Last Thursday,
Hungary dedicated busts of Zbigniew Herbert and Hannah Arendt in Budapest’s
Széchenyi Square. The occasion was the sixtieth anniversary, on Oct. 23, of the
Hungarian Revolution against Soviet domination. Daily News Hungary reports:
“U.S.
Ambassador Colleen Bell told the inauguration ceremony that the writings and
ideas of Arendt and Herbert are still the subject of discourse. She cited a
letter written by Arendt about the 1956 revolution, in which she said `In any
case, Hungary is the best thing that has happened for a long time.’ Commenting
on Herbert, she said the Communist regime silenced him several times but he was
still fighting against repression with his poems. They both used their
knowledge to educate and inspire young people, Bell added.”
That’s a
stretch, but we can’t expect a diplomat to be a close reader of poetry.
Herbert’s first collection of poems, Chord
of Light, was published in Poland in 1956, the year of the Hungarian
revolt. Included is “Three Poems by Heart.” In the third section, as translated
by John and Bogdana Carpenter, Herbert writes:
“the
pigeons—
softly gray
“a Poet’s
statue was in the park
children
would roll their hoops
and
colorful shouts
birds sat
on the Poet’s hand
read his
silence”
You
probably think you know where the convergence of statue and pigeons is going,
but Herbert leaves it unstated. Pigeons are roughly to public monuments as dogs
are to fire plugs. Dictators love to see their image in public, preferably in
outsized dimensions. Poets understand the experience can be unexpectedly
humbling. Herbert’s poem continues:
“pigeons
fell lightly
like shot down air
“now the
lips of the Poet
form an
empty horizon
birds
children and wives cannot live
in the
city’s funereal shells
in cold
eiderdowns of ashes”
A
much-touted “thaw” was proclaimed in 1956, following Khrushchev’s speech to the
20th Party Congress, but those remained bleak years in Poland, Hungary and the rest
of the Soviet bloc. Anything resembling freedom was many years away.
Herbert concludes his poem:
“the city
stands over water
smooth as
the memory of a mirror
it
reflects in the water from the bottom
and flies
to a high star
where a
distant fire is burning
like a
page of the Iliad”
1 comment:
Thank you for reminding us of the dean, and for the link to Verses on the Death of Dr Swift - a comical piece which (largely) passes the test of time.
Re the translations for the epitaph: my six-inch-thick and six-pound-heavy copy of Harper's Latin Dictionary had been under my computer screen, as a height-raiser, for a number of years. However, I manoeuvred it out from underneath, and found that under "virilis" (II) (in addition to: worthy of a man, manly, manful) it gives: firm, vigorous, bold, spirited. I think the dean would have been happy with this latter emphasis of the word, rather than Damrosch's "manly", or Yeats's anaemic "human". I cannot think the dean would have regarded liberty as having only male, rather than male and female, characteristics.
I must remember to keep the Latin dictionary ready and more accessible in future.
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