[In the following essay, Coetzee considers how censorship by the Communist Party has informed and shaped the poetry of Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert.]

Under pressure at the 1934 Soviet Writers' Congress to embrace socialist realism, Isaac Babel announced that he would prefer to practice “the genre of silence.”¹ As a form of resistance to ideological prescription, the genre of silence was obdurately followed by a handful of Russia's leading writers. Widely interpreted as a refusal to accommodate their art to the demands of the state, their silence had an enduring moral and even political impact.

Until Stalin's death in 1953, and for a few years thereafter, writers in the Soviet Union and its satellite states had what Stanislaw Baranczak calls a “complex system of terrors, baits, lies and sophistic rationalizations” deployed against them.² After 1956 the component of outright terrorization in this mixture diminished. Of the Hungarian variant of the new and more manipulative censorship that evolved, Miklos Haraszti wrote:

Traditional censorship presupposes the inherent opposition of creators and censors; the new censorship strives to eliminate this antagonism. The artist and the censor—two faces of official culture—diligently and cheerfully cultivate the gardens of art together.

The decommissioning of the iron fist did not thus of itself entail a slackening of control. On the contrary, Haraszti suggests, by internalizing the censoring function, the individual writer became assimilated into the system. Cooperating with the censor who controlled him, he had in a sense become a prototype of the “new individual” that Communism sought to create.³

In Poland, censorship underwent its own phases of thaw and freeze, some taking their cue from the Soviet Union, others responding to developments within Poland itself. During the 1970s control was particularly rigid, the censors making some 10,000 interventions a year. The degree to which not only cultural life but the everyday flow of information was controlled from above came to light in 1977, when one of the employees of the apparatus smuggled a batch of ministerial directives out of the country. From these documents—later made public as the so-called Black Book—it emerged that cultural figures of whom the regime disapproved were treated according to closely defined rules. In the most extreme cases—like that of the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski—no mention of the offender's name was allowed, nor any favorable comment on his or her work. In a second category (in which Czeslaw Milosz and Aleksandr Wat figured) no mention might be made without prior and specific approval of the ministry; in the popular media (radio, television, the press) the ban was to be total. A third and more lenient category limited mention to scholarly publications. In 1976, Zbigniew Herbert, along with thirty-six other intellectuals who had protested against amendments to the constitution, was blacklisted: his name was not to be mentioned without approval from head office.⁴

The existence of a censorship apparatus was itself treated as classified information. Instructions in the Black Book were marked as for the eyes of the censors alone, “not [to] be revealed or referred to as a reason for censorship to anyone.”⁵ But as the contents of the Black Book became widely known, censorship developed into a hot political issue. Relaxation of censorship was high on the list of demands of the Gdansk strikers in 1980.⁶

While the system was in control, censorship was part of the writer's professional but also psychical environment. Its operations were complicated by ties between writers and fellow-intellectuals who for reasons of their own, some bad, some less bad, might have been part of the apparatus. Managing a relationship with the censors, inner and outer, became not only a preoccupation but a persistent if veiled theme of Polish writing. Baranczak writes:

The author used to make a show before the censor, pretending that he had really intended to write a novel about the Borgias; at the same time he used to wink at the reader, pretending that in fact he had written a novel about Stalinism. The reader in turn used to wink back, pretending that he understood the allusion, and the censor did the same, pretending that he did not notice it.⁷

Ultimately, however, Baranczak concludes, this web of deception and self-deception produced a “sterile” literature. The novelist Tadeusz Konwicki confirms this judgment. Censorship may indeed “mobilize a writer to create ways of by-passing censorship, [forcing] the writer to employ metaphors which raise the piece of writing to a higher level.”⁸ Yet in time the hypersubtle forms born out of the game with the censor themselves become conventions. “The secret language becomes public, and the censor will ban it too. So new, more subtle forms are devised. And so it goes, on and on, the literature becoming increasingly more obscure, eventually losing all traces of life.”⁹

The play of collusion, connivance, and mutual deception between authors and intellectuals did not limit itself to the field of the text, but reproduced itself in cultural life in general, where it developed on a dynamic of its own and led to unexpected results. “The very system set up to propagate socialist art,” says Jeffrey Goldfarb, “[promoted] an unanticipated critical cultural life. The battle with rigid editors, censors, officials [led] to estrangement of artists, so that ‘cultural dissidents’ [were] reproduced by the system itself.”¹⁰

Zbigniew Herbert was 24 years old when the communists took power in Poland. When it became apparent—as it soon did—that the Party expected writers to be, in Stalin's phrase, “engineers of human souls,” Herbert resigned from the Writers' Union and retreated into silence.

Of the Stalinist repression—or, as the revisionist locution had it, “the period of errors and distortions”—Herbert has observed: “I believed that [it] would last until the end of my life. I was absolutely sure. … One had to choose internal emigration. … When I was still a member of the Writers' Union I told myself that I would never write anything according to party directions. I simply won't.” For this refusal he has claimed no heroic motive. “Can someone who feels no attraction to women be called ascetic? … Is it a virtue, or is it invalidism?”¹¹

Herbert's first book of poems appeared in 1956. As his reputation grew, he was able to travel outside Poland. During the period 1965 to 1971, and then again during the harsh years from 1976 to 1980, he lived abroad. By the 1970s his international reputation had grown too secure for blacklisting at home to harm him. His relationship with the censors was thus in some respects untypical. Nonetheless, writing under a regime of censorship in a language spoken in only one country remains a qualititatively different fate from writing in a world language for an open market. The censor's office creates a force field that affects all those working in proximity to it, whether or not they try to ignore it: what varies from case to case is how the force makes itself felt, how it is internally transformed.

There is a further dimension as well. A work brought out under censorship has a different mode of existence from a work brought out in unrestricted circumstances. In the former case, publication is an act with a different and heightened social meaning, while reading is a more complex, more suspicious, and perhaps more alert activity. Whatever Herbert's efforts to block out or ignore the censorship, his poems could not seclude themselves from the environment in which they were destined to be read.

It is within this complex of forces, internal and external, that I turn to Herbert's poems, reading them less as responses to the Polish censorship as that censorship responded to and embodied specific moments in Poland's postwar history, than as instances of the complex general problem of writing within a regime of censorship.

I start with a poem that has every appearance of being an anti-Soviet statement cloaked in allegory to deceive the dull-witted censor. The dramatic situation in “To Marcus Aurelius” is a familiar one in Herbert. The speaker, representative of a dying order awaiting the invasion of the barbarians (“terror continuous dark terror / against the fragile human land”), addresses Marcus Aurelius: “give me your hand across the dark,” he says.¹² The poem is thus about solidarity, and specifically evokes the solidarity of comrades facing extinction. In the obvious allegorical reading, Marcus Aurelius and the poet who stretches out a hand to him from Poland across the centuries stand for the values of Western civilization, the threatening hordes for the Russians.

Yet to uncloak the poem in this way, to propose that uncloaking the allegory constitutes a reading, does far less than justice to it. For, in the same motion that it invites uncloaking, the poem invites a question: In the face of the pressure for an allegorical reading created by the realities of Poland's historical situation and indeed by the paranoia of censorship itself—which, constitutionally opposed to innocent readings, spreads its habits of overreading through the whole of the reading community—how would it be possible to write a poem genuinely about Marcus Aurelius?

This question, which at its heart is the question of the genuine itself—What is the genuine? Is it possible to write the genuine in a regime of overreading?—is addressed less obliquely in “Why the Classics.”¹³ This poem arises out of an autobiographical passage in The Peloponnesian War in which, without trying to excuse himself, Thucydides describes his single failure of generalship in the war, a failure for which he paid with lifelong exile. Herbert's poem ends as follows, drawing an explicit moral:

if art for its subject
will have a broken jar
a small broken soul
with a great self-pity
what will remain after us
will be like lovers' weeping
in a small dirty hotel
when wall-paper dawns

The answer to the question proposed by the title—Why the classics?—is thus: The classics because they provide models of response to misfortune that, unlike the self-pity of the lovers, will outlast us; the classics because the classics give an answer to our appeal for a model of how to become classic, that is, how to endure. (Again in the poem “The Old Masters” Herbert will write: “I call on you Old Masters / in my moments of doubt.”)¹⁴

It is quite possible to push the reading of “Why the Classics” further, making its disguised addressee the Polish artist or intellectual facing lifelong exile from the Western culture to which he feels he belongs. Nevertheless, the first reading cannot be submerged beneath the second: no less than it is about how to outlast the conqueror, this is a poem about how to outlast all-conquering Time. On the other hand, as a poem about time and mortality, it is hard to see how it could not invoke a past—the classical past—that has succeeded in lasting into the present, and thereby lay itself open to being read between the lines as a poem about how to make the unreconstructed past-in-the-present (what survives of the West in Poland) last into the future.

Writing between the lines is of course a familiar strategy, one whose ingenuity is that it places the censor, himself quite as capable of reading between the lines as the writer is of writing between them, at a tactical disadvantage: unless he can somehow demonstrate the presence of a something where there seems to be a nothing, a blank, he risks ridicule. Under the paternalistic post-Stalinist censorship, however, even the space between the lines had been colonized. Writing of Hungary in the early 1980s, Haraszti observes:

Debates between the lines are an acceptable launching ground for trial balloons. … The opinions expressed there are not alien to the state but are perhaps simply premature. This is the true function of this space: it is the repository of loyal digressions that, for one reason or another, cannot now be openly expressed.¹⁵

When writers and censors have reached the level of accommodation Haraszti describes and the between-the-lines has been established as a privileged channel for esoteric communications, the honorable writer may prefer not use it.

I am closer now to defining the warp in the plane on which Herbert operates, a warp that originates squarely with the censor-reader and not with the poet. It is that Herbert's genuine field of reference and genuine mode of operation heavily overlap the field of reference and mode of operation of a writer writing with an anxious eye to the censor. Herbert is an allusive and ironic poet not because he uses allusiveness and irony as devices to evade the censor's red pencil, not even because the history of his times has made him wary and indirect by temperament, but because allusiveness is for him a mode of humanistic affirmation, and irony an ethical value.¹⁶

Consider in this light “Three Studies on the Subject of Realism.”¹⁷ The poem is in three parts, each describing (as if describing a painting) a different historical style of realism: classicist realism, romantic realism, socialist realism. Socialist realism uses “only two colors / color yes and color no” and employs a well-worn iconography of clenched fists, etc. (“Later,” says its apologist, “when we get installed in the fruits of our labor / we will use the subtle color ‘perhaps.’”) The poem is thus “about” the grace of the seventeenth century, the color and variety (but also heaviness) of the nineteenth, the drabness of the twentieth; but these characterizations are set out not as judgments on historical reality but as accounts of historically conditioned modes of representation, that is, of realisms. The poem may read to the censoring eye as if it has set out to disguise a judgment on life under socialism as a judgment on art; but in its firm logic the poem reprimands such a reading for confusing reality with its representations.

In this poem, somewhat labored despite its gestures toward lightness, it is hard to avoid the impression that, in the force-field created by the institution of censorship, Herbert is conducting a didactic demonstration of how the censor can be shepherded into performing a misreading, mistaking the secondary referent for the primary. (If the censor, seeing through the game that is being played with him, tries to sidestep the lesson by taking the poem at face value, he runs the risk of seeming naive, of revealing himself as unable to see through disguises as he is paid to do, of failing to embody the paranoia of the state. Lacking any guiding principle, he can only fall back on the politically most opportune reading—as Goldfarb acutely observes.)¹⁸

All of which is not to say that Herbert never adopts the Aesopian mode. There are poems—more often than not prose poems—which, in their very form, proclaim a parabolic intent: “Emperor,” “The Emperor's Dream,” “A Russian Tale,” “A Description of the King,” for instance. In these pieces Stalin is the unmistakable if veiled first subject.¹⁹

“The Return of the Proconsul” is, at first glance, another poem of unambiguous ambiguity: the court of the emperor to which the proconsul nervously returns from the remote outreaches of the empire can be no other than the court of Stalin (or of one of Stalin's petty imitators), and the fate that awaits him there will be no other than the liquidation that befell so many of Stalin's lieutenants.²⁰

The fatalism of Stalin's victims, even their paralysis in the face of extinction, has often been commented on. Insofar as the poem invites a reading as a Browningesque dramatization of the self-deception by which such fatalism justifies itself to itself, the following lines belong to that psychology of self-deception:

besides the emperor likes courage of convictions
to a certain extent to a certain reasonable extent
he is after all a man like everyone else

These lines are about second-guessing the tyrant, about presenting a face not of abject fear but of “courage of convictions,” to an appropriate degree, as a strategy of survival, doing so to put a distance between oneself and the other candidates for liquidation. Insofar as it is no longer a value in itself but a means to a calculated end, the version of courage the proconsul plans to employ is therefore inauthentic.

It is at this point that “Return of the Proconsul” invites another level of questioning. Does the poem present its own true convictions to the gaze of authority? If it does, and if those convictions are courageous, is their courage not perhaps inauthentic, the result of a calculation, an attempt to second-guess him? In such a reading the harshness or leniency of the tyrant is of no consequence (that is to say, it does not matter whether or not he is a Stalin). The poem is about the relation between the self and authority in conditions of absolutism, and specifically about the impossibility of being “genuine,” of expressing the authentic self, under threat (threat of death, threat of censorship)—that is to say, about the impossibility of being sure the self is authentically presenting itself.

It is in the light of questions like these that I turn to one of Herbert's Mr. Cogito series, “The Monster of Mr. Cogito.”²¹ Whereas the looming dark of the earlier Marcus Aurelius poem is the definable (if all-destroying) darkness of barbarism, what “monster” it is that threatens Mr. Cogito is hard to pin down:

it is spread out like low pressure
hanging over the country
you can't touch it
with a pen
or with a spear
were it not for its suffocating weight
and the death it sends down
one would think
it is an abstraction
of the type informel
but it exists
for certain it exists
like carbon monoxide
it enters all the windows
poisons the wells
covers bread with mold
the proof of the monster
is its victims
it is not direct proof
but sufficient

Stainslaw Baranczak points out the shift in focus in Herbert's later poems, including this one, toward

the widespread dissolution of value systems, the banalization of evil, the fading of threshold situations in which contemporary man could define himself in moral terms, and the lack of transcendental mainstays toward which he could orient himself. Emptiness … acquires new appearances and meanings.²²

In a sense, the suffocating low pressure system against which Mr. Cogito rides out is a metaphor for the set of losses or absences that Baranczak describes. Yet to say that it “is” a metaphor is precisely to minimize Mr. Cogito's problem. The “low pressure system” “is” not there: rather, it is a lack standing for a lack: it looks like a metaphor but has only the form, not the body, of a metaphor; nor “has” it the form: it “has” nothing; it is “of the type informel.”

The task of Mr. Cogito, quixotic knight of the pen, is therefore not so much to slay the monster as to track it down. His strategy is to “offend the monster / provoke the monster” in the hope that it will show itself

before there will be
a fall from inertia
an ordinary death without glory
suffocation from formlessness

It is clear that the monster will never come, clear that Mr. Cogito is doomed to pace the suburban streets with his lance/pen, calling into the fog (or whatever it is), till the neighbors and other “reasonable people” who believe that “we can live together / with the monster” coax him home to be cured of his folly.

What is it that ruins the life of Mr. Cogito? One kind of answer, the kind of answer Baranczak gives in the passage quoted above, is that it is a pervasive moral inertia, an entropy of civilization: it is something that has befallen the modern world, a collapse into meaningless. An alternative version of this kind of answer would be that it is the dead weight of socialism in Eastern Europe, exhausted of all belief in itself but not as yet prepared to die.

Why, then, is Mr. Cogito a figure of absurdity? What qualifies him for the irony with which he is treated? It is not that he has decided that the “transcendental mainstays” are gone, or that Polish socialism has turned old and deathly: most intelligent people, even most “reasonable people,” would agree. It is, rather, that Mr. Cogito believes in the existence of a monster, the only proof of whose existence is that the wells are poisoned, the bread is covered with mold, and there are victims everywhere. Like Don Quixote, he does not appreciate how second-order representations (which include metaphors) work. He does not appreciate that “dragon” stands for a certain set of abstractions (such as those above), whose effect happens to be fatal. Were he to read, Mr. Cogito would almost certainly show himself to be as naive a reader as Quixote.

Herbert's great poem “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito”²³ ends:

go because only in this way will you be admitted to the
          company of cold skulls
to the company of your ancestors: Gilgamesh Hector Roland
the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of
          ashes
Be faithful Go

The dominant mode of “The Envoy” is, for a change, not irony but tragic paradox. That is why Quixote is not numbered among “the defenders of the kingdom without limit and the city of ashes.” For among the other charges addressed to his creature Mr. Cogito by Zbigniew Herbert, speaking in the voices of François Villon and numerous other ghostly avatars, is the charge that he

repeat old incantations of humanity fables and legends
because this is how you will attain the good you will not attain
repeat great words repeat them stubbornly
like those crossing the desert who perished in the sand

The hero is not a decoder of second-level significations but a naive reader who takes stories at their face value. The allegiance of “The Envoy” is at an ethical level to fidelity in and for itself, and at an aesthetic level to “great words” in and for themselves. The allegiance of “The Monster of Mr. Cogito” is to the fidelity of its comic hero to his knightly duty; its aesthetic allegiance is to a naive reading in which “monster” stands for monster.²⁴

Five men are to be executed by firing squad (“Five Men”).²⁵ In such terrible times, the relevance of poetry must be questioned, even by the poet. Why, in these times, “have I been writing / unimportant poems on flowers”? Herbert postpones his reply till he has asked and answered an apparently slighter question: What did the five men talk of the night before their execution?

of prophetic dreams
of an escapade in a brothel
of automobile parts
of a sea voyage
of how when he had spades
he ought not to have opened
of how vodka is best
after wine you get a headache
of girls
of fruit
of life

Without transition he now returns to and answers the original question:

thus one can use in poetry
names of Greek shepherds
one can attempt to catch the color of morning sky
write of love
and also
once again
in dead earnest
offer to the betrayed world
a rose

What is the logic that allows the word “thus” to come out so decisively? One answer, the answer the reader perhaps infers: because the five men had not occupied their last night in being heroes, because they had not acted as if upon the stage of history but had instead gone on being their ordinary human selves, therefore poetry can (Herbert's careful word: not must) give to the world something of what ordinary people fumble towards in their hopes and longings: a vision of an ideal world. The poem then has something to do with the precious, with what should be held on to from the story of these five lives and five deaths.

Nevertheless, the move from the because to the therefore belongs not to logic but to rhetoric: it is meant to convince, but its capacity to convince comes specifically from the breathtaking leap it makes across the abyss of the non sequitur. Virtually anything could occur after the words “thus one can use in poetry,” including the clarion calls to action that would likely be favored by the questioner behind the question, “Why write unimportant poems on flowers?”—as long as whatever comes after “thus” comes equipped with sufficient rhetorical firepower.

“Five Men” may seem to be a poem defending the autonomy of art against attempts to prescribe a certain social role for it, but that is not quite the truth of the matter. Rather, “Five Men” is an attempt to enact in poetry the power of art to validate itself. The poem does not conduct an argument—as an argument it literally has a hole in its middle—but is an argument. If it is about anything, therefore, it is about power: about its own power to compel a logic upon art and history, but also, by implication, about the power that would be required to compel a rival logic upon art and history. In this sense it sets itself up not only against questioners who attack “unimportant poems” but against interpretation, any interpretation, that tries to subject and defeat it. When Herbert pits himself against those questioners and interpreters—who include the socialist censor ready to condemn aestheticism or solipsism—the test he proposes is ultimately the most violent of all: the power to withstand the battering of time, the test of endurance, the test of the classic.

In his study of Herbert, Baranczak suggests that the framework of Herbert's poetry is constituted by the polarities East versus West, past versus present, mythic versus empiric. These polarities can on occasion coalesce, he goes on, into the syncretic polarity heritage versus disinheritance, where the heritage is a European and classical one, and the disinheritance dates, symbolically at least, from 1944. In none of these polarizations does a particular pole prevail for long: instead, opposites hold each other in “dynamic equilibrium.”

Thus far Baranczak describes only what we might think of as the aesthetic structure of prototypical New Criticism poetry. But he goes on: “The basic structural pattern in Herbert's poetry is not only … incessant confrontation … but the mutual unmasking of the two sets of antinomical values and two types of reality: the reality of heritage and the reality of disinheritance.”²⁶ In Baranczak's reading, Herbert's irony is therefore quite different in nature from the irony held in esteem by the New Criticism, which is a kind of magnetic field in which the poem as verbal icon hangs suspended. Herbert's irony is ontologically more fundamental: on the one hand, it says, the story of the past told by the great European tradition may present itself as reality, but contemporary experience unmasks it as no more than a collection of consoling fictions; on the other hand the world in its brute empirical presence claims to be reality, but the classics reveal that a tissue of familiar old myths move behind it and animate it. (Finally, “From Mythology” unmasks the god of irony himself: “Then came the barbarians. They too valued highly the little god of irony. They would crush it under their heels and add it to their dishes.”)²⁷

If even irony can be crushed, domesticated, and used as a condiment, what is left that can stand up to the barbarian? Is there indeed an absolute in Herbert's poetry? Is that absolute the nihilism of the Longobards, the newly arrived appropriators of the civilized world, who “flock into the valley / shouting their protracted nothing nothing nothing”?²⁸

I turn to two of Herbert's poems that in any interpretation must be about barbarism: “At the Gate of the Valley,” in which the angels dividing mankind into the saved and the damned resemble nothing so much as SS soldiers dividing convoys of prisoners into those who will live and those who will die; and “Apollo and Marsyas,” in which Apollo, god of rationality, guardian of Olympian order, is also the barbaric torturer of Marsyas.²⁹

What links the conquering Longobards to Olympian gods and heavenly angels, and to those functionaries of the Inquisition who interrogated, tortured, and executed the Albigensians and Knights Templar—atrocities that Herbert recounts at length in Barbarian in the Garden—is their absolutism. They all believe in the tyranny of system; they tolerate no exceptions.

Side by side with these poems we may set “The Seventh Angel,” in which Shemkel, the seventh angel, black and nervous, by his imperfection humanizes (so to speak) the heavenly heptad; and “Report from Paradise,” a report from a “real” paradise where things are better, though only a little better, than on earth (a thirty-hour work week, for instance). In this latter paradise, heavenly perfection does not, alas, reign: someone forget that the resurrection would take place in the flesh; and when flesh was admitted into paradise, the human, the imperfect—the spirit of imperfection, in fact—was admitted too.³⁰

What do such poems as the latter two, of which the best characterization is perhaps sly, imply for the order of interpretation?

Herbert's poems present us with a gallery of absolutists who believe that the universe we presently have is an imperfect form of another, ideal order—an imperfect form of paradise, for instance, or of the classless society, or of the perfectly ductile kind of society created by totalitarian terror. The language of the ideal order preferred by these absolutists is a language perfectly abstracted from human language, which is an imperfect medium born of an imperfect world. Unfortunately for utopians, the language that people, real people, stubbornly desire to speak and hear is not perfect and other-worldly: it remains the imperfect, this-worldly language of the flesh. The only expedient through which the language of the flesh can be redeemed for the ideal is by interpreting it, abstracting it. As this process is performed, as the flesh is flayed off it, the skeleton of the ideal, it is hoped, will begin to gleam through.

Interpretation is therefore the road absolutists take to the truth behind poetry. The censor is a figure of the absolutist reader: he reads the poem in order to know what it really means, to know its truth.

Herbert offers two kinds of reflection on truth and interpretation. On the one hand, he offers credos like “Five Men” or “Eschatological Forebodings of Mr. Cogito,”³¹ in the latter of which the Mr. Cogito persona explicitly muses on whether he might not be permitted to forgo paradise and remain in service of the world. On the other hand, Herbert offers fables about interpretation.

What the interpreter/censor desires from Herbert and looks for in him is second-order writing (metaphor, allegory) that will open itself to interpretation—to interpretation as belief in a heavenly, abstract order of one or other variety, for instance. What he looks for is therefore a certain faith. But an underpinning, foundational faith in a second order of representation, a faith that by its nature would sanction some revelation of itself, however devious, some opening of itself to interpretation, is stubbornly not there. Herbert's fidelity remains to the first-order language, the language of the flesh.

The reading I have given to Herbert, therefore—a project not without its own ironies, considering the resistances detectable in Herbert to being given a reading at all—makes of the censor a generalized yet highly problematic figure. Herbert's real-life situation may have robbed the censor of much of his prohibitory and inhibitory power. Nevertheless, the censor remains the emblematic tyrannical second-order reader, whether his tyranny is the tyranny of political absolutism or of rationalistic reduction. On the one hand he stands in relation to Herbert as a necessary resistance, a marker for a limit beyond which the poem exceeds itself and begins to act out ambitions to partake in an ideal order. On the other, as interpreter par excellence of a poetry which is much of the time occupied in reflecting on its distance from all interpretations of itself, he is a figure of absurdity.

The present reading is directed at Herbert's more powerful and intellectually scrupulous poetry. It does not try to embrace all of his work. There are certainly poems in which the tactics of second-order representation are employed unreflectively and without qualification. Read in isolation, such poems may indeed support Paul Coates's judgment that “the calculated art of outwitting the censor [has] muted some aspect of [Herbert's] sensibility (and that of his entire generation), a constant resort to classical allusion filtering out direct feeling in a manner that comes perilously close to aestheticism.”³² Nevertheless, the body of Herbert's poetry rests on one great secret that the censor does not know: the secret of what makes a classic. Whatever popular opinion may say, whatever the classics themselves may claim, the classic does not belong to an ideal order, nor is it attained by adhering to one set of ideas or another. On the contrary, the classic is the human; or, at least, it is what survives of the human.

Notes

1. Max Hayward, Writers in Russia 1917-78, ed. Patricia Blake (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983), p. 136.

2. Stanislaw Baranczak, “The Gag and the Word,” Survey 25/1 (1980): 58.

3. Miklos Haraszti, The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism, trans. Katalin and Stephen Landesmann (New York: Basic Books, 1987), pp. 7, 97.

4. George Schöpflin, “The Black Book of Polish Censorship,” in George Schöpflin, ed., Censorship and Political Communication in Eastern Europe (New York: St Martin's, 1983), pp. 52-54; Jane Leftwich Curry, ed. and trans., The Black Book of Polish Censorship (New York: Random House, 1984), pp. 8, 382-86. On the history of censorship in Poland between 1949 and the early 1980s, see Stanislaw Baranczak, “Poland: Literature and Censorship,” in The Writer and Human Rights, ed. Toronto Arts Group for Human Rights (New York: Anchor, 1983), pp. 173-83; Chris Pszenicki, “Polish Publishing 1980-81,” Index on Censorship 11/1 (February 1982): 8-11; Chris Pszenicki, “Freedom of Expression in Jaruzelski's Poland,” Index on Censorship 12/6 (December 1983): 19-24.

5. Quoted in Curry, The Black Book, p. 8.

6. Stanislaw Baranczak, “My Ten Uncensorable Years,” in Schöpflin, ed., Censorship and Political Communication in Eastern Europe, pp. 113-14.

7. Stanislaw Baranczak, “Poems and Tanks,” TriQuarterly, no. 57 (1983): 53.

8. Tadeusz Konwicki, “Interview: The Delights of Writing under Censorship,” Index on Censorship 15/3 (March 1986), 30.

9. Konwicki, quoted in Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, On Cultural Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 90.

10. Ibid., p. 90.

11. Quoted in Jacek Trznadel, “An Interview with Zbigniew Herbert,” Partisan Review 54 (1987): 567. On Herbert's career, see also A. Alvarez, “Noble Poet,” in The Mature Laurel, ed. Adam Czerniawski (Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour, 1991), pp. 163-71; Marek Oramus and Maria Szmidt, “A Poet of Exact Meaning,” PN Review 8/6, no. 26 (1982): 8-12; Donald P. A. Pirie, “Engineering the People's Dreams: An Assessment of Socialist Realist Poetry in Poland 1949-1955,” in Czerniawski, ed., The Mature Laurel, pp. 135-59.

12. Selected Poems, trans. Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 22; hereafter cited as Milosz/Scott.

13. Milosz/Scott, pp. 137-38.

14. Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems, trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 10-11; hereafter cited as Report. As Stanislaw Baranczak points out, the stoicism adhered to by Herbert in these poems and elsewhere is darker than classical stoicism. The latter identifies virtue with nature and founds its ethics on concord with nature; there is no such faith in Herbert. A Fugitive from Utopia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 118.

15. Haraszti, The Velvet Prison, p. 145.

16. In his 1962 book of essays on France and Italy, Herbert emerges from the caves of Lascaux confirmed in his belief that he is “a citizen of the earth, an inheritor not only of the Greeks and Romans but of almost the whole of infinity.” Later he quotes T. S. Eliot approvingly: “No poet, no artist … has his complete meaning alone. … You must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” Barbarian in the Garden, trans. Michael March and Jaroslaw Anders (Manchester: Carcanet, 1985), pp. 16, 78.

17. Milosz/Scott, pp. 46-47.

18. Goldfarb, On Cultural Freedom, p. 92.

19. See Milosz/Scott, pp. 68, 74, 75, 133. That so pointed a reading is within the ambit of Herbert's intention is confirmed by his guarded admission that in the poem “Damastes (also known as Procrustes) Speaks” (Report, p. 44) there is indeed a certain resemblance between Procrustes and Lenin. See John and Bogdana Carpenter, “Zbigniew Herbert: The Poet as Conscience,” Slavic and East European Journal 24 (1980): 46-47.

20. Milosz/Scott, pp. 96-97.

21. Trans. Czeslaw Milosz, in Milosz, ed., Postwar Polish Poetry, 3d ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 69-71. For another and, in my view, inferior translation, see Report, pp. 39-42.

22. A Fugitive from Utopia, p. 119.

23. Selected Poems, trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 79-80.

24. In this vein, in the introduction he wrote in 1973 for a selection of his poems, Herbert quotes Cyprian Norwid: “Let words mean only what they mean, and not whom they were used against” (quoted in Baranczak, A Fugitive from Utopia, p. 66). Similarly, one may cite “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination” (Report, pp. 17-19): Mr. Cogito

    adored tautologies
    explanations
    idem per idem
    that a bird is a
              bird
    slavery means
              slavery
    a knife is a knife
    death remains
              death

25. Milosz/Scott, pp. 58-60.

26. A Fugitive from Utopia, pp. 12, 64.

27. Milosz/Scott, p. 93.

28. “The Longobards,” in Milosz/Scott, p. 127.

29. Milosz/Scott, pp. 35-37, 82-83.

30. Milosz/Scott, pp. 51-52, 131.

31. Report, pp. 29-31.

32. “Gardens of Stone: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Rozewicz,” in Czerniawski, ed., The Mature Laurel, p. 178.