Zbigniew Herbert

Zbigniew Herbert (29 October 1924 in Lwów - 28 July 1998 in Warsaw) was an influential Polish poet, essayist and moralist. He was a member of the Polish resistance movement during World War II. He was one of the most famous and translated Polish writers.

Biography

In 1938 Herbert started studies at the Gimnazjum im. Kazimierza Wielkiego in Lwów. During World War II he joined the Armia Krajowa resistance and continued his studies in underground schools. In 1944 he moved from Lwów to Cracow and studied at the Akademia Sztuk Pięknych, graduated from the Akademia Ekonomiczna w Krakowie, then studied law and philosophy at the Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika in Toruń.

His poetry was first published in 1950 in the magazine Dziś i jutro. His first poetry book Struna światła was published in 1956.

During the 1950s he worked at many low-paying jobs because he refused to write according to official Communist guidelines. Between 1963 and 1968 he worked as an editor for Poezja magazine. Between 1955 and 1983 he was a member of Związek Literatów Polskich.

In 1968 his work was translated into English by Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott. The publication of his Selected Poems in the United States and England made Herbert one of the most popular contemporary poets in the English-speaking world.

He traveled widely through the West and lived in Paris, Berlin and the United States, where he taught briefly at the University of California at Los Angeles.

He died on July 28, 1998, in Warsaw, Poland.

Literary criticism

In his works he presented the 'reflection-intellectual' perspective, with stress on human beingss and their dignity, to the background of history, where people are almost irrelevant cogs in the machine of fate. He often used elements of mediterranean culture in his works.

"Herbert's steadily detached, ironic and historically minded style represents, I suppose, a form of classicism. But it is a one-sided classicism (.....) In a way, Herbert's poetry is typical of the whole Polish attitude to their position within the communist bloc; independent, brilliant, ironic, wary, a bit contemptuous, pained." - A. Alvarez, Under Pressure (1965)

"If the key to contemporary Polish poetry is the selective experience of the last decades, Herbert is perhaps the most skilful in expressing it and can be called a poet of historical irony. He achieves a sort of precarious equilibrium by endowing the patterns of civilization with meanings, in spite of all its horrors." - Czesław Miłosz, Postwar Polish Poetry (3rd ed., 1983)

"There is little doubt that at this writing Zbigniew Herbert is the most admired and respected poet now living in Poland. (...) Polish readers have always revered poets who succeed in defining the nation's spiritual dilemma; what is exceptional in Herbert is that his popularity at home is matched by a wide acclaim abroad." - Stanisław Barańczak, A Fugitive from Utopia (1987)

Awards and Prizes