Reconstruction of the Poet - Zbigniew Herbert

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Reconstruction of the Poet

by
Zbigniew Herbert

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Title:	Reconstruction of the Poet
Author:	Zbigniew Herbert
Genre:	Various
Written:	(Eng. 2024)
Length:	269 pages
Original in:	Polish
Availability:	Reconstruction of the Poet - US
	Reconstruction of the Poet - UK
	Reconstruction of the Poet - Canada

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Uncollected Works of Zbigniew Herbert
Translated and with an Introduction by Alissa Valles

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Our Assessment:

B+ : a very welcome collection, with some remarkable pieces

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Publishers Weekly	A	15/7/2024	.

From the Reviews:

"This spectacular compendium from Polish poet Herbert (1924-1998) consists of writing previously unseen or only available in periodicals. (...) Delicate, perfectly pitched, and rich in insight, this volume reveals an essential body of work." - Publishers Weekly

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

Reconstruction of the Poet collects three (radio-)plays and seventy-four poems by Zbigniew Herbert. The plays were first produced on radio between 1957 and 1960, with staged productions soon later; remarkably, all three were also broadcast in (different) English translation between 1962 and 1964 on the BBC. Thirty-three of the seventy-four poems were only published posthumously; of those published during Herbert's lifetime -- only one in one of his collections, from which it was later removed -- are arranged chronologically, and the majority date to the 1950s.
The selection of poems is that -- a selection -- as translator and editor Alissa Valles explains in her Introduction that she limited herself to:

poems that were clearly marked or could reasonably be considered finished, those that can be read without extensive annotation and marked lacunae, and I focused on those that could shed new light on Herbert's work as a whole.

In addition, she notes:

The emphasis on my selection of poems published posthumously is on poems addressed to friends, poems written in memory, and outings of Mr Cogito that add new facets to that persona.

       [A Bibliography helpfully does provide information about the first publication of the poems and first publication and performances of the plays but, disappointingly, does not provide the original Polish titles of the texts; Valles there also only notes the name of the first English-language translator (for the BBC productions) of one of the three plays.]

       The first play is The Philosophers' Cave (Jaskinia filozofów (1956), previously translated by Paul (Pawel) Mayewski as The Philosophers' Den (in The Broken Mirror (1958)), depicting Socrates' final days, in prison. It opens with a Prologue, a six-part Chorus introducing the play -- already very nicely done. The three-act play then shows Socrates in his cell, awaiting death, and his exchanges with various visitors as well as a Guard.
       Among those visiting him is an Emissary -- who notes:

You're mortally weary, Socrates, and you're dreaming of a rest deeper than sleep. If that's not the truth, please contradict me.

Socrates says nothing.
That's normal. But what's not normal in you is the lure of theatricality.

The Emissary accuses him: "feeling that death is near, you've reached for the tragic mask" -- and if Socrates is not exactly hamming iy up, there's certainly a sense of staged-ness to the whole scenario he has put himself in (all the more appropriate for and in a play, of course). So too when the Guard suggests he might want to get it over with the day before the official 'execution' -- "Tomorrow it's going to be swarming with people in here, women will come, there will be wailing. Today you can do it without a fuss" -- Socrates declines.
The visitors include his wife and several of his students -- and, of course, Plato (to whom Socrates suggests: "Write poems, Plato"). There is also a long exchange between Xanthippe and Plato, in which Plato argues:

The true Socrates, what I will call the public Socrates, is a creation of his pupils. When they discovered him a dozen or so years ago, he was like a street singer, clearly a talent, but without any culture. He didn't know Homer, his dialectics were amateurish, and he had not metaphysical interests -- in a word, a primitive. A whole system of finishing his education was worked out, by presenting him with supposedly random interlocutors, from a shoemaker to a sophist. A tremendous labor.

And he states:

Yes, he must die because of his philosophical school. He shone bright in the intellectual firmament of Athens and he must be extinguished, before people start analyzing the brightness, before they ask Socrates for a system. Only we know that there is no system. To preserve that secret, we must sacrifice Socrates. The rest belongs to commentators.

A nice touch too is a final argument by the Keeper of Remains, who notes that: "Socrates came from the proletariat" and that: "economic conditions turned him into a philosopher", a nod to the Marxist environment Herbert was writing in at the time (without hammering home the idea too hard).
The second play is the one this collection takes its title from, Reconstruction of the Poet (Rekonstrukcja poety (1960); previously translated by Magdalena Czajkowska as Reconstruction of a Poet, broadcast on BBC Three in 1964). It revolves around Homer, who rises up to counter a contemporary professor's account -- complaining:

First Virgil, then the translators, philologists, archaeologists ... There' s nothing left of me but a handbook of mythology and a model for teaching stylistic analysis.

       The play has a forty-five-year-old Homer living in Miletus, imagining his retirement -- he wants to buy a hotel, and: "I'd also like to work on the theory of epic. I think I've accomplished a little bit in that field". He goes to the market to ply his wares -- tell a tale -- but falters; he abandons Miletus and goes to the island of Milos, starting, in a very different way, anew -- "not with Troy, not with Achilles, but from a sandal, from a buckle on a sandal, from a pebble struck carelessly in the road". Herbert nicely imagines Homer's poetic reïnvention -- and amusingly closes off the play with the contemporary professor's estimation of the master in his other guise.
       The third play is The Other Room (Drugi pokój (1958); previously translated by Halina Carroll, broadcast on BBC Three in 1962). [This is the one previous translator Valles mentions in her Bibliography -- referring to her as 'Halina Carroll-Najder'; this is technically correct, but since Halina Carroll only married Zdzisław Najder (and took his name) in 1965 the original credit was simply 'Halina Carroll'.] The play is a (then-)contemporary two-hander, the characters a married couple identified only as 'He' and 'She'. The dramatis personae does list another presence: 'What's on the Other Side of the Wall', and it is this that dominates the play, the old woman who lives in the room next door in the otherwise shared living quarters typical of post-war urban Poland.
       The couple had hoped she wouldn't last long when they moved in, but she's stuck it out, leaving them complaining: "Who could have known this would go on for three years ?" It's gnawing on the couple's nerves and impacts their relationship; a familiar kind of story, but decently enough presented.

       The uncollected poetry makes for a nice collection -- and, spanning Herbert's entire career (though 1950s-heavy), makes for a good overview-sampler and/or introduction to his poetry.
       Among the pieces are several always welcome 'Mr Cogito'-poems (see also the dedicated collection) -- including one 'From Mr Cogito's Erotica', which concludes:

I draw you in snagged on the line of my dream
an ant's touch opens the body's loose burrow
from this moment our breath will rise as one
from the vertiginous pinnacle of the spine

Perhaps the stand-out among the Cogito-poems -- surely the most significant -- is 'Mr Cogito's Disability', a humorous take in which he emphatically makes, and spins out, a:

confession:

Mr Cogito
was born
lived
and will depart
as an individual
COMPLETELY DEVOID OF A SUBCONSCIOUS

There are several prose-poems, including 'Mr Cogito's Addendum to the Tragedy of Mayerling', and a number dedicated to or invoking the memory of other poets and writers, including a powerful one in memory of Jean Améry and one 'On the Repatriation of Bruno Jasieński's Remains'. In 'Generation' he offers a whole roll-call of fellow-writers, including Paul (Celan) and Ingeborg (Bachmann), and notes that:

we fooled ourselves that we'd be the vanguard
that we'd open the road to the promised land
we quickly lost contact with man's regular army

       Of interest too is the curiosity 'Epic' -- published in the first edition of Herbert's debut collection, but not in later ones.

       There is a bit of a lumped-together feel to Reconstruction of the Poet, but that's to be expected from a collection of previously uncollected writings, and it really is a collection with two very different halves. The plays -- the ones with a classical setting in particular -- are the big and very pleasant surprise, with both The Philosophers' Cave and Reconstruction of the Poet very strong. If not quite overshadowing the poetry, they can take a reader's attention away from it; the two halves of the book really are better enjoyed entirely separately, so that the poetry can be fully appreciated as well, as there are quite a few very strong pieces here as well.
       A very welcome collection, with a number of truly remarkable pieces.

- M.A.Orthofer, 3 September 2024

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Links:

Reconstruction of the Poet:

Ecco publicity page

Reviews:

Zbigniew Herbert:

The complete review's Zbigniew Herbert page.
Zbigniew Herbert at the Poetry Foundation
Fundacja Herberta
Zbigniew Herbert at Polska 2000

Other books by Herbert under review:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Poetry under review

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About the Author:

Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998) was born in Lwow. He earned degrees from the University of Krakow, the University of Warsaw, and the Nicholas Copernicus University of Torun. He began publishing his poetry in 1956, though he continued to have difficulties getting much of it published in his native Poland. One of the foremost modern European poets, he has been extensively translated.

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