Where Have You Been? by Michael Hofmann

Author:Michael Hofmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374709167
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ZBIGNIEW HERBERT

Zbigniew Herbert died in 1998. He was a very great and idiosyncratic poet—something in me wants to say a peerless poet—and, it is reported, a perennial Nobel bridesmaid. It was ironic—and no doubt wounding—that during the period of his expectations, in 1980 and 1996, two other Poles of, as I see it, manifestly lesser gifts and importance, Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska, were chosen by the academy and decorated by Carl Gustav.

I had been waiting for his Collected Poems from the time of Herbert’s death, if not even longer. Frankly, in view of some bruited complications (related below), I thought it would take rather longer than it did, and its eventual coming caught me by surprise—as perhaps things do when you wait for them hard. While waiting, I kept my hand in by buying up spare copies of his individual volumes, Report from the Besieged City (1985), Mr. Cogito (1993), both Selected Poems (the one from 1968 and, confusingly, a completely different book from 1977), and others; if nothing else, it was handy practical instruction in the ways of the price-supply curve. I have the German translations and read them. I can’t read Polish, but I have Herbert wherever I go. He is the first poet I ever read. The poem was “From Antiquity”; I was eight. Probably he is as near to sacred to me as anything in or out of poetry is.

And now I have a book that I wasn’t expecting at all. Herbert has a new translator, someone I have never heard of. Even that drafty, echoey thing the Internet (our very own updated version of Ovid’s cave of rumor) has barely heard of Alissa Valles. This, by the way, is to register my surprise, not some snobbish impulse; Herbert, after all, is surely a sought-after commodity, somewhere near the pinnacle both of Polish poetry and the twentieth century; anyone taking him on should probably come with some sort of track record, not least for their own peace of mind—and even then of course it would be no guarantee of a successful outcome. It’s pretty much the last thing I would press upon a young poet looking for a start in life or career, or a middle-aged one looking to diversify. I must now enter certain caveats. As I say, I can’t (“can’t” seems more honest, more regretful than “don’t”) read Polish. My information from the great publishing centers of London and New York is vague and unattributable and thirdhand. It’s not a nice thing to bash a young—or an old, or a middle-aged—translator, least of all when one is unable to read the originals. But it remains the case that my strongest feeling about this book is a sort of helpless and bewildered regret.

Practically synonymous with Herbert in the English-speaking world are—or were?—his English translators, John and Bogdana Carpenter. Over more than twenty years and six books—all but the very first Selected Poems, which was done in 1968 by Miłosz (in the days when he

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