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Representatives and Revolutionists The New Urban Politics Revisited m. wynn thomas  In their introduction to Walt Whitman and the World, Gay Wilson Allen and Ed Folsom have noted that “various national cultures have reconstructed Whitman in order to make him fit their native patterns” and how this has resulted in “some radically realigned versions of Whitman, as his writing . . . undertakes a different kind of cultural work than it performs in the United States.”1 Theirs is an important insight into the complex processes of cultural (and not merely linguistic) translation involved in the “globalization” of the work of a poet who may be thought of as holding, in consequence, a kind of dual citizenship — as an American and as a world citizen. Following the practice adopted in postcolonial studies of distinguishing between “English” (the language of England) and “english” (the world language), it might therefore be useful to distinguish, in this connection, between “Whitman” (the American poet) and “whitman” (the world poet).2 That “Whitman” becomes “whitman” even in those foreign (that is, non-American) cultures that are anglophone in character and where therefore cultural translation does not entail linguistic translation is neatly illustrated in the case of his greatest English “disciple,” Edward Carpenter (1844–1929). Carpenter’s “Towards Democracy” (1881), a prose poem of 110 pages and seventy sections, is an English version of “Song of Myself” so uncannily like the “original” in almost all its textual features that if passages from Carpenter’s poem were to be introduced at random into “Song of Myself” even the shrewdest of Whitman scholars might be hard-pressed to identify them. Yet in the essay appended to later editions of his collection of poems, Towards Democracy, Carpenter insisted on noting the significant difference between his poetry and that of Whitman: He has the amplitude of the Earth itself, and can no more be thought away than a mountain can. He often indeed reminds one of a great quarry on a mountain side — the great shafts of sunlight and the shadows , the primitive face of the rock itself, the power and the daring of the men at work upon it, the tumbled blocks and masses, materials for endless buildings, and the beautiful tufts of weed or flower on inaccessible hedges — a picture most artistic in its very incoherence and formlessness . “Towards Democracy” has a milder radiance, as of the moon compared with the sun — allowing you to glimpse the stars behind. Tender and meditative, less resolute and altogether less massive, it has the quality of the fluid and yielding air rather than of the solid and uncompromising earth.3 What Carpenter is implicitly saying, in the language of his day, is that Whitman was an American poet whereas he, Carpenter, is by contrast an English poet — America being, according to Victorian national typology, a young, exhilaratingly crude emergent nation, tending to violent extremes of self-assertion, whereas England is mild, settled, subtle, tolerant, and temperate. For Carpenter to “translate” “Song of Myself” into “Towards Democracy” is therefore, as he recognizes, to turn Whitman into whitman, and our present-day studies of the “global” poet must be principally concerned with precisely such acts of cultural translation as this. But the extraordinary — not to say peculiar — character of this worldwide phenomenon can be fully realized only if we first register the specifically “local” character of the writings of Whitman himself, whatever their universalizing rhetoric, and so this essay will concentrate on relocating them, and him, within the narrow confines of the New York of the 1850s. The following passage occurs in the open letter to Emerson that Whitman used as a postscript to the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass: “Just so long, in our country or any country, as no revolutionists advance, and are backed by the people, sweeping off the swarm of routine representatives, officers in power, book-makers, teachers, ecclesiastics, politicians, just so long, I perceive, do they that are in power fairly represent that country, and remain of use, probably of very great use. To supersede them, when it is the pleasure of These States, full provision is made; and I say the time has arrived to use it with a strong hand” (WPP 1331). In an essay I prepared for publication (in Chinese) under the auspices of Peking University , I suggested that although excellent scholarly work has been done over 146 M. Wynn Thomas [3.15.151.214] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 07:29 GMT...

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