[New-Poetry] Barbarian in the Garden

[jforjames at aol.com]

http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/yarbrough_sp09.html
In Zbigniew Herbert's Garden   
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough   


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" 



Barbarian in the Garden
by Zbigniew Herbert, translated by
Michael March and Jaroslaw Anders.


For many years I believed that the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert traveled by bus to the places he describes in Barbarian in the Garden. Each time I re-read Barbarian I could picture him wearing a white shirt, sleeves rolled up, wiping sweat off his forehead, and climbing onto a dust-covered bus. Since I had no clue what an Italian bus would have looked like at the time of Herbert's journeys, it invariably resembled the dilapidated Polish bus I used to ride as a child in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and the background I envisioned could have come straight from a Rosellini or a De Sica movie. 
 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20090312/3ca539bd/attachment.html