Translating Interdisciplinarity: Reading Martí Reading Whitman

I see the superior oceans and the inferior ones, the Atlantic and Pacific, the sea of Mexico, the Brazilian sea, and the sea of Peru.…

I see the Brazilian vaquero,I see the Bolivian ascending mount Sorata,I see the Wacho crossing the plains, I see the incomparablerider of horses with his lasso on his arm,I see over the pampas the pursuit of wild cattle for their hides.

Walt Whitman, "Salut au monde!"¹

[Whitman] seldom read any book deliberately through, and there was no more (apparent) system about his reading than in anything else that he did; that is to say, there was no system about it at all. If he sat in the library an hour, he would have half a dozen to a dozen volumes about him, on the table, on chairs and on the floor. He seemed to read a few pages here and a few pages there, and pass from place to place, from volume to volume, doubtless pursuing some clue or thread of his own. Sometimes (though very seldom) he would get sufficiently interested in a volume to read it all.… In his way of reading he dipped into histories, essays, metaphysical, religious and scientific treatises, novels and poetry—though I think he read less poetry than anything else. He read no language but English, yet I believe he knew a great deal more French, German and Spanish than he would own to.

Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness²

Walt Whitman never saw most of the myriad places he name-checks in "Salut au Monde," in fact never traveled beyond North America.³ That minor technicality does not stop him from envisioning them—"seeing" them, as it were—through the lens of his own mystical, abstracted vision of an America at once generalized and exceptional. The first proposition of this essay is that Whitman's unfamiliarity with the rest of the world, in all its political, economic, and above all cultural diversity and difference, crucially informs his ability to envision it as he does: as an undifferentiated Other ("indifferent of place," as he puts it) facilely reducible to "Camerados" [sic] in turn subsumed into his Hegelian vision of America as an ever-expanding end-of-History. It is a tautology all the more breathtaking for its near-perfect crystallization of American exceptionalism, then and now, as simultaneously teleological and horizonless: prophesy as inescapable world-without-end.

Whitman did not recite "Salut au monde" during his appearance at New York's Madison Square Theater on April 14, 1887, an event biographers consider the apogee of his life as a public figure. In truth, such a poem would not have been appropriate, as Whitman's appearance was advertised as a lecture on Abraham Lincoln. Although Whitman did not come close to filling the great hall, the reverence and adulation among those in attendance—many of them VIPs in their own right—did much to cement Whitman's lasting legacy as the most important American poet of his time. Among the many who came to pay tribute to the grand old man were fellow poets James Russell Lowell and Edmund Clarence Stedman; Mark Twain; John Hay, former secretary to Lincoln and future U.S. Secretary of State; and Andrew Carnegie, who paid $350 for his own box.⁴

José Martí was there too. Unlike Carnegie, Martí's $1.50 ticket would have only bought him a seat among the anonymous hundreds who came to hear Whitman recite "O Captain! My Captain!" and reminisce about the late, great President. Some scholars believe, however, that the two met and may have exchanged brief pleasantries at a reception for Whitman later that night.⁵ No record exists of the two poets' brief conversation, which in any case probably consisted of little beyond the requisite niceties, if it happened at all. If that conversation did happen, however, it certainly took place in English: Given Martí's near-native fluency in the language and Whitman's minimal grasp of Spanish, it is the only plausible option. Martí also read Leaves of Grass in the original English; no...