Abstract
Page 10 American Book Review Polish poetry has fared very well in the marketplace of global literary recognition over the last few decades. The two Nobel Prizes awarded to Polish poets in the span of merely sixteen years—Czesław Miłosz in 1980,Wisława Szymborska in 1996—were not an unprecedented feat: curiously, and no doubt enticingly to conspiracy-sniffing Nobel watchers, the same chronological distance separates the two prizes awarded for poetry to Greek authors (Giorgos Seferis in 1963, Odysseus Elitis in 1979) and to Italians (Salvatore Quasimodo in 1959, Eugenio Montale in 1975). However, no other country from beyond the historical pale separating Europe’s core from its Eastern peripheries—keenly reimagined by Zbigniew Herbert, the self-described “barbarian in the garden” of Western European culture—has been similarly distinguished, and no other has seen its poets’work gracing the pages of The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, et al., with such reliable regularity in recent years. Against this background, Herbert’s figure stands out precisely for not having been rewarded with a literary Nobel, despite (or, as some would argue, because of) his long-standing international acclaim and widespread recognition as “a spiritual leader of the anticommunist movement in Poland” (to quote from his biographical note in The Collected Poems). It may interest theAmerican reader to know that one of several theories circulating in Poland to explain “the denial” of a Nobel Prize to Herbert evokes the popularity of his poetry in the US and the alleged anti-American bias of the prize committee. If such an explanation merits inclusion in some cosmic balance sheet of the poet’s fame (regardless of its doubtful truth value), the publication of these Collected Poems should go a long way toward erasing any burden of guilt borne by Herbert’s admirers in the US. The volume brings together all of Herbert’s individual collections published over forty-two years, from Chord of Light (1956) to Epilogue to a Storm (1998), and includes several bonus features, including a somewhat disappointing introduction byAdam Zagajewski (himself a prominent Polish poet). Not all translations are byAlissa Valles herself: Collected Poems reproduces the first book-length sample of Herbert’s poetry to have appeared in English, the Selected Poems (1968) translated by Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott, published originally in the Penguin Modern European Poets series and more recently kept in print by Ecco. The publication of Herbert’s Collected Poems has generated quite a buzz since the volume’s appearance in early 2007, but not, lamentably, for the best of reasons. Writing in the May 2007 issue of Poetry, Michael Hofmann criticized vehemently the decision to entrust the translation of Herbert’s complete poetry to “someone I have never heard of” over the more obvious choice of Bogdana and John Carpenter, who in 1977 produced the second volume of the Polish poet’s work in English (published by Oxford University Press and, confusingly, also entitled Selected Poems), and who, as Valles acknowledges, “contributed much to his reception and recognition in the English-speaking world.” The rather eerie similarity between this controversy and the discussions surrounding the non-attribution of the Nobel Prize to Herbert—complete with unsavory insinuations and name-calling (Hofmann refers to a literary agent whom he nicknames “The Jackal”)—is an irony we could do without, and it is particularly unfortunate that the reviewer’s peremptory judgment of Valles’s translation, negative in the extreme and bordering on hysterical—“This Collected Poems is a hopelessly, irredeemably bad book”—does not rely on any direct confrontation with Herbert’s original texts (since Hofmann cannot read Polish). Zbigniew Herbert is the self-described “barbarian in the garden” of Western European culture. It will come as a pleasant surprise to any otherwise unbiased reader who may have been exposed to the negative publicity about Collected Poems that Valles proves to be, on the whole, a sensitive , careful, and imaginative interpreter of Herbert’s poetry. She gives an eloquent demonstration of her care and insight in her four-paragraph commentary on the only change—as microscopic as it is significant— that she made to the Miłosz/Scott translations...
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