Cambridge University Central European Society - CUCES

Date: Tuesday 3 May 2005
Venue: Senior Parlour, Gonville and Caius College

8pm

Professor George Gomori is an expert on Polish poetry. During his lecture a number of poems, mostly in English translations, were read and analysed. Information about the poets: CZESLAW MILOSZ

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1980 „who with uncompromising clear-sightedness voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts“

ZBIGNIEW HERBERT

Born on October 29, 1924, in Lvov. He majored in Polish literature at the underground King John Casimir University, where he was a member of the underground resistance movement. In 1944, he moved to Krakow, and three years later he graduated from the University of Krakow with a master's degree in economics. He also received a law degree from Nicholas Copernicus University in Torun and studied philosophy at the University of Warsaw under Henryk Elzenberg.

During the 1950s he worked at many low-paying jobs because he refused to write within the framework of official Communist guidelines. After widespread riots against Soviet control in 1956 brought about a political „thaw,“ Herbert became an administrator at the Union of Polish Composers and published his first collection, The Chord of Light („Struna swiatla,“ 1956). The book put him immediately among the most prominent representatives of the „Contemporaries“. Soon he became an acknowledged master not only in the field of poetry but also in essays and drama. In 1957 his second collection of verse, Hermes, the Dog and the Star, came out. The year 1961 brought about his third book of poems, Study of the Object („Studium przedmiotu“), and in 1962 he published his famous collection of essays, Barbarian in the Garden, which was eventually translated into many languages. In 1964 Herbert received the Koscielski Foundation Prize, and in 1965 the national Austrian Lenau Prize and the Alfred Jurzykowski Prize. Translations of his poems appeared in many countries, and he traveled throughout Western Europe and North America, giving lectures and poetry readings and participating in writers' congresses.

In 1968 his Selected Poems, translated into English by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott, came out in the United States and England, making Herbert one of the most popular contemporary poets in the English-speaking world. In 1973, he received another prestigious European award, the Herder Prize. The volume Mr. Cogito („Pan Cogito,“ 1974) brought him even more recognition. In 1979 in Verona he received the Petrarch Prize, to which the following years added, among others, awards from the Foundation of Prince Gabor Bethlem, the Bruno Schulz Prize, and the Jerusalem Prize.

In recent years he has published a collection of essays, Still Life with a Bridle (1991), as well as two more books of poetry: Rovigo and Elegy for the Departure („Elegia na odejscie“; due in English from Ecco Press in 1999). He died on July 28, 1998, in Warsaw, Poland.