values, against what injustice? Talent is a valuable thing, but it goes to waste without character. What do I mean without character? I mean without a conscious moral attitude toward reality, without a stubborn, uncompromising borderline between what is good and what is evil. For that reason writers are valued not only for their skill but for being uncompromising, for their courage, their disinterestedness—which are extra-aesthetic qualities.

  A. One of your volumes of poetry is titled Study of the Object. You’ve written many poems whose “protagonists” are a stone, a stool, a knocker, a chair—in other words, banal objects of everyday life. One could describe that as one of your spheres of interest. But then there’s another, opposite, strongly contrasting group of poems, like “Elegy of Fortinbras,” devoted to mythology, history, historical or literary figures. How do you resolve this contradiction?

  B. One shouldn’t resolve contradictions. But one should be conscious of them. A work of art isn’t a scientific theory that has to be internally coherent. We live in a world of contradictions and we ourselves are the victims of contradictory ideas, impulses, imaginings. And I don’t think moving between two poles is evidence of a weak personality at all.

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nbsp; A. But does it seem right to you to divide your poems—as I have—in a very general way into poems about objects and poems about culture?

  B. That is a division according to themes, and so to some extent it helps in an initial orientation. But you’re probably interested in knowing why I wrote both poems about a stool and about Hamlet, about the banal quotidian and sublime cultural figures?

  A. Yes, because there must have been some reasons guiding you…

  B. Then I’ll try to explain it. I’ve lived through—if not personally then as a witness—more than one compromised ideology, many a breakdown of an artificially constructed image of reality, a capitulation of faith in the face of facts. At those times the domain of objects, the domain of nature seemed to be a point of support, as well as a point of departure for the creation of an image of the world that might accord with our experience. After the departure of false prophets, objects showed their innocent faces, so to speak, faces untarnished by lies. It’s connected to an old dream of poets…

  A. Of Arcadia…

  B. Of a paradise, a place of human happiness. But poets do not have power over the world. Their only kingdom is speech. Only in that sphere are they sovereign rulers and legislators.

  A. But language is a common medium of communication for all people.

  B. That’s exactly where the problem lies. Language is an impure instrument of expression. Tortured on a daily basis, made banal, subjected to base treatment. So the dream of poets is to reach the virgin meaning of words, to give things their proper names, as Norwid says. “Let words mean only what they mean and not against whom they are used.” That’s a quote from another great poet. For me the dialogue with objects was such an attempt to reach the pure sources of speech. It was also a rebellion against liars and swindlers.

  A. And that other pole of your work? Poems about mythology, history? Critics say you are a poet of culture.

  B. I don’t take that as an insult, although from the lips of people who demand absolute innovation of artists it sounds like a reproach. This is a very serious problem, so I’ll take the liberty of laying out what I have to say more or less systematically. It seems to me absolutely essential for every artist to work on evolving his own active relationship to tradition, if possible to tradition as a whole and not just one generation, as some young poets often do, sticking out their tongues at their predecessors, and forgetting about Homer, Aeschylus, Horace, Dante, and Shakespeare.

  A. So you propose a flight into the past?

  B. That’s not what I’m proposing at all. I said “active relationship to tradition,” a recognition that we are a link in a great chain of generations, which lays a responsibility on us. People often talk about a “cultural legacy.” But culture is not inherited mechanically, like a house, let’s say, left by someone’s parents. We have to labor for it in the sweat of our brow, acquire it for ourselves, prove it on ourselves. And here the justification and explanation that we live in an extraordinary time won’t help us, because every age of humanity has been extraordinary. It’s also wrong to assume that culture lives and is sustained by itself, stored in libraries and museums. History teaches us that peoples and their achievements can be almost perfectly destroyed. During the war I saw libraries on fire. The same fire consumed wise and stupid books, good and evil books. I understood then that nihilism is the greatest threat to culture. The nihilism of fire, stupidity, hatred.

  A. And yet you return to memories, to personal experience?

  B. Yes, although I make an effort to be as objective as I can and not to talk about myself. I see I’m not very good at it.

  A. So perhaps you could say in closing what culture is to you and why there are so many allusions to the Bible, to mythology and history in your poetry?

  B. The basic function of culture is to build values worth living for. There’s the old notion of the humanist, one dear and meaningful to me, though ridiculous and unfashionable to others. For others it means an aging gentleman who reads the classics but is lost in the modern world; a helpless relic of the past. But a humanist is someone who tries to assimilate, to make himself familiar with and make his own the widest possible area of reality. To create a world, or at least an image of the world, to man’s measure—the measure of his capacity for understanding and feeling. Why do I return to Biblical or historical themes in my poems? I never do it to wow readers. Nor is it in my view a flight from reality. Fortunately the age which opposed mythology to realism is past. Ancient tales and legends contain essential human experiences. And when I write about Apollo and Marsyas, for example, I’m not just copying the myth from a handbook of Greek mythology, I’m trying to read an old tale about a cruel duel anew and answer the question what content, what truth is still current and alive in it. Not just for myself but I hope for my readers as well.

  1973

  THE PRESENCE OF HISTORY1

  I FIND MYSELF IN a pretty awkward situation. I’m supposed to talk on the subject of Gegenwart der Geschichte, the presence of history, not being a professional historian, just barely an amateur and that, I fear, only for masochistic reasons. In addition, the meaning of current events eludes my—surely quite limited—powers of understanding. So I am competent in neither the sphere of Gegenwart, nor that of Geschichte.

  We are all, however, all without exception, embedded in history, or to use the macabre image, we are prisoners of history. To put it more precisely, not all of us: to some it still seems that they enjoy an illusory freedom, others are now under investigation, some are already in the dock. As for myself, I think I have already been given a guilty verdict. After a verdict you have a lot of time, various everyday cares and worries fall by the wayside, so you can devote yourself to serious studies—of the prison system, for example—or you can simply philosophize. Not only the work of Boethius but many other valuable books have been written in such circumstances.

  I would now like to say how I understand the somewhat enigmatic theme of our discussion: the presence of history. I assume the aim of our encounter is to consider a fairly universal phenomenon, namely the disappearance, the dying away of historical consciousness in industrial society. One can understand the process, explain it and call it inevitable. In the construction of a brave new world the past is a hindrance, an obstacle, a superfluous ballast—like the perhaps pretty but not very functional or useful buildings of centuries past to those who are planning new sunlit neighborhoods, new houses with their windows open on the future. We are probably all lovers of air, light, greenery—but it seems to me that the past does not allow itself easily to be erased with the aid of bulldozers.

  I said “disappearance of historical consciousness in an industrial society” and I realize that is a hypothesis, an assumption, a subjective feeling that I can’t support with any statistics. Someone might reply that it’s not like that at all, because books on the Germans, Celts, and Hittites enjoy enormous popularity, and a book on a dictator’s sexual neuroses can always count on an enthusiastic reception. But interest in a historical subject is not equivalent to what I called historical consciousness, which implies a sense of continuity and the inescapable presence of time past in time present.

  It seems we are all fascinated by our own exceptionality, by the sense that we live in incomparable times, without analogy to what came before. It is a kind of civilizational narcissism. The past is moving away from us as rapidly as the earth from an interplanetary spaceship. Light years cannot be broken down into generations. Cosmic time is beginning to compete with human time.

  So it is not strange that we do not follow our ancestors and do not turn for advice, instruction, models of behavior, or ideals, to the so-called treasure-house of the past. That storehouse of experiences seems to us suspect, ambiguous, dubious. We don’t really know what to do with it. In any case, it seems we cannot draw from studying the crooked paths of humanity any rational premises to guide our conduct in the here and now. History is not a popular subject of study for the young, is not an incentive to t
he actions of pragmatic individuals at the age of adulthood; it is at most a melancholy consolation for the elderly.

  No one denies that the past exists, although we try to push it under the surface of consciousness. It exists, because it stands in the way of politicians, urbanists, pedagogues. It’s big, mute, heavy, awkward. Even if it’s dead—as some claim—it can’t be hidden or destroyed without a trace.

  One of the real reasons people regard the past with distaste is the fact that many Europeans have no particular reason to be proud of what took place on our continent in the last several decades. It’s pleasant to engage with history when one has a sense of one’s own innocence, righteousness, and serenity. Then it’s easy to pass judgment on the past, defend the oppressed, and brand the tyrants. But the slaughter of Samians on the orders of the young Pericles, the crusade against the Albigensians, the destruction of Aztec civilization by Cortez—spook us because they have analogues in recent history. History turns into a balance sheet of conscience—it condemns, reminds, robs us of peace.

  If the future account of the times we live in is going to be a synthesis, a critical edition of all the diaries in the world, plus documents as yet unknown to us, I wonder whether it’s worth living another 25 years to find out how I was swindled and who was chiefly to blame. Is it worth frantically holding onto this life another quarter century to read in a diary what the secretary general of the United Nations felt in the depths of his diplomatic soul when he accepted a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Prague in 1975 A.D., or what Pope Paul VI talked about with Daddy Idi Amin in the same year? Speaking for myself (I’m in the position of a condemned man, whose instinct for self-preservation tells him he should rid himself of morbid curiosity) I can easily die without that knowledge.

  Someone may say that these are all quasi arguments against history drawn from the man in the street, from the feelings of the uneducated masses. But perhaps that’s exactly what it’s all about: I’d like to understand the resistance of the average person to history.