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PARTISAN REVIEW
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, imagery, Do you think it's still effective? Is it a common language?
\
; JB:
In my view, yes it is, At least it's common vis-a.-vis my Russian
audience, And I'm either generous or cynical enough to think that
I
my Russian audience is not that qualitatively different in the final
I
analysis from my English audience, But maybe that's wishful think-
ing on my part. I think it's still a language comprehensible to a cer-
tain percentage of people, and that's enough. For no percentage of
the people is merely a small one. How small are, let's say, ten people,
or six?
\'
DM:
Marek Oramus, while interviewing Zbigniew Herbert, said
.
that Herbert
corrects
mythology. How do you approach it?
JB:
You animate it, you try to make sense out of all of this, out of all
that you've inherited. That's what you do. You're not really correct-
ing it, you're making sense out of it. It's simply interpreted. It's the
.
function of the species to interpret the Bible, mythology, the
Upanishads, anything we have inherited, including our own
dreams.
Basically, each era, each century, not to mention each culture
has its own Greece, its own Christianity, its own Orient, its own my–
thology. Each century simply offers its own interpretation, like a
magnifying glass, in a sense. We're just yet another lens. And it
simply indicates the distance that grows between us and myths, and
I think the attempt to interpret is essentially proportionate to the
distance.
DM:
You mentioned in one essay - and I'll just quote you - "At cer–
tain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with
reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that
otherwise couldn't be retained by the mind." What are some other
functions of poetry? What is the power of language through poetry?
JB:
Poetry sells perhaps better as the record of human sensibility. To
give you an example, the age of the Augustan poets. I think if we
have a notion of Roman and of the human sensibility of the time it's
based on Horace, for instance, the way he sees the world, or Ovid or
Propertius. And we don't have any other record, frankly.
DM:
This might not be pertinent at all since the poet's fascination
with language isn't with its utility, but what does poetry now provide
that prose doesn't, that religion doesn't, that philosophy doesn't?
How strong is language in fending off a sense of chaos, in defending
people or their sensibility from brutality?
JB:
Well, I don't really know how to answer this, except by pointing
out the very simple fact that speech is a reaction to the world, some
kind of grimacing in the darkness or making faces behind the bas-
