Elegy For The Departure - Hardcover

Herbert, Zbigniew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0880016191 ISBN 13: 9780880016193

Publisher: Ecco, 1999

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Zbigniew Herbert was born in Lwów, Poland, in 1924. Herbert studied law, economics, and philosophy at the universities of Krakow, Torun, and Warsaw. His books include Selected Poems, Mr Cogito, Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems, Barbarian in the Garden, Still Life with a Bridle, The King of the Ants, and Reconstruction of the Poet.

From the Back Cover

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.

Reviews

Many consider Herbert's work the equal of his fellow Polish poets Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, nobel laureates both; his death this past summer sadly precludes his joining them. Although his more familiar poems couch their approach to the public and political in the terms of the personal, this luminously translated collection expressly represents Herbert at his most lyrical. A beautiful prose poem, "The Button" (below in full) captures a dilemma of the lyric mode?the need to balance the particularity of subjective experience with a meaning accessible to others: "The best fairy tales of all are about us, how once we were small. I like the one about how I swallowed an ivory button. My mother was crying." This volume brings together work uncollected in English from throughout his career, culling from his early works of 1956-1969 and from a 1990 volume. The poems quickly move from obscure, self-consciously modernist fragmentary meditations marked by flashes of brilliance to assured, confident wholes, though there are standouts among the early efforts. "Chosen By The Stars," for instance, superbly reworks the Icarus myth to explore the poetic psyche, while the meditation "What Our Dead Do" ("out of gratitude/ we imagine immortality for them/ snug as the burrow of a mouse") shows, with masterfully understated irony, how the dead structure the imagination of the living. His recurring alter ego "Mr. Cogito" (who "always defended himself/ against the smoke of time") returns in the later poems, "so when the hour comes/ he can consent without a murmur// to the trial of truth and falsehood/ to the trial of fire and water." In sum, this collection will only serve to broaden and deepen our appreciation of this remarkable late-century poet.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Zbigniew Herbert is one of the finest and most original writers living in Europe today and one of the greatest Polish writers of this century. He is a figure comparable to, say, T. S. Eliot or W. H. Auden.

Herbert was not just a great Polish poet but one of the great poets of the latter 20th century. This book collects poems not yet translated into English. Spanning from 1950 to 1990, they give a good feel for his development. The poems in Part 1, drawn from Herberts first collection, feature dislocated images of loss and melancholy and sometimes feel a little scattered. By his second and third collections, from which the poems in Part 2 were taken, Herbert has hit his stride; pared down, ironic, and showing the poets steely control, these exemplify his best work. Witty and full of biting social commentary, the chronologically arranged prose poems in Part 3 are better than most in the genre. Finally, Part 4 includes all the poems in the 1990 volume Elegy for a Departure and are indeed elegiac in tone. This volume does have the feel of collecting what is left, and libraries that can afford only one or two volumes of Herberts work should probably stick to Report from the Beseiged City or Mr. Cogito. But any library collecting seriously in contemporary poetry should include this work.Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0880016191
• ISBN 13: 9780880016193
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144