Books &Literature Entropy | 26 May 2009
In Zbigniew Herbert’s Garden
This is an enlightening excerpt from a review of Zbigniew Herbert’s book “Barbarian in the Garden” his remarkable collection of essays that constitute a ruminative tour of the architectural landmarks of European civilization.
The polish poet and essayist who insisted that civilization depended on artists’ staking out clear moral positions resistant to the winds of history and ideology.
If you set out on a journey let it be long
wandering that seems to have no aim groping your way blindly
so you learn the roughness of the earth not only with your eyes
but by touch so you confront the world with your whole skin
—Zbigniew Herbert, “Journey”
Art and life are part of the same fabric of human experience. He believes that “The ideal traveler knows how to enter into contact with nature, with people and their history as well as their art. Only familiarity with these three overlapping elements can be the starting point of knowledge about a country.” This lover of antiquity, this classicist, wants to immerse himself in the everyday life of the places he visits as much as he longs to see the masterpieces that have remained the same for centuries.
When we travel, otherness has two senses: we’re obviously “the other,” but the world we encounter is also “the other.” And even though it may be bewildering, Herbert believes we should reach out to that otherness. He acknowledges that it’s more difficult for the modern traveler “to mix in with the concrete otherness of the landscape, the people, and the events” Today’s traveler is protected from the quotidian life by “The international hotel, the conventionality of tourism, guidebooks, a hurried contact with notable objects, the injunction to commune with universal works and not with the incomparable, distinctive beauty of life.
Just as he doesn’t believe in “the rapid swallowing of paintings,” he takes his time enjoying local food. His descriptions of art in Barbarian are followed by descriptions of the delights of the palate. This Olympian of high taste was obviously someone to whom the pleasures of eating were not foreign. Living under Communism rarely led to a refined taste in food, unless, like Herbert, one was a sensualist and a natural gourmet. On his way to Lascaux, he stops at the small village of Montignac for breakfast and raves about an omelette—”an omelette with truffles is delicious and their smell, as the dish has no taste, is incomparable.”
Then he follows with a brief lecture on truffles. After viewing the paintings of Simone Martini and Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Siena, Herbert offers gushing praise of pizza, which he learned to love in Naples, and later describes the sensation of drinking Campari. Before leaving Siena he regales the reader with a detailed explanation of how one should drink wine—instruction that no winery owner whose family has been in the business of wine-making for centuries could surpass. When in Arles, he extols the glories of Provençal cooking: “First comes a tin tray with hors d’oeuvres: green and black olives, pickles, endives, and spicy potatoes. Then the delicious fish soup, a cousin of the queen of soups—the bouillabaisse of Marseilles.”
Herbert’s insatiability, his voracious appetite for the experience of the world—people, landscape, food, art—makes him an ideal traveler. For him, the perfect trip is “what the Germans call Bildungsreise,” an educational journey during which we learn about both the world and ourselves.
© Excerpt from review in The Threepenny Review
By Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough
on 26 May 2009 at 4:54 pm 1.Nimesh Dadia said …
Lao Aju
Enigmatic Portrait. I would like to share a stanza from his poem “I would like to describe”
“I would like to describe courage
without dragging behind me a dusty lion
and also anxiety
without shaking a glass full of water
to put it another way
I would give all metaphors
in return for one word
drawn out of my breast like a rib
for one word
contained within the boundaries
of my skin
but apparently this is not possible”
I am searching for a good English translation of him poem “Mr.Cogito”
Regards
Nimesh