One Poem by Zbigniew Herbert

Abstract

The poem Colantonio – S. Gierolamo e il Leone, although it was written as early as the end of the 1950s, translated abroad and published, among others in the German book Inschrift, does not appear in any Polish collection of the poet's lyrical poems. A Polish reader could find the mentioned text among the young poet's letters to Jerzy Zawiejski or in a special edition of “Dekada Literacka” published in 1999. Among the considerable number of experts on the works of the author of Inscription only Tomasz Garbol devoted some attention to it in his valuable monograph “Chrzest ziemi. Sacrum w poezji Zbigniewa Herberta (Baptism of the Earth. Sacrum in Zbigniew Herbert's Poetry). The history of the text and its inter-texts allows verification of some of the researcher's theses about its interpretation. It seems that the poem is first of all about the relation between “I” and “another”, about an encounter. It is not without a sense of humor that the poet writes that the unexpected intensity of relations between the figures went much beyond the expected form of a conventional contact, it surpassed not only the mental habits of the society, but also surprised the main protagonists, who, owing to it, suddenly felt challenged in their own being and forced to undergo a drastic existential change.