In English, s’il vous plaît…
A Polish friend and blogger, Artur Sebastian Rosman, sent me this youtube clip of the Irish Nobel poet Seamus Heaney reading the poems of Zbigniew Herbert. We’ve written about Seamus here and here and here, and Herbert here and here and here – and my visit with Herbert’s cat Szu-Szu in Warsaw is discussed here.
Artur considers Herbert’s satirical poem about labor conditions in Poland during the 1960s, “Report from Paradise” here, along with a few theological peregrinations. Poet and translator Stanisław Barańczak noted that in Herbert’s poem, even heaven has been “degraded into a social utopia, a sort of fairy-tale socialism,” in which the only solution, in Herbert’s words, is “to mix a grain of the absolute with a grain of clay.”
Bully.
This reading, however, begins with Herbert’s famous and devastating (to me) poem, “Apollo and Marsyas,” and ends his Seamus’s own sonnet on the Polish poet’s death, in which Apollo also figures. Frankly, I’ve never been able to think of Apollo in quite the same way after reading Herbert’s poem. A bit of a brute…well, more than a bit.
Anyway, here’s Seamus’s 2008 reading at the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin. Like it? There’s more: Part One of the reading is here and Part Two is here.
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Tags: Artur Sebastian Rosman, Seamus Heaney, Stanisław Barańczak, Zbigniew Herbert