Mr Cogito

First USA Edition.
Mr. Cogito is the long-awaited English translation of Zbigniew Herbert’s fifth collection of poetry, Pan Cogito (Warsaw, 1974). Published now for the first time in the U.S., Mr. Cogito presents the full sequence of forty poems from the original, expertly rendered into English by long-time Herbert translators John and Bogdana Carpenter.
As a member of the Polish underground resistance during World War Il and a spiritual leader of the anticommunist movement in Poland, Zbigniew Herbert has been uniquely situated to articulate the position of the late-twentieth-century intellectual. In this collection, he uses the persona of Mr. Cogito to speak to the specific history of his Polish inheritance as well as the intellectual tradition of western Civilization, always with his characteristically strange and wonderful mixture of sly wit, nobility, and inno-cence. “The poet of a certain age,” he writes, “in the middle of an uncertain age.” The sequence introduces us to Mr. Cogito piece by piece, exploring his relationships with the world — from his body, to his family, to the intellectual and spiritual tradition of the West. Here we find, as Herbert writes, “the marble greenness of Veronese…. paleolithic hunger and fear… the body linked to the chain of species.” Taken as a whole, these poems offer us a multi-dimen-sional portrait of ourselves as thinking beings in the late twentieth century, and remind us that
we are already and have always been creatures of the history of humankind.