'Then Came the Barbarians'

“Prose poetry” suggests transfusing a patient with a blood type not his own. You’ll kill him or at least make him sick. When I confront a prose poem I run, though sometimes I pause to laugh and then run. The question becomes, which is worse: the poet’s ineptness or his artsy-fartsiness? 

Then I happen on a partial exception. Few poets I admire more than Zbigniew Herbert. He was a brave, difficult man. For decades he was Poland’s conscience. His poetry is stark and seldom mushy, and it might be confused with avant-garde self-indulgence until his wit and respect for Western civilization become obvious. And he wrote the occasional prose poem, seemingly an oxymoronic act.

 

Here is “From Mythology” from his third collection, Study of the Object (1961). The translation is by Czesław Miłosz (Postwar Polish Poetry, rev. ed., 1983):

 

“First there was a god of night and tempest, a black idol without eyes, before whom they leaped, naked and smeared with blood. Later on, in the times of the republic, there were many gods with wives, children, creaking beds, and harmlessly exploding thunderbolts. At the end only superstitious neurotics carried in their pockets little statues of salt, representing the god of irony. There was no greater god at that time.

 

“Then came the barbarians. They too valued highly the little god of irony. They would crush it under their heels and add it to their dishes.”

 

I would have preferred calling it a fable, parable or even a little allegory. It’s not poetry but let’s put that aside. Keep in mind that Herbert himself was a master of irony. In The Alluring Problem: An Essay on Irony (Oxford University Press, 1986), D.J. Enright writes:

 

“Possibly Herbert, and we, are to be numbered among those superstitious neurotics: irony couldn’t have achieved much, but no greater god was available. We cannot believe the barbarians would prize irony—though they may have appreciated its value as a highbrow equivalent of bread and circuses—but, being blessed with healthy appetite, they might well discover the uses of salt: the metaphorical ‘ironically,’ i.e. aptly, declining into the literal.”

 

And let’s remember Herbert titled his first essay collection Barbarian in the Garden (1962; trans. Michael March and Jarosław Anders, 1985). He wrote it after his first visits to Western Europe in the early nineteen-sixties. He was the barbarian.