'Nor a Single Thing That Belongs to Us'

“[W]hen a country is occupied by a foreign power or governed by a single party, literature also becomes a form of crypto-politics. . . . In times of national stress it is impossible for a Polish poet to write a lyric about the birds and the bees without someone reading it as a political metaphor or allusion. The Poles call this ‘Aesopian language’ and it is long and honoured tradition.” 

I was introduced to Zbigniew Herbert thanks to the English writer A. Alvarez (1929-2019). He wrote the introduction to Selected Poems (trans. Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott), published by Penguin in 1968, and I bought the paperback soon after. There are few writers I revere more than Herbert. Alvarez met him in the nineteen-sixties and was an early champion of his work in the West. The passage quoted above is from Alvarez’s 1999 memoir, Where Did It All Go Right? He continues:

 

“Herbert used this tradition, duly adapted to his own subtle purposes, and it gave him a moral authority which poets in the West lacked.”

 

Herbert was born in 1924 in Lviv (Lvov, Lwów, Lemberg, Lwihorod, Leopolis) when it was part of the Second Polish Republic. In “Mr Cogito Considers a Return to His Native Town,” Herbert writes:

 

“If I went back there

I would probably not find

A single shadow of my old home

Nor the trees of childhood

Nor a cross with an iron plaque

A bench on which I murmured incantations

Nor a single thing that belongs to us.”

 

Herbert earned the right to write about the invasion of one country by another. He was a veteran of such things. On September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, sixteen days after Nazi Germany had invaded the country from the west. The invasion had been secretly agreed upon less than a month earlier with the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The battle was over, Poland subdued, by October 6. The Soviets were driven out of Poland by the Germans in the summer of 1941, and the Germans were driven out in turn by the Red Army three years later. Zbigniew Herbert published “September 17” in Paris in 1982, during the rise of Solidarity, when Poland was yet again threatened with invasion from the east. Herbert dedicates the poem to Józef Czapski, author of Inhuman Land, who survived the Katyn massacre in 1940. Here is “September 17”:

 

“My defenseless country will admit you invader

where Jaś and Mary went walking to school

the path won’t be split into an abyss

 

“Rivers are too lazy not quick to flood

knights sleeping in the mountains continue to sleep

so you will enter easily uninvited guest

 

“But sons of the earth will gather at night

funny carbonari plotters of freedom

they will clean old-fashioned weapons

will swear on a bird on two colors

 

“And then as always—glows and explosions

boys like children sleepless commanders

knapsacks filled with defeat crimson fields of glory

the strengthening knowledge—we are alone

 

“My defenseless country will admit you invader

and give you a plot of earth under a willow—and peace

so those who come after us will learn again

the most difficult art—the forgiveness of sins”

 

In their notes to the poem, the translators report: “The carbonari were a secret political association organized in Italy in the nineteenth century to establish a republic.”

 

[The first Herbert poem quoted is from The Collected Poems 1956-1998 (Ecco, 2007), translated by Alissa Valles. The second is translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter in Report From the Besieged City and Other Poems (Ecco, 1985).]