Mr. Cogito by Zbigniew Herbert

First published:Pan Cogito, 1974 (English translation, 1993)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Cogito, ergo sum, wrote René Descartes, “I think, therefore I am.” Mr. Cogito, a twentieth century human being, the citizen of a small European nation, and at least occasionally the alter ego of poet Zbigniew Herbert, does a lot of thinking in this collection of Herbert’s poetry from the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Mr. Cogito, not surprisingly, confronts the philosophical problem as to precisely what constitutes the self; what makes up human identity in a world full of others, past and present; where Mr. Cogito ends and where others—animal, vegetable, or mineral—begin; and how one individual lives among others.

Herbert’s earlier work, including Struna ´wiatła (1956), Hermes, pies i gwiazda (1957), Studium przedmiotu (1961), and Napis (1969), deal in historical and political ironies, chief among them the question of art (or form) confronted with unspeakable experience. Herbert, like many of his contemporaries throughout Central and Eastern Europe, had a thorough education. During the Nazi occupation, he began writing underground, just as he studied and fought underground; when the war ended and the Stalinization of Polish life began, that did not essentially change.

Avant-garde in its avoidance of rhyme and punctuation, its use of idiom and casual diction, and classical in its spareness and clarity, Herbert’s poetry rarely makes direct mention of contemporary events, yet it expresses the collective experience of Poland with unsparing intelligence. The poet often speaks in the first person plural, reserving the “I” for a figure from history or myth, distant in time or space. However, the speech and sensibility of these figures are as close to the readers of Herbert’s time as those of the morning newspaper.

In “Elegy of Fortinbras,” one of his best-known pieces, Fortinbras addresses the dead Hamlet with the pragmatic coolness of a twentieth century enlightened tyrant, contemptuous of fancy and as skilled in inventories as he is in invasion: “Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project/ and a decree on prostitutes and beggars/ I must also elaborate a better system of prisons/ since as you justly said Denmark is a prison.”

The irony inherent in conversations between the powerful and powerless underlies much of Herbert’s work, and his rejection of both the style and the substance of Poland under communism made publication difficult for him even after the thaw of 1956. Report from the Besieged City (1983), written while Poland was under martial law, was his first work to be published abroad, and even before it appeared in his homeland.

Ironic detachment (not to be confused with moral indifference) has been a hallmark of Herbert’s poetry from the beginning, and Mr. Cogito is no exception. Mr. Cogito is not a fixed character with a stable point of view, and Herbert himself called him neither a mask nor a persona but a method for distancing, “objectifying.” His points of reference are Herbert’s beloved humanist tradition—Greek mythology, ancient history, philosophy—yet the book is clearly more personal than Herbert’s earlier ones. This is particularly true of the opening poems, where Mr. Cogito looks at his own reflection, remembers father, mother, and sister, and contemplates returning to his birthplace. In “Mr. Cogito Looks at His Face in the Mirror,” he sees features he would rather not belong to him: close-set eyes, the better to spy out invading tribes; big ears, the better to hear rumbling mammoths. Those same eyes and ears, he protests, have absorbed Veronese and Mozart, but “the inherited face” shows the descent of the species with all its animal fears and ancient passions, and Mr. Cogito regretfully concludes that it, not he, wins.

“About Mr. Cogito’s Two Legs” is an anatomical version of two different attitudes toward life: one leg is boyish, well-shaped, and energetic, ready to dance or run away at any moment, to survive for the love of life; the other is thin, scarred, and rigid. One is not better than the other; rather, they might be compared to Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, and the combination is not crippling. Mr. Cogito simply staggers slightly as he makes his way through the world.

Distressed by the presence of others within himself, he is also surprised and touched by their separateness. Mr. Cogito often feels amazement, as the young boy discovers in “Sister,” that he has “remained within the limits of his own skin,” or as the grown man wonders at the sudden impenetrability of a dead friend’s body. “Others” include things as well as people: In “Sense of Identity” Mr. Cogito looks to a sandstone that, far from being dead and inert, varies according to light and weather, struggles with the elements, and endures changes in its own nature. He is not personifying the stone in any conventional sense; it leads its own opaque, self-enclosed sandstone life, which happens to share much with human existence. Both are always subject to external pressures, to a reality outside themselves—and here is where the self in Herbert’s poetry differs from the self-absorbed “I” of many other twentieth century Western poets.

Loss and dislocation lie at the core of Herbert’s reality. In “Mr. Cogito Thinks of Returning to the City Where He Was Born,” he expects that he will find nothing of his childhood except, and here the speculation turns to nightmarish certainty, a flagstone on which the boy draws a chalk circle. He raises one foot to hop but finds himself frozen in that pose, unable to grow up, as years pass and wars rage and the circle fills with ash, all the way up to his shoulders and mouth. On one level, the loss is universal—past lost to present, childhood irretrievably lost to the bitter taste of adult experience, lost homes to which one cannot return—but there are more levels as well, on which history and geography cease to be symbolic. After World War II, Herbert’s own birthplace of łwów was suddenly no longer Poland but the Soviet Union, as far removed as if it, like hundreds of other Polish towns and villages, was razed to the ground. Warfare or camps killed roughly one-sixth of Poland’s entire population, and much of Polish Jewry was indeed reduced to ash. Long used in poetry as a symbol of death and desolation, ash in postwar Poland had a quite specific and horrible meaning.

What is inhuman for Herbert the humanist is not the inanimate object but the perfect system, whether earthly or heavenly. Mr. Cogito is, in his own modest, bemused way, a continuation of what some Herbert commentators have called “the attack on transcendence,” and what others have called “the rejection of ’purity.’” Purity was often represented in his earlier works by imperturbable gods or angels bent on creating an unlivable paradise. In “At the Gate of the Valley,” for example,

after a loud whisper of explosionafter a loud whisper of silencethis voice resounds like a spring of living waterit is we are tolda cry of mothers from whom children are takensince as it turns outwe shall be saved each one alonethe guardian angels are unmovedand let us grant they have a hard job

A philosopher’s yearning for absolute perfection prompts “Mr. Cogito Tells About the Temptation of Spinoza,” in which God counters Baruch Spinoza’s questions about first and final causes with kindly practical advice: take care of yourself, eat better, dress better, buy a new house, forgive flawed mirrors and drunken singers.

—calmthe rational furythrones will fall because of itand stars turn black—thinkabout the womanwho will give you a child—you see Baruchwe are speaking about Great Things

Mr. Cogito may think about great things and great people, but he does not want to be one. In “Mr. Cogito’s Game,” which is a replay of the escape of Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin from a czarist prison, he delights in the daring flight but prefers the inferior role, being a helper rather than a hero. This is not cowardice but temperament, as well as a refusal to strike dramatic poses and make grand gestures in the service of a grand abstraction. He clings to his earthly senses of sight, touch, and sound. There is some wistfulness in “Mr. Cogito Laments the Pettiness of Dreams,” wherein he envies his grandparents their vividly colored dreams. (His are of the bill collector knocking on his door.) The tone of “Mr. Cogito’s Abyss” is low-key and apologetic as he explains that his abyss—his despair, his sense of disinheritance, his isolation—is persistent and annoying, like a small pet or a skin disease, but hardly the black hole of a Blaise Pascal or a Fyodor Dostoevski.

Even at his most cartoonlike, Mr. Cogito is a small, individual bastion of human values, of the good and the beautiful, fidelity and truth. Mr. Cogito may accept imperfection and defeat; he has his limitations, being an ordinary man. Ordinary men and women are, however, faced with moral choices, and those moral choices are very much present, though Herbert presents them less starkly, more compassionately, than he did in his earlier work. In “Mr. Cogito on Upright Attitudes,” the inhabitants of a threatened city surrender long before the enemy is at the gates; they are sewing white flags, teaching their children to lie, and practicing their kneeling. Herbert uses an undramatic, ordinary figure of speech for Mr. Cogito’s choice, which is “to stand up to the situation,” knowing full well that it is simply the choice of position in which to die. Standing up, in fact, simply makes him a better target. Upright attitudes guarantee nothing, most especially not survival. As the biblical language of “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito” argues, however, that is not the point. The point is to bear truthful witness in things great and small, and this is no less heroic than the exploits of a Gilgamesh, a Hector, or a Roland.

Perhaps no other Polish poet except the Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz has so wide an appeal to the foreign reader as has Herbert, whose work translates into English with relative ease. The “relative” is important, because he is particularly skilled at using common idioms and clichés, which generally do not translate well, in unexpected contexts. There are allusions to Polish as well as to Roman history, and associations that non-Polish readers might not make without a footnote. However, this grounding in the local, the specific, and the individual keeps the poetry from ever seeming abstract and generalized. This and his balance between austerity and compassion, lucidity and complexity, the ideal and the real give him a voice that resonates far beyond the borders of his country.

Bibliography

Alvarez, A. Introduction to Selected Poems: Zbigniew Herbert, translated by Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott. New York: Ecco, 1968. A brief but eloquent and useful introduction to the first volume of Herbert’s poetry to be published in English.

Baranczak, Stanisław. A Fugitive from Utopia: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. A thorough study of Herbert’s poetry, organized around his use of antinomy, or paradox. Baranczak argues that the contradiction between Herbert’s attachment to the cultural heritage of the West and his sense of Eastern European disinheritance lies at the core of his work.

Bayley, John. “The Art of Austerity: Zbigniew Herbert.” In The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature, Essays, 1962-2002. Selected by Leo Carey. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. An examination of Herbert’s work is included in this compilation of the work of literary critic Bayley.

Carpenter, Bogdana, and John Carpenter. “The Recent Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert.” World Literature Today 51, no. 2 (Spring, 1977): 210-214. Refers specifically to Mr. Cogito, which the authors later translated. Discusses Herbert’s relationship to his persona and the differences between this and his earlier work.

Czerniawski, Adam, ed. The Mature Laurel: Essays on Modern Polish Poetry. Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour, 1991. Contains several good essays on Herbert, some devoted to analysis of individual poems. Others discuss his work in relationship to that of such leading contemporaries as Wisława Szymborska and Tadeusz Różewicz.

Heaney, Seamus. “Atlas of Civilization.” In The Government of the Tongue. New York: Noonday Press, 1990. Heaney sees a direct connection between Herbert and Socrates, Plato, and the notion of the examined life.

Hirsch, Edward. “Zbigniew Herbert.” In Responsive Reading. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Hirsch, himself a poet, analyzes the work of Herbert.

Levis, Larry. “Strange Days: Zbigniew Herbert in Los Angeles.” In The Gazer Within, edited by James Marshall, Andrew Miller, and John Venable. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Levis, an American poet, reviews Herbert’s work.

Popovic, Dunjal. “’The Trace of a Hand Searching for Form’: Zbigniew Herbert, Classical Heritage, and Poetry After Auschwitz.” Slavic and East European Journal 51, no. 1 (Spring, 2007): 74-86. Examines Herbert’s poetry written before and after World War II to determine how he responded to Nazism and other events of the conflict.

Zagajewski, Adam, ed. Polish Writers on Writing. San Antonio, Tex.: Trinity University Press, 2007. Some of Herbert’s correspondence and an interview with the poet are included in this anthology of works in which Polish authors describe what it means to be a writer.