Volume 32, Number 12 · July 18, 1985
Noble Poet
By Al Alvarez
Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems
by Zbigniew Herbert, translated by John Carpenter, by Bogdana Carpenter
Ecco Press, 82 pp., $12.50
Barbarian in the Garden
by Zbigniew Herbert, translated by Michael March, by Jaroslaw Anders
Carcanet (to be published in September), 180 pp., $14.95
Selected Poems
by Zbigniew Herbert, translated by Czeslaw Milosz, by Peter Dale Scott
Carcanet (London), (to be published by Ecco Press in April 1986), 144 pp., £4.95
Zbigniew Herbert has had an exemplary Central European education. He was born in 1924 in Lwów in eastern Poland, the son of a lawyer and professor of economics whose great-grandfather spoke only English (hence his literary British surname). In September 1939, when Herbert was fifteen, Lwów was swallowed by the Russian whale. Twenty months later, the Germans marched in and Herbert finished high school underground; fighting in the Resistance. At the end of the war he went to university to study both his father's disciplines: he took a master's in economics at Kraków, then a master's in law at Torun, where he stayed on to study philosophy. In 1950 he moved briefly to Gdansk, then on to Warsaw where for six years he held down a series of menial, Kafkaesque jobs: in a bank, in a shop, as a clerk in the management office of the peat industry, in the department for retired pensioners of the Teachers' Cooperative, and in the legal department of the Composers' Association.
Review, 2703 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |