Please help me ID this poem by a Polish poet

Cafe Society
1

I screwed up. :smack:

I wrote down a few lines. Possibly wrongly.

I wrote down (or so I thought) the name of the author. Zbigniew Herbert. And the name of the poem (or so I thought). ‘Prologue’.

However, it’s not from ‘Prologue’, and a search of Z. Herbert’s collected works doesn’t throw up anything likely.

The only information I have are the following lines:

My Polish soil/ my Polish, Polish air

and, I assume from later in the poem:

those little Polish bilberries/ that have no smell/ and break the heart

(The bilberries might, on the other hand, actually be blueberries. My knowledge of Polish flora is less than extensive.)

Searching Herbert’s collected works, and the works of Czeslaw Milosz (the only other poet I know in any depth) have turned up nothing.

Please, Polish and poetic Dopers! All hints appreciated.

2

Where did you read/hear/find the poem?

3

Unfortunately, I have no idea.

I have it written on a small piece of paper stuck inside my pencil box. I can date the piece of paper to around 8 - 10 years ago, by my handwriting and the type of paper.

Given the timing, I’m assuming I either picked it up from an anthology, periodical or English language radio. Less likely: my clumsy translation from Russian (which I do speak) or Polish (which I don’t, but not knowing a language never stopped me yet.)

The only other possibility for the author would be Nabokov, but that seems very unlikely, given the ‘Polish’ in the first fragment.

Any ideas/ suggestions? Googling gets me nowhere…

4

I’ll ask around!

5

Is the poem originally in English or is this a translation?

6

I’m assuming it’s a translation, and an official one.

However, as I said above,

Thank you, jsgoddess for asking around.

7

FWIW, I tried Googling what I assumed the Polish source text would be, and didn’t find anything.

8

No luck yet. One person does feel that it’s not likely to be Herbert because Herbert tends toward the very dense, and the fragments you have are simpler.

9

Surok, someone posted this to my blog. I think it’s remarkable:

Another person on a different board suggested it might be from a grouping of patriotic or war poems by unknowns.

I think that it’s a dead end. The similarity to the McDiarmid poem is striking.

10

The similarity is indeed very striking.

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘I think it’s a dead end’ - there’s no point in pursuing this any further?

11

Sorry. I really wasn’t clear was I? I blame my lack of caffeine.

I think that the search for the poem is a dead end because the number and kind of the lines you have makes it unlikely we’ll stumble across someone who spontaneously remembers it. I’ll leave my queries up at my blog and on the board (email me if you would like a link to the board), but I’m not very hopeful at this point.

Sorry.

12

Thank you. I already found your blog. :smiley:

Mail me a link to the board, if it’s poetry related. Or vaguely intelligent.

I really appreciate your efforts.