Episode In a Library
"A blond girl is bent over a poem. With a pencil sharp as a lance she transfers words onto a white sheet of paper and translates them into lines, accents, caesuras. The fallen poet's lament now looks like a salamander gnawed by ants.
When we carried him off under fire, I believed his still warm body would be resurrected in the word. Now I see words dying. I know that there is no limit to decay. What will remain after us are fragments of words scattered on the black earth. Accent signs over nothingness."
Zbigniew Herbert