'They Will Leave Behind Trenches'

“You wouldn’t give up utopia it was too nourishing seductive / For mommy’s boys the heirs of fortune heirs / To the bloody myths of the twentieth city.” 

Today is the centenary of Polish poet and essayist Zbigniew Herbert. The Anglophone world has been fortunate. Herbert’s poems are said to be receptive to translation into English. Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott, John and Bogdana Carpenter, Jaroslaw Anders, Clare Cavanagh and most recently, Alissa Valles, have supplied us with a steady flow of his work in poetry and prose for sixty years. The lines above serve as the opening of “Trenches,” translated by Valles and collected in Reconstruction of the Poet: Uncollected Works of Zbigniew Herbert (Ecco, 2024).

 

The theme is recurrent in Herbert’s work. By “bloody myths” he means the murderous ideologies that cost millions their lives in the last century. Herbert was a veteran of the Soviet and Nazi invasions of his country:

 

“The twilight of the fraudsters is upon us but still unborn

 The bookkeeper of the era in spectacles of barbed wire

Who swears alternately in Russian and in German”

 

“Trenches” reminded me of Katyń, Andrzej Wajda’s 2009 film about the murder of 22,000 Polish officers by the NKVD in 1940, on orders from Stalin. Poland’s conscription laws required university graduates to serve as reserve officers, so the Soviets effectively wiped out much of the nation’s professional class – doctors, lawyers, university instructors. The bodies were buried in vast trenches in the Katyń Forest. The Soviets denied involvement in the slaughter for half a century, blaming it on the Nazis.

 

In Wajda’s film, a husband and father in Kraków is an officer rounded up by the Soviets and held in a prison camp. He and a friend, another officer, speculate on their future, and one says, “Buttons. That’s all that will be left of us.” I remember the line taking me by surprise as it seems to allude to “Buttons,” a poem published by Herbert in Rovigo in 1992. Here’s the poem as translated by Valles in The Complete Poems: 1956-1998 (2007):

 

“Only buttons witnesses to the crime

proved unyielding outlasting death

and as sole memorial on the grave

rise up from the depths of the earth

 

“they are a testimony it is for God

to count them and to be merciful

but what resurrection if each body

lies in the earth a clinging particle

 

“a bird flies over a cloud sails past

a leaf descends mallows grow lush

a mist drifts in the Smolensk forest

and up in the heights a deep hush

 

“only buttons proved unyielding

the mighty voice of a muted chorus

only buttons proved unyielding

buttons from coats and uniforms”

 

Smolensk is a Russian city about 15 miles west of the Katyń Forest, where most of the murders took place. Herbert dedicates the poem “In memory of Captain Edward Herbert,” the son of the poet’s paternal uncle. Edward Herbert was among the dead of Katyń, as was Wajda’s father. Later in “Trenches,” which is dedicated to “Those buried knee-deep in the forefathers,” Herbert writes:

 

“In forests and cities they will leave behind trenches

From the terrible battle for man’s soul where sedges

Now plant their green banner in a true wind

 

“Ants cross blindly across these pits of crime

Rain splashes rocking their nothingness

So not even a field mouse will move in here”

 

Herbert was born on October 29, 1924 in Lviv (Lvov, Lwów, Lemberg, Lwihorod, Leopolis) when it was part of the Second Polish Republic and died July 28, 1998 in Warsaw.