9“Es ist eine Feinmalerei”: It is a piece of fine art.
10Witold Gombrowicz…upupienie: (1904–1969) Polish novelist and dramatist. “Upupienie,” from the Polish pupa, or imposing on an individual an inferior and immature role, making an ass of him.
11Robert Fludd: also known as Robertus de Fluctibus (1574–1637) English physician, astrologer, and mystic. He was not a member of the Rosicrucians, but defended their thoughts in the Apologia Compendiaria of 1616. He had a celebrated exchange of views with Johannes Kepler concerning the scientific and hermetic approaches to knowledge.
12Studion: Simon Studion, 1543–1605. German teacher, poet, historian, archaeologist, and apocryphal writer; the author of the Naometria (Temple Measure, 1596), a combination of mathematics, laws of nature, plan of the building of the allegorical Temple, and prophecy.
13Jacob Boehme and Theophrast Bombastus of Hohenheim: Böhme (1575–1624) German Christian mystic and theologian; von Hohenheim (1493–1541) physician, botanist, alchemist, astrologer, and general occultist. He later took up the name Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, and still later the title Paracelsus (equal to or greater than Celsus, a Roman encyclopedist, Aulus Cornelius Celsus from the first century known for his tract on medicine). He is also credited for giving zinc its name and is regarded as the first systematic botanist.
14Christian Rosenkreutz: legendary founder of the Rosicrucian Order.
1Hoorn and Egmont: Philip de Montmorency (1524–1568), also known as Count of Hoorn, became stadtholder of Guelders in 1555, an admiral of Flanders, and a knight of the Golden Fleece in 1556; Lamoral, Count of Egmont, Prince of Gavere (1522–1568), general and statesman in Flanders just before the start of the Eighty Years’ War; their execution helped spark the national uprising that eventually led to the independence of the Netherlands.
2William the Silent: William I, Prince of Orange (1533–1584), (Dutch: Willem de Zwijger), or William of Orange, main leader of the Dutch revolt against the Spanish that set off the Eighty Years’ War and resulted in the formal independence of the United Provinces in 1648.
3Emanuel van Meteren: (1535–1612) Flemish historian and Consul for the traders of the Low Countries in London.
4Duke of Alva: Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel, 3rd Duke of Alba (1507–1582), Spanish general and governor of the Spanish Netherlands (1567–1573), nicknamed “the Iron Duke” by the Protestants of the Low Countries because of his harsh rule and cruelty.
5Don Luis de Requesens: Luis de Zúñiga y Requesens (1528–1576), Spanish governor of the Netherlands, succeeded the Duke of Alba and governed in a time of crisis under Philip II.
6Hendrik Vroom: Hendrik Cornelisz Vroom (1566–1640) Dutch painter, introduced the marine subject to western European painting as an independent genre.
7La Hollande est de religion d’Erasme: Holland is of the religion of Erasmus.
8Jakob Adriaensz Backer: (1609–1651) was a prolific Dutch Golden Age painter, mainly of portraits and religious, pastoral, and mythological subjects.
1Jan van Olden Barneveldt: also Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547–1619) Dutch statesman, who played an important role in the Dutch struggle for independence from Spain.
1William Ysbrantz Bontekoe: (1587–1657) was a skipper in the Dutch East India Company (VOC), who made only one voyage for the company (1618–1625); a journal of his adventures appeared in 1646 as the Journal or memorable description of the East Indian voyage of Willem Bontekoe from Hoorn, including many remarkable and dangerous things that happened to him there.
1Jan Pietersoon Coen: (1587–1629) was an officer of Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the early seventeenth century, holding two terms as its Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies.
1Jan Swammerdam: (1637–1680) biologist and microscopist. His work on insects demonstrated that the various phases during the life of an insect—egg, larva, pupa, and adult—are different forms of the same animal. He came under the influence of the Flemish mystic, Antoinette Bourignon, but did not give up his scientific studies. He died at age 43 of malaria. In 1737–1738, a half century after his death, his papers appeared in Latin as Biblia naturae Book of Nature).
1Cornelis Drebbel: (1572–1633) Dutch inventor of the first navigable submarine in 1620; he contributed to the development of measurement and control systems, optics, and chemistry. Towards the end of his life, in 1633, Drebbel was involved in a plan to drain the Fens around Cambridge, while living in near-poverty running an ale house in England.
1Jacob van Heemskerk: (1567–1607) Dutch explorer and later admiral in the Battle of Gibraltar, after which he died of cannonball wounds. With Willem Barents, he wintered in the Arctic (1596–97) in a house made of driftwood and ship’s timber.
2Willem Barents: Willem Barentsz (c. 1550–1597) Dutch navigator and explorer, a leader of early expeditions to the far north; died returning from Novaya Zemlya with Jacob van Heemskerk.
3Almond King: Figure from Polish tradition, crowned on the Feast of Three Kings (January 6).
1Anton van Leeuwenhoek: also Antonie van L. (1632–1723) Dutch tradesman and scientist from Delft, the Netherlands, commonly considered to be the first microbiologist. Van Leeuwenhoek acted as the executor when the painter Johannes Vermeer, also of Delft, died in 1675.
1Cornelis Troost: the name ordinarily refers to an Amsterdam painter (1697–1750) of portraits, some of actors (Troost started out as an actor) in famous roles, as well as witty genre scenes.
2Abraham Anslo: perhaps based on Cornelis Claesz Anslo (1592–1646), a Mennonite preacher painted several times by Rembrandt.
1This poem, without a dedication, and slightly altered, appeared in the collection Rovigo (1992).
2Eksekias: Attic potter and painter, representative of the black-figure style, active ca. 550–525 BCE. Nine works signed by Eksekias are known to us, among them the one described in this poem, Dionysus in a Boat, a kylix kept in the State Collection of Ancient Art in Munich.
1The title derives from Rudyard Kipling’s poem of 1919, sent to Herbert in a 1991 letter by his friend Aleksander Schenker, who had translated it into Polish and also offered the following commentary: In 1919, clearly under the impression of the revolutionary movements then sweeping across Europe, Rudyard Kipling wrote a ballad, in which he contrasted the good sense of religious dicta and folk sayings with new ideologies and social experiments. The Copybook Headings of the ballad’s title are precisely the essential maxims that pupils at British schools had to copy into their notebooks. In Kipling’s prophetic vision, societies that depart from the Gods of the Copybook Headings and succumb to the Gods of the Marketplace, or the temptations of fashion, will be deservedly punished. It is interesting that Kipling in his poem uses the Shakespearean phrase “brave new world” (Tempest, Act V) thirteen years before Aldous Huxley popularized it in the title of his famous anti-utopian novel.
2In the 1999 U.S. edition of King of the Ants the title of this piece was mistranslated as Eos, perhaps because Herbert left out the full stops in one version of the manuscript, obscuring the connection between the piece and R. M. Rilke’s poem “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.”
1“In one of his Isthmian Odes, Pindar…”: Pindar’s Fourth Isthmian Ode (3.3).
2Diodorus Siculus: Greek historian of the first century BCE from Agyrion on Sicily. Author of the history [Bibliotheke] in fourteen volumes, of which only Books I–V and XI–XX were preserved intact, the rest existing in fragmented form.
3The Renaissance painter Antonio Pollaiuolo: Antonio del Pollaiuolo (1432–1498), active mainly in Florence. Among his works is the cycle of paintings The Labors of Hercules. His miniature painting on wood, Hercules Fights Antaeus (18x12 cm), is in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
4chthonic: born from the earth, subterranean. In Greek mythology, the chthonic gods are the gods of the underworld and death, but also of fertility—Demeter, Hades, Persephone, among others—as well as the three judges Minos, Radamanthys, and Ajakos.
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p; 5Tingis: now Tangier in northern Morocco. In antiquity, a Phoenician colony, and from ca. 45 A.D. the capital of the Roman province Mauretania Tingitana.
For a long time “Antaeus” was introduced by the following passage, later eliminated:
My attitude to Heracles changed with the passage of years, swayed dramatically from boyish worship to youthful admiration and later even skeptical distance and dislike. For a certain time I entertained the idea of inventing a new biography for him, cleansed of incomprehensible furies and crimes. An impious project. His essence is a splendid mixture of the great and the small, the exalted and the disgusting, the divine and the arch-human.
But even when I distanced myself from the hero, I never lost my admiration for his industry. I know it sounds blasphemous. It’s as if you were to call Aphrodite a pretty girl or Hephaestus an able smith. But I insist: Heracles was industrious as an ant, as a volcano, as a Protestant artisan.
The famous Dodecathlos6 does not cover the hero’s astonishing diligence. The paths of his wanderings run the length and the width of the geography we know or intuit. And what a profligacy of landscapes serving as a backdrop to his wrestling matches with the world—deserts and seas, snowy plains and forests, spirit worlds and stables.
It is a remarkable thing that Heracles accomplished so much as it were in the margins of his main undertakings, working a double shift, so to speak, and even a triple shift. Like a star overburdened with responsibilities, and with a very irregular private life to boot, time and time managing to give charity concerts, he performs disinterested acts that truly can add no shade, no color to his majestic portrait.
Wandering in search of the apple of the Hesperides in the realm of the expansive gardens of the gods, Heracles set Prometheus free, killed the cruel tyrant Busiris7 and fought a duel with Antaeus “along the way.”
6Dodecathlos: Gr. Heracles’ twelve labors.
7Busiris: mythical king of Egypt, who ordered all foreigners to be killed, so that he bring them as a sacrifice to Zeus. He also tried to kill Heracles as he returned from the garden of the Hesperides.
1According to the Archpoet: Homer, Iliad, VIII. 368.
2Hesiod mentions Cerberus twice: Hesiod, Theogony 310–312 and 769–771.
3Kora: Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, taken to the underworld by Hades.
4Andokides: Attic potter, active ca. 540–520 bce; he is associated with the invention of the black figure technique; a number of his vases are decorated in red figure technique. The amphora from the Louvre mentioned here (ca. 520–510 bce) is a red-figure work.
1Gotha almanac: genealogical-diplomatic almanac published in German and French in the German city of Gotha from 1763 to 1944 and from 1956 onward.
1One of the typescripts of the essay includes an epigraph taken from Plutarch, Moralia. On the ingenuity of animals (11):
It is impossible to relate in full detail all the methods of production and storage practiced by ants, but it would be careless to omit them entirely. Nature has, in fact, nowhere else so small a mirror of greater and nobler enterprises. Just as you may see greater things reflected in a drop of water, so among ants there exists the delineation of every virtue. [Tr. H. Cherniss & W. Helmbold]
2“Love and affection are found…”: Iliad, XIV. 216
3Myrmidons: from the Greek word for ant, myrmex. The descendants of the Myrmidons appear at Troy. Iliad IX. 185–191.
4the scholar Jotvues: a lightly coded reference to Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin; in Herbert’s archive there are notes for a story called Typhon (intended as an addition to The King of the Ants), made on the back of an errata slip to J.V. Stalin’s Marxism and Problems of Linguistics.
5the ontological principle of identity: point of departure for the thought of Parmenides of Elea (VI/V century bce).
6apeiron: Gk. infinity, according to Anaximander of Miletus (ca. 610–540 bce) the principle and foundation of all being, infinite and indeterminate matter.
1The armies took their seats…: Iliad, Book II.211–215; from a free translation by Herbert.
2“Or still more gold…”: Iliad, Book II.229–231 from a free translation by Herbert.
3Aetolia: a rocky and barren part of mainland Greece (now the environs of Artinia and Lepanto) without a significant role in Greek cultural history.
4a favorite motif of many painters…: In the State Collection of Ancient Art in Munich there is a famous red-figure goblet with Achilles killing Penthesilea (ca.460 bce).
1Astipalea: island of the Sporades archipelago in the Aegean Sea, and a city of the same name (now Stampalia).
2Ate: personification of the blindness and error that lead to excess and crime. In the Iliad it appears chiefly in impersonal or allegorical form, but in Book XIX (91–95), Homer describes it as a female figure, “the oldest of Zeus’s daughters.”
3Pausanias: Greek writer, geographer, and traveler of the time of Antonin Pius and Marcus Aurelius (ca. 115–ca. 180) the author of Travels in Greece. He tells the story of Cleomedes in Book VI (9, 6–8), dating it to the time of the seventy-second Olympiad, around 488 bce.
1Villa Borghese: Palace with park grounds in Rome, now home to the Borghese Gallery and Museum.
2one of those boys…: perhaps an allusion to the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975).
1In the Herbert archive there is a separate sheet of paper with a fragment from Pliny (Natural History, II, 42) that Herbert seems to have envisioned as an epigraph to Endymion, but never used:
But the wonder of everyone is vanquished by the last star, the one most familiar to the earth, and devised by Nature to serve as a remedy for the shadows of darkness—the Moon. By the riddle of her transformations she has racked the wits of observers, who are ashamed that the star which is nearest should be the one about which we know least…Tr. H. Rackham 1997
2affetuoso: affectionately
3con tenerezza: delicately, sensitively
4Poor Python!: in Greek myth, a dragon or monstrous serpent, son of Hera, who (according to the Homeric Hymn to Apollo cited in Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths) conceived him parthenogenetically upon the wrath of Zeus; identified with Typhon. Consumed mortals at the foot of Mount Parnassus, near Delphi, and Apollo, wishing to build his own oracular site there, killed him with bow and arrows. Zeus established the Pythian Games in his honor.
5Hypnos: son of Night and Erebus, twin brother of Thanatos, the god of death, and the father of Morpheus.
1sons of Aloeus: Otos and Ephialtes, sons of Poseidon, borne to him by Iphimedea (wife of Aloeus). They held Ares, god of war, imprisoned in a cast iron cauldron or box for thirteen months, after which he was freed by Hermes.
2This is how Herodotus described…: Herodotus, History, IV. 62.
1Securitas: Roman personification of security, both of the citizen and the state.
2sine die: without fixing a day for future action or meeting.
3Tertium non datur: No third possibility; the logical principle of the excluded middle, according to which two contradictory statements cannot both be false.
1It was Aristotle who closed the doors of art to him: in the Poetics (1450a/VI) Aristotle writes “Besides, without action there could be no tragedy, but without character there could be…”. (tr. Stephen Halliwell).
2Agrigentum: Gr. Akragas, then Girgenti, and from 1927 onward Agrigento, a city on the southern coast of Scicily, founded by Greek colonists in 581 bce and destroyed many times by the Carthaginians and Romans. It contains the ruins of many temples, i.a. to Hera and Demeter.
3Upelluri: Anatolian (or Hittite) divinity, corresponding to Atlas.
1from Mr Cogito, 1974. Reprinted from Collected Poems.
1Las Hilanderas: oil painting by Diego Vélasquez, held in the Prado Museum in Madrid.
1from Mr Cogito, 1974. Reprinted from Collected Poems.
1from Rovigo, 1992. Reprinted from Collected Poems.
1Hecuba: wife of Priam, king of Troy, mother of fourteen children, all of whom died.
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