'He Could Take Part in This Savouring of the World'

One of the ways biologists distinguish the animate from the inanimate, and the dead, is motility. Life moves independently, under its own power. Stasis suggests the end of life. Travel is especially prized by those unable to do so, whether confined to bed or a Soviet Bloc regime. For Zbigniew Herbert, permission to travel to Western Europe starting in the late nineteen-fifties became a form of cultural pilgrimage. He learned to resist Poland’s present by studying the West’s past. Here is the first stanza of Herbert’s “Journey” (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter):

 

“If you set out on a journey let it be long

 a wandering that seems to have no aim groping your way blindly

 so you learn the roughness of the earth not only with your eyes but by touch

 so you can confront the world with your whole skin”

 

Life as a journey must be among the oldest of extant metaphors, probably universal. Herbert suggests not tourism but cultural immersion and sustenance -- reading and visiting museums as a form of travel. Here is the poem's seventh and final stanza:

 

“So if it is to be a journey let it be long

 a true journey from which you do not return

 the repetition of the world elementary journey

 conservation with elements question without answer

 a pact forced after struggle

 great reconciliation”

 

Herbert is one of the last century’s essential poets and “travel writers.” The Barbarian in the Garden (1962; trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985) documents those early travels outside Poland. Herbert was always history-minded. Travel beyond the Communist bloc was escape from an ugly, tedious, oppressive present into a rich past populated with painters and poets. He was an erudite traveler in space and time. He writes:

 

“The Judeo-Greek-Roman tradition really interests me. I cannot study Persian or Indian cultures, which for sure are great too. I was born and raised in this culture and would like to maintain – as much as my small abilities, strength and talent allow – these ties that once were connecting Poland with Ferrara, Prague, Bologna, Heidelberg or Oxford.”

 

In Barbarian in the Garden, Herbert is almost giddy with the history that suffuses everything he sees. My comparable experience has been numerous visits to Civil War battlefields – Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville. Such places are haunted. The ideal experience combines physical presence with a deep grounding in the literature. Herbert’s biographer, Andrzej Franaszek (still untranslated into English), says in an interview:

 

“He wrote beautifully not only about delight, but also, for instance, about immersing into the new city on  the first day of [his] stay[,] drinking in every detail and exploring what the colours of this city are, what materials it is built of, what the smell of the air is like, how people behave, in front of which shops or bakeries they gather. He was naturally a person travelling to museums, making pilgrimages to paintings by Rembrandt or Vermeer, but he also noticed the tangible, material, physical world. He could describe this, he could take part in this savouring of the world. And naturally, trivially, I would say, this enriched his writing about art.”

 

Herbert died at age seventy-three on this date, July 27, in 1998.