Inhabiting History : MR. COGITO: Poems <i> By Zbigniew Herbert</i> ; <i> Translated from Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter (The Ecco Press: $22.95; 80 pp.) </i>

Poets write out of their own back yards. Whether the character of the back yards effects the quality of the poetry is hard to decide. Is American culture in the 1990s less likely to produce important poets than the culture of the ‘50s and ‘60s, because its sense of what is burningly important is so much more distracted and diffuse? We have subtle and gifted figures and several powerful ones, but we don’t have a Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath or John Berryman.

Even 40 years ago, the back yards of American poets rarely found themselves invaded by history. Their Western culture came conveniently detached from the darker elements that attended its birth. For the modern poets of Europe, it was different. How to separate the beauty from the cruelty: the artistry of the Renaissance from the murderous battles of the city-states, the art that grew out of Catholic and Protestant liturgies from the slaughter of religious wars, the generous idealism of 19th-Century radicals from the Cheka or Stasi that came for your father.

This was not an abstract question. The desolation of history, and the art that history engenders, are a weed-choked tangle in the back yards of Osip Mandelshtam and Anna Akhmatova, of Primo Levi, of Georges Bernanos and Georges Perec, of Seamus Heaney, Antonio Machado, Milan Kundera, Czeslaw Milosz and many others. Is their poetry (let us call them all poets) better? What would we do about Rilke, for example--although in his relatively pristine back yard he devised poetic tools that the more entangled poets would use.

Not necessarily better, but in some sense more necessary. It is under the sign of necessity as well as beauty that we read this newly published collection by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. He is less known in this country than most of the others, but no less a ticket-holder in the sublime vagaries of the Nobel lottery, and perhaps no more likely to win. (Only Milosz has won, in fact.) The translation by John and Bogdana Carpenter feels rough at times, but it brings Herbert to us even if his shoes occasionally squeak.

The poems in “Mr. Cogito” are intensely personal, whether they provide a self-portrait and sketches of his family, or go on to suggest states of mind and of his poetic instrument, or open out into an incandescent reflection of the individual conscinece and the forces of history. They call for a use of the I, but one of the conflicts that ignite the poems, like flint striking steel, is that Herbert cannot provide it.

His life as citizen of a country whose history was butchered by the imperial egos of its neighbors, as a member of the anti-Nazi underground, as a free spirit and sometime exile under the Communists, has made him allergic to the genocidal vertical pronoun. Hence Mr. Cogito who, as Herbert writes, limps through the poems on two uneven legs: the long one fiercely visionary, the short one humanely practical. Don Quixote, the one; Sancho Panza, the other--together, the alter ego of a poet whose gentleness is as powerful as Attila’s war-making, because it is itself the product of a civil war inside a spirit of singular fineness.

At the start, Cogito looks in the mirror and observes immortal longings mocked by a double chin, pockmarks, squinty eyes and the low forehead that contains all matter of aesthetic sublimities:

*

I applied the marble greenness of Veronese to my eyes

steeped my ears in Mozart perfected my nostrils with the fragrance of old books

in front of the mirror the inherited face

old meats fermenting in a bag. . . .

*

He writes of a father who seemed like a king to him when he was little:

*

I thought I would sit at his right hand

and we would separate light from darkness

and judge those of us who live

--it happened otherwise

a junkdealer carried his throne on a handcart. . . .

*

And then Herbert writes one of those lines that particularly characterize him; it is as if we have been making an exhilarating flight when suddenly the engine cuts and we are gliding on a silent current of air:

*

in an unimportant place there is a shadow under a stone.

He writes of the child who grows away from his mother:

He fell from her knees like a ball of yarn.

He unwound in a hurry and ran blindly away.

*

From childhood he moves into exploring a personal and philosophical sensibility. There is the blankness and banality of his spirit. “The Abyss of Mr. Cogito” is not like Pascal’s or Dostoevsky’s abysses but something much shallower:

*

it follows him like a shadow

stops at the bakery

in the park it reads the newspaper

over Mr. Cogito’s shoulder. . . .

*

There is the lethargy of his thoughts that inhabit a parched landscape and when they come to someone else’s torrential enthusiasm,

*

they stand on the shore

on one leg

like hungry herons.

*

In “Ordinariness of the Soul” he imagines his muse as the maid to a dull scholar. She tidies his room for such important visitors as Heraclitus and Isaiah. But when he goes out after another arid day:

*

the muse unties her blue apron

rests her elbows on the window sill

leans out

waits

for her sergeant

with red mustaches.

*

And in “Suffering” the sorrowful irony becomes more sonorous:

*

do not brandish the stump

over the heads of others

don’t knock with the white cane

against the windows of the

well-fed

drink the essence of bitter herbs

but not the the dregs

leave carefully

a few sips for the future.

*

The climactic final poems in “Mr. Cogito” swell in scale without ever relinquishing their individuality. They are huge and modest. In “Mr. Cogito Seeks Advice,” he puts aside learning to seek the great Hasidic Rabbi Nachman. He goes to the village of Braclaw and calls out for him as though he were still alive. There is no answer; the sunflowers in the fields around the village are black. It is not only Rabbi Nachman who has died--history, the arsonist, has incinerated itself:

*

perhaps rabbi Nachman

could give me advice

but how can I find him

among so many ashes

*

After this cry, Mr. Cogito resumes his quieter and more characteristic voice. Yet it is the same tolling bronze. “Game” recalls the escape of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin from a Czarist prison, aided by his aristocratic friends. Mr. Cogito would like to be one of the friends, or even the horse that pulled the getaway-carriage. He would not want to be Kropotkin. Throughout history, tortured ideas have become torturers in their turn. And so he:

*

would like to be the intermediary of freedom

to hold the rope of escape . . .

to trust the heart

the pure impulse of sympathy

but he doesn’t want to be responsible for what

will be written in the monthly “Freedom”

by bearded men

of faint imagination

he accepts an inferior role

he won’t inhabit history