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Does anybody know what has happened to Zbigniew Herbert’s The Labyrinth on the Sea, the translation of the final volume of the trilogy of essays on European history that began with The Barbarian in the Garden and continued with Still Life with a Bridle? Ecco Press announced it for dates beginning in 2005 and continuing through August 30, 2007, according to various websites, but it has disappeared from official listings as completely as any title dropped down an Orwellian memory hole. (The 1984 metaphor is fairly exact; one wholesaler’s announcement and one amazon.ca listing never deleted, plus Adam Zagarewski’s reference in his essay on Herbert to the book having recently been published posthumously, which of course could be taken to be Zagarewski referring to the Polish original by a translated title. When somebody gets round to updating the websites, there might as well never have been an unpublished English translation.)
HarperCollins reshuffles their publicity office so fast, and updates their website so slowly, that I can’t figure out whom to contact there.
I may have written previously about Herbert’s situation as a Polish poet celebrated in the countries he never went to, obscure or resented in the places in which he chose to live, completely fed up with the conditions of the waning Communist regime in Poland but unable to stay away after long stints of being allowed to live in Paris or Berlin in marginal circumstances. I suppose so-called vulgar Marxists and orthodox Freudians alike could derive his interests from his material conditions; he wrote brilliant, haunting essays on the Cathars, and on assorted other outcasts of history. The Golden Age of Dutch painting is looked at in Still Life with a Bridle through the career of a talented and moderately successful artist whose work is known today through a single surviving example.
I am fairly certain I wrote a much earlier essay in this blog about Herbert’s perspective as a Pole visiting the holy places (metaphorically and literally) of Western European culture and writing about them as an outsider whose culture and history were as unknown to (and dismissed by) the intellectuals among whom he moved as was, once, the African history that Aimé Césaire summarizes so memorably in Return to My Native Land ( Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal, and please note that nobody bothers to cite the Polish originals of Herbert’s titles).
I realize (again courtesy of the memory jog of Love & Sleep) that I read Czeslaw Milosz’s autobiographymany years ago with fierce delight because it gave me some tiny perspective on the impossible-to-remember wars and divisions and subdivisions of distant places that really were, as Neville Chamberlain said, “far-off lands of which we know little.” There was a time in which, even after reading a few ill-written surveys, I had little in the way of mental images of East European history beyond Eisenstein’s battle on the ice and the cover of the Classics Illustrated comic of Henryk Sienkiewicz’ With Fire and Sword.
Herbert’s take on history from the outsider’s perspective belongs, thematically if not chronologically, to the era into which we have increasingly been moving. His life, of course, belongs largely to those forty years of tense stability in Europe and slow, steady change in Africa and Asia that gave birth to a briefly unified global avant-garde. From about 1950 to 1970 there seemed to be an agreed-upon canon of experimental poetry, fiction, art, film, dance, and music within which, even if the contending schools of thought and action ridiculed one another, there was agreement on the notion that all these things were important.
Now I am struck by how little people in the visual arts (into which film and performance have been subsumed) know or care about literature, especially poetry which has lapsed back into its status as stepchild of the arts*; how little people in poetry know or care about fiction, even, never mind visual genres. And so on. There are huge areas of the arts that have become as specialized as any subdiscipline of medicine, and as poorly comprehended even by an educated elite, whose shared experience may not extend much beyond the most intelligent television series.
Granted, each of these areas of practice have their authorized topics of excitement in the other arts…the novel du jour or the filmmaker about whom everyone is talking. But they are not the same novels, or the same filmmakers, and anyone who admits to being excited by the wrong one will be greeted with “Who?” or an embarrassed silence that implies that no one with any sense of the twenty-first century could possibly take seriously someone like THAT.
Lately, I have been trying to find a photograph I took in 1991 Berlin that shows a wall graffito reading “Alle Menschen sind Ausländer fast Überall.” (“All human beings are foreigners almost everywhere.”) Throw in the variables of divided communities and you can omit the part about “almost.”
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*By the standards established by Eastern European and Latin American poetry of Back in the Day, of course, academic poetry is pretty much pointless and poetry slams, while populist, fall under the radar of acceptable Kulchur; not unlike the populist poets whom Kenneth Rexroth attempted unsuccessfully to rehabitate among the mandarins of his day. The relationship, or non-relationship, between the New York intellectuals of Back in the Day and the global avant-garde culture of the day is another topic entirely. In France, Romanian émigré E. M. Cioran was already predicting the demise of the historic capitals of culture: "The future belongs to the suburbs of the globe."
I am attempting to post this previously written essay in a wi-fi cafe playing satellite radio's Sixties at Six, providing a disconcerting 1965 soundtrack that makes me happy I never ingested the controlled substances that would make me fear I was having a flashback, if not a full-fledged timeslip.
HarperCollins reshuffles their publicity office so fast, and updates their website so slowly, that I can’t figure out whom to contact there.
I may have written previously about Herbert’s situation as a Polish poet celebrated in the countries he never went to, obscure or resented in the places in which he chose to live, completely fed up with the conditions of the waning Communist regime in Poland but unable to stay away after long stints of being allowed to live in Paris or Berlin in marginal circumstances. I suppose so-called vulgar Marxists and orthodox Freudians alike could derive his interests from his material conditions; he wrote brilliant, haunting essays on the Cathars, and on assorted other outcasts of history. The Golden Age of Dutch painting is looked at in Still Life with a Bridle through the career of a talented and moderately successful artist whose work is known today through a single surviving example.
I am fairly certain I wrote a much earlier essay in this blog about Herbert’s perspective as a Pole visiting the holy places (metaphorically and literally) of Western European culture and writing about them as an outsider whose culture and history were as unknown to (and dismissed by) the intellectuals among whom he moved as was, once, the African history that Aimé Césaire summarizes so memorably in Return to My Native Land ( Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal, and please note that nobody bothers to cite the Polish originals of Herbert’s titles).
I realize (again courtesy of the memory jog of Love & Sleep) that I read Czeslaw Milosz’s autobiographymany years ago with fierce delight because it gave me some tiny perspective on the impossible-to-remember wars and divisions and subdivisions of distant places that really were, as Neville Chamberlain said, “far-off lands of which we know little.” There was a time in which, even after reading a few ill-written surveys, I had little in the way of mental images of East European history beyond Eisenstein’s battle on the ice and the cover of the Classics Illustrated comic of Henryk Sienkiewicz’ With Fire and Sword.
Herbert’s take on history from the outsider’s perspective belongs, thematically if not chronologically, to the era into which we have increasingly been moving. His life, of course, belongs largely to those forty years of tense stability in Europe and slow, steady change in Africa and Asia that gave birth to a briefly unified global avant-garde. From about 1950 to 1970 there seemed to be an agreed-upon canon of experimental poetry, fiction, art, film, dance, and music within which, even if the contending schools of thought and action ridiculed one another, there was agreement on the notion that all these things were important.
Now I am struck by how little people in the visual arts (into which film and performance have been subsumed) know or care about literature, especially poetry which has lapsed back into its status as stepchild of the arts*; how little people in poetry know or care about fiction, even, never mind visual genres. And so on. There are huge areas of the arts that have become as specialized as any subdiscipline of medicine, and as poorly comprehended even by an educated elite, whose shared experience may not extend much beyond the most intelligent television series.
Granted, each of these areas of practice have their authorized topics of excitement in the other arts…the novel du jour or the filmmaker about whom everyone is talking. But they are not the same novels, or the same filmmakers, and anyone who admits to being excited by the wrong one will be greeted with “Who?” or an embarrassed silence that implies that no one with any sense of the twenty-first century could possibly take seriously someone like THAT.
Lately, I have been trying to find a photograph I took in 1991 Berlin that shows a wall graffito reading “Alle Menschen sind Ausländer fast Überall.” (“All human beings are foreigners almost everywhere.”) Throw in the variables of divided communities and you can omit the part about “almost.”
----------
*By the standards established by Eastern European and Latin American poetry of Back in the Day, of course, academic poetry is pretty much pointless and poetry slams, while populist, fall under the radar of acceptable Kulchur; not unlike the populist poets whom Kenneth Rexroth attempted unsuccessfully to rehabitate among the mandarins of his day. The relationship, or non-relationship, between the New York intellectuals of Back in the Day and the global avant-garde culture of the day is another topic entirely. In France, Romanian émigré E. M. Cioran was already predicting the demise of the historic capitals of culture: "The future belongs to the suburbs of the globe."
I am attempting to post this previously written essay in a wi-fi cafe playing satellite radio's Sixties at Six, providing a disconcerting 1965 soundtrack that makes me happy I never ingested the controlled substances that would make me fear I was having a flashback, if not a full-fledged timeslip.
