`An Art of Empathy'

Zbigniew Herbert is among those writers – Geoffrey Hill and Henry Green are others, to cite an unlikely pair – who inspire appetites that can never be sated. I want to read everything by and about them, even journalism and juvenilia. In Herbert’s case, hunger is compounded by the vagaries of translation. The shelves in my university library are packed tight with his untranslated work – poems, drama, prose – that might as well be locked in a vault for those of us without Polish. Polish Writers on Writing, edited by Adam Zagajewski and recently published by Trinity University Press, gives us a meal just sumptuous enough to temporarily ease the peckishness.

Zagajewski includes work from 25 writers, several of whom are new to me, but first I went to the Herbert selection – six letters he wrote in the early fifties to his teacher and mentor, Henryk Elzenberg (1887-1967), and an interview from 1986 with Renata Gorczynski, “The Art of Empathy.” All are translated by Alissa Valles, who earlier this year translated his Collected Poems: 1956-1998. In the letters, one is struck by Herbert’s reverence and respect for Elzenberg, who taught philosophy, a discipline Herbert studied with conviction and nearly accepted as a vocation. Of philosophy he writes:

“I put to myself – in answer to your letter – the question what I really look for philosophy. The question is rather Faustian and perhaps it would be more appropriate to ask what philosophy demands of me, what responsibilities the discipline lays on me.

“The answer to the first, more my own version, turns out to be extremely compromising for me. I look for emotion. Powerful intellectual emotion, painful tensions between reality and abstraction, yet another rending, yet another, deeper than personal, cause for sorrow. And in that subjective cloud, respectable truth and sublime measure are lost, so I’ll never be a decent university philosopher. I prefer living through philosophy to brooding on it like a hen.”

Born in 1924, Herbert was not yet 30 when he wrote these letters, yet his sources and themes are already in place. He is openly contemptuous of Marxism. He worships classical literature – Homer, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius – and already is devoted to Shakespeare and Pascal. All of them show up in his mature poetry. Here are some other selections:

“…it’s not so important whether you find truth (in this I’m a skeptic), but what philosophy does to a person.”

“My God, we don’t even know how religious we are.”

“I don’t like philosophy that explains, I love the kind that makes one’s head spin. I put in this confession so that you won’t be deluded: Nothing will come of me.”

“Coherence isn’t necessarily an intellectual principle, it often signifies fear, a closure to another image of the world. In the end one can live with two images; one practical, for everyday use, another dazzling, for when hypotheses are proven true, when one goes from darkness into the light, or from the half-dark into a great darkness.”

And this, from the interview:

“We made a kind of pact with our readers, which I would like to respect. But I also try to make it clear that the author doesn’t appear in his own person. He creates a certain poetic persona, which – sadly – is better than he is. Because I think man isn’t who he really is – who knows who he is – but who he would like to be. That is my fundamental discovery in the sphere of psychology. That’s why I feel sympathy for elderly people who make themselves look younger, for people with bow legs who happen to like dancing. I sympathize with people who have bad voices but never let an occasion slip in company to sing the Virgin’s Prayer. It’s moving, this striving, this attempt to outstrip oneself, that’s what literature is. It’s a longing for a better `I’ that I thought up, and that then takes its revenge on me.”

And one more:

“In general, writing is not a medium of expression, of expressing oneself, but an art of empathy – that is, entering into others. You can’t write novels, which I don’t read much anyway, because I don’t have a taste for them, unless the author manages to divide himself into several characters – a protagonist, an antagonist, or whatever they’re called. That’s elementary from my point of view and doesn’t require further explanation. It’s probably my lacking, because I don’t have that kind of reliable capacity for fantasizing, that kind of imagination. The ability to put oneself in the position of another person is very useful in life.”