Sphinx

As my regular reader (hi, Trev!) will have noticed, this blog has been rather quiet of late, as I’ve been struggling to keep my head above All The Things, but I cannot miss the opportunity to add another entry to the small but striking archive of Thucydides Poetry – not least because I’ll probably forget it almost immediately if I don’t. This one is especially interesting, as it hints at a whole tradition of post-WWII classical reception in Poland of which I knew more or less nothing; I would be rushing off to write emails to colleagues in Poland to ask more, except that they are high on the list of people whose deadlines I have missed…

Zbigniew Herbert, about whom I knew absolutely nothing before this morning; 1924-98, first published as a poet in the 1950s, with an anthology translated into English published in the USA in 1968. His Wikipedia page…reads rather oddly to me; a mass of information, especially about his trips abroad, with little sense of the overall shape of his life, and then a mass of critical commentary with no references. Maybe it’s all just been translated out of Polish, maybe there’s a lot of editing conflict going on behind the scenes, as one might imagine – there’s no obvious hint of this in the current version, which simply treats him as a literary figure – the meaning of this writer and his legacy in early C21 Poland might be a matter of political debate.

There certainly are strong indications of a classical reception element in both Herbert’s poems – a suggestion, if I understand the discussion correctly, that this was one of the reasons why his poetry might not have found favour with the Communist regime, for its lack of social realism – and essays. A late collection of the latter looks like being especially relevant for his take on history, and Thucydides:

Labirynt nad morzem consists mainly of essays devoted to ancient Greek culture and history, as well as in a lesser degree to the Etruscans and the Roman legionnaires from Hadrian’s wall. This time however, the traveler seems not to be seeking his own way – he copes with the monuments of culture – the Acropolis of Athensor Knossos. Yet, when referring to the history of Greece, Herbert draws out the episodes which take up not too many pages in textbooks, and wrecks view patterns. He shows how Pericles’ policy in the case of Samos became the beginning of the end of not only the Greek cities union but also of Athenian democracy. The assessments of history are reviewed in the same way as the one postulated in the poetry – by changing the perspective, rejecting the winners’ point of view.

But I came on here to talk about a specific poem: ‘Why the Classics’, published in the Selected Poems collection in 1968, actual date of writing unclear on the basis of what I’ve gleaned so far. It’s famous enough that one can buy a 44-page study guide on what is only a one-and-a-half page poem, so my main emotion this morning has been faint embarrassment that I haven’t heard of it before.

in the fourth book of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides tells among other things
the story of his unsuccessful expedition
among long speeches of chiefs
battles sieges plague
dense net of intrigues of diplomatic endeavours
the episode is like a pin
in a forest

So far so descriptive, except that I have no idea whether a pin in a forest is analogous to a needle in a haystack. Thucydides is taken to need no introduction; his work offers a mass of information about politics and war, and hidden in the middle of it the bright sharpness of his own experience. As the stanza goes on to explain, Amphipolis fell because Thucydides was late with relief, resulting in his exile; “exiles of all times / know what price that is”.

The second part shifts the focus to the present, contrasting Thucydides’ refusal to make excuses or even discuss the episode in any depth with the likely behaviour of any contemporary general or leader:

generals of the most recent wars
if a similar affair happens to them
whine on their knees before posterity
praise their heroism and innocence
they accuse their subordinates
envious colleagues
unfavourable winds
Thucydides says only
that he had seven ships
it was winter
and he sailed quickly

This is a minor spin on a familiar theme in Thucydidean reception; his down-playing of his own failure, even narrating himself in the third person, as a sign of his noble spirit and historical integrity – no complaints, only the truth. But for Herbert it’s clearly part of the answer to the question posed by the title. Why the Classics? Because they offer a model of behaviour that, even if it is impossible to realise in the present, at least offers a basis for criticism of the present, rather than accepting that the way things are is the only possibility.

if art for its subject
will have a broken jar
a small broken soul
with a great self-pity
what will remain after us
will it be lovers’ weeping
in a small dirty hotel
when wall-paper dawns 

I like this third and final stanza, whereas the previous two really do read just like straightforward prose with the punctuation taken out – which may of course be a function of translating the original into English. Again, I haven’t the foggiest what “when wall-paper dawns” means – maybe I need to buy the study guide – but clearly here Herbert is shifting the past/present contrast from action in the world to artistic engagement with it. Is modern art no more than self-pitying and solipsistic accounts of minutiae, in contrast to Thucydides’ panoply of events? His experience was woven into something much bigger; our poems are no more than fragments of experience, aspiring to universality through the hope that others will have had the same experience of weeping in a sordid hotel. Again, why the classics? Because they tell us that there can, and should be, something more.