Something like Introduction
The Damastes (Also Known as Procrustes) Speaks, a poem by Zbigniew Herbert (October 29, 1924 – July 28, 1998), is included in the 6th volume of his poems entitled Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems (Raport z oblężonego Miasta i inne wiersze) – poems written between 1953 and 1982, while the volume was published by Instytut Literacki in 1983.
The important Polish poet was born in the city of Lviv (Lwów), formerly Polish, former Soviet and now Ukrainian, a city that probably forms the geographical analogy of Zbigniew Herbert’s great poetry: multicultural and multi-ethnic, since it was inhabited by Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, Russians and Armenians, and multi-religious, since it was worshiped by active Jewish, Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Ukrainian Greek Catholic communities, invites you to cogitate on the human of society and history, but also on the human existence and its metaphysics.
And Zbigniew Herbert responds to this call, without grandiloquence or ideological pomposity, without the usual nationalistic intestinal rumblings or sterile political mobilization, embracing, as a well-travelled poet, humanity to the very limits of ironic poetic discourse – just like the city in which he was born.
Z. Herbert - Damastes (Also Known as Procrustes) Speaks
My movable empire between Athens and Megara
I ruled alone over forests ravines precipices
without the advice of old men foolish insignia with a simple club
dressed only in the shadow of a wolf
and terror caused by the sound of the word Damastes
I lacked subjects that is I had them briefly
they didn’t live as long as dawn however it is slander
to say I was a bandit as the falsifiers of history claim
in reality I was a scholar and social reformer
my real passion was anthropometry
I invented a bed with the measurements of a perfect man
I compared the travelers I caught with this bed
it was hard to avoid–I admit–stretching limbs cutting legs
the patients died but the more there were who perished
the more I was certain my research was right
the goal was noble progress demands victims
I longed to abolish the difference between the high and the low
I wanted to give a single form to disgustingly varied humanity
I never stopped in my efforts to make people equal
my life was taken by Theseus the murderer of the innocent Minotaur
the one who went through the labyrinth with a woman’s ball of yarn
an impostor full of tricks without principles or a vision of the future
I have the well-grounded hope others will continue my labor
and bring the task so boldly begun to its end
Translation: John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter
Poem by Zbigniew Herbert from the Collection Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems (Raport z Oblężonego Miasta i Inne Wiersze), 1985
Seamus Heaney Talks About the Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert
The talk by the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney on the poetry of the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, took place at the Irish Writers’ Center in Dublin on 16 October 2008.
- Barańczak, S., & Cavanagh, C. (1991). Polish Poetry of the Last Two Decades of Communist Rule: Spoiling Cannibals’ Fun. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
- Herbert, Z. (1985). Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems (J. Carpenter, B. Carpenter, Trans.). New York: Ecco Press.
- Herbert, Z. (2024). Selected Poems. Penguin Classics.
- Blackbird Archive: Strange Days, Zbigniew Herbert in Los Angeles (by Larry Levis)
Clarification
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