Hungry for antiquity: Zbigniew Herbert and reception as ingestion

Abstract This article examines the travel writing of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert (1924–98) through a reception-theoretical lens, identifying a pattern of representing contact with antiquity as food consumption in the travelogues Barbarian in the Garden (1962) and Labyrinth on the Sea (1973/2000). While closely situating this prandial language within the changing cultural discourses of consumption in socialist Poland, I argue for Herbert’s construction of a more widely applicable model of reception as ingestion that speaks to current debates on distance, temporality, and affective relations to the past. By rooting this reception model in Herbert’s lived experiences of post-war precarity, hunger, and the connection between food scarcity and economies of violence, as well as by linking it to his practice of ‘devouring’ knowledge about antiquity through intense research in Western libraries, I also highlight the centrality of embodied experience for seemingly abstract theory-making in reception studies and beyond.