The Stones of Atanas Dalchev and Zbigniew Herbert – Concerning an Unrealized Poetic Dialogue

Abstract

The paper offers an intertextual approach towards the poems Pebble (Kamyk, 1961) by Zbigniew Herbert and Stone (Камък, 1926) by the Bulgarian poet Atanas Dalchev. Although these works, emblematic for their authors’ ars poetica, reveal similar concepts, they have never been studied from a comparative perspective. In 1993 Joseph Brodsky’s comment on Pebble (Wilson Quarterly, vol. 17) puts Herbert’s work in the context of Polish history and national spirituality, while numerous analyses of Dalchev’s Stone have never provoqued similar reflections on modern Bulgarian identity. The paper defends the thesis that Brodsky’s comments on Pebble could be extended towards Dalchev’s poem provided the existence of an appropriate context for interpreting Bulgarian 20th century literature. Up to today such an interpretive background – revealing national specifics and historical experience in works that have been unambiguously recognized as individualistic – is scantily represented in critic and scholarly texts on Bulgarian literature.