Poetry Versus the World: Remembering Zbigniew Herbert

Beginning to remember . . . while a person whom we know and admire is still alive—even if he lives far away—remembering remains rather lazy, tranquil, and pointillist. The memory does not yet strive for unity. It calmly drifts from spot to spot; it skips from one episode to another like a child playing hopscotch. We say: but do you remember the trip to Meaux? Do you remember Christmas Eve in Berlin, Zbigniew's bass voice singing carols? Do you remember the visit to the Hôpital St. Louis? Do you remember the bouquet he brought you for . . . ?

After a death, everything changes. The memory sobers, and settles down to its great labor. Now its goal is synthesis. It longs to capture and combine all the scraps and pieces it remembers, along with the thoughts they inspired, into a single portrait. In the first weeks and months after the loss of a great friend, the memory repeats: it's still too soon, I still can't see, let's wait a bit. But then the first anniversary of the death draws near, time swims past like an Olympic freestyler and suddenly you have to hurry, suddenly it seems that no task is more pressing. And all at once, it turns out that we are dealing with an open-ended project, with a process of remembering that cannot be seen through to conclusion. Of course, you can write down recollections, pronounce the words "the end," send your text off to the printer—only to realize a few days later that you had forgotten something, left something out. Often the most important something . . .

It also turns out that we have at least two kinds of memory. One is intelligent, educated, not only able, but eager, to synthesize; this sort of memory sets down large outlines, rational theses, vivid colors. But there is also a humbler sister, the memory of little snapshots, fleeting instants, a single-use camera producing atoms of recollection that are not only unsuitable for enlargement and standardization, but seem even to take pride in their absolutely idiomatic character. And it is this Lesser Memory—modest, quick, perceptive—that does not accept death, does not agree to revolutionize its system for delivering photographs to the archives. Thanks to its resistance, this variety of memory retains more life, more freshness, in its flashes. For it repeats: remember, remember, remember . . . and after each "remember," another slide from its vast repository lights up. It is useless, though, to request a specific moment, a specific day. Memory of this type is capricious—like the librarian who thinks her paycheck is a disgrace and, as revenge, agrees to find for patrons only photographs that strike her fancy. The mystery that any powerful personality conceals will not open up simply because the person bearing the mystery is no longer alive. We saw the greatness, during his lifetime, of the man who died. We also saw his weaknesses, and did not dare to link the two, or perhaps did not know how. Now, when the biographical parentheses contain an implacable second date, we try to understand.

He was a great poet. It is a pity that Gombrowicz spoiled the flavor of that phrase—a nobly simple declaration of the highest esteem. He was a great poet, and as is always the case with greatness, analysis can add nothing to the laconic formula. (One may write analytically, and at great length, about the worst graphomaniac.) Powerful emotion, intellectual pleasure, a sense for the rare quality of the voice that speaks—only these may, sometimes, enhance our understanding. Critics have searched Zbigniew Herbert's often flawless books and essays for the guiding principle of his poetry: "neoclassicism," "the fugitive from utopia," "the poet of fidelity," "the voice of suffering." His work is strangely resistant. It may be that some poetic imaginations stand upon a single principle that cannot be divided further, while others build instead on multiplicity...