'Where Silence Suddenly Erupts in Speech'

Zbigniew Herbert visited Western Europe for the first time in 1958-59: France, then England, Italy, France again and back to Poland. His budget was tight but Herbert was no hedonistic tourist. Nor was he a stuffy academic or critic. The essays in Barbarian in the Garden (1962; trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985) chronicle a self-guided tour of Western culture. They are acts of regeneration for an age increasingly stricken with amnesia. The tone is celebratory after so many gray years in Stalinist Poland. Adam Zagajewski refers in his poem “Farewell to Zbigniew Herbert” to “that blissful first Paris / after years of Soviet scarcity and squalor.” The essays are suffused with a muted sense of exaltation. Zagajewski writes: 

“Afterwards, long after, Provence’s golden dust,

fig trees in the vineyards, the lesson of white Greece,

obscure museums, Piero’s Madonna great with child

—in the interim, two occupations, two inhuman armies,

death’s clumsy vehicles patrol your streets.”

 

The only essay in Barbarian in the Garden devoted to a single artist is “Piero della Francesca.” If you appreciate symbolism, consider that Piero died on the first Columbus Day – October 12, 1492. Herbert judges him virtually a saint of humanism. Here is the conclusion of his essay:

 

“Tradition holds that he went blind towards the end of his life. Marco di Longara told Berto degli Alberti that as a young boy he walked the streets of Borgo San Sepolcro with an old, blind painter called Piero della Francesca.

 

“Little Marco could not have known that his hand was leading light.”

 

Herbert was a dedicated traveler (including Los Angeles in the seventies) though he remained a resident of his birthplace, Poland. The museums, churches and ruins of Western Europe signified aesthetic, philosophical solace:

 

“I liked to imagine your strolls

in Umbria, Liguria; your dapper chase,

your quest for places where the glaciers

of the past melt, baring forms.”

 

Another Barbarian essay, “Orvieto’s Duomo,” recounts Herbert's visit to the fourteenth-century cathedral in that Umbrian city:

 

“The muses were not silent though the times were by no means peaceful. The town was a hotbed of heresy; and through historical irony and thanks to thick walls, the frequent refuge of popes. The Guelph clan of the Monaldeschi fought against its Ghibbelline faction, who were expelled from the town while the sculptors were illustrating Genesis. According to the reliable witness, the author of The Divine Comedy, both families suffer in purgatory along with the kin of Romeo and Juliet. They were prolonged contests for power within the town – in Dante’s words the fate of dolore ostello, ‘the inn of suffering.’”

 

Barbarian in the Garden may be my favorite collection of essays written by anyone, second only to Montaigne’s. It’s a poet’s book but never descends into the merely “poetic.” Herbert’s excitement and gratitude for finally being able to visit the primal sites of his culture – Western culture – are palpable. Zagajewski writes:

 

“I liked to imagine you roving

through poetry’s mountains, seeking the spot

where silence suddenly erupts in speech.”

 

[The Zagajewski poem can be found in Without End: New and Selected Poems (trans. Clare Cavanagh, 2002).