The Fascinating Ancient World of Zbigniew Herbert
There is little that expires more quickly than secondhand historical literature. Discovery preserves in books an almost invincible vitality: the confusion of their style or Schliemann's biographical asides matter little; watching him enter the land while we delve deeper into his book, until he finds Troy and sees his faith in Homer confirmed, is an extraordinary experience. Reading the multitude of interpreters who follow him, however, is like trying to cure a toothache in a nineteenth-century consulting room. Everything can be picturesque, if we're in the right mood, but nothing seems useful.
Interpretations obey obsolete sciences, facts are refuted or incomplete, novelties are already commonplaces, so it's rare for a historical essay to survive history itself. Rarer still is a poet who, faced with history, resists rounding it off with more or less hidden rhetoric. We see this in so many of the language's greatest writers: Agustina's historical figures never resisted his novelistic perversion, Garrett's Camões is an immense flourish that camouflages the poet himself, and in none of Camilo's many historical studies does rigor prevail over a good sentence. All this is understandable: they are not textbooks; what there is to learn from them is of a different order.
This, however, makes this posthumous book by Zbigniew Herbert, the great Polish poet of the second half of the 20th century who wrote seven essays on the Ancient World, from Knossos to Etruria, a precious treasure. There's no need to burden it with praise unbecoming of the tone in which the book was printed. It's a pleasant book, offering a calm and discreet pleasure, yet still unusual. This is because it's a book of essays—some of them bordering on essay and travelogue, as in the detailed description of the Heraklion Museum or his attempt to describe the Greek landscape—on subjects Herbert knows well (secondhand, yes, but well, with that ease typical of prolonged contact with the subjects) to the point of never ceasing to be informative, but in which a vivacity more characteristic of the artist than the historian is never lost.
The great mystery here is understanding how Herbert's book doesn't fade into the monotony of repeated facts and manages to maintain a vivacity so unusual in this type of essay, which has neither grand discoveries nor grand ideological pretensions. And this has to do, above all, with Herbert's stylistic perspective. Herbert's way of looking at things is essentially original, but very discreet. That is, when faced with the Greek landscape, what he immediately summons is not what associates it with the Hellenic world, but what dissociates it from it. He has little interest in that habitual movement of the intellect that involves creating connections between things and that ends up making so many history books reproductions of the world in which they were written. Herbert's perspective is more dissociative than associative, which constantly takes his observations far from their starting point.
At the same time, however, there's a tacit underpinning to the book that lends it a second layer of charm, one that has less to do with the adventures of Pericles' invasion of the island of Samos than with the hidden wonders of Etruscan art. This book, more than a collection of essays by a great scholar, is a record of a man's encounter with a civilization he's heard about since childhood. This is revealed in a central essay, in which Herbert recounts Freud's reaction upon first encountering the Acropolis. Herbert is interested, beyond the art and history he's already read, in understanding the reaction of the senses when encountering what they've known for so long in a different way. Hence the connection to what Freud himself wrote – in which he ends up meditating on the distrust of his own senses in relation to that which they had never doubted – and that he adds to these essays a “Latin lesson” with memories of his childhood teacher and the way in which his awareness of civilization was formed within him.
These essays are important because they reveal an important aspect of the book: there is a youthful enthusiasm within it, an enthusiasm that is also revealed when, alongside the descriptions of key archaeological sites of the Mycenaean and Minoan civilizations, it includes portraits of Arthur Evans and his team, a veritable pleiad of Victorian explorers, the kind who fuel the imagination of youth.
It is also extraordinary to perceive the intimate connection that school education once considered its duty to foster between young students and the beginnings of Western civilization. It is because this concern has remained relevant today that Herbert's book so often feels like an encounter with his own youth, like an old man regaining his vigor upon discovering, buried in the garden, the old toys of his childhood. Perhaps such a book would no longer be possible today. Not because there is a lack of scholars capable of knowing more about Athens, Rome, the Roman governments of Great Britain, or how the cloaca maxima was drained to create the Roman forum; simply because for no one else will this be etched in their memory alongside the fears of a strict teacher or the discoveries of companionship in childhood, the time when civilization becomes life itself.
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