Mr Cogito
Herbert's "Mr Cogito," a mild, ironic intellectual who has survived totalitarianism and is trying to figure out how to live with dignity, is one of the great recurring characters in world poetry. The "Envoy of Mr Cogito" ends with an instruction to survive with one's honor intact even when everything is lost. Herbert is the poet of moral resistance without sentimentality; his influence on American poets like Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky has been enormous.
Multiple readers say the back half of the collection, made up of longer and later poems, loses momentum next to the sharper, shorter pieces up front. The Carpenter translation's dropped punctuation, praised by fans, reads as a real barrier to others, demanding a deliberate readjustment that some say just adds friction. The translator question splits readers further: comparing Alissa Valles' later renderings against the Carpenters', one writes bluntly, “these are some sloppy translations,” and another says Valles comes “nowhere near the grace and subtle shifts of voice” the earlier version carried. A third sums up the consensus among skeptics: “Valles' translations don't quite stand up to Carpenters' or Milosz's,” even while granting Valles covers poems the earlier translators never touched. English editions have also gone out of print at times, a practical obstacle to finding a copy.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
