ARTS-ENTERTAINMENT – 1.

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Farhan Haq

NEW YORK, Apr 7 1998 (IPS) - In the early 1980s, U.S. scholar Clifton Fadiman devised a plan to present an exhaustive look at all the major poets, in every culture and language, from the Bronze Age to modern timesa project which has now resulted in a new anthology, ‘World Poetry’.

Fadiman, along with editors Katharine Washburn and John S. Major, has succeeded after nearly two decades in offering a collection of more than 1,600 poems, from the Rig Vedas to Chairman Mao – many originally written in languages ranging from ancient Tamil and Latin to modern-day Vietnamese and French.

The non-English selections, which comprise four-fifths of the anthology, are all lovingly translated into English by other accomplished writers and poets, including John Updike and William Carlos Williams.

“Our time happens, fortunately, to be one of great translation, comparable in this respect to the Elizabethan- Jacobean period,” Fadiman contends in the anthology’s foreword. “In Robert Fitzgerald’s version, the old Homer is new.”

‘World Poetry’ – published by Norton for a U.S. price of 45 dollars, and weighing in at 1,338 pages – poses both delights and challenges for the casual reader.

Each section offers a distinct historical period; but within them, each culture is featured, so that the Classical Age (from 750 before the Christian Era to 50 years after its advent) segues from such Greek epics as Homer’s ‘Iliad’ to Sanskrit religious poetry like the Bhagavad-Gita.

“A minor inconvenience of this plan is that if one wants, for example, to read all of the Chinese poetry in the anthology, one has to skip from part to part, reading the Chinese poem in all eight (sections),” says Major. “But this inconvenience is far outweighed by the fascination of finding intriguing and unexpected possibilities for comparing verse among cultural boundaries.”

As Washburn puts it, “The connective tissue binding a poem by the twentieth-century German Bertolt Brecht, a Japanese haiku, and a ballad by Francois Villon may become more visible. A fragment of Sappho’s might recall a love poem in Tamil, and a poem from medieval Wales suggest a richer reading of Dylan Thomas.”

Indeed, one of the best features of ‘World Poetry’ is the way it offers revealing similarities and contrasts between different cultures and historical eras. The seventh-century Arab poet Labid’s great work ‘The Mu’allaqa’, for example, offers a terse, powerful dismissal of love: “Or didn’t you know, Nawar,/ that I/ am one who ties a love knot/ and cuts it free?”

A similar wistfulness, combined with playfulness, appears in the first-century epigraphs of the poet Martial, whose classic insult ‘Non Te Amo, Sabidine’ (I Don’t Love You, Sabidine) is translated wittily by Thomas Brown as: “I do not like thee, Doctor Fell/ The reason why I cannot tell./ But this I know and know full well/ I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.”

Martial also shows how a poem written in an era of completely different morals can still offer a revealing message, as in his ‘You Sold a Slave Just Yesterday’, which ends a passage about how two friends bought mullet after receiving money for a slave with the heart-rending lament, “But that’s no fish/ we’ll eat tonight; that was a man.”

Poems of political disillusion are equally pithy and graceful in the later works offered here. Yo Inlo, a poet of Korea’s Koryo Dynasty, implores: “Would that we so might comb the State/ Free of her follies and her greed!/ So cast aside old dead ideas/ And build new strength to face our foes!” But Yo’s brave talk of a “new era” ends wistfully, as the poet acknowledges, “The flame of jade is lost in grease,/ And sleep drowns my desires.”

Nearly 900 years later, the twentieth-century Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet can also talk with muted hope after suffering “ten years/ of my slavery” in prison. Hikmet’s ‘Rubai’ imagines a world where partisans about to be shot are set free, poets are best-selling authors and “no one should be deprived/ of bread, rose, the sun/ and liberty./ Oh, send me books with happy endings.”

Each section of the book offers so many poetic riches that the total effect is somewhat bewildering – and most poets are represented only by one or two short pieces.

Modern poets, for example, include the Urdu master Faiz Ahmed Faiz, who offers two of his typically desolate love songs; ‘Harlem renaissance’ leader Langston Hughes, whose sole entry includes the wrenching line “life for me ain’t been no crystal stair;” Chile’s national poets, Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, who each contribute one lyric; and T.S. Eliot, represented by ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’

As Washburn concedes, there is plenty of room for second- guessing certain choices. English-speakers, she says, may clamour for more selections originally written in English. Other critics, however, could just as easily wonder why Mao Tse-Tung – who will likely always be remembered for his day job as the Great Helmsman of the People’s Republic of China – has three of his poems included in the anthology, while Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Prize-winning Bengali poet, has only two.

Of course, that sort of complaining is part of the fun: Sorting through the maze of world cultures, a reader is free to find how old favourites and national icons stack up to the best authors of different literary heritages.

“Every page should be a source of pleasure and discovery,” argues Major – and it is a testament to the editors and translators that ‘World Poetry’ makes good on that claim.