“I believe that in such periods one should turn to the classics, to look at great paintings, to listen to the music. No power on earth could force me to read [Stalin’s] ‘The Short History of the Bolshevik Party.’ The only piece by Yosif Vissarionovich [Stalin] I always carry with me is his dissertation on language. Whenever The Pickwick Papers would not suffice, I open this work and my good mood comes back. It is a gigantic joke, a grotesque, a satire on rationalism.”
Zbigniew
Herbert’s interviewer, Jacek Trznadel, replies, “Not reading certain books can
also be a kind of testimony.” and the Polish poet says: “These questions
concern the depths of the human soul. I shall probably die unreconciled with
the world. At least that is how I would like to die. I lack knowledge of this
world. I did not receive it from the participants in this crime against
culture. I didn’t get any answers.”
Irony is
often a means of evasion, the last resort of the cowardly and unprincipled. It
can also be a covert moral weapon. There’s nothing bullies and louts detest so
much as mocking laughter. Swift understood this, as did Evelyn Waugh. The Polish
style of irony as practiced by Herbert in his poetry and this 1985 interview
is straight-faced and deadly. Herbert was a prickly man. Marius
Kociejowski, who knew him in the 1980’s, characterized the poet as “the spiritual
leader of Solidarity, although its members would no more be able to contain him
than could the Communist regime.” A veteran of the Nazi and Soviet
invasions, of the worst the twentieth century could dish out, Herbert possessed few illusions. He tells Trznadel:
“In times of
terror every moral gesture is a risk – that’s obvious -- but it is also
surprisingly funny. As if a knight in armor walked on stage in a contemporary
play. A comic effect. Even today, when we agree that one should declare oneself
on the side of truth and freedom, it sounds somehow embarrassing. But there was
and is no other way. Freedom is always tragic. A free man is lonely.”
This shouldn’t
be confused with self-pity. Herbert writes in his poem “A Life” (perhaps about
the Stalin text cited above):
“Someone
recommended a classic work — as he said
it changed
his life and the lives of millions of others
I read it —
I didn’t change — and I’m ashamed to admit
for the life
of me I don’t remember the classic’s name”
[The interview, translated from the Polish by Jaroslav Anders, was published in 1987
in Partisan Review. Kociejowski’s
remark is from “A Meeting with Pan Cogito” (The Pebble Chance: Feuilletons and
Other Prose, 2014). “A Life” can be found in Alissa Valles’ translation in The Collected Poems 1956–1998 (2007).]
No comments:
Post a Comment