Avocations: On Poetry and Poets

World News Today

26 Avocations World News Today At a time when mass media serves as a grand equalizer, flattening all events into 30 column inches of type or ninety seconds on the airwaves, literature, and especially poetry, is removed to the cultural margins. But even amongst the literati, the translator remains least visible. Gary Snyder has called poetry “high quality information,” a useful concept. The “news” or high quality information brought by those messengers from other languages and cultures is of an almost infinitely superior quality to that of our major media. “Poetry is news,” Ezra Pound said, “that stays news.” In the autumn of 1989, the National Endowment for the Humanities sponsored a Gallup poll which revealed, among other things, that 78 percent of all colleges and universities graduate students with no courses in western (or eastern) civilization; 77 percent have no foreign language requirement; 45 percent require no American or English literature; and 38 percent require no history. In short, our institutions of “higher learning” are no more than glorified trade schools whose single-minded purpose is to train people for placement in the “labor market” of the Technocracy. When college-educated adults have no background in literature, philosophy, or history, our future is grim indeed. Responding to the Gallup poll, Dr. J. Robert Wills, academic provost at Pacific Lutheran University said, “Higher education in the 80s ought to prepare students for the 21st century and not just reinforce the 19th.” His comments were underscored by representatives of colleges and universities throughout the northwest in a story carried by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. These “educated” men believe, presumably, that Shakespeare prepares us only for life in the 16th and 17th centuries. Over the past year or so, I have accumulated a number of books of poetry in translation, each written by a 20th century poet, but for Lao Tzu’s ancient Chinese Tao Te Ching. There is much to be learned from these books. The “news” of these poets is news of the human condition, changed and changing and unchanged since the dawn of time. Moral and political struggles compete with transcendent vision. Poetry remains the highest quality information of the world community, and it is written by men and women who have learned from the past the necessity of speaking, of clarifying one’s vision and experience and passing on whatever revelation results. Our poets know—perhaps better than anyone else—that unless we are connected to Heraclitus, we cannot cross his river; that unless we sail with Odysseus, we shall sail our own wine-dark seas alone, and suffer our trials and tribulations without benefit of counsel. At a glance, the following books may appear awfully diverse, but these poets all share a common struggle, each having to confront a life at war, personal trials, sexism, racism, poverty, prison, exile—in short, all the horrors of this bloody century. And if our educated public reads no poetry, for whom is the translator’s art refined? The translator becomes invisible perfecting an art appreciated only by a nearly invisible secret readership. And our own culture grows, as it has always grown, fed by shards of other languages and cultures. Steven F. White’s translations of poems by the Nicaraguan poet, Gioconda Belli (From Eve’s Rib, Curbstone Press, 1989 9.95 paper), capture her social-political passions and her intense, steamy eroticism: I want to taste your salty, strong flesh, start with your arms as splendid as the branches of a ceiba tree, then your chest like a cave in a dream I’ve dreamt, chest-cave where my head lies hidden, searching for tenderness, that chest sounding like drums and life’s never-ending flow./ . . . Gioconda Belli graduated high school in Spain, studied advertising in Philadelphia, and worked in Nicaragua as an account executive until she made a commitment to the political struggle to overthrow the Somoza dictatorship. From 1975 to 1978, she was forced to live in exile in Costa Rica, returning after the Sandinista victory of 1979. She presently lives in Managua. Her poems link feminist eroticism with social convictions, and her sense of lyrical structure—an almost incantatory delivery—recalls Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia-Lorca more than Rubén Darío. In “Patria Libre: July 19, 1979,” she writes: 28 Avocations Strange to feel this sun again and to see the jubilation of streets swarming with people, the red and black flags...