“your Latin”: In a postscript to the 1951 letter to Henryk Elzenberg in which Herbert included this poem, the poet jokingly apologizes for suggesting that Marcus Aurelius wrote in Latin: “As the fragment indicates, the author knows M. Aurelius only from hear-say, as it is well-known that his Meditations were written in Greek and bore the title Eis heauton, see also T. Sinko, On the so-called cynical-stoical diatribe and many others.” In the Polish language, “lacina” rhymes with “zaczyna” (begins), which presumably made it difficult to alter.
Forest of Arden
In Polish the title refers both to the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and to the Ardennes forest in Belgium and northern France. During World War II, much of the Polish resistance to the Nazi and Soviet occupations took the form of partisan groups based in the wide expanses of forest in what is now the territory of Belorussia, Lithuania, and western Ukraine, where the Herbert family lived until 1944.
Trembles and Heaves
Aquilos: Roman personification of the north wind, counterpart of the Greek Boreas.
Winter Garden
phorminx: Greek seven-stringed instrument, intermediate between lyre and kithara.
Altar
Tellus: Roman goddess of the earth, counterpart of the Greek Gaia and the fertility goddess Ceres. A temple devoted to Tellus was built on the Forum Pacis in Rome in 268 BCE. During the spring festival of Fordicidia, cows—being with young—were sacrificed there.
Wawel
Hill with castle and cathedral in Kraków, the former capital city of Poland; the seat and burial place of Polish kings. In the nineteenth century, when Kraków was on Austro-Hungarian territory, the buildings were used as barracks. The playwright and painter Stanislaw Wyspiaóski (1869–1907) had conceived an idea to transform the site into a modern Acropolis, home for political research and cultural institutions.
Jerzy Turowicz (1912–1999): Prominent intellectual, editor of Tygodnik Powszechny, a Catholic weekly based in Kraków in which Herbert published poems and articles from 1950 onward.
A Parable of King Midas
Silenus: father of satyrs and companion to Dionysus. According to myth, King Midas took Silenus into his care when his subjects had got the king drunk.
Fragment of a Greek Vase
Eos: Greek personification of the dawn, sister to Helios and Selene, sun and moon; mother to the four winds. Her most faithful consort, Tithonus, turned into a cricket after having been granted eternal life without eternal youth.
Memnon: king of Ethiopia, son of Eos and Tithonus, killed by Achilles at Troy and made immortal by Zeus for his mother Eos’ sake.
Arion
Greek poet-singer, c. 600 BCE. According to myth, he was cast overboard by pirates on his way back to the court of Corinth from a musical contest in Sicily, but he charmed the sea with his singing and was rescued by a dolphin.
HERMES, DOG AND STAR
Akhenaton
Egyptian pharaoh, tenth ruler of the eighteenth dynasty and husband of Nefertiti; converted the Egyptians temporarily from polytheism to monotheistic worship of Aton, the sun god.
“barking divinities”: Anubis, the Egyptian god of the underworld, was portrayed with the head of a dog or jackal.
“toward scales”: According to Egyptian beliefs, the soul of the deceased was weighed against a feather, representing truth.
Journey to Kraków
The Peasants: by Reymont, a long description of peasant life at the turn of the century.
(M/S)
The Folk Wedding: by Wyspiański, a symbolist play of 1901. (M/S)
The Deluge: the second volume of The Trilogy by Sienkiewicz, the author of Quo Vadis.
(M/S)
Thorns and Roses
Saint Ignatius: Ignatius of Antioch, called the father of orthodoxy, who died a martyr around AD 115.
Balconies
eheu: Latin for “alas,” as in Horace’s fourteenth ode: eheu fugaces labuntur anni, “alas, the fleeting years pass away.”
Ornament Makers
“Bach’s Air on the G-string”: from J. S. Bach’s Orchestral Suite no.3.
Answer
On its first publication in 1956, this poem was given the title ‘Answer 53.”
To the Hungarians
In November 1956 Soviet troops invaded communist Hungary in response to an uprising led by Prime Minister Imre Nagy. This poem was published in Hermes, Dog and Star in 1957 without title or date. Herbert said later that this had been his only concession to censorship.
Ballad of Old Bachelors
“Rachel, when he …” is a quotation from the opera La Juive (“The Jewess”), 1835, by the composer Jacques Fromental Halévy and librettist Augustin-Eugène Scribe.
Classic
Diocletian: Roman emperor (284–304). Known among other things for his avid persecution of Christians.
STUDY OF THE OBJECT
Gauguin—The End
“avec le premier barbouilleur venu”: “with the first dabbler to come along.”
Apollo and Marsyas
According to myth, Marsyas, a silene or satyr, challenged Apollo to a musical competition, in which the winner would be allowed to do with the loser what he liked. Apollo won and flayed the silene in punishment. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (c. 382–400), the tears of wood and water deities and local spectators form a clear river thereafter named Marsyas.
Elegy of Fortinbras
for C.M.: Czeslaw Milosz, whose name could not be printed in the Poland of 1961.
First the Dog
Laika: the dog, a Moscow stray sent into space in 1957 on the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2. In 2002 a Russian scientist revealed that Laika did not die peacefully after several days in orbit, as the Soviet government had claimed, but died of overheating and stress hours after the launch.
Attempt at a Description
In Herbert’s 1960 radio play Reconstruction of the Poet, which portrays Homer, the poet recites this poem, as well as “Pebble” and “Tamarisk.”
Pebble
See note to ‘Attempt at a Description.”
INSCRIPTION
Prologue
“Griffin” “Wolf” “Bullet”: pseudonyms of Polish resistance fighters.
Common Death
Tadeusz Żebrowski: Herbert’s brother-in-law
In the Margin of a Trial
Sanhedrin: council of seventy-one Jewish sages constituting the supreme court and legislative body in Judea during the Roman period.
Episode from Saint-Benoît
Max Jacob: French-Jewish poet (1876–1944). Jacob was living in an abandoned monastery at Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire when he was seized by French police; he died in the transit camp of Drancy.
Malachowski’s Ravine
Count Juliusz Malachowski (1801–1831), a poet as well as a general, fell in the November uprising against Russia in 1830–1831 in Kazimierz Dolny in eastern Poland, where a stone was erected in his memory.
Tusculum
Ancient city of Latium, fifteen miles from Rome, where Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BCE) had a residence and wrote a series of books, the Tusculanae Quaestiones, in 45 BCE.
Cernunnos
Horned god of British Gaul, associated with fertility.
MR COGITO
Mr Cogito Studies His Face in the Mirror
Veneds: a proto-Slavic people mentioned by Tacitus, Ptolemy, and Pliny
Sequoia
Mount Tamalpais: mountain in northern California near the Muir Woods, a national park populated by sequoia. drakkars: Viking longships.
Georg Heym—An Almost Metaphysical Adventure
Georg Heym (1887–1912): a poet, prose writer, and dramatist of early German expressionism. He drowned while skating on the frozen Havel River near Berlin on January 16, 1912.
Mr Cogito Seeks Advice
Rabbi Nachman of Braclaw: a famous tzaddik, born in 1772 in Międzyboż. He settled in Braclaw (now Breslov, Ukraine) in 1802, and died in 1812 in Hum
a? (Uman), where forty years previously a massacre of thousands of Jews had taken place. His gravesite, on which a building was erected during the Soviet period, is now a place of pilgrimage for Hasidic Jews.
Mr Cogito on Upright Attitudes
Cato the Younger Uticensis (95–46 BCE) rebelled against Caesar and committed suicide after the defeat of his party at Utica, despite Caesar’s offer of reconciliation.
REPORT FROM A BESIEGED CITY
What I Saw
Kazimierz Moczarski (1907–1975): Polish resistance fighter, accused by communists after the Second World War of collaboration with the Nazis; for several years he shared a prison cell with the German war criminal Jürgen Stroop, an experience described in his Conversations with an Executioner.
“distortions”: in the post-Stalinist period in Poland, communists accused the Stalinist regime of “errors and distortions” resulting from an incorrect interpretation of socialist doctrine.
Old Masters
“di città sul mare”: of cities on the sea.
“della Beata Umiltà”: of Blessed Humility
“sogno/miracolo/crocifissione”: dream/miracle/crucifixion.
Prayer of the Traveler Mr Cogito
Tarquinia: Italian city, site of the largest Etruscan temple known to history.
Corkyra: ancient name of the island Corfu.
“kato kyrie kato”: Greek—“that way, sir, that way.”
In Memoriam Nagy László
László Nagy (1925–1978): a Hungarian poet; he translated Herbert’s work but the two never met.
To Ryszard Krynicki—A Letter
Ryszard Krynicki (1943): prominent Polish poet of the “New Wave” generation of 1968 (with Stanisńaw Barańczak, Julian Kornhauser, and Adam Zagajewski), whose poetry in the 1970s and 1980s was characterized by harsh criticism and often satire of the Communist regime and its language. Also a distinguished translator and publisher.
Mr Cogito and Longevity
Hippoglossus vulgaris: the halibut, known to live up to ninety years.
Lullaby
Ca d’Oro: fifteenth-century palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, properly Palazzo Santa Sofia, called the “golden house” because of the gilt and polychrome decorations on its exterior walls.
Photograph
Hypanis: now the Bug River.
Babylon
Petrus Christus (1420–1472 or 1473): Netherlandish painter, thought to have been a pupil of Jan van Eyck; his Portrait of a Young Woman now hangs in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie.
The Divine Claudius
Claudius (10 BCE–54 CE): became Roman emperor in 41 CE after the assassination of Caligula. Claudius invented three letters, which he proposed to add to the Roman alphabet, two of which served the function of the modern W and Y.
Regicides
Dr Émile Régis: author of Les regicides dans l’histoire et dans le présent, published in 1890.
François Ravaillac (1578–1610): the assassin of Henry IV of France, captured immediately after the crime on May 14, 1610; under torture and interrogation, he denied acting with any accomplices. He was drawn and quartered on May 27, 1610.
Gavrilo Princip (1894–1918): Bosnian Serb nationalist, assassinated Prince Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, prompting the Austrian action against Serbia that led to the outbreak of the First World War. He was sentenced to twenty years in prison but died of tuberculosis at Theresienstadt in 1918.
Gregory Clement (1594–1660): English merchant and member of Parliament, appointed to the high court of justice in 1647, a signatory to the death warrant of King Charles. At the Restoration he went into hiding to avoid prosecution for regicide, but he was captured, sentenced to death, and drawn and quartered at Charing Cross on October 17, 1660.
Sante Jeronimo Caserio (1873–1894): Italian anarchist, assassin of the French president Marie-François-Sadi Carnot; he fatally stabbed the president of the Third Republic at a banquet on June 24, 1894, and was put to death by guillotine.
Mr Cogito and Maria Rasputin—An Attempt at Contact
“A certain Svetlana”: Svetlana Alleluyeva, the daughter of Joseph Stalin, published her memoirs Twenty Letters to a Friend in 1967.
Isadora Duncan
Isadora Duncan (1877–1927): American dancer and pedagogue who founded a dance school in Moscow in 1921. Duncan had a stormy relationship with the Russian poet Sergey Yesenin (1895–1925). She died in Nice, France, when her shawl caught in the wheel of the car in which she was a passenger.
September 17
On September 17, 1939, Poland was invaded and its eastern provinces annexed by Soviet troops, in accordance with the Soviets’ agreement with Hitler, whose armies had attacked Polish territory from the west weeks before.
Józef Czapski (1896–1993): Polish painter and writer, captured by the Soviets and interned in a series of camps with a large number of fellow Polish officers, the vast majority of whom were executed at Katy? in 1940. After the war, having published an account of his wartime experiences in the Soviet Union, On Inhuman Land, Czapski lived and worked in Paris.
“painted lads”: a quotation from an anonymous army song of World War I.
The Power of Taste
Professor Izydora Dambska (1903–1983): Polish philosopher. Born and educated in Lwów, Dambska took part in underground university instruction during the occupation. She settled in Kraków after the war but was removed from her position at the Institute of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University in the 1960s because of her critical stance toward Marxism.
ELEGY FOR THE DEPARTURE
Livy’s Metamorphoses
“res tam foeda”: a reprehensible matter after all.
The Nepenthes Family
“Jean-Jacques the Tender”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778).
Blackthorn
Konstanty Jeleński (1922–1987): Polish essayist, editor of the Polish émigré journal Kultura; he fought with the Polish army of General Wtadyslaw Anders in World War II.
Mass for the Imprisoned
Adam Michnik (1946): Polish dissident, a leading figure of the Polish anticommunist movement in the 1970s and 1980s; now chief editor of the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. Author of several essay collections, including Letters from Prison and Other Essays.
A Small Heart
Jan Józef Szczepański (1919–2003): Polish prose writer, reporter, and screenwriter, a soldier in the September 1939 campaign, and a resistance fighter during the German occupation.
Landscape
“prince of Parma”: Alessandro Farnese, sixteenth-century regent of the Netherlands, known for his cruel persecution of Dutch insurgents against Spanish power.
Journey
This poem begins with a nearly exact quotation from Constantine Cavafy’s poem “Ithaca.”
Kalambaka, Orcho menos, Kavalla, Levadia: Greek towns.
Wit Stwosz: The Dormition of the Virgin
Wit Stwosz (c. 1447–1533): German sculptor who came to Kraków in 1477 to design the Dormition altarpiece for St Mary’s Cathedral.
Leo’s Death
“a bright clearing”: In Russian yasnaya polyana, the name of Leo Tolstoy’s estate.
“Nation shall rise against nation …”: from Luke 21: 5–38.
ROVIGO
To Henryk Elzenberg on the Centennial of His Birth
Henryk Elzenberg: see note to “To Marcus Aurelius.”
“dialectical frauds”: in 1950, Elzenberg was forced to withdraw from his teaching position at the university in Toru?, having refused to adapt to Marxist-Leninist doctrine. He continued to conduct a private philosophy seminar at his home.
The Book
Ryszard Przybylski (1928): Polish literary critic, author of many articles on Herbert’s poetry.
Pacific III (on the Peace Conference)
This poem was written in 1950 and constitutes an ironic commentary on the Second World Peace Congress organized in November 1950 by communist authorities in Warsaw. It was part o
f a sequence which, for political reasons, could not be published at the time.
Wolves
Maria Oberc: A fellow Lvovian, Maria Oberc became a friend of both Herbert and Professor Izydora Dambska and one of Herbert’s most regular correspondents.
Many wartime partisan groups who fought the Nazi occupation in Poland also fought against the communists taking control after the war.
Buttons
“the crime”: The murder of tens of thousands of Polish officers and civilians by the NKVD during the war, most infamously at Katy?. Captain Edward Herbert, the son of Herbert’s paternal uncle Marian Herbert, perished in one such mass execution.
Clouds over Ferrara
Maria Rzepińska: Polish critic and historian of art.
A Postcard from Adam Zagajewski
Adam Zagajewski (1945): poet and essayist, prominent member of the “New Wave” of Polish poets; author of, among other works, Without End and A Defense of Ardor.
“Das war sehr schön … das war wirklich sehr schön”: “That was very beautiful, Mr Zagajewski.”
“Really very beautiful.” “Thank you.” “My pleasure.” “That was really very beautiful.”
“drzewo”— “der Baum”: tree.
“obtoki”—“die Wolken”: clouds.
“stońice”—“die Sonne”: sun.
Mitteleuropa
Alexander Schenker (1924): literary scholar, professor at Yale University.
To Piotr Vujičič
Piotr Vujičič was a Serbian translator of Herbert’s work.
“white City”: Belgrade.
Dinosaurs’ Holiday
Jan Adamski (1923): friend of Herbert’s from his student days; actor and writer.
To Yehuda Amichai
Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000): Israeli poet; he and Herbert met in the Netherlands in 1988.
A Mirror Wanders the Road
Leopold Tyrmand (1920–1978): Polish writer and an old friend of Herbert’s.
“Svetlana”: Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alleluyeva.
The Collected Poems Page 32