NIn the second text of this beautiful volume of essays, Zbigniew Herbert carries out an ‘Attempt at a Description of the Greek Landscape’. What the Polish poet begins to problematize is not so much the landscape itself, dazzlingly southern, but the act of fixing it within the limits of written language and respective mental images. On the one hand due to its variety (this “tangle of blue, mountains, water, air and light”), but above all because the observer is subject to a very strong “sense of movement, as if the eyes were constantly opened to the painful drama of the birth of the earth”. Herbert nevertheless risks the exercise, embarking on a wander through various settings: a cave in Psychro where, according to legend, Zeus was born; Epidaurus, with the sanctuary of Asclepius and “the most beautiful theater in the ancient world”, with perfect acoustics (as Sophia de Mello Breyner demonstrates in one of her poems); Mycenae and its “Cyclopean walls”; the Pikermia Animal Cemetery; culminating in Delphi, the place of the oracle, whose “splendor” no one can “capture in words”.