American Poet

Amanda Gorman

 

            One of the high points of the inauguration of President Biden was the poem written and read from the Capitol steps by Amanda Gorman, our “youth poet laureate” and a recent Harvard graduate.  Her poem, entitled “The Hill We Climb,” hardly  glossed over the specific circumstances of its  difficult and dramatic historical moment.  The bitterly divisive recent election is there, including the aftermath of the shocking riot  that had transpired on virtually the same spot two weeks earlier.  So is the national racial turmoil, and so is the coronavirus pandemic.  Thus the composition combines some somber truth-telling that seasons its emphatic aspirational encouragement, all of it animated by a glowing American patriotism, and all of it arranged with a technically assertive verbal boldness of musicality, assonance, and hinted half rhymes, emblems perhaps of a national work in progress.  The “occasional poem” is a difficult genre with few long-remembered examples, but “The Hill We Climb” may turn out to be one of the few.  The attractiveness of the young poet, the playful seriousness of her poem’s content, and the tidal wave of good will with which it was received, all suggest as much.

 

            I suppose it is my inner English professor who led me to think of an even younger poet writing two hundred years earlier.   “Much have I travell’ed in the realms of gold,” wrote Keats in 1816, “And many goodly states and kingdoms seen”.  He was twenty years old , and had but five more years to live.  In fact, young Keats had never been outside of England, and had seen little enough even of it.  The “goodly states and kingdoms” he had seen were imaginary.  He had visited them in his reading, and especially in his reading of poetry.  Such is poetry’s evocative power.  And now he has had an imaginative experience unlike any he has known before, one he compares to an astronomer’s  discovery of a new planet or the adventurer Cortez’s first sight of the Pacific ocean.  He has encountered Homer, the wellspring of our poetry, in the English translation of the Elizabethan scholar and poet, George Chapman.

 

            It is rather thrilling to find a poet paying homage to another in such a fashion.  And of course Keats honors two poets, the great Homer, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the rather obscure George Chapman whose translation of Homer’s Greek was for Keats the necessary intermediary of transformative experience.  We can all appreciate Keats’s gratitude, since the number of native English-speakers who can read Homer in the original ancient Greek has always been small and today is miniscule.  How lucky we are to have our Richmond Lattimore, our Robert Graves or our Robert Fagles.  For this reason I have been saddened to read in the press of the controversy that has overtaken proposals to translate “The Hill We Climb” into several other languages.  The controversy, in my opinion, is really dumb, but emblematic of a larger cultural confusion that is actually quite dangerous.

 

            The controversy, as you probably know, or at least could easily guess, is about race.  Amanda Gorman is a dark-skinned American woman of African ancestry.  This fact, obvious to the thousands actually present at her poem’s reading and probably millions who have seen videos of the event, would be likewise obvious to a blind person as well, as it appears prominently within the first ten lines of her poem’s text.  Around this fact a strange doctrine emerged.  In several countries with readers eager to have the poem available in the local vernacular—two I have read about are the Netherlands and Catalonia—distinguished literary people have been discouraged in their proposals to translate the work because of, yes, the color of their skin.  It is not black.  What may seem incomprehensible to readers of ordinary common sense will be less surprising to those apprized of recent developments within our elite cultural institutions, where the Kool-Aid of “identity politics” has swamped the water mains.  It appears even to be bubbling up through the water coolers of our still partially empty business offices.

 

            All literary translation is difficult and necessarily somewhat approximate.  Poetry presents special problems.  The great classical scholar Bentley is supposed to have said of Alexander Pope’s efforts on the ancient Greek bard “It is a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.”  Even if but partial success is the best to be hoped for, the first and indispensable requirement of anyone who would try to be a good translator is a thorough knowledge of the language being translated—in this instance standard American English as used by a highly educated American woman.  It is true that a broad familiarity with whole body of work of the author to be translated is relevant, and that in it there could conceivably be cultural markers related to race put to artistic purpose.  But this poem is in effect Ms. Gorman’s public debut, and its ceremonial role in a national occasion meant to unify and express a shared spiritual aspiration was anticipated and applauded.  The idea that it requires the pigmented sensibility of an Afro-Catalan to introduce her to an eager audience in Barcelona, or that the insufficiently pigmented are thought-criminals for even trying, is beyond preposterous.  Such views mistake the nature of poetry and insult the powers of poets to allow us to see through their art “goodly states and kingdoms” previously unknown, rather than confirm a party line.  Most of all they are deaf to the actual content of “The Hill We  Climb,” a poem animated by the universalizing national aspirations appropriate to its occasion.  The skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother is in the poem, but so are the embattled farmers of Concord Bridge, claimed and exalted by Gorman as “our forefathers who first realized revolution”.  Yes, our forefathers, an homage to the most famous speech of Abraham Lincoln, a man recently deemed by the members of the San Francisco School Board as morally unworthy of having one of their buildings named for him.  Ms. Gorman, thank God, is a Californian of a different stripe.  Our country desperately needs her youthful optimism and unifying encouragement, indeed that of her whole generation,

 

            Buoyed by spring’s arrival and promising news on the vaccination front I have felt that we were entering a more hopeful political climate as well.  Perhaps the mental aberrations that exacerbate our current sorrows are only temporary, though such an episode as this has to be discouraging.  But so was the first dawn of Easter here.  The morning was glowering, and though not exactly cold it was not warm enough for our proposed outdoor family feast in the early afternoon.  Various electronic devices were even threatening drizzle.  But by mid-morning the sun was shining brightly, and the air, still brisk, began to warm.  The Day of Resurrection turned out to be a resurrected day.  Our family get-together was a triumph.  Renewal, fresh possibility, exhortation to persevere in efforts of national perfection are major themes in “The Hill We Climb”.  Though it is not a religious poem, the author does invoke from the Bible a famous image of peace and plenty—the people gathered each beneath their own vine and fig tree—a favorite of our nation’s first president and, I hope a continuing inspiration to our forty-sixth.