patrickkanouse.com Blog

What’s the Difference? Part 1

June 10, 2009 on 1:42 pm | In Poetry, Uncategorized | No Comments

I recently completed Zbigniew Herbert’s collected poems (translated by Alissa Valles). According to the vast majority of criticism and other commentaries I have read, Herbert is consider a substantial 20th-century poet. Alas, I found the work mostly boring, which I am sure will bother some people. After some consideration, I must admit that I find other “giants” of Eastern European poetry rather boring: Milosz, Brodsky, Seifert, Szymborska (the earlier 20th-century Russian poets seem to be an exception: Mayakovsky, Akhamtova, Pasternak). Now I could say that it’s just the fact that it is poetry in translation, but that cannot be all of it for modern Greek and Italian poetry I find remarkable in translation (Seferis, Cavafy, Elytis, Montale, Ungaretti) in addition to the earlier Russian poets and other poets in translation.

So what is it? I’ve been re-reading a bit of Montale and Elytis, and it seems to me to be the type of poetry it is. Montale and Elytis seem to be more, well, abstract and symbolist while Herbert and Seifert seem too literal and too concrete. Hence, Herbert in translation (and let’s be fair, I’m only reading them in translation and this should not, in the end, indicate any valuation of their poetry in their native language) comes off as prosy and flat. Montale, however, leaps off the page in imaginative fireworks. The abstraction and symbolism become the main focus of the poetry and carry my interest. I’d rather read Milosz’s Captive Mind than most of his poetry (and Milosz I find most agreeable of the Eastern European poets I mention here).

Here’s some of a Herbert poem titled “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination”:

Mr. Cogito never trusted
tricks of the imagination
the piano at the top of the Alps
played false concerts for him

he didn’t appreciate labyrinths
the Sphinx filled him with loathing

he lived in a house with no basement
without mirrors of dialectics

jungles of tangled images
were not his home

he would rarely soar
on the wings of metaphor
and then he fell like Icarus
into the embrace of the Great Mother

he adored tautologies
explanations
idem per idem

that a bird is a bird
slavery means slavery
a knife is a knife
death remains death

he loved
the flat horizon
a straight line
the gravity of the earth

At first blush, this may seem abstract and contradictory to my statements, what with its “without mirrors of dialectics,” but I do not find a spark in this language. It remains flat on the page and fails, interestingly, to elicit an imaginative response. In a future post, I’ll look at a Montale poem and comment further on these ideas.