Zbigniew Herbert

Zbigniew Herbert (29 October 1924 in Lwow - 28 July 1998 in Warsaw) was an influential Polish poet, essayist and moralist. He was a member of the Polish resistance movement during World War II. He was one of the most famous and most translated Polish writers.

Zbigniew Herbert - Biography

One branch of his family came to Polish Galicia from the United Kingdom. His grandfather was an English teacher and his father fought for Polish liberation in the Polish Legions.

In 1938 Herbert started studies at the Gimnazjum im. Kazimierza Wielkiego in Lwow. During World War II he joined the Armia Krajowa resistance and continued his studies in underground schools. In 1944 he moved from Lwow to Krakow just before the communists Read Army took the city and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, graduated from the Akademia Ekonomiczna w Krakowie (Economic University in Krakow), then studied law and philosophy at the Uniwersytet Miko³aja Kopernika in Torun.

His poetry was first published in 1950 in the magazine Dzis i jutro. His first poetry book Struna swiat³a ("The String of Light") was published in 1956.

During the 1950s he worked at many low-paying jobs because he refused to write according to official Communist guidelines. Between 1963 and 1968 he worked as an editor for Poezja ("The Poetry") magazine. Between 1955 and 1983 he was a member of Zwi±zek Literatow Polskich (Polish Literary Association).

In 1968 his work was translated into English by Czes³aw Mi³osz and Peter Dale Scott. The publication of his Selected Poems in the United States and England made Herbert one of the most popular contemporary poets in the English-speaking world.

He traveled widely through the West and lived in Paris, Berlin and the United States, where he taught briefly at the University of California at Los Angeles.

In 1992 he returned to Warsaw. By this time he was already seriously ill. Back in Poland, he excited controversies by his publicly presented strong anti-communist opinions. He wrote an open letter to the president Lech Wa³êsa concerning the case of colonel Ryszard Kuklinski (1994) and to the president Dzjochar Dudajev supporting him morally. In his famous interview for "Tygodnik Solidarnosæ" (and numerous other publications there) he criticized not only the Round Table agreements and the public life in the Third Polish Republic (III Rzeczpospolita), but also he accused some prominent people like Czes³aw Mi³osz and Adam Michnik, in his opinion personally responsible for the present situation. These publications induced many attacks and polemics that lasted even after his death. To some extent, these controversies still remain in the center of the public debate in Poland (as of 2006).

He died on July 28, 1998, in Warsaw, Poland.

Zbigniew Herbert - Literary criticism

In his works he presented the 'reflection-intellectual' perspective, with stress on human beings and their dignity, to the background of history, where people are almost irrelevant cogs in the machine of fate. He often used elements of mediterranean culture in his works.

"Herbert's steadily detached, ironic and historically minded style represents, I suppose, a form of classicism. But it is a one-sided classicism (.....) In a way, Herbert's poetry is typical of the whole Polish attitude to their position within the communist bloc; independent, brilliant, ironic, wary, a bit contemptuous, pained." - A. Alvarez, Under Pressure (1965)

"If the key to contemporary Polish poetry is the selective experience of the last decades, Herbert is perhaps the most skilful in expressing it and can be called a poet of historical irony. He achieves a sort of precarious equilibrium by endowing the patterns of civilization with meanings, in spite of all its horrors." - Czes³aw Mi³osz, Postwar Polish Poetry (3rd ed., 1983)

"There is little doubt that at this writing Zbigniew Herbert is the most admired and respected poet now living in Poland. (...) Polish readers have always revered poets who succeed in defining the nation's spiritual dilemma; what is exceptional in Herbert is that his popularity at home is matched by a wide acclaim abroad." - Stanis³aw Baranczak, A Fugitive from Utopia (1987)

In modern poetry, Herbert advocated semantic transparence. In a talk given at a conference organized by the journal Odra he said: "So not having pretensions to infallibility, but stating only my predilections, I would like to say that in contemporary poetry the poems that appeal to me the most are those in which I discern something I would call a quality of semantic transparency (a term borrowed from Husserl's logic). This semantic transparency is the characteristic of a sign consisting in this: that during the time when the sign is used, attention is directed towards the object denoted, and the sign itself does not hold the attention. The word is a window onto reality." [Herbert's talk at the meeting "Poet in face of the present day", organized by the "Odra" journal; print version: preface to: Zbigniew Herbert "Poezje", Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, Warszawa 1998, ISBN 83-06-02667-5.]

Zbigniew Herbert - Awards and prizes

Nicholaus Lenau Prize (1965)
Jerusalem Prize (1991)
Nagrada Vilenica (1991)

Zbigniew Herbert - Selected works

Struna swiat³a, Warszawa, Czytelnik, 1956
Hermes, pies i gwiazda, Warszawa, Czytelnik, 1957
Studium przedmiotu, Warszawa, Czytelnik, 1961
Barbarzynca w ogrodzie, Warszawa, Czytelnik, 1962
Napis, Warszawa, Czytelnik, 1969
Pan Cogito, Warszawa, Czytelnik, 1974
Raport z oblê¿onego miasta i inne wiersze, Pary¿, Instytut Literacki, 1983
Elegia na odejscie, Pary¿, Instytut Literacki, 1990
Rovigo, Wroc³aw, Wydawnictwo Dolnosl±skie, 1992
Martwa natura z wêdzid³em, Wroc³aw, Wydawnictwo Dolnosl±skie, 1993
Epilog burzy, Wroc³aw, Wydawnictwo Dolnosl±skie, 1998
Labirynt nad morzem, Zeszyty Literackie, 2000
Krol mrowek, Krakow, a5, 2001
Wêze³ gordyjski oraz inne pisma rozproszone, Warszawa, Biblioteka Wiêzi, 2001

Zbigniew Herbert - English translations

Selected Poems translators Czes³aw Mi³osz and Peter Dale Scott, and an introduction by Al Alvarez, Penguin Modern European Poets, 1968 reprinted by The Ecco Press.
Elegy for the Departure translators: John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter, The Ecco Press, 1999.