JOANNA NIZYNSKA

            MARSYAS'S HOWL:  THE MYTH OF MARSYAS IN OVID'S  METAMORPHOSES
            AND ZBIGNIEW HERBERT'S "APOLLO AND MARSYAS"

"The poet writes to please his predecessors," claims Joseph Brodsky, asserting a belief that the power of poetic tradition frees poets from their immediate history and, thus, liberates them from the dictates of politics and pressures of readership. Yet, the vector of poetry does not point exclusively toward the past. It also extends into the future: poets write to please their descendants as well as their predecessors.  If poetic practice situates poets simultaneously in the past and in the future, then poets themselves invite a mode of critical reading that is based not upon direct spatial, temporal, or even cultural proximity, but upon juxtapositions. In such parallel readings, the proximity of disparate texts—rather than their proximity in literary genealogies—produces nuanced revelations of meaning. In synchronic juxtaposition rather than diachronic continuation, with predecessors and descendants side by side, one can trace over-arching structures and individual idiosyncrasies as well as decipher the political and social meanderings often overlooked when texts are approached in their singularity.

Questions of proximity, continuity, resemblance, as well as readership, become vividly apparent when a poet refers to a predecessor with a specific allusion that forces us to examine how the two poets configure poetic spaces. Such an instance is the subject of "Marsyas' Howl"—an exploration of the treatment of the myth of Marsyas and Apollo by the Augustan Age Roman poet, Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE-18 CE), and the contemporary Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998). The juxtaposition of these two versions not only becomes a magnifying glass for examining the aesthetic choice of both poets, but also reveals how they sought to avoid political repercussions by manipulating their material. The aesthetic choices were partially determined by political conditions: both Ovid and Herbert wrote under repressive regimes, and both incorporated into their craft a complex dialogue concerning freedom of expression, the power of the state, and the artist’s relation to the
state. 

The subtle presence of revisionary awareness in Herbert forces us to reread Ovid and to rethink the myth's powerful content and its political implications. It also manifests the simultaneously progressive and regressive nature of reading. Once Herbert rewrites the episode from Ovid, he creates for his audience a new reading horizon—the process is irrevocable—no original experience of reading Ovid without Herbert is possible just as there is no experience of Herbert without Ovid.  Ovid's explicit presence in the work of a contemporary Polish poet shows that the reality of literature—the activities of reading and of writing—belongs to an order of time that defies chronology and to a sphere of activity that transcends immediate historical circumstances.  Perhaps this very attempt to re-incarnate the old by an act of rereading and of rewriting constitutes our modern form of translatio studii, which transcends cultural and chronological distinctions. Quite possibly it also demonstrates that, after all, each culture in its particular historical moment discovers the meaning of the myth for its specific reality a posteriori. Herbert himself affirms the synchronic nature of the literary enterprise in his remark: "A poet's sphere of activity is not the time in which he lives but reality, which is a much broader notion."