Mr Cogito Reads the Newspaper by Zbigniew Herbert

Mr Cogito Reads the Newspaper

The front page reports

120 soldiers were killed

the war was long

you get used to it

right next to this news

of a spectacular crime

with the killer’s photo

Mr Cogito’s gaze

moves with indifference

over the soldiers’ hecatomb

to plunge with great relish

into the quotidian macabre

a thirty-year-old farmworker

in a state of manic depression

murdered his own wife

and two small children

we are told the exact

way they were killed

the position of bodies

and the other details

it’s no use trying to find

120 lost men on a map

a distance too remote

hides them like a jungle

they don’t speak to the imagination

there are too many of them

the numeral zero on the end

turns them into an abstraction

a theme for further reflection:

the arithmetic of compassion

(Translated by Alissa Valles)