Works by
Zbigniew Herbert
(Poet, Writer)
[October 29, 1924 - July 28, 1998]

Essays and Stories

• Labyrinth on the Sea-Shore (2000)
  Polish version (Labirynt nad morzem)

• The King of the Ants (1999)
  Hybrids of the short story and the essay, these prose pieces contest traditional interpretations of history and present Herbert's very different ("apocryphal") views. This new work of prose from the much celebrated Zbigniew Herbert--available for the first time in English--is a fascinating rewriting of myths and tales "as old and as simple as the world." In the title story, "The King of the Ants," Herbert considers the tension between humankind's "solemn idleness" and "progress-that treacherous force." Other pieces include a new reading of the old story about Alexander the Great hacking the great knot to bits ("The Gordian Knot"), an ode to the mythic suffering of "the catatonic of mythology" ("Atlas"), and a Chinese tale about the dangers of vanity and authority ("Mirror"). All of the pieces on "The King of the Ants" have been translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, who have been praised for their "linguistic precision and poetic mastery" by "Choice."

• Still Life With a Bridle: Essays and Apocryphas (1993)
  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.

• Barbarian In The Garden (1962)
  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.

Poetry

• The Collected Poems: 1956-1998 (2007)
  This outstanding new translation brings a uniformity of voice to Zbigniew Herbert's entire poetic output, from his first book of poems, String of Light, in 1956, to his final volume, previously unpublished in English, Epilogue Of the Storm. Collected Poems: 1956-1998, as Joseph Brodsky said of Herbert's Selected Poems, is "bound for a much longer haul than any of us can anticipate." He continues, "For Zbigniew Herbert's poetry adds to the biography of civilization the sensibility of a man not defeated by the century that has been most thorough, most effective in dehumanization of the species. Herbert's irony, his austere reserve and his compassion, the lucidity of his lyricism, the intensity of his sentiment toward classical antiquity, are not just trappings of a modern poet, but the necessary armor—in his case well-tempered and shining indeed—for man not to be crushed by the onslaught of reality. By offering to his readers neither aesthetic nor ethical discount, this poet, in fact, saves them from that poverty which every form of human evil finds so congenial. As long as the species exists, this book will be timely."

• Rovigo (1992)
  Polish edition

• Elegy For The Departure (1990)
  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.

• Report From The Besieged City and Other Poems (1985)

• Selected Poems (1977, 1999)

• Epilogue of the Storm (1975)

• Mr Cogito (1974)

• Study of the Object (1961)
  Polish edition (Studium przedmiotu)

• Hermes, Dog and Star (1957)
  Polish edition (Hermes, pies i gwiazda)

• Chord of Light (1956)

Other

• From On Translating Poetry (1985)

See also:

• Through the Poet's Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky (2002) by Bozena Shallcross
  An exploration of the sensory experience of travel and the corresponding revelatory perception of the visual arts in the essays of three major East European poets.

• Herbert (1989) by Andrzej Kaliszewski

• A Fugitive from Utopia: The Poetry of Zbignew Herbert (1987) by Stanislaw Baranczak
  Until this volume, the leading Polish poet  had not been the subject of a book-length study in English. Stanislaw Baranczak, himself a poet, critic, and translator, emigrated from Poland only in 1981, and is therefore eminently qualified to supply a politico-cultural context for Herbert while describing and analyzing the texts and themes of his poems.
  
  Herbert's poetry is based on permanent confrontation--the confrontation of Western tradition with the experience of a "barbarian" from Eastern Europe, of the classical past with the modern era, of cultural myth with a practical, empirical point of view. Baranczak illustrates these oppositions by examining, first, the complex relations between "disinheritance" and "heritage" as they appear in Herbert's work on various structural levels, from symbolic key words to lyrical characters; second, the forms and functions of Herbert's "unmasking metaphor"; third, his uses of irony; fourth, his ethical system, which enables him to be both ironist and moralist. Baranczak pays special attention to irony as the most conspicuous feature of Herbert's poetic method.
  
  A Fugitive from Utopia makes Herbert's poetic ideas fully accessible to the general reader, and will also be of interest to students of Polish literature, of East European culture and society, and of modern poetry. Those who have already encountered Herbert's poetry in one of the several translations into English currently available will welcome this lucid explication of his work.

• East European Poets (1976) by Edwin Morgan