From one of Poland's most acclaimed poets comes a new collection of poems and plays spanning almost five decades and translated for the first time. Encapsulating the prolific work of the poet and playwright Zbigniew Herbert, Reconstruction of the Poet is both a celebration of a profound life of letters and a wide-ranging collection of never-before-published work that casts new light on a much-loved poet. Spanning from 1950 to 1998, this volume of work contains three plays—The Philosophers’ Cave, The Other Room, and Reconstruction of the Poet—and over fifty poems. This collection takes readers through the mind of a man attempting to look at the ruins of a postwar world while seeking living sources of European culture, with poems commemorating contemporaries fallen in wartime, elevating erotic experience and friendship, and exploring political and metaphysical passions. A rich expansion of previously published works by Herbert, Reconstruction of the Poet is both an introduction for readers who might still be unfamiliar with this important poet’s work and a fresh invitation for reflection for his longtime readers.
Zbigniew Herbert is one of the outstanding poets of the last century. This exceptional new translation brings together, for the first time in English in one volume, his entire poetic output – from his first book of poems, String of Light, in 1956, to his final volume, previously unpublished in English, Epilogue of the Storm. As Joseph Brodsky said of Herbert's Selected Poems, this definitive collection is 'bound for a much longer haul than any of us can anticipate'.
Ten lyrical and passionate essays on the culture, art, and history of Western Europe written from the perspective of the post-Stalinist thaw of the 1960s.
Available for the first time in English, Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems is an important collection from the late Zbigniew Herbert. Translated from the Polish by award-winning translators John and Bogdana Carpenter, these sixty-eight verse and prose poems span forty years of Herbert's incredible life and work. The pieces are organized chronologically from 1950 to 1990, with an emphasis on the writer's early and late poems. Here Zbigniew Herbert's poetry turns from the public--what we have come to expect from this poet--to the more personal. The title poem, "Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp , is a three-part farewell ode to the inanimate objects and memories of childhood. Herbert reflects on the relationship between the living and the dead in "What Our Dead Do," the state of his homeland in "Country," and the power of language in "We fall asleep on words . . . " Herbert's short prose poems read like aphorisms, deceptively whimsical but always wise: "Bears are divided into brown and white, also paws, head, and trunk. They have nice snouts, and small eyes.... Children who love Winnie-the-Pooh would give them anything, but a hunter walks in the forest and aims with his rifle between that pair of small eyes." Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems confirms Zbigniew Herbert's place as one of the world's greatest and most influential poets.
“One of the finest and most original writers…and one of the greatest Polish writers of [the 20th] century. [Herbert] is a figure comparable to, say, T. S. Eliot or W. H. Auden.” —Edward Hirsch, The New Yorker Polish essayist, poet, and spiritual leader of his nation’s anti-Communist movement, the late Zbigniew Herbert is a literary giant whose writings are revered throughout Europe and the world. A companion volume to the author’s Collected Poems (Ecco 2007), Collected Prose is the only English language edition of the award-winning writer’s prose works collected in a single, beautiful, accessible volume—including in their entirety his renowned Labyrinth on the Sea, Still Life with a Bridle, King of the Ants, and Barbarian in the Garden.
In "Still Life with a Bridle, " poet and essayist Zbigniew Herbert takes an intriguing look at the cultural, artisitic, and aesthetic legacy of 17th-century Holland. These sixteen essays reveal Hervert's discriminating artistic eye and poetic sensibility, one that revels in irony, humor, and a satirist's appreciation of the absurd. An inveterate museum-goer, he focuses on the art of the Dutch masters, using it as a stepping-off point for a thoroughly individual and entertaining examination of the foibles, genius, and character of the Dutch people as a whole. The result is an unorthodox and revealing glimpse into the past that gives us a keener understanding not only of a distant people, but of ourselves as well.
In these pages of prose, the poet Zbigniew Herbert brings the Dutch 17th century alive. The people, as they bid crippling sums of money for one bulb of a new variety of tulip; the painters like Torrentius who loved women, was persecuted for heresy and who paintings disappeared - all but one, named 'Sill Life with a Bridle.
The author of this book travelled to Holland from his native Poland to explore the history of Dutch life in the 17th century. The 16 prose pieces that make up this book reveal the author's discriminating artistic eye and poetic sensibility, one that revels in irony, humour and a satirist's appreciation of the absurd. An inveterate museum-goer, he focuses on the art of the period, using it as a stepping-stone point for an individual examination of the foibles, genius and character of the Dutch people as a whole.
At last the full sequence of Herbert's brilliant Cogito poems are translated from the 1974 Polish edition, Pan Cogito. Herbert, who fought in the underground resistance against the Nazis and in the spiritual resistance to communism, speaks with a combination of innocence and irony to the condition of humankind at the end of the 20th century. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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