“Sea horses with fat rumps and ironic eyes and horses dressed in orange horse blankets lead the procession—,” 146
Seamstress, 143
Season, 562
Sense of Identity, 277
September 17, 403
Sequoia, 296
Seven Angels, 135–36
Seventh Angel, The (M/S), 96–97
Shame, 490
Shameful Dreams, 363
“she could no longer move her head,” 173–74
Shell, 131
“She waits on the bank of a great slow-moving river,” 253
She Was Doing Her Hair, 258
“She was doing her hair before going to bed,” 258
“She was not beautiful a nose slightly ducklike,” 399–401
Shore, 253
Silk of a Soul (M/S), 102–3
Sister, 275
Small Heart, A, 430–31
“So first the faithful dog will go” (M/S), 190
“So if there is a journey pray that it be long,” 438–39
Soldier, 144
“So many books dictionaries,” 323–24
“So many miracles,” 364–66
“So many sleepless nights so many diapers,” 530
“so many years,” 327–28
“Sometimes Mr Cogito calls to mind, not without emotion, his youthful march on perfection,” 276
Song, 541
Speculations on the Subject of Barabbas, 449
Stake, 532
Stars’ Chosen Ones, The, 79
Still Life, 145
Stool (M/S), 41
Stuck in the Mind, 544
Study of the Object (M/S), 193–96
Substance, 126
“Suddenly you notice there’s nothing in your glass; you’re raising an abyss to your lips,” 138
Suicide, 148
“Sunday,” 391–96
“Sure there’s plenty,” 557
“Sweetness bears a flower’s name—,” 21–22
Tale, A (M/S), 77
Tale of a Nail, 457
Tamarisk (M/S), 200
“Teach us too to fold our fingers,” 115
Tenderness, 569
Testament, 28
“Thanks to energetic action taken by the government, firefighters and youth organizations,” 168
“Thank you Adam for your card from Fryburg,” 483–84
“that one from II A—,” 110
“That’s a poet,” 79
“That wall,” 27
“The best fairy tales are about how we were little,” 130
“the bullet I fired,” 430–31
“the caretaker ran out with the big bell,” 109–10
“The carpet is too soft,” 135
“The castles and cities he leased to masters of alchemy and fraudulent magicians,” 248
“The cold blue sky like a stone on which angels,” 26
“The condottieri of Cyrus the Foreign Legion,” 382
“The days were the color of amaranth” (M/S), 5
“The double truth of all the senses—,” 64
“The elements went in front: water carrying silt,” 43
“the finale,” 454–56
“The forests were on fire—” (M/S), 3
“The front page reports,” 285–86
“The gods gathered in a barracks just outside town,” 255
“The hen is the best example of what living constantly with humans leads to” (M/S), 141
“The High Castle,” 553
“The hill facing Minos’s palace is like a Greek theater,” 252
“The inquisitors are in our midst” (M/S), 149
“the intricate coronations,” 21–22
“The king’s beard on which sauces and ovations” (M/S), 243
“The left leg is normal,” 272
“The lowest circle of hell,” 329
“The lucky Saint George,” 375–78
“The messenger awaited a despairingly long time,” 402
“The moment has come it is time to say farewell,” 435
“The most beautiful is the object” (M/S), 193–96
“The new gods followed the Roman army at a decent distance,” 251
“the note in the Voice of the Pacific,” 393–95
“Then your homeland will seem too small for you,” 437–38
“The Old Masters,” 345–46
“The oration of worlds is unflagging,” 295
“The pebble” (M/S), 197
“The poet imitates the voices of birds” (M/S), 77
“the poet of a certain age,” 300
“The priests have a problem,” 312–13
“The priests lead the peasants out onto an elevated plain,” 246
“The real duel of Apollo” (M/S), 165–66
“There are those who grow” (M/S), 78
“There goes a woman,” 53–54
“There’s a sudden island Sea sculpture cradle,” 225
“there’s a terrible silence,” 383–84
“The Sanhedrin did not judge at night,” 237
“the sensible say,” 376–78
“Theseus is passing through a sea,” 570
“The seventh angel” (M/S), 96–97
“The singer’s lips are welded fast,” 9
“The sleep of fish is beyond imagination,” 145
“The stone is well-preserved An inscription (bad Latin),” 254
“the tensely,” 546–47
“The three-dimensional illustrations from pitiful textbooks,” 249
“The tower is fifty ells down and the same up,” 137–38
“the trouble is,” 303
“The true history of the prince Minotaur is told in the yet undeciphered script Linear A,” 308
“The tsar our little father had grown old, very old” (M/S), 151–52
“The vast space of little planets,” 33
“The water is shallow,” 139
“The well is in the middle of the square among apartment buildings, pigeons, and towers,”132
“The whole royal family was living in one room at that time” (M/S), 178
“the women in our street,” 7–8
“the Wunderlich family quartet,” 538
“They have ugly mugs, but their hands are dexterous, accustomed to hammer and nail, iron and wood,” 263
“They just go on sitting on the spreading branches of trees,” 179
“they rebuilt the poet,” 113
“They say—,” 493–95
“They say that he went deaf—but it isn’t true,” 386
“They shave with a razor,” 137
They Sit in Trees, 179
“They take them out in the morning” (M/S), 106–8
“They went down gorges of former streets,” 18
They Who Lost, 297
“They who lost now dance with bells on their ankles,” 297
“They who sailed at dawn,” 40
“This autumn the trees have peace at last,” 181
“This book is a gentle reminder it does not permit me,” 469
“This is he—Arion—” (M/S), 55–56
“This is the most endearing spot the body’s city,” 561
“This little cosmology of fired clay,” 307
Thomas, 550
Thorns and Roses, 74
“those standing on the right bank,” 318–19
“those who paint interiors of old barber-shops” (M/S), 80–81
“Those who paint small mirrors of lakes” (M/S), 80–81
“Thoughts cross the mind,” 287
Three Poems by Heart, 6–8
Three Studies on the Subject of Realism (M/S), 80–81
“Through owlish darkness,” 16
“Through seven mountain frontiers” (M/S), 170–72
Time, 558
“Tirelessly they work in me my ancestors’ hands,” 475
To Apollo, 14–15
To Athena, 16
To Czeslaw Milosz
, 508
“today we know exactly,” 388–90
To Extract Objects, 294
“To extract objects from their majestic silence takes either a ploy or a crime,” 294
To Henryk Elzenberg on the Centennial of His Birth, 467–68
To His Fist, 114
To Marcus Aurelius (M/S), 19
To My Bones (M/S), 205
Tongue (M/S), 210
“Too old to carry arms and fight like the others—,” 416–18
To Piotr Vuji?i?, 486
To Pompeii’s Aid, 168
To Ryszard Krynicki—A Letter, 356–57
To the Fallen Poets, 9
To the Hungarians, 129
To the River, 344
Touch, 64
Tower, 137–38
“To whom do I play? Closed shutters,” 223–24
To Yehuda Amichai, 489
Trembles and Heaves, 33
Trial, 397–98
Troubles of a Minor Creator, 38–39
“Truly my infidelity is great and hard to forgive,” 458–63
Tusculum, 250
Two Drops (M/S), 3
“Two perhaps three” (M/S), 201–2
Two Prophets. A Voice Test, 524
“Under walls white as a birch forest grow the ferns of paintings,” 141
“Very quickly the smell of sulfur left him,” 248
“Veterans of forty-day floods,” 59–60
Violin, 130
Voice (M/S), 67–68
Wagon, 450–52
Wall, 136
War, 136
Warsaw Cemetery, 27
“Was Jean-Jacques the Tender aware of the pitcher plant,” 425
Wasp, 133
Water Horse, 198–99
Wawel, 44
Weather, 220
“We fall asleep on words,” 264–65
“We halted in a town the host” (M/S), 229
“we lay side by side,” 411–15
“We live in the narrow bed of our flesh” (M/S), 215
Well, 132
“We stand against the wall,” 136
“We stand on the border,” 129
“we take a shortcut,” 553–54
“We walk by the sea-shore” (M/S), 101
“What a thick mist,” 94
“What became of Barabbas? I ask but no one knows,” 449
“what business is it of mine,” 523
“What has become of the soul,” 71
What I Saw, 337
“What is he doing,” 450–52
“What is that city bay street river,” 438
What Mr Cogito Thinks of Hell, 329
What Our Dead Do, 75–76
“What the princess likes best is lying face down on the floor,” 130
“what was the death that lay ahead:” 233–34
“What will happen,” 268
“What would have become of me had I not met you—Master Henryk,” 467–68
“Whelp of the empty realms,” 38–39
“When Achilles pierced Penthesilea’s breast with his short sword, he twisted it—as is proper—three times in the wound,” 506
“When he gave his great speech the prosecutor,” 397–98
“When he stands before them” (M/S), 238–39
“when I mount a chair,” 158
“when I sleep,” 525–26
“When I was very ill shame abandoned me,” 490
“When my older brother” (M/S), 90–91
“When the flowered tablecloth, honey, and fruit were mowed from the table in one fell swoop,” 133
“When the horror subsided the floodlights went out” (M/S), 227
“when the platoon” (M/S), 106–7
When the World Stands Still (M/S), 218
“When years later I returned to Babylon it had changed,” 370
“When you come to know don’t speak of knowing,” 437
“Where is Dionysus sailing across a sea as red as wine,” 507
“White,” 478–80
White Eyes, 10
White Stone, 85–86
“Who ever thought a warm neck would become an armrest, or legs eager for flight and joy could stiffen into four simple stilts?” (M/S), 217
“who knows,” 366
“Who wrote our faces chicken pox for sure,” 271
Why the Classics (M/S), 266–67
Wind and the Rose, The (M/S), 140
Winter Garden, 42, 235–36
“With a light step,” 160–61
“With deliberate carelessness, shapes violently torn from life are scattered on the table: a fish, an apple, a bunch of vegetables mixed with flowers,” 145
“With great bounds—,” 453–56
“With that little boy unmoving like the Eleatic arrow,” 369
“with the inexorable,” 499–500
Wit Stwosz: The Dormition of the Virgin, 440
Wolf and the Lamb, The, 136–37
Wolves, 476
Wooden Bird (M/S), 156–57
Wooden Die (M/S), 207
Wringer (M/S), 149
Wristwatch (M/S), 260
Writing, 158
“Years are shorter and shorter,” 367–68
“You can cross the earth by donkey,” 95
“You cannot pass on the knowledge,” 39
“You look at my hands,” 12
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ZBIGNIEW HERBERT (1924–1998) was a spiritual leader of the anticommunist movement in Poland. His work has been translated into almost every European language, and he won numerous prizes, including the Jerusalem Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. His books include Selected Poems, Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems, Mr Cogito, Still Life with a Bridle, and King of the Ants, all published by Ecco.
ALISSA VALLES is a poet and translator who lives in Warsaw. 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.
OTHER BOOKS BY ZBIGNIEW HERBERT
Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems
Selected Poems
Still Life with a Bridle
Mr Cogito
King of the Ants
Barbarian in the Garden
Copyright
THE COLLECTED POEMS: 1956–1998.
Copyright © 2007 The Estate of Zbigniew Herbert.
Translation copyright © 2007 by Alissa Valles.
Introduction copyright © 2007 by Adam Zagajewski.
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EPub Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-04615-4
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FIRST ECCO PAPERBACK PUBLISHED 2008.
Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:
Herbert, Zbigniew.
The Collected Poems: 1956–1998 / Zbigniew Herbert.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-0-06-078390-7
ISBN-10: 0-06-078390-7
Includes index.
PG7167.E64 A2 2006
891.8/5173 22 2006040856
ISBN: 978-0-06-078395-2 (pbk)
08 09 10 11 12 ID/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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NOTES
(M/S): Notes added by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott to their translations.
CHORD OF LIGHT
Two Drops
The epigraph from Juliusz Slowacki’s poem was added by Milosz and Scott.
Farewell to September
One of a group of three poems which mark Herbert’s poetic debut, in the journal Dziśi Jutro [Today and Tomorrow] in September 1950.
“amaranth”: Poland’s national color in the Napoleonic era. (M/S)
“an anachronistic ballad/about Poles and bayonets”: the “Warszawianka,” a Polish adaptation of a French song, from the era of the anti-Russian uprising in 1830–1831.
“live torpedoes” was the name given in 1939 to volunteers for suicidal military missions. (M/S)
“not one button”: On August 6, 1939, the Polish General Edward Smigly-Rydz (1886–1941) declared at the grave of the hero of Polish independence, Józef Pilsudski: “They [the Germans] will not have our coats, not one button.” A few weeks later, on September 1, 1939, Poland was invaded by Hitler’s forces.
To the Fallen Poets
A number of gifted young poets of Herbert’s generation, notably Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński (1921–1944) and Tadeusz Gajcy (1922–1944), lost their lives in the Warsaw uprising of 1944.
On Troy
“Song escapes whole”: a quotation from “Wajdelota’s Song” in Konrad Wallenrod, a narrative poem by Poland’s great Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855).
To Marcus Aurelius
Henryk Elzenberg (1887–1967): Polish philosopher, author of i.a. Klopot z Istnieniem [The Trouble with Existence]; Herbert’s professor at the university in Toru? in 1949–1950 and an important mentor, correspondent, and friend in the following decade and a half.
The Collected Poems Page 31