Talk with a Polish Poet
STEPANCHEV, STEPHEN
'OBJECTS DON'T LIE' Talk with a Polish Poet By Stephen Stepanchev Zbigniew Herbert, the best of the remarkable group of poets who have come into prominence in Poland since the political and...
...In "Farewell to September," he contrasts the romantic bravado and boasts of his countrymen in 1939 with their defeat and death on a battlefield where they are "sewn flatly on to the heath...
...I've noticed that many of your poems are written in the first person," I said...
...It also appears in the toughmindedness of his numerous poems about objects, about a tool, a wooden bird, a drawer, an armchair, a wristwatch, a pebble...
...Objects don't lie...
...Herbert is truly a witness to his time, to the life of his generation in a country that has known more than its share of the horrors of war and revolutionary upheaval...
...The melody develops and creates form...
...Is she a Polish girl...
...He earns his right to the poems about flowers by a process of psychological exorcism, by imagining the experience of the five condemned men, by entering their lives...
...They can be adapted to contemporary conditions as, for example, in my poem 'Jonah.' " "Do you always write free verse...
...He paused...
...His work is eminently sane...
...He arouses doubts and uncertainties and brings everything into question...
...he speaks for a generation, if you like...
...They're different...
...I've lived in Vienna, Paris, and West Berlin...
...What is your conception of the T character...
...Is there any censorship in Poland...
...One of my relatives, my grandfather's brother, was a general in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War 1 and, later, in the Polish Army...
...At this point the doorbell rang and Herbert admitted a tall, attractive young lady...
...I like to travel...
...In these poems Herbert's preoccupation is with honesty of statement, with telling the truth, with avoiding the easy cliches and fat thinking of politicians and all those who refuse to assume their responsibilities as human beings...
...Well, New York strikes me as surprisingly naked...
...One of the poems that make this particularly clear is entitled "Pebble": The pebble is a perfect creature equal to itself mindful of its limits filled exactly with a pebbly meaning with a scent which does not remind one of anything does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire its ardor and coldness are just and full of dignity I feel a heavy remorse when I hold it in my hand and its noble body is permeated by false warmth —Pebbles cannot be tamed to the end they will look at us with a calm and very clear eye Imet Zbigniew Herbert shortly after his arrival in the United States and found him affable and eager to discuss his work, Poland, and America—which he was seeing for the first time...
...I asked one more question...
...after all, poetry lives longer than any conceivable political crisis...
...Does that include matter and spirit...
...Of course...
...How does a Polish poet make a living...
...New York seems bare, stripped down, in its verticals and horizontals...
...Herbert seemed puzzled...
...Yes," Herbert replied, smiling...
...How do you begin a line...
...Pop art could never be a European art...
...Yes...
...The high quality of Herbert's work—the basis for the extraordinary international attention he is currently receiving—is evident not only in the poems he has presented but also in his book, Selected Poems, translated by Milosz and Peter Dale Scott and published recently by Penguin Books...
...Escorting us to the elevator, he said, "I must take these things upstairs...
...I come of a family of military people, mostly, and lawyers...
...No, never, though I admire the work of Sylvia Plath very much...
...Some writers censor themselves...
...What would you consider an appropriately American art...
...and arrived a half-hour late...
...The thaw meant, simply, that we poets could be published again...
...The speaker in my poems is a generalized figure who speaks not lor himself or for me but for humanity...
...What is behind this interest in objects...
...Pop art, I think...
...I worked with him for a while...
...I mean, how do you break up the lines of your poem...
...He makes observations on the problems of his own time, to be sure, but he is a partisan only in the sense that he is a partisan of the truth...
...We were all in the same net...
...one of them, I later discovered, contained a paperback edition of a dictionary of the "American language...
...He paused a moment and added, "You know, I began as a painter myself...
...When can I see you...
...Do you ever aim for a confessional strain in the manner of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath...
...in a sense, all of his poems represent a revolt against darkness, disintegration, and death...
...I'm very happy to be here...
...I've been out of Poland for three years now...
...How...
...I've translated some of her poems into Polish...
...Stephen Stepanchev, author of "American Poetry Since 1945," leaches English at Queens College...
...But New York is utterly different from what I had always imagined it would be like...
...In the strictness and honesty of attention that Herbert demands of the world, he is remarkably like certain American poets on the scene, notably Robert Creeley...
...It's as simple as that...
...As a young man 1 wrote sonnets and worked in traditional syllables...
...It has practically no ornament, no decoration...
...There is a legend in my family to the effect that one of my paternal forebears left England during the 16th century at a time of religious controversy...
...Do the lines represent units of attention, breath, image, or what...
...I asked...
...You see, my friends and I had begun writing during World War II, when publication was impossible...
...He is developing a paunch and looks heavy—a little like Dylan Thomas—but is actually light in movement and even elegant as he smokes...
...I got married about three months ago...
...In "The Rain," he describes the mental decline and death of an older brother who was wounded in a war that took on the character of all wars, including World War I, the Napoleonic wars, and the Punic wars, and was eventually reduced to a whisper and a touch, the sound of rain on the poet's window, telling "improbable tales" and "touching my face/ with blind fingers of rain...
...In one poem objects "reprove us constantly for our instability...
...there is just enough infusion of wit and rationality to prevent it from slopping over into sentimentality or extravagance of utterance...
...He laughed and shrugged his shoulders in a gesture of helplessness...
...It's all very simple," he said solemnly, shaking my hand as I walked to the door...
...He is 44 years old, having been born in Lwow (now in the Ukraine) in 1924...
...The nakedness of European cities is quite different —much more sensual, much more sexual, if you like...
...How do you determine your line lengths...
...The Polish poet who is closest to me, to what I'm doing, is Miron Bialoszewski...
...The phone rang and he got up, excused himself, and answered it in another part of the room...
...He was introduced on these occasions by Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet, translator, and professor of Slavic languages at the University of California in Berkeley...
...Do you have a law degree...
...Units of attention...
...My father is a lawyer and practices in Gdansk...
...But it's obvious that the art of New York, the art of America, must be vastly different from the art of Europe...
...It was obvious that the interview would have to come to an end...
...Myths are crystallizations of profound aspects of human experience...
...he makes historical and moral judgments...
...I overheard snatches of conversation: "Friday...
...I asked...
...In one of your poems you call yourself a moralist...
...OBJECTS DON'T LIE' Talk with a Polish Poet By Stephen Stepanchev Zbigniew Herbert, the best of the remarkable group of poets who have come into prominence in Poland since the political and intellectual thaw of 1956, is at present completing a cross-country tour of the United States...
...You say you've been walking around New York all day," I began...
...He is representative...
...In the basement of the Museum of Modern Art I came across a French Impressionist painting, and I saw instantly that this could never be the art of America...
...I begin with a musical phrase, and then the phrase evokes a meaning...
...What's your impression of the city...
...Yes...
...He smiled...
...We were introduced...
...Herbert read his poetry in Polish...
...the English translations were read by Milosz and by Elzbieta Czyzewska, a dazzlingly beautiful blond actress who has appeared in Polish films and is married to an American reporter, David Halberstam...
...Many of these poems are brilliant crystallizations of historical experience and awareness...
...Then I work to achieve unity...
...because of the rigidity of the Stalinists...
...This is the way the poem ends: / did not learn this [the execution] today I knew it before yesterday so why have I been writing unimportant poems on flowers what did the five talk of the night before the execution of prophetic dreams of an escapade in a brothel of automobile parts of a sea voyage of how when he had spades he ought to have opened of how vodka is best after wine you get a headache of girls of fruit of life thus one can use in poetry names of Greek shepherds one can attempt to catch the color of morning sky write of love and also once again in dead earnest offer to the betrayed world a rose This poem is characteristic of Herbert in that it moves beyond despair to the contemplation of a rose and the sky and to the making of poems...
...Paul Lysek asked...
...But that would be a happening...
...I asked him about the impulse that had generated the brilliant new poetry of Poland, and he said, "There really isn't any mystery about it...
...Including their politics...
...We found that publication was impossible after the War, too...
...He greeted me with effusive apologies for his tardiness...
...he joins the moral and the esthetic, the distant and the near—in fact, he joins all the contraries of reality...
...First impressions are rarely profound," he said, beaming...
...The most effective of these history-haunted poems, I think, is "Five Men...
...Yes, the poet keeps making seemingly impossible syntheses...
...The poet looks over a broad terrain and over vast stretches of time...
...He kissed her and then introduced her to us...
...Herbert's tour began with a public reading of his poems at the State University of New York at Stony Brook on June 23, and at the Poetry Center of the Young Men's Hebrew Association in New York City on June 24...
...Herbert is a stocky man of medium height with graying black hair, a broad, fleshy face with short, upturned nose, and pale blue eyes...
...The language of poetry differs from the language of politics...
...He gets his stipend, by the way, not necessarily because of his excellence as a poet or even his popularity...
...As for the poets in other countries of Eastern Europe, 1 feel closest to the Czech poet Miroslav Holub and the Yugoslav poet Mija Pavlovich...
...But you must remember that there is such a thing as personal censorship...
...When Herbert returned to the table, he offered some details about his family background...
...Fundamentally it's a matter of voice...
...Here Herbert recalls the execution of five men against the wall of a stone courtyard and then asks himself, in an access of guilt feeling, whether he has the right to compose poems about flowers when such horrors have occurred in the past and are likely to recur...
...This wit appears in humorous details of the sort that one finds in "The Seventh Angel," which is about a sad-sack angel named Shemkel who is a disgrace to his squad and wears an "old threadbare nimbus...
...He laughed...
...What's your impression of the people of New York...
...Mythology and religion are very important to me...
...My last name is English," he said, nodding his head gravely...
...there is a sense of the passion of the lives of their creators...
...In Poland we think of the poet as a prophet...
...1 seem to prefer politically 'hot' cities...
...I've noticed that some of your poems are about objects, about chairs, tables, stones, and so forth...
...You want me to read in English...
...I studied law in the underground university at Lwow during World War II, then at Krakow, Torun, and Warsaw...
...One of my grandmothers was Armenian...
...For two months now he has been going up and down the roads of America by car?largely because, as he says, he wants to see the country "right up close...
...The cities of Europe have curves and contours...
...he was to meet me at 3:00 p.m...
...I've been pounding the sidewalks of New York for the past seven hours," he announced shyly, by way of explanation, first in Polish to my interpreter, Paul Lysek, a Polish writer and librarian at Queens College, and then to me in a halting, broken English...
...In what way...
...Well, not in any immediate sense...
...On this occasion he was wearing a dark blue jersey-type sweater, a gold chain around his neck, and striped, light tan trousers...
...It all began with Gomulka, in 1956...
...He was staying in a small, dimly lit, dingily furnished apartment at 7 Park Avenue...
...Do you intend to return to Poland...
...I asked...
...The city is all bone and tough flesh...
...It's huge and even ugly in a way, and yet tremendously exciting...
...The doorbell rang again, and a tall, dark-haired young man entered...
...I don't know how—but different...
...he is not merely a maker of verbal forms or an imitator of reality...
...In 1956 we found a hole in the net and swam out into the ocean...
...He was carrying several packages...
...Yes...
...No, there isn't," Herbert replied, stroking his cheek...
...My response to the world is essentially visual...
...I want both...
...The poet expresses the deepest feelings and the widest awareness of people...
...Are you married...
...She sat down on a sofa and we continued our interview...
...The poets do not represent any uniform program or point of view...
...He is supported by the State, by the people, if you will, through the Writers' Union...
Vol. 51 • August 1968 • No. 16
