From Naples to Poseidonia

Zbigniew Herbert’s First ‘Greek Journey’

Abstract

Although ‘Greek  journeys’ exist, these studies on Zbigniew Herbert’s do not include the writer’s expedition in the footsteps of Greater Greece to Naples and Paestum. This first ‘Greek journey’ – documented in  numerous epistolary notes as well as the essay U Dorów – says a lot about both the narrator of Herbert’s story and the image of reality he conveys to us. What is striking first is the marginalisation of the visit to Naples, in which the poet took little interest. What is also striking is the essayist’s specific understanding of the category of silence and his tendency to meditatively purify his consciousness and apprehend things in an unprejudiced way. Herbert’s subject tries to push aside everything he knows about the sights he sees; he also programmatically avoids the accounts of other travellers. He consciously chooses places, works of art, objects and phenomena without extensive literary descriptions. He also consciously constructs a ‘dialogical’ concept of adventure. The travelling adventures he describes are adventures connected with various kinds of encounters. They are profound dialogues with reality, leading to an inner transformation of the subject.