674
PARTISAN REVIEW
heads, the publishing wizards-had realized that a genius was slipping
through their fingers . Being posthumously nestled in the covers of a
Library of America volume is a nice bit of recognition, but the belated
glory is cold comfort indeed.
DAVID YAFFE
Elegy for Uncertain Clarity
ELEGY FOR THE DEPARTURE AND OTHER POEMS.
By
Zbigniew
Herbert.
Translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter. The Ecco Press.
$24.00.
THE KING OF THE ANTS.
By
Zbigniew Herbert.
Translated by John
and Bogdana Carpenter. The Ecco Press. $22.00.
lbigniew Herbert was unwavering in his life-long protest against all forms
of tyranny and oppression, which he countered not wi th explosive or rev–
olutionary tactics but with simple, irrefutable reason: the laws of a wooden
die, the logic of a pebble. A spiritual leader of the anticommunist move–
ment in Poland, for half a century Herbert observed his surrounclings with
an unclouded eye, sending out reports in the form of poems. The acute
precision normally reserved for the realms of biology, geometry, or some
other unflinching science became, in Herbert's hands, a tool for investigat–
ing the imagination, the soul, suffering; in short, everything inexact. His
death last July went practically unnoticed in the English-speaking press, a
grim surprise despite his relative obscurity in the West (at least compared
to his Polish compatriots Czeslaw Milosz or even post-Nobel Wislawa
Szym.borska.) Two new books published
posthumously-Elegy Jar the
Departure and Other Poems,
and a book of "mythological essays,"
King
if
the
Ants-are
renunders of Herbert's painful absence and make even more
unacceptable any further ignorance of one of the greatest Polish poets, if
not one of the greatest poets, full-s top, of our century.
The poems in
Elegy Jar the Departure,
written between 1950 and 1990,
have not been collected before in English. From the very beginning,
Herbert had little use for conunas and colons: without the prompts of
punctuation, his language does not have the leisure of ambiguity and is
forced into directness. Very often each of Herbert's lines is an intact phrase,
and the line break is the only cue for a caesura Herbert needs: "the poet
