The Crowning of a Poet's Quest: Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound. (Cross Cultures)

The Crowning of a Poet’s Quest C ross ultures Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English 108 Series Ed...

Author: Paola Loreto

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The Crowning of a Poet’s Quest

C

ross ultures

Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English

108 Series Editors

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

†Hena Maes–Jelinek (Liège)

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

The Crowning of a Poet’s Quest Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound

Paola Loreto

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Cover painting: Camille Pissarro, The Hermitage at Pontoise (Les Côteaux de l’Hermitage) (ca. 1867; oil on canvas, 151.4 x 200.6 cm) Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Thannhauser Collection, Gift, Justin K. Thannhauser, 1978 78.2514.67 Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2638-4 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2639-1 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2009 Printed in The Netherlands

alla luce della mia vita, a quella terrena, e a quella che la ispira

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

1

ix xiii

The Poetry of Pragmatic Imagination: The Circuitous Influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art as Organic Expression: From Augustine to Emerson The Pragmatic Turn: From Emerson to Walcott Through a Functional Conception of Art / 11 The Elation of a New World’s Geography / 16 Time and Space as Circularity / 19 The Life of Love as the Ultimate Cause: The Logic and Language of Transition / 22 The Ethics of Poetry’s Praxis / 22

2

8

Ex-Centric Manners: Walcott and Nabokov’s New Paradigm for the Writer of the Twenty-First Century

From the ‘Margins’ to the ‘Centre’ / 31 Bilingualism / 32 Self-Reflexivity and Involution / 33 The Theme of Memory / 36 Postmodern Techniques and Romantic Creativity

3

/

1

/

38

The Escher-Effect in the Double Narrative of an Artist’s Bildung: Walcott’s Autobiography in Verse

The Triple Achievement of Tiepolo’s Hound The Modern Epic / 44

/

43

27

43

The Caribbean Aesthetic / 47 The Autobiography in Verse / 54

4

The Quest of the Poet-Knight: Walcott’s Revision of the Arthurian Matter

The Poetic Calling as a Religious Vocation / Tiepolo’s Hound as a Künstlerroman / 63 Tradition and the Individual Talent / 65 The Shape of the Quest / 72

5

59

59

The Fulfilment of the Aesthetic of Light in the Achievement of the Metaphor of Light

A Long-Pursued Symbol / The Meaning(s) of Light / The Epiphanic Influence / Light as Clarity / 107

91

93 95 101

Appendix: Walcott in Italy, 2000–2001: Transcriptions of Recordings Derek Walcott Meets the Students, University of Milan, 15 May 2000 / 111 Tiepolo’s Hound: Reading and Book-Signing, University of Milan, 15 May 2000 / 125 Reading at the Celebrazioni Verdiane, Parma, L’8 di Saffi, Parma, 7 July 2001 / 130 Creative Writing Seminar, University of Milan, 9–11 July 2001 Press Conference, Conference Room, Brunelleschi Hotel, Milan, 11 July 2001 / 189 Reading, University of Milan, 12 July 2001 / 204

Works Cited Index

/

111

135

211 219

Acknowledgments

T

I should thank among those who have helped me achieve this book is Professor Luigi Sampietro, who led me to my discovering and appreciation of Derek Walcott’s poetry during my last years at university. Moreover, I owe Professor Sampietro the opportunity I had, in 2000, to meet Derek Walcott, to attend many of the readings he has been giving in Italy in the last decade, and to participate in the summer seminars in creative writing he held at the University of Milan in the years 2001–2003. The first time I saw Derek Walcott was on the occasion of the international conference Caribana-Milano, which took place at the University of Milan in May 1996. A group of Caribbean writers gathered in Milan to read, talk, and share thoughts for two days. I personally met Walcott four years later, when he came to Italy on a series of engagements, including his participation in the Festival di Poesia in Genoa (26 June), his contribution of the unpublished poem “The Migrants” to Sebastião Salgado’s photo exhibition on migrants at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome (Vernissage, 28 June), and the award ceremony for the Ennio Flaiano prize in Pescara (15 July). On 15 May of that year, he stopped in Milan and gave a reading from the newly released Tiepolo’s Hound, during which he met the students of the University of Milan. I came to know Walcott better during the years that followed. Since 2000 he has been visiting Italy regularly every year, sometimes more than once a year. On the occasion of these visits, in the summers of 2001, 2002 and 2003 he made a stay in Milan and gave a seminar of creative writing and American poetry to a small group of students, former students, and researchers of the University of Milan. For the chance to be part of this group I am deeply grateful to Professor Sampietro, who organized these events, and to the University of Milan, which largely sponsored them. The Milan seminars were often crowned with a reading by Walcott, and interspersed with HE FIRST PERSON

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T HE C ROWNING OF A P OET ’ S Q UEST

interviews or press conferences. Classes would last until our energies were worn out, and master and pupils would often share meals. Around the same dates, I was part of a select group who followed Walcott on his performances around the peninsula, among which were the Celebrazioni verdiane in Parma (7 July 2001), the international Letterature festival in Rome (6 June 2002), the Milanesiana in Milan (26 June 2003), Rimini’s international symposium The Economics of the Noble Path (18–20 October 2003), the Nobel tra letteratura e teatro event in Genoa (Fondazione Teatro dell’Archivolto– Genova Capitale Europea della Cultura, 5 April 2004), the first Teatro Festival “Poesia” in Parma (with the collaboration of the poetry magazine Poesia, Teatro Farnese, 29–30 May 2004), the Futurshow 3004 in Milan (Palazzo della Triennale, 18 November 2004), the reading for the release of the Italian version of Walcott’s The Odyssey (Teatro di Verdura, Milan, 27 June 2006), a reading at the Centro Culturale di Milano (20 June 2007), and a second Milanesiana (8 and 9 July 2008). An article reporting Walcott’s first Milan seminar in poetry writing, my interview with Walcott during a press conference that took place at the Brunelleschi Hotel in Milan on 11 July 2001, and Luigi Sampietro’s translations from Tiepolo’s Hound and The Bounty were published in Poesia, the most widely read Italian poetry magazine, in September 2002. In the Appendix, I include the transcriptions of that first seminar (authorized by Walcott), of the whole press conference at the Brunelleschi Hotel, of the following reading at the University of Milan on 12 July, and of the previous reading at L’8 di Saffi, in Parma, in that same July of 2001. These materials are preceded by the transcriptions of his reading and of his encounter with the students at the University of Milan on 15 May 2000; the proceedings of the 1996 Caribana conference are ready to be printed as soon as they find a publisher. It comes to me now right from the heart to express my deepest thanks to Derek Walcott himself, for his friendship and his teaching. His openness and generosity are a joy in themselves, while his example as an artist goes beyond what can be measured, ranging, as it does, from his actual teaching in class to his way of perceiving things, of feeling about them, and of making poetry out of them. Walcott’s teaching is a source of moral strength for a young poet in the process of making the fundamental choices of his or her life, and developing his or her mode of apprehending things and of inhabiting the world as a human being. I would also like to thank the University of Milan for the research funds they assign annually to their faculty, and of which I have largely availed



Acknowledgements

xi

myself, over the past five years, to gather the materials I needed for the writing of this book. Special thanks go to Robert Baker, a friend and exemplary scholar, who, with his omnivorous reading, intellectual expertise, and generous listening, has been my most attentive and responsive interlocutor in the final phase of my writing, and the source of invaluable comments on my use of English. More and similar thanks go to Carol Keller, another friend and exemplary artist, who was unhesitatingly ready to put aside her own academic and studio-work priorities and read the drafts of the original articles on Walcott that have become part of the present book. I am also fortunate to have benefited from Gordon Collier’s wonderfully accurate and painstaking editing, which he has conducted with highly professional expertise. It has been challenging and inspiring to work with him and tackle his countless observations, which have contributed to the final version of this work. Finally, I wish to thank Daniele, my earthly light, for the patience and support with which he has kept his eye on this, for him, curious and time-andenergy-devouring job of a researcher. Earlier versions of parts of chapters 1, 3, and 5 appeared in the proceedings of the following conferences: Emerson at 200: Proceedings of the International Bicentennial Conference. Rome, October 16–18, 2003, ed. Giorgio Mariani et al. (Rome: Aracne, 2004): “The Poetry of Pragmatic Imagination: The Circuitous Influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on Derek Walcott,” 171–84. Roots and Beginnings: Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Italian Association for the Study of Literatures in English (A I S L I ). Spilimbergo, October 3–6, 2002, ed. Paolo Deandrea & Viktoria Tchernichova (Venice: Cafoscarina, 2003): “The Escher-Effect in the Double Narrative of an Artist’s Bildung: Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound,” 259–57. America and the Mediterranean: Proceedings of the XVI Biennial International Conference of the Italian Association for North-American Studies, University of Genoa, November 8–10, 2001, ed. Massimo Bacigalupo & Pierangelo Castagneto (Turin: Otto, 2003): “‘Light on the Wharves of Charlotte Amalie / Light on the Sparkling Straits of Sicily’: Derek Walcott’s Aesthetic of (Irresistible) Light in Tiepolo’s Hound,” 103–10.

Introduction

T

as a study of what then was Derek Walcott’s last book, the long poem Tiepolo’s Hound, which came out in 2000 and was, like Another Life, the unsuspected development of a prose project. It started with the idea that Sigrid Nama, Walcott’s companion, would write an introduction to a book of Walcott’s paintings, and evolved into a long poem accompanied by the paintings.1 In its 164 pages, four books, and twenty-six chapters (of four sections each), it tells the story of the nineteenth-century painter Camille Pissarro, interweaving it with fragments of Walcott’s life and meditations on art. Both protagonists being of Caribbean origin, but each having followed the opposite path of an exile without return and of a home-based travelling, the narratives sustain a reflection on the relationship of Caribbean art to world art, of geography and history to art, of memory to art, and of art to reality. The ultimate focus of Walcott’s musings in the book is the artist’s Bildung and his moral and spiritual development as a representative of humankind. Tiepolo’s Hound is written in iambic pentameters that incline to stretch into longer lines, making use of Walcott’s earlierexperimentation with hexameters in Omeros. It is patterned in couplets rhyming abab cdcd that were envisaged by Walcott, and are symbolized in the book, as furrows—such as one might see on a hillside, he said, and which are there in Pissarro’s paintings around Pontoise (Milan Reading)— and as stairs, which give place to an endless play of self-reflexivity, as in the lines “even as I write // paused on a step of this couplet.”2 HIS WORK BEGAN

Bruce King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2000): 627. Walcott, Tiepolo’s Hound (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000): 8. Further page references are in the main text, after ‘T’ if the context is unclear. For an interpretation of Walcott’s free use of the couplet in Tiepolo’s Hound as a formal strategy for the social and cultural construction of the Caribbean as a space for creolization, see Jim Hannan, “Crossing Couplets: Making Form the Matter of Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound,” New Literary History 33.3 (Summer 2002): 555–79. 1 2

xiv


In the course of my analysis, though, it became clear that it would be impossible to achieve a grounded evaluation of the book without putting it in relation to Walcott’s entire production. Walcott shapes his poetry by an organic process, so that the experience of reading his verse is determined by the laws of the hermeneutic circle, which characterize most of the best contemporary writing. In the hermeneutic circle, each of the parts takes its meaning from the totality, while, simultaneously, the totality needs all of its parts to be properly understood. Interpretation, then, is made possible only by a circular movement between the understanding of the part and the understanding of the totality. By this principle, a correct interpretation requires a simultaneous awareness both of the totality of a text and of each of its elements, an ability that can be built by means of further, successive readings of the same text, and by a gradual acquaintance with the whole output of an author. The only other writer who had compelled me so powerfully into this kind of reading experience is the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, another ‘wanderer’, like Walcott, in both the world of geography and the world of letters. Furthermore, as I was drawing my initial conclusions, I kept on noticing how each of the features of Derek Walcott’s earlier poetry that I saw recurring in Tiepolo’s Hound emerged in the book as fully realized, wholly integrated, and raised to the level of intense self-awareness. For this reason, Tiepolo’s Hound for me has come to represent the book of Walcott’s complete maturity, and the crowning of his poetic quest. This quest had been concerned for decades with the development of a Caribbean aesthetic, of an epic mode of writing that would allow verse to enjoy the relaxed space of a narrative, and of a powerful metaphoric device that would be able to attain the utmost exactitude through visual vividness and polysemy. Whatever Walcott has been attempting consistently, as a poet, in his career, he has fulfilled in Tiepolo’s Hound. Whatever process has been at work in his poetry, it has reached its highest point of development in this book. Tiepolo’s Hound is the full realization of Walcott’s poetic potential, and the clearest manifestation of the poetry he has been crafting in his maturity. For me, it is the best perspective from which to try to understand and evaluate the poet’s achievement. Tiepolo’s Hound also offers the best vantage on Walcott’s poetic. In a powerful act of self-reflexivity, it succeeds in being at once a statement of poetic and its exemplification—a modern and daring feat which, again, I had hitherto seen only Nabokov as fully capable of executing.

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Introduction

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What this work has come to be, then, is an evaluation of Derek Walcott’s thought and practice as a poet as seen in the overall development of his oeuvre. My approach in this evaluation has been broader than those hitherto adopted in the analysis of Walcott’s work. Taking example from its object, it has felt free to soar above the most current theoretical conceptualizations, which oscillate between modernist and postmodernist classifications, and traditional and postcolonial antitheses. In endeavouring to articulate an accurate and coherent description of Walcott’s world-view and of his aesthetic, I have been drawn to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s proto-pragmatic revision of Romantic ideas and to the pragmatists’ use of Emerson. Walcott’s access to these ideas could have been through the modernists, who first assumed an existential and pragmatic attitude in making explicit the motivation for their writing. An inevitable and ironic awareness of the relativity of one’s ways of arranging things in this world is the keynote of our era’s epistemology. It is the same note that I hear ringing in the voices of the writers that I think will become emblematic figures of the second half of the last century: writers like Walcott and Nabokov, who, intellectually, can be thought of as travellers— or “wanderers,” to use Walcott’s definition of himself, which he has opposed to that of an “émigré.”3 I personally prefer the word ‘traveler’, because it denotes the purposefulness of the coming and going between appointed places. Walcott himself declared, in 1982, that he had found an even balance, geographically and mentally, between the U S A and the Caribbean.4 Unlike the émigré, or exile, the wanderer, or traveller, or voluntary exile, is defined by his choice to belong to more than one culture and to be free to move between more than one culture. Unlike the exile, the traveller is moored, at bottom, off his island’s coasts. In current philosophical terms, this position could be defined as a postmodern stance that is held, though, by a strong and inescapably positive temperament. In Harold Bloom’s terms, it could be interpreted as a critique of language that tries to restore and redress meaning rather than to deconstruct it. This, Bloom has maintained, can be achieved by “declining to make of de-mystification the principal end of dialectical thought in criticism,” something that Emerson did by refusing to make it “fulfill the primary function of fighting off the idealistic drive of an

Walcott, The Bounty (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997): 21, 77. Anthony Milne, “This Country Is a Very Small Place” (1982), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. William Baer (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1996): 70. 3 4

xvi


expanding consciousness.”5 Emerson’s peculiarly American re-centering of language remains, for Bloom, logocentric, in that it valorizes “eloquence, the inspired voice, over the scene of writing.”6 From my perspective, which takes in the whole line of descent from Emerson to Walcott, this position is better described as a post-Romantic vision, whose idealism is tempered by rinsing its ecstatic impulse in the sobering waters of pragmatism. Aesthetically, the results of such a philosophical orientation are a self-confident use of all the available literary traditions, and the avoidance of new, ideological, allegedly more democratic preconceptions. The wanderer that is in Derek Walcott and the wanderer that was in Nabokov are contemporary reincarnations of the Romantic artist, advocating total freedom in art, and of the self-reliant poet, whose figure Emerson originally pictured for the American nation. They are able to conceive of a use of language that is free and playful: i.e. creative. Being also, perforce, bilingual (at the very least), both Walcott and Nabokov share the advantage enjoyed by every polyglot of being endowed with particular linguistic abilities, which make them especially prone to linguistic inventiveness. Moreover, as Elizabeth K. Beaujour has noted, “Bilingual or polyglot writers have more in common with each other, whatever their national origins, than they do with monolinguals who write in any of their languages.”7 No wonder both Nabokov and Walcott have been highly praised by illustrious mother-tongue colleagues for their mastery of English. In his review of The Defense, John Updike wrote of Nabokov that he was easily the best writer of English prose then holding American citizenship;8 while Robert Graves observed, of In a Green Night, that “Derek Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most (if not any) of his English-born contemporaries.”9 Writers like Walcott and Nabokov can well be read as paradigms for the writer of our century because of the courage and freedom with which they have confronted not only the imposing weight—and potentially oppressive Bloom, “The Freshness of Transformation: Emerson’s Dialectics of Influence,” in Emerson: Prophecy, Metamorphosis, and Influence, ed. David Levin (New York: Columbia U P , 1975): 146–47. 6 Bloom, “The Freshness of Transformation,” 148. 7 Elizabeth K. Beaujour, “Bilingualism,” in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (New York & London: Garland, 1995): 37. 8 John Updike, “Grandmaster Nabokov” (1963), in Updike, Assorted Prose (Greenwich C T : Fawcett, 1969): 248. 9 Mentioned in King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, 182. 5

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Introduction

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pressure—of their Western education, but also the frequently aggressive pressure exerted by their contemporaries on the artist’s agenda—actually, the pressure of the imposition itself, on the artist, of the need for an agenda. As Joseph Brodsky has aptly pointed out, Walcott’s use of language as an instrument of self-betterment: i.e. “a way to gain an identity superior to the confines of class, race, or ego,” is “the most sound program of social change there is.”10 Thinking and acting in the observance of the fundamental law of art, which is the total freedom for the artist in the selection of his own signs and structures of signification, Walcott and Nabokov have naturally taken their place in the history of world literature as writers who have spontaneously been ‘modern’. Their speculative focus has been a meditation on the ontological issue, which in our times is being recast in terms of the relationship between an outer and an inner reality. They have attempted to solve the subject’s impasse in transferring inner experience to an outer, other self by experimenting in their styles with reader-response-oriented techniques. Stylistic techniques affecting the reader’s response have been tested by both writers as a vehicle for crossing the constitutive border of the I–Thou relationship. Ultimately, Nabokov’s and Walcott’s formal solutions have often amounted to the revision or the overturn of genre boundaries, ranging from the basic modes of writing prose and poetry, and the basic modes of thinking in tragedy and comedy, to a rigorously classified literary genre like the autobiography, through the revival of a classical genre like the epic, and the intermixing of different narrative mediums, such as literature and cinema. Technically, Walcott realizes his aesthetic of the island artist through his treatment of metaphor, which is also his most original and conspicuous contribution to the renewal of poetic language. It is based on a recuperation of a pristine conception of metaphor as an instrument for expressing analogy, and of analogy as the primary instrument of perception: i.e. as the basic mode of knowledge. It finds its place in the tradition of the modern use of metaphor, which originated, once again, in the Romantic revolution in aesthetics. As Lillian Furst has pointed out, the Romantics believed in the imagination as the supreme faculty of the artist, and the organ of the ego’s perception. They believed in the power of imagination to associate shapes and ideas

10 Joseph Brodsky, “The Sound of the Tide” (1983), in Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986): 171.

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by discerning “the similitude of things.”11 And they believed in the imagination’s products—new images that would throw together the poet’s insights, unifying them into a symbolic, mythic system.12 The modern use of metaphor—of which, for example, Emily Dickinson became an early champion—is not decorative or merely illustrative. It is cognitive, and creative.13 In the modern metaphor, the relation between sign and referent is not conventional and fixed, but always new, and the origin of a poet’s personal symbolism. La métaphore vive (the living metaphor), or la metafora buona (the good metaphor), as Paul Ricoeur and Umberto Eco, among others, have respectively dubbed it, is polysemous and cumulative. It reflects vividly our times’ most advanced consciousness, in that it exposes the limits of language without giving up the vocation of language to signify and be the poet’s instrument for making sense of the world. The development of the following examination will proceed from a theoretical and historical framing, including a description of Walcott’s indirect absorption of Emerson’s heritage through his contact with American culture and his wide exposure to modernist poetry (chapter 1), and a presentation of Walcott and Nabokov as paradigmatic figures for the writer at the turn of the century, both for their conscious choice of being and remaining travellers between cultures, and for the freedom with which they have formulated their composite aesthetic projects. Further, a comparison between the narrative techniques employed by Walcott in his largely autobiographical long poems, and the techniques of “involution” employed by Nabokov in his last two novels, one of which is a reversed fictionalized autobiography, will also bring into focus surprising similarities between the outcomes of the two writers’ careers (chapter 2). My analysis will then focus on Tiepolo’s Hound. Chapter 3 will deal with Walcott’s completion of his repeatedly attempted autobiography in verse, which is his main contribution to the modern project and practice of genre-revisioning. Chapter 4 focuses on the materials of the autobiographical narrative in Tiepolo’s Hound, and interprets them as a Künstlerroman that is recast in the shape of a revived Arthurian quest. The fifth and last chapter is intended as both the core and the culmination of my study. It de11 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Works, ed. Roger Ingpen & Walter E. Peck (New York: Gordian, 1965), vol. 7: 107, 109. 12 Lillian F. Furst, Romanticism in Perspective: A Comparative Study of the Romantic Movements in England, France and Germany (1969; London: Macmillan, 2nd ed. 1979): 117–210. 13 Paola Loreto, La contemplazione dell’emblema: La poesia eretica di Emily Dickinson (Milan: C U E M , 1999), ch. 5.

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scribes the construction of the metaphor of light in Tiepolo’s Hound, presenting it as Walcott’s ultimate achievement in his treatment of metaphor and as his realization of a poetic that he has successfully, and definitively, formulated in the book. 

1

The Poetry of Pragmatic Imagination:

The Circuitous Influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.1

P

U R S U I N G R E S E A R C H into a possible influence by the father of American Transcendentalism on a contemporary Caribbean poet and Nobel Prize winner may seem an idea that begs some justification. I should clarify immediately, then, that I am considering an intellectual vanguard, on which modes of perception and thinking are formed, and a privileged channel of communication through which they travel. This intellectual vanguard is the consciousness of strong writers and thinkers such as Dante Alighieri, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vladimir Nabokov, and Derek Walcott. It is a consciousness that is always ahead of its time and anticipates the regeneration of ideas, in the way that poets were, for Pound, the antennae of the race. The privileged channel is a sensibility that is alive to the ideas conceived by this consciousness and carries them through the centuries needed for them to become public and widespread. It uses every available code as its support, from sermons to poetry, from narrative to cinema. My belief in the existence of such a place for the formation and circulation of new ideas that became a legacy from a few isolated human beings to the whole of humanity is my justification for suggesting that Walcott’s vision and aesthetic are best understood in the light of the proto-pragmatic thought of Emerson and of its ultimate development in modernist poetry.

1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience” (Essays: Second Series, 1844), in Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983): 487.

2


To begin by following the grain of my object and being pragmatic, I will start with facts. The fact is, that while I was reading Tiepolo’s Hound I kept on finding striking similarities between Walcott’s and Emerson’s ideas, particularly those revolving around a conception of knowledge and a conception of poetry, on which both writers have focused. The central position of Emerson in the elaboration of an “American mind” and of an “American aesthetic” has long been agreed upon by illustrious writers and scholars of all sides and orientations, from Matthew Arnold to Friedrich Nietzsche, from Emily Dickinson to Walt Whitman, from Sigmund Freud to William James and John Dewey; and, among literary scholars, from F.O. Matthiessen to Hyatt H. Waggoner. The pithiest expression has been, as usual, that of Harold Bloom. “The mind of Emerson is the mind of America,” he wrote in Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (1982), where he also nominated Emerson as the inventor of the American religion of self-reliance. Furthermore, in an article on Emerson published in the New York Review of Books on 22 November 1984, Bloom appointed him “the principal source of the American difference in poetry, criticism and pragmatic post-philosophy.”2 The recent studies of Emerson that have reassessed his thought in the light of its legacy to American Pragmatism were most useful to me in my attempt to put together and make sense of the similarities I was finding between Walcott’s and Emerson’s positions. One book I found particularly illuminating was The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism, by Jonathan Levin (1999). Identifying the concept of transition as pivotal in Emerson, Levin brings into focus a line of thinking that links Emerson’s transcendentalism to American Pragmatism and to American literary modernism, of which he presents the poetry of Wallace Stevens as a case study. More specifically, Levin’s work persuasively shows that there is a strain of Romanticism in American Pragmatism, and a strain of pragmatic Romanticism in Stevens’ modernism, for example; and that both facts are signs of a continuity in the epistemology and aesthetic which Emerson initiated, which the American Pragmatists and modernists continued, and which now underlies Walcott’s own poetic. The core of these conceptions remains Romantic, but it is ‘modernized’ by a pragmatic attitude toward the conditions and modes of the subject’s knowing and of his use of knowledge and language.

2

Bloom, Poetics of Influence (New Haven C T : Charles Schwab, 1988): 309.

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The Poetry of Pragmatic Imagination

3

This theoretical grid requires a use of labels like ‘Romanticism’, ‘Pragmatism’, and ‘modernism’ as conceptual categories essential to the definition of major shifts in the evolution of modern European and American literatures. In this perspective, which is the one I have chosen as a theoretical frame for my analysis, ‘Romanticism’ stands for man’s assumption of the failure of reason as a sufficient means for knowledge, and for his turning to—or, rather, going back to—a faith in a more complex and extensive range of faculties in his attempt to comprehend the world. I agree with Isaiah Berlin’s thesis that Romanticism appears to be the greatest, single shift that has occurred in Western consciousness, one that has affected forever the life and thought of the Western world.3 Some of the basic features of Romanticism defined by Berlin in his brilliant study of the movement have tempted me to agree with Herbert Read and Kenneth Clark—whom he quotes—on their conception of it as having become a “permanent state of mind which might be found anywhere” in history (5)—and which could have made its appearance again, say, in Nabokov and Walcott. At the risk of simplification, I will list these features in anticipation of arguments I hope to elaborate in what follows. They are: the assurance that the universe is—if not pure flux—endless self-creativity, and does not possess a structure: thus, there is no pattern to which one must adapt oneself and all the knowledge of values that men can achieve is creation of values (119); the notion of the freedom of the artist (146); the mystical belief that God speaks to men through nature (49); the conception of art as the “attempt to evoke by symbols the inexpressible vision of the unceasing activity which is life” (122); the use of myth as a means to grasp the dark, the irrational, the inexpressible sides of that activity, by embodying them in images which lead to further images and which point in some infinite direction (121); the valuing of “integrity, sincerity, and readiness to sacrifice one’s life to some inner light”—i.e. to identify oneself with the complete and heroic (albeit unmotivated) devotion to a cause—as supreme virtues (8); more precisely, the idea that the artist “creates in accordance with the light which is within him, and that is all that a man should do; that is what makes a man a hero” (13). To conclude the definition of my own terminology, Pragmatism in my view marks the shift in epistemology from an ontological to a functional 3 Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism: The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, ed. Henry Hardy (1965; Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1999): 1. Further page references in this paragraph are in the main text.

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goal; and modernism is the aesthetic expression of this ‘diminished’ Romantic approach to a theory of knowledge. I am still using the word ‘Romanticism’ to define the world-view of writers like Walcott and Nabokov because I find it has retained two fundamental features of Romantic philosophy: the reliance on versions of both the cognitive faculties that Emerson called Reason and Understanding, a distinction that he borrowed from the German transcendentalist philosophers through Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection;4 and the centering of the knowing process in the subject. The reasons for the contemporary revival of this centering are opposite to those of the original Romantics, but the result is the same. The pragmatic adjustment has made epistemological reflection focus on the subject’s perspective not because of the assumption of its potentialities but because of the consideration of its limits. While the postmodern way of dealing with our acquired consciousness of the limits of the validity of knowledge has been the effort to limit the subject’s subjectivity by multiplying points of view, the Pragmatists’ and the modernists’ way—a highly American one—had been to turn the impasse into new fuel, and the subjectivity of the subject into the powerful source of all signifying constructions. “As I am, so I see,” wrote Emerson in “Experience”; “use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.”5 There is another red thread, then, emerging from Emerson and running to our days, which is the thread of hope and optimism, or the will to believe, or the faith in the power of art. Harold Bloom—who was convinced that Romanticism was in 1976 what it had been for the past two hundred years—has written that it is centrally a humanism, seeking our renewal as makers and believing that nothing need be lost if we learn to listen again and to touch without self-appropriation.6 I also find this Romantic disposition, persisting through Emerson and the pragmatic and modernist traditions, a more lucid and a more genuinely American way of confronting reality and the subject’s position in it. Postmodern theory, in fact, has finally solved the problem of limiting the subject’s pretensions to knowledge by making space for the object and recognizing and caring for the Other. This nostalgia for a transmuted form of Emerson, “Experience,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 489. Emerson, “Experience,” 489. See also Harold Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination (New York: Seabury, 1976): 57. 6 Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism: The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, ed. Henry Hardy (1965; Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1999): 1. Further page references in this paragraph are in the main text. 4 5

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unity, though, is not so different, ultimately, from the Romantic conception of the artist’s power of empathy and from its philosophical premise in Emerson’s metaphor of the “transparent eye-ball” which in nature is nothing, but which sees all, and through which run “the currents of the Universal Being”7—a perfect organ of perception and Emerson’s image for the artist as a medium. In my perspective, Romanticism, Pragmatism and modernism are ways for the artist to exist in the world that are still available and apt. They were incarnated by Dickinson, Stevens, Robert Frost, and A.R. Ammons. They are also incarnated by Richard Wilbur and, in younger generations, by Jorie Graham and Mary Oliver. Walcott is one of the clearest spokesmen of this sensibility: his being born on the margins of the Western tradition has made him less vulnerable to the weight of postmodern consciousness on artistic creativity. On the other hand, in Bloomian terms, he has led a tough fight with several of the major figures of Western literature, in a long and rich history of anxiety-of-influence confrontation, which has been recounted at length elsewhere. While I am maintaining here that one way of Emerson’s influence on Walcott may well have come through the modernists, I am not unaware that he has declared himself wary of Emerson’s idealism, and weary of Stevens’ abstractions. On various occasions, he has indicated a disinclination to read Emerson but has revealed close familiarity with Stevens’ poetry. During his seminar in creative writing of 2001 at the University of Milan, he made instructive use of Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West.” He made us learn by heart a stanza of our choice from the poem and, after pointing out how easily Stevens’ verse would lend itself to memorizing owing to its incantatory rhythm, he passed on to a collective attempt at transposition and translation. The immediate result was, of course, our engagement with the difficult meaning of the poem. Walcott’s conclusion then was that, as far as he was concerned, he had decided long before that he could not (and should not) admire what he could not understand, although he found the sound of the poem beautiful. Of Emerson, and all the Transcendentalists in general, Walcott has always been suspicious because of what has now been proved to be a common misreading of the sage of Concord’s thought: i.e. a tendency to ‘transcend’ reality in the ordinary sense of escaping from it, and avoiding dealing with it. In 7

Emerson, “Nature” (1836), in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 10.

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an interview with Luigi Sampietro, Walcott provides directions concerning his poetic models. Sampietro asks him if Emily Dickinson and Robert Lowell are the only two New England poets he enjoys reading, and if he has ever been exposed to Emerson as a poet or an essayist. Walcott answers: Emerson? No, I’ve never read… You see, I’m very cautious about the Transcendentalists. I don’t know why, I’m scared of that tone—very afraid of it. I’m afraid of the assurance that may be contained in, say, Thoreau. That’s very unfair, I know… the kind of illuminated reason—I find it a little frightening, and restrictive… But the other poets, like Lowell and Emily Dickinson are… Well, there is Stevens, but much of Stevens’s poetry to me is… I find it very tiring, and too much… I think it’s excessive. I think the music is overdone. That it’s self-lulling. Sometimes to me it’s very high nonsense. I don’t know what it means, most of the time. When it tries to move into the area of abstract painting—which I find phenomenally boring—then I find Stevens going on and on. It’s exasperating. 8

Walcott’s assimilation of Emerson through Stevens may have been involuntary. I remember his fascination with the word “genius” in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” and the time we spent in the attempt at finding a corresponding word in Italian. As Walcott taught us then, to feel envy toward another poet is to desire to have written one of his lines. So it may well have been reluctant admiration that prompted Walcott, malgré lui, to read his Stevens. Walcott’s spontaneous admiration for Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, though, has surely opened for him a main avenue to Emerson’s influence, and created another case of a reading of Emerson in his poetic descendants, as happened, according to Harold Bloom, with Hart Crane.9 I have been several times witness, during Walcott’s Milan seminars, to his appreciation of the two ancestors of American poetry; in his 2001 Seminar, he quoted Whitman, for example, as a model of when and how a poet can take a liberty with meter, because, as he warned us, “That’s what’s great about

Walcott, “ ‘ An Object Beyond One’s Own Life’: An Interview with Derek Walcott,” Caribana 2 (1991): 30. 9 Bloom, “The Freshness of Transformation: Emerson’s Dialectics of Influence,” in Emerson: Prophecy, Metamorphosis, and Influence, ed. David Levin (New York: Columbia U P , 1975): 132. 8

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English verse: that the subtlest deviation can be a shock to the rhythm. The rigidity of the meter.” Here is an excerpt from the transcription of the seminar, in which he couples Whitman and Dickinson in his appreciation of their dexterity in handling meter: Now I’ll show you what Whitman does with adding. It’s the elegy for President Lincoln [. . . ]. “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d / And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night….” When else is the star shining? And what is great is that he adds extra syllables in that second line. That’s superb. Those two extra syllables, beyond the regularity of the iambic pentameter. He multiplies the song by the extra syllables. I’m saying that the rigidity of a column, in the knowledge of Shelley and in the knowledge of Whitman, has to do it. And the person who does this superbly, too, is Emily Dickinson. She does little boxes. She works as a miniaturist. I’ve come to believe she is probably the greatest American poet. She’s using as a model the hymnbook. Hymns are also as boxes, as the confines of a room. The condition of faith is the condition of her life, because she’s a recluse. You cannot say what rhymes she uses, because she uses assonantal, associative rhymes. So like the half rhymes, they would not be predictable. When you read her a lot, you can say, “Oh yes, if she has grass she’s going to have grace.” But what is remarkable is that she does this within a structure.

A final obvious fact is Walcott’s involvement in American culture. Walcott has always recognized the influence of American culture on the Caribbean, and has been regularly and intensely active in the U S A as a poet and a teacher of creative writing. In his last seminar in Milan, in July 2003, he came to say that the U S A was the first country in the world to create a real democracy, which shows that his participation in that culture is freely and consciously embraced, although not lacking critical distance, as we shall see later. This participation is full of consequences for Walcott and for “many contemporary Americans,” who, as Bloom has acutely pointed out, are “still paying something [for Emersonian light], whether or not they have read Emerson, since his peculiar relevance now is that we seem to read him merely by living here, in this place still somehow his, and not our own.”10

10 Bloom, “The Freshness of Transformation: Emerson’s Dialectics of Influence,” in Emerson: Prophecy, Metamorphosis, and Influence, ed. David Levin (New York: Columbia U P , 1975): 142.

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Art as Organic Expression: From Augustine to Emerson Before I proceed to illustrate how Emerson elaborated his Romantic borrowings into what we would today define as a pragmatic construct, it may be useful to recall briefly that his main legacy to American poetry was his theory of organic expression,11 which he derived largely from Coleridge. In a nutshell, it says that form is innate in the germ of the poet’s material and it shapes itself as it develops from within.12 In Emerson’s famous formulation, a poem is made of a “metre-making argument […] a thought so passionate and alive that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own and adorns nature with a new thing.”13 Consequently, expression is necessary down to the single word. “In the truly great poets,” wrote Coleridge, “there is a reason assignable not only for every word, but for the position of every word.”14 Emerson wrote that, “in writing, there is always a right word, & every other than that is wrong,”15 and that the poet’s selection is unconscious, because “There is no choice of words for him who clearly sees the truth. That provides him with the best word.”16 The second quotation brings to mind Coleridge’s distinction between Imagination, the true poetic faculty, dynamic and vital, and Fancy, a function of the conscious will operating choices.17 Emerson, too, talks of the Imagination as the most authentic cognitive faculty and, consequently, as the poetic faculty par excellence. He describes it as “a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.”18 11

Norman Foerster, “Emerson on the Organic Principle in Art,” P M L A 41 (1926):

193–208. 12 For an articulate description of Emerson’s theory of organic expression, see Eric W. Carlson’s introduction to Emerson’s Literary Criticism, ed. Carlson (Lincoln & London: U of Nebraska P , 1979): esp. xxviii–xxxii. 13 Emerson, “The Poet” (Essays: Second Series, 1844), in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 450. 14 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell & W. Jackson Bate (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul & Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1983), vol. 1: 9. 15 Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, gen. ed. William H. Gilman et al. (Cambridge M A : Belknap Press of Harvard U P , 1960–82), vol. 3: 271. 16 Quoted in Foerster, “Emerson on the Organic Principle in Art,” 195. 17 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1: 304–305. 18 Emerson, “The Poet,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 459.

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The experience that prompted this statement must have been that the shape of things is unstable; as nature is fluid and its law metamorphic, so should the tools man uses to grasp it be, if they are to prove suitable to their function. According to Eric Wilson, this feeling was corroborated by developments in nineteenth-century science, which challenged traditional Western narratives.19 Hence, the core of Emerson’s philosophy is that since reality is a system of related phenomena whose shape is determined by flowing energy, man should give up attempting to know the noumenon—or the Ding an sich (the thing in itself), to employ Kant’s terminology, with which Emerson was familiar—and should instead take his own place among things, because the only way of knowing them is by surrendering to their form. “We are symbols, and inhabit symbols,” wrote Emerson.20 St Augustine called it a knowledge by connaturality or inclination, by which we lean forward to things and meet them intimately. Emerson defined it in terms of energy: “Beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, [man] is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things.”21 As Levin points out, the model advocates a “vigorously cultivated activity” or an “active passivity,”22 strongly reminiscent of Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness.”23 In imparting his directives to the poet, Emerson indicates this attitude as the fundamental requisite of the task of true naming: “The condition of true naming, on the poet’s part, is his resigning himself to the divine aura which breathes through forms, and accompanying that.”24 Walcott speaks of empathy as the poet’s best and keenest faculty, as the source of his utterances, and as the agent that provides them with value. “I 19 According to Eric Wilson, “Attending to the electrochemistry of Humphry Davy and the electromagnetism of Michael Faraday of the 1830s Emerson was faced with the possibility that matter is not a physical part of a spiritual whole but rather a vigorous field of force, a pattern of electrical energy […] this volatile universe […] challenges the mind to represent unpresentable physical forces: evanescent currents, fluxional patterns, polarized strife”; Wilson, “Emerson’s Nature, Paralogy, and the Physics of the Sublime,” Mosaic 33.1 (March 2000): 39. 20 Emerson, “The Poet,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 456. 21 Emerson, “The Poet,” 459. 22 Jonathan Levin, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1999): 37, 19. 23 William Wordsworth, “Expostulation and Reply” (1798), in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler & Karen Green (Ithaca N Y & London: Cornell U P , 1992): 108. 24 Emerson, “The Poet,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 459.

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shared, I shared,” he writes in Another Life, “I was struck like rock, and I opened / to His gift!”25 This use of imagination is a part of the Romantic aesthetic which has been a constant in American literature, which Walcott has absorbed, and which Emerson had first advocated in “Nature.” In his typical prose style, proceeding by further reformulations of the same concepts, which are defined more by associative connections of ideas, and fresh perceptions, than by consecutive logic, Emerson first distinguishes between Understanding—man’s faculty that “adds, divides, combines measures”— and Reason—man’s faculty that perceives analogies between Matter and Mind.26 Then he relates Reason to Imagination by saying that what Reason sees proceeds from imagination and affection,27 and defines Imagination as “the use which the Reason makes of the material world”28 Walcott, for his part, has always shown a belief in the same kind of faculty as the operating force in the creative process. He views imagination as a faculty pertaining to the entire man, and not only to his reason. Through its use, the poet may come to identify himself so thoroughly with the Not-me that the fictions to which he gives life prove more real to him than his own life, because they are as if experienced. The way in which Walcott has endeavoured to exercise his poetic faculty is by developing verse that would be alive in the sense of being able to reproduce the quality of life through vividness, or exactitude of “stroke,” as he likes to express himself in an analogy with painting. The direct model for this aesthetic goal is the permanent immediacy, or cinematic concentration, of Dante Alighieri.29 Accordingly, the image that has come to symbolize Walcott’s poetic ideal in his verse is light. He talks of lines “that shine with life” (69) in The Bounty, for example, and he makes it the central metaphor of Tiepolo’s Hound, where he elaborates the fiction of his hunting for a painting that made him aware of the importance of realizing the “epiphanic detail,” “so exact in its lucency” that it can bring back, and saturate the feeling of life (7–8). In this book, this powerfully revealing detail is the single brushstroke that perfectly renders the light illuminating the inside of a dog’s thigh in a 25 Derek Walcott, “Another Life” (1973), in Collected Poems, 1948–1984 (1986; London & Boston M A : Faber & Faber, 1992): 282. Hereafter in the main text as CP. 26 Emerson, “Nature,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 26. 27 Emerson, “Nature,” 33. 28 Emerson, “Nature,” 34. 29 Maria Cristina Fumagalli, The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and the Impress of Dante (Cross/Cultures 49; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2001): 277–78.

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painting by one of two Italian artists, either Giambattista Tiepolo or Paolo Veronese. “The stroke in a hound’s thigh” is openly equated with “the stroke, the syllable, planted in the furrows / of page and canvas” (13). This merging of techniques aims at the closest possible rendition of a visual kind of apprehension and imagination, and aspires to fulfil the hope Walcott expressed in Another Life “that both disciplines might / by painful accretion cohere / and finally ignite” (CP 200–201). As we have seen, furrows unfolding on a hillside are the image with which Walcott envisioned the couplets of Tiepolo’s Hound, a wonderful signal of how his thinking—even his thinking about his craft—is done by images.30 Here is how Walcott explained his choice of meter in Tiepolo’s Hound when he read from the book and signed copies at the University of Milan on 15 May 2000: In this one [book] what I felt was an image of continuity. It was the image of furrows that you might see on a hillside and that is there in Pissarro’s paintings around Pontoise. You see a hillside, and the hillside has furrows of planting, so it’s like that, the lines are like that. So those couplets made a space like planting. Another space in couplets that was there.

The Pragmatic Turn: From Emerson to Walcott Through a Functional Conception of Art Walcott perhaps comes closest to Emerson’s formulation of his theory of organic expression in poem 35 of The Bounty, where he affirms that form and content are necessarily linked in accomplished verse, although he makes content proceed from form, in accordance with the modernist golden rule, rather than form from content, as Emerson had done in his definition of poetry as a meter-making argument. Walcott’s poem opens: “Never plotted, never provided with their proper metre: / the fictions in the dark, on the back shelves of the brain” (76). Then the voice in the poem quotes the beginning of an imaginary line, but stops abruptly to say that what places the

It is also, evidently, a reminiscence of the etymological derivation of the word ‘verse’ from the Latin versus, which Walcott may have found in some contemporary poets’ writings, such as Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry, for example, where he says that it indicates “the ploughman at the end of a furrow turning about to begin again”; Pinsky, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998): 25. 30

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action in verse is rhyme. The lines, it adds, are what propels narrative, while their author stands “on the edge of the unuttered, of metamorphosis.” The fictions that secretly dwell in the dark, on the hidden shelves of our mind, and the poet who stands on the border of what he has not yet been able to express because it is constantly changing into a new shape, introduce us to a much thornier field of epistemological enquiry, very similar to Emerson’s vision as it has recently been reappraised. The Bounty is indeed the book in Walcott’s oeuvre that makes short work of the common and false identification of its author’s predominant attitude with a facile optimism and a naive idealism, which is what such essays by Emerson as “Experience” (1844) and “Fate” (1860) did to counter the latter writer’s reception. Just like Emerson’s, Walcott’s discourse proceeds by successive reformulations that consolidate their definitional power. In Tiepolo’s Hound, for example, we have a statement correlative to that in poem 35 of The Bounty, where Walcott affirms that even the linear structuring of time is a human delusion: “youth // feels it has the measure of Time, that there is a plot / and metre to Time, structured as if it were fiction // with a beginning, a middle, and an end, except Time is not / narrative […] and time continues its process” (94). The conceptualization of time is one of the foci of the epistemological reflection of all times. Here Walcott shows that, like Emerson, he finds a circular temporality a more suitable framing of experience than the linear temporality of traditional Western thought. What is most interesting, though, is that although Emerson establishes as a condition of the poet’s activity of true naming his resignation to the transient nature of things, he also points out the pleasure deriving from this act of self-abandonment. For Emerson, as for Whitman, Stevens, and many other poets in the same line, the pleasure we derive from rhyme is the same pleasure we savour in executing the repetitive movements that nature has assigned to us as creatures. Thus art is the human activity that is able to reproduce the kind of satisfaction man obtains from his harmonious participation in nature as one of its elements. This is how Emerson drew an aesthetic, and a poetic, from an episteme: A rhyme in one of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a seashell, or the resembling difference of a group of

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flowers. […] Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these glide into our spirits, and we participate the invention of nature?31

Richard Shusterman has shown that Emerson was a main source of the Pragmatist aesthetic made famous by John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934). One of his arguments was that Pragmatists, too, insist on art’s “deep roots in the natural world, in the elemental desires, needs, and rhythms of the human organism interacting with the world.”32 The rhythm of loss of integration with environment and recovery of union is the basis of aesthetic experience for Dewey;33 thus, art is continuous re-creation and renewal. It comes from and reproduces the transitional rhythm of life, on which the rhythm of “the substantial life of community” is founded.34 As Levin reminds us, “both together constitute ‘life’” for Dewey.35 By reflecting and sustaining the biological and cultural rhythms of living itself,36 art’s ongoing creative agency releases in man the “lively relief and pleasure”37 that accompany his experience of transition between loss and recovery, dissociation and union. Emerson had called it nature’s principle of Polarity, “that great principle of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow of the sea, in day and night; in heat and cold.”38 This knowledge would leave little ground to scientific investigation of an elusive object, and open all space for the spiritual assurance that “after the ruin the resurrection is sure.”39 Walcott seems to have appropriated the same lesson through his own experience of death and separation, on which he has evidently meditated in The Bounty, and through his successive renewed celebration of life and the present moment of vision and elation in Tiepolo’s Hound.

Emerson, “The Poet,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 459. Richard Shusterman, “Emerson’s Pragmatist Aesthetics,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 207 (1999): 88–89. 33 John Dewey, The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois U P , 1981–91), vol. 10: 20–21. 34 Dewey, The Later Works, vol. 10: 20–21. 35 Jonathan Levin, The Poetics of Transition, 85. 36 Jonathan Levin, The Poetics of Transition, 85. 37 William James, Writings, 1878–1899, 950, Dewey, The Later Works, vol. 10: 21–22: 38 Emerson, “The American Scholar” (1837), in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 62. 39 Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, vol. 4: 34. 31 32

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“Nature,” William James wrote, “is but a name for excess, because every point in her opens out and runs into the more.” “My present field of consciousness,” he added, “is a centre surrounded by a fringe that shades insensibly into a subconscious more.”40 James’s debt to Emerson is here undeniable. From “Circles”: Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; […]. This fact […] symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at once the inspirer and the condemner of every success […]. 41

“The universe is fluid and volatile,” wrote Emerson in “Circles”; “The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid.”42 And further on we have the memorable sentence: “In nature, every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.”43 As Levin remarks, Emerson distinguishes mere form from the authentic life that infuses all form.44 This is where the conclusion of “Circles” comes from. If form is limiting and life is expansive, a never-ending process of vital transitions and transformations,45 then the only way of knowing life is to realize one’s self as part of that life and to obey the same law: The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propiety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment.46

The object being ultimately irreducible to the subject’s logic, the subject lets himself be assimilated by the object’s law. To know, then, is to be in transit, William James, Writings, 1878–1899, 760–61. Emerson, “Circles” (Essays: First Series, 1841), in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 403. 42 Emerson, “Circles,” 403. 43 Emerson, “Circles,” 413. 44 Jonathan Levin, The Poetics of Transition, 2. 45 Jonathan Levin, The Poetics of Transition, 2. 46 Emerson, “Circles,” 414. 40 41

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to change, to assume one shape after the other, or become one thing after the other. Emerson stated that poetic language may perform the same by generating a constant tension between the exertion of its symbolizing power and its loss. First of all, in “The Poet,” he posited that all language would originally be poetic, because all language is generative: “Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.”47 “All language is vehicular and transitive,” he wrote, adding that language in its “secondary use” (the everyday use of communication) is fossil poetry because it has lost its original reference to the world. “Each word was at first a stroke of genius […] and for the moment symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer.” “All symbols are fluxional,” because “the quality of the imagination is to flow and not to freeze,” according to the nature of the universe; “and the power to flux is the measure of the mind.”48 The Pragmatists made of this cognitive theory the core of their functional conception of art. For Dewey, art is continuous re-creation and renewal because only a sequence of moments of resistance and tension can bring “to living consciousness an experience that”—as “limited in scope and duration”—“is unified and total.”49 The “aesthetic function in knowledge” would qualify pragmatic instrumentalism by balancing the “control” side by the “liberation side”: “‘truth for its own sake,’ harmony, etc.”50 Dewey envisaged this conception on the basis of James’s “sentiment of rationality,” according to which we engage in transition “from a state of puzzle or perplexity to rational comprehension” with a feeling of “lively relief and pleasure.”51 Art is caused by and cultivates the transitional rhythms of life because transition is the moment of highest pleasure for man. As Dewey wrote, “the moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life.”52 Emerson had written that “Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the

Emerson, “The Poet,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 455. Emerson, “The Poet,” 463, 457, 463; “Fate” (The Conduct of Life, 1860), in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 964. 49 Dewey, The Later Works, vol. 10: 21–22. 50 Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James (Boston M A : Little, 1935), vol. 2: 526. 51 William James, Writings, 1878–1899, ed. Gerald E. Myers (New York: Library of America, 1992): 950. 52 Dewey, The Later Works, vol. 10: 21–22. 47

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moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim.”53

The Elation of a New World’s Geography Because of his enthusiastic drive, Derek Walcott is, like Emerson, someone who could be taken to be an easy optimist. If Emerson could write that “the world is the perennial miracle,”54 Walcott, when asked how much the notion of suicide had affected his poetry, answered that “It is very hard to get up in a Caribbean morning and want to kill yourself.”55 In the Caribbean, he explained in another interview, “the beauty is overwhelming.”56 The cause and the effect of this feeling of sheer exultation seem to be the same for Walcott and for Emerson, and they are the astonished, ecstatic discovery of a new continent, which is one’s own, as a cause, and the impulse to name it, as an effect. Another oft-quoted observation by Emerson is that “America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”57 Walcott, too, has made a geography the source of an aesthetic: “this geography will continue to shape West Indian art more than anything else […] the geography itself is an aesthetic.”58 He once explained that the difference between his tone and that of an angry African American, who “is still enslaved, […] has to do with the reality of the geography of the islands, the sense of freedom, of possibility, of just the simple reality of air, sun, light, grass, fruit, beauty.”59 Walcott and Emerson posit the same potential to re-live, mythologically, Man’s prelapsarian condition in Eden. In the poetic tradition they share, this primeval experience of innocence and of the potential for all realizations has

53 Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (Essays: First Series, 1841), in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 271. 54 Emerson, “The Over-Soul” (Essays: First Series, 1841), in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 400. 55 Walcott, “‘An Object Beyond One’s Own Life’: An Interview with Derek Walcott,” 36. 56 Edward Hirsch, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1979), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 54. 57 Emerson, “The Poet,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 465. 58 Walcott, Arena, B B C 2 (London; 22 February 1993). 59 J.P. White, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1990), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 167.

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become the symbol of the poetic impulse to possess a world, figuratively, through its first naming. Like Emerson, Walcott feels elated at the sense of possibility with which the mere geography of his birthplace inspires him: “the beauty is overwhelming, it really is. It’s not a used beauty… it’s not a known beauty, and so the privilege of just looking at these places and seeing their totally uncorrupted existence remains an Adamic experience… you can’t avoid the feeling that this is a new world.”60 And the poet Walcott feels, of course, elated at the idea of the privilege of being the first to name it: “I can still remember the tremendous elation I had at eighteen just standing on a little hill somewhere and looking around at the sea and the sky and the town knowing that nobody had really written about this. It was exhilarating to know that I was privileged to be the first one to put down the name of a certain town, or fisherman, or road—a privilege very few writers ever have.”61 At the end of Another Life, his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in verse, he writes that “We were blessed with a virginal, unpainted world / with Adam’s task of giving things their names […] with nothing so old / that it could not be invented” (CP 294). From his own Adamic position, Emerson had written in “The Poet” that “the poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.”62 Walcott’s linking of Geography to Art in the poet’s task to name his landscape and environment may have found inspiration in Emerson’s directive as it was appropriated by Whitman in Song of Myself; and it may have found an agenda in Whitman’s Preface to Leaves of Grass, where he wrote that “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” and that the American bard “incarnates the geography of its country.”63 The idea figures in Walcott’s poetry from its beginnings to the present day, and is connoted with the tone and denouement of an Arthurian knight’s quest. In the two instalments of Walcott’s Künstlerroman in verse,64 the poet–hero takes his 60 Edward Hirsch, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1979), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 54. 61 Hirsch, “An Interview with Derek Walcott,” in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 54. 62 Emerson, “The Poet,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 449. 63 Walt Whitman, “Preface to Leaves of Grass,” in Whitman, Prose Works 1892: Collect and Other Prose, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York U P , 1964), vol. 2: 434. 64 Edward Baugh, “The Poem as Autobiographical Novel: Derek Walcott’s Another Life in Relation to Wordsworth’s Prelude and Joyce’s Portrait,” in Awakened Conscience: Studies in Commonwealth Literature, ed. C.D. Narasimhaiah (New Delhi: Sterling, 1978): 227.

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oath: “we swore, / disciples of that astigmatic saint, / that we would never leave the island / until we had put down, in paint, in words, / […] all of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines, / every neglected, self-pitying inlet” (Another Life, CP 194); “I swore: I shall // get their true tints someday” (T 94). On the other hand, like Emerson, Walcott sets Geography against History: “You want to hear my history? Ask the sea” (Another Life, CP 281). In the prose of “The Muse of History,” he explained that “It is this awe of the numinous, this elemental privilege of naming the new World which annihilates history in our great poets […]. They reject ethnic ancestry for faith in elemental man.”65 The secret is to cultivate what Walcott calls “amnesia,” which is a form of forgetting that remembers and forgives: “In time the slave surrendered to amnesia. That amnesia is the true history of the New World” (39). Only amnesia can rid the former slave of the “delirium of revenge” and the “malaria of nostalgia for the empire” that false history fosters (54), and that “produce a literature of recrimination and despair” (37). The logic of History, Walcott maintains, is contrary to that of the elemental man: The strength of the sea gives you an idea of time that makes history absurd. Because history is an intrusion on that immensity […]. And by history, I mean a direction that is progressive and linear. With the sea, you can travel the horizon in any direction […]. It doesn’t proceed from A to B to C to D and so on. It is not a rational line. It’s a circle, and that’s what you feel. (158–59)

More poetically, or spontaneously, “there is no history now, only the weather, / day’s wheeling light, the rising and setting / seasons” (T 71). We have come to Emerson’s trope, which Walcott has also taken—and, I would almost say, received—from nature. Contemplation of a natural landscape elicits in Walcott exactly the same feelings, and the same poetic, as in Emerson. It suggests that “there are spaces / wider than conscience” (Another Life, CP 280), which seems to be a poetic rendition of James’ “field of consciousness” and the opening of Emerson’s “Circles,” perhaps through the assimilation of Dickinson’s well-known and much-debated metaphor of the circumference, her own representation of the expanding limits of con-

65 Walcott, “The Muse of History” (1974), in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998): 40. Further page references are in the maintext paragraph.

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sciousness: “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.”66

Time and Space as Circularity For Walcott, too, nature’s infinite succession of circles induces in the poet a new way of thinking of time, which is accompanied by “an elation which sees everything as renewed”67—“I am amazed that the wind is tirelessly fresh. / The wind is older than the world” (Another Life, CP 233). And the sea can also be “tireless,” with its “one tense, one crest where the last was” (T 137). Nature opposes a circular logic to the linear logic of history by granting man a different experience of time. While History proceeds, nature recurs. That is why, in poetic knowledge, Reason has to be ruled by “that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition.”68 Nature, for Walcott, is “a place in which what you feel continually is a daily erasure of what was yesterday. Simply from the sunlight, simply from the sea. Yesterday is erased.”69 In a sense, time is eluded because it is experienced as space. A space that can be filled with meaning received and given: with the words of poetry; a space that can open up to Art, where Memory changes to Imagination, and Reason into Rhyme (T 134). History is a “tilted freighter stuck in its sense / of the past, the intellect, an egret’s ewer of light, / stabbing a phrase”; and in an aphorism: “History is insult, energy is intellect” (T 90–91). I was astonished by the similarity between the images that Emerson and Walcott have conceived for the cultivated passivity that is a condition of poetic creativity. The first passage is perhaps the most famous from Emerson’s essays. The second is taken form The Bounty. “Standing on the bare ground,” writes Emerson, “—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate

Emerson, “Circles,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 403. Walcott, “The Muse of History” (1974), in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays, 38. 68 Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 269. 69 Robert Brown & Cheryl Johnson. “Thinking Poetry: An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1990), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 184. 66 67

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through me; I am part or particle of God.”70 And here is Walcott: “Therefore, I foresee myself as blessedly invisible, / anonymous and transparent as the wind, the clear, the unsayable voice” (56). Walcott, too, can cultivate an active passivity. “The only art left is the preparation of grace,” he says in The Bounty, the book where he pauses and reconsiders his own ideals. In The Bounty, ideals are made more human, or less transcendental in Walcott’s meaning of this word: i.e. exceeding reality, the earth: learn, wanderer, to go nowhere […] […] [… ] no longer force your memory to understand […] This is the right light […] [… ] not the expected wonder of self-igniting truth [… ] but these shallows as gentle as the voice of your daughter, while the gods fade […] (78)

The sublime will come now with the poet’s tuning-in with the elemental rhythms of nature, which include death in their cycles: The sublime always begins with the chord ‘And then I saw,’ [… ] and then I saw that darkness which I gradually accepted grow startling in its joy, its promised anonymity [… ] in time and the space that kept it immortal and changing without the least thought of me, […] one dare not ask of the thunder what is its cause. Let it be written: The dark days also I have praised. (59)

The identification with elemental nature, the leaning down to the level of one’s own body again, resuming its rhythms and repossessing it and becoming whole again, makes the poet understand that love and loss are one: I am not weary of the elate, but grey days are useful… … there is no loss without love,

70

Emerson, “Nature,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 10.

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but this too must be muted, like the metronome of breath close to the even heart. Pause. Resume. Pause. Once more. (55)

The Life of Love as the Ultimate Cause: The Logic and Language of Transition Emerson found the ultimate cause of the energy that moves the universe in love: “And, beholding in many souls the traits of the divine beauty […] the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this ladder of created souls.”71 Walcott shares the same view; only, he has chosen Dante as his guide on this spiritual journey of discovery. In an interview with J.P. White, he talks about love as “a radiant light that swirls backward into a center,” and as “the is, the light, the is, the thing that is at the heart of being.”72 At his 2001 reading in Parma, he affirmed that “The most moving, the greatest achievement for me in verse is I think the X X X I I I canto of Paradiso, which begins ‘Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio.’ And it’s all about light. It is a light that is not of the sun: it has no shadows. And the light of course is the light of love.” The reflection, and the metaphor, though, are well seasoned; from Another Life: [the day] had, as usual, the old engine, love nodded acknowledgment to the supreme maker’s hand, yet could not tell you why, or how it moved, its bow of daylight driving to the dark, as if its love and the stunned blue afternoon were life enough. (264)

Walcott’s and Emerson’s ultimate certainty is that life is holy and that it is love. Their way of cherishing life is to accept it always, because to be able to “begin again” is to be absolved for one’s mistakes and to conquer death. “Life is an ecstasy,” wrote Emerson,73 and Walcott, in Another Life, addresses the sun, the source and symbol of light, as a life-giving deity: “O sun, on that morning, / did I not mutter towards your / holy, repetitive resurrection… / ‘Thank you, life?’” (CP 288). Being thankful to the life principle, for a poet, Emerson, “Love” (Essays: First Series, 1841), in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 334. 72 J.P. White, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1990), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 155. 73 Emerson, “Fate,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 963. 71

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is to apprehend it in total respect for its essence, to see stones that shine in their stoniness, Walcott says in The Bounty, and to see nothing after the lizard has scuttled (56). And then it is to name all this, considering “a syntax the color of slate, / with glints of quartz for occasional perceptions and / winking mica for wit” (55). It means, in other words, to elaborate a transitional language that follows the shape of things, yields to it, and puts it forth again in expression, following an intellect, or energy, or will, that is wider than one’s self: “now stroke or word or note presume their intent / because of what they are: shape, sound, and stain” (T 57). The result is Walcott’s achievement of the quest he announced in Another Life, when he said that he was seeking “the paradoxical flash of an instant / in which every facet was caught / in a crystal of ambiguities” (CP 200): a medium that could convey life’s unutterable complexity through endless ambiguity. A signifying process that is able to stay open in the very act of defining its meanings is the only one able to satisfy the poet’s paradoxical need to continually structure his perceptions and undo his own structures in order to begin again, because nature should not be reduced “to the service / of praising or humbling men”; because there is a yes without a question, there is assent founded on ignorance in the mangroves plunged to the wrist, repeating the mangroves plunging to the wrist, there are spaces wider than conscience. (CP 280)

All this Walcott has finally realized in the fluxional metaphor of light in Tiepolo’s Hound, which works like Emerson’s poetic prose: by releasing its total meaning through subsequent renamings of its reference—or punctual recordings of recurrences—a technique that typically compels the reader into the hermeneutic circle.

The Ethics of Poetry’s Praxis Although the list of similarities that one can gather between Emerson’s and Walcott’s world-view and aesthetic could be extended, I would like to add here only some coincidences in the two authors’ positions in relation to the ethics of poetic praxis.

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Two of them are the issues of influence and of impersonality in art. As for the latter, T.S. Eliot and his “Tradition and the Individual Talent” may have been Walcott’s channel of derivation, especially since Eliot’s own influence on Walcott’s early poetry is so self-evident that it does not require any demonstration. In “Uses of Great Men,” Emerson wrote that he liked “a master standing firm on legs of iron,” but he found him greater when he could abolish himself, and all heroes.74 For his part, Walcott has often observed that much bad poetry is being written today in the U S A because young poets are taught to whine about their private sorrows instead of inscribing them in a universal meaning,75 The statement, in its formulation, reminds one almost literally of Emerson’s motivation for his own admiration of Dante, where, after having lamented the absence in American letters of the genius–poet, he praises Dante for having “dared to write his autobiography in colossal cipher, or into universality.”76 On influence, Emerson expressed a view that was echoed in Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and resonates in Walcott’s conception of ‘mimicry’. Emerson wrote in “English Literature” that “The influence of great minds is always salutary,”77 and that “The great men never hinder us.”78 In “Shakespeare”, he also said that “no great men are original,”79 something that Walcott would seem to have read to write in his turn, in “The Muse of History,” that “Fear of imitation obsesses minor poets,” and that “the great poets have no wish to be different, no time to be original, that their originality emerges only when they have absorbed all the poetry which they have read, entire.”80 Finally, I would like to contribute to the revision of the once common misreading of both Emerson and Walcott as incurable optimists by borrowing a distinction from Morse Peckham, who was among the first to observe

74 Emerson, “Uses of Great Men” (Representative Men, 1850), in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 625. 75 Robert Brown & Cheryl Johnson, “Thinking Poetry: An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1990), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 187; Milan Seminar. 76 Emerson, “The Poet,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 465. 77 Emerson, The Early Lectures, ed. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller & Wallace E. Williams (Cambridge M A : Belknap Press of Harvard U P , 1959–72), vol. 1: 230. 78 Emerson, The Early Lectures, vol. 3: 215. 79 Emerson, “Shakespeare; or, the Poet” (Representative Men, 1850), in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 710. 80 Walcott, “The Muse of History” (1974), in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays, 62.

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that Emerson was “not an optimist, but a redemptionist.” “The optimist,” he wrote, “thinks that the progress of the race is automatic. The redemptionist thinks that if man will truly understand his situation, he can redeem himself and the world, and permeate both with a radiant and permanent value.”81 Like Søren Kierkegaard—the representative of another group of thinkers of whom Walcott is very suspicious—Emerson and Walcott think that redemption is a spiritual achievement that lies not in overcoming alienation but in plunging into alienation in total solitude, with “no assurance of what, if anything, might lie beyond it”; in accepting nature’s and one’s own incoherence and absurdity, because “nature is not to be mastered but loved.”82 For Emerson and Walcott, and Nabokov, this is the only authentic engagement with reality. Its harshness can be sustained only thanks to an ironic distancing that is learned through the experience of loss—the loss of a person, a people, a culture. To develop a redemptive power means to become able to make the conscious choice of cherishing a love object without yielding to the temptation of possessing it. In other words, it means developing a will to care, and believe, in the constant awareness of the proximity of loss and finitude—an ability that can be more easily acquired in the condition of weightlessness that Julia Kristeva attaches to the foreign writer, “who, belonging to nothing, can feel as appertaining to everything, and to an entire tradition.”83 Writers like Nabokov, and Walcott, have gained worlds by accepting the loss of their exclusive attachment to a single one. Acceptance of endings, though, and the sudden, mysterious reversal of sorrow into joy, is not something to be learned but experienced. It is something that cannot be communicated but only expressed in the paradoxical language of poetry. In the redemptive words of The Bounty: “the running stream’s bliss / contradicts the self-importance of despair / by these glittering simplicities, water, leaves, and air, / that elate dissolution which goes beyond happiness” (27). In Tiepolo’s Hound, at the saddest moment in the life of the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, when he loses his little daughter Jeanne, the logic of positivistic reason and that of a healing ritualistic prayer are intentionally juxtaposed. If “all the light in paint could not restore / her

Morse Peckham, “Emerson’s Prose” (1969), American Transcendental Quarterly 21.1 (Winter 1974): 73. 82 Morse Peckham, “Emerson’s Prose,” 73. 83 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (Étrangers à nous-mêmes, 1988; New York: Columbia U P , 1991): 32. 81

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short life ravaged by an unfair fever,” “every stroke he made / absorbed her absence; with calm, even / paint he built his blue. This was the way he prayed” (86). The whole poetic of Pissarro’s painting is described in the book as a celebration of light’s power to redeem ordinary objects: as an art that “cherishes the plain and the repetitive: light in a kitchen, / […] and sunlight shot with rain, / things without grandeur in their modest shine” (65). When “delight in light remains unaffected” through the world’s temptations and trials, even Pissarro’s “greys have joy,” and the rusting roof he paints contains a muted bliss (62).

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Ex-Centric Manners:

Walcott and Nabokov’s New Paradigm for the Writer of the Twenty-First Century

The more particular you get, the more universal you become.1

P

the occurrence of coincidences as the result of our intense focusing on a particular object of interest, more a subjective than an objective phenomenon. But when I realized that my reading of Nabokov’s last book, Look at the Harlequins! (1974), was shedding so much light on certain narrative techniques employed by Walcott in Tiepolo’s Hound, I decided that the fact must have a wider significance. This time, the theoretical reservation I had concerned the propriety of comparing a fiction-writer’s techniques with those of a poet, but Walcott himself soon came to my rescue. In July 2001, he opened a press conference at the Brunelleschi Hotel in Milan by stating that Tiepolo’s Hound was different from his previous book, The Bounty (1997), in that it had a story. Actually, Tiepolo’s Hound tells two stories: a biography—that of the Impressionist Jewish-Caribbean painter Camille Pissarro—and an autobiography, that of the amateur (but serious) painter and successful Caribbean poet Derek Walcott. Both artists were born on a small island in the Caribbean, Pissarro on St Thomas and Walcott on St Lucia. Both faced the dilemma of exile for the sake of their art and saw the consequences of their opposite choices. Pissarro became an émigré, whose palette was dimmed by the tints of the misty capital of nineteenth-century European art; Walcott became a wanderer—or, rather, a commuter—based on his island of origin, who would 1

SYCHOLOGY EXPLAINS

Robert D. Hamner, “Conversation with Derek Walcott” (1977), in Conversations with Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 24.

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develop a poetic inspired by the light of the Caribbean. It is already clear that success has rewarded him more than it did Pissarro, although the most intimate and disrupting doubt of the Caribbean artist is formulated in the book around the transcendent worth of his work. Moreover, before The Bounty, Walcott had written a real narrative in verse, the epic (and partly autobiographical) poem Omeros (1990), which in 1992 had gained him the Nobel Prize. This fact, together with an important and acute statement by another great writer, Jorge Luis Borges, oriented my reflection on the genre of Walcott’s long narratives in verse. In his Harvard lectures, Borges said that he wished that, since the novel was exhausting itself as a literary form, the telling of a tale and the reciting of a poem would come together again and make something important happen in world literature. This would be nothing less than the rebirth of the epic, a genre in which a story is told but also sung, without our perceiving the two modes of poetic utterance as distinct. Borges even foresaw that this would happen in the U S A .2 Borges’s prophecy made me think that Walcott’s revival of the genre could be considered its possible fulfilment because of some coincidences with his life and late poetic. Nowadays, the Caribbean poet can surely be said to belong to the scene of contemporary American poetry. More than this, he has gained himself a firm position on the scene of world poetry, where in the future he may eventually gain the accolade of ‘the new Homer’. The last edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature states that American poetry “has been greatly influenced by the presence on American soil (and in American universities) of poets like […] Seamus Heaney, Czesław Miłosz […] and Derek Walcott.”3 As Paula Burnett reports in her book on Walcott, the poet acknowledges his debt to American English when he affirms: “the inflection of language is not English-accented but American-accented, and what we really are speaking, however defensively the English may feel about it, is we are all speaking American.”4

2 Jorge Luis Borges, L’invenzione della poesia: Le lezioni americane, ed. Calin–Andrei Mihailescu (“The Craft of Verse,” Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Harvard University; Milan: Mondadori, 2001): 55. 3 Norton Anthology of American Literature, gen. ed. Nina Bayme (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 5th ed. 1998), vol. 2: 2411. 4 Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (Gainesville: U P of Florida, 2000): 132–33.

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Walcott’s determination to elaborate a form that would tell a story and be sung at the same time has been explicit since, at the latest, the writing of Omeros. In his Milan reading of 2000, he declared of his “epic” in verse that because of the Homeric tribute—I tried to pay tribute, as an English poet, or a poet writing in English, to great poets of European culture— then the long line, the hexametric line, which was wider than the iambic line, and in that sense, it was like a horizon. The line had a succession of strokes, in terms of the scansion, which would be like anything—like a sail. The hexameter would give you more than one rest, one caesura. You could have a couple of caesuras in a hexametric line. So you could rest, like prose, and telling a story.

Another revival that Walcott proposed during his Milan seminar of 2002 was the writing of drama in verse. I remember how resolute he was in asserting that the only hope that theatre had to be born again in our times from its own ashes was that young poets would think of writing drama, and he pointed to Eliot’s plays as a model to imitate. The last prompt I needed to convince myself of the opportunity to compare Walcott’s and Nabokov’s narrative styles came again from Walcott himself, who, during his 2001 creative writing seminar in Milan, declared that he found Nabokov’s prose extraordinary, and that he much admired the Russian-American writer’s use of the English tongue. What he admired particularly in Nabokov was a kind of inventiveness of which only bilingual writers are capable. He was also talking about his friend Joseph Brodsky, and, I suspect, about himself. One could not avoid recalling, on that occasion, that as a St Lucian, Walcott, too, has been exposed all his life to multiple linguistic codes, ranging from literary Standard English and the French patois spoken on the island, through Trinidadian creole English, to Kingston’s ‘Patwa’. From my perspective, Walcott’s comment meant two important things: first, that Walcott had read widely in Nabokov; secondly, that he shared with him a boundless passion for manipulating language, and for more than that, as I found out later on in my research, some of the least surprising discoveries being common derivations from Emerson, an idealistic and Platonic frame for their thinking, and a Romantic conception of art as a combination of inspiration and artistry—in Nabokov’s words, “a divine game […] in which man comes nearest to God through becoming a true creator in his own

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right.”5 The last encouraging information I gathered came from Patricia Ismond’s study of Another Life, where she reports Walcott’s acknowledgement of Nabokov’s The Gift as a liberating influence. While he was writing Another Life, Walcott was reading and then reviewing The Gift, and both books display the artistic treatment of autobiographical material, aiming at the distillation, in re-creation, of the inner essence of lived experience. Moreover, The Gift explores a theme that has become particularly dear to Walcott, which is “the integrity and authority of the inner truth of the lived experience, over and above strict accuracy, even to the extent of radical departure from and editing of the actual experience.”6 There are historical facts that can explain these affinities between two authors who might otherwise be seen as somewhat remote from each other. Both Walcott’s and Nabokov’s lives have put them in situations where they had reason to feel on the margins of a dominant host culture. Nabokov was a Russian émigré in the U S A of the 1940s, and Walcott was educated in the literary and cultural tradition of the British Empire, and has also been exposed to the economic and cultural imperialism of the U S A in the Caribbean. Both, however, moved from their respective forms of marginalization to a privileged, autonomous position at the centre of world culture. This move was both physical and intellectual. Geographically, from being an émigré (Nabokov) and risking becoming one (Walcott), they came to thrive in places that would be amenable to their writing, put them in more immediate touch with world literature, and allow them to move between continents and their cultures. Mentally, they were drawn into a position of independence and boldly embraced it. From here, they freely elected their masters and built their own sense of belonging to a culture and to a literary tradition, or to more than one.

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5 Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (San Diego C A , New York & London: Harcourt Brace, 1981): 106. 6 Patricia Ismond, Abandoning Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott’s Poetry (Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago: The Press, U of the West Indies, 2001): 143, commenting on Walcott’s review “A Great Russian Novel,” Sunday Guardian (19 April 1964): 15.

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From the ‘Margins’ to the ‘Centre’ In a characteristically American way, both Nabokov and Walcott turned a condition of disadvantage and vulnerability into one of advantage and strength. Of both it can be said that they spontaneously assumed aspects of the American mind as their own—basically, the Emersonian doctrine of selfreliance, fuelled in their case by the regenerative experience of being able to express themselves on American soil. Walcott’s view of the U S A sounds ultimately positive: Even if there is negative evidence politically, the America the people love and believe in is an America that is fairly well realized in terms of the individual. Now this is not to be blind to the realities of ghettoes, racial prejudice, anti-semitism, rich or monolithic capitalism. I’m talking about a place where there is a sense of equality.7

At the same time, in fact, both Nabokov and Walcott have kept a critical distance from other aspects, which they have found less pleasant or less ethical, such as racism, violence, conformism, mass culture, provincialism, and consumerism.8 Both of them have expressed gratitude for their adoption by American universities and institutions whose support allowed their careers to bloom. “I find I am able to make a living in America,” said Walcott in 1979, “and I owe America a great deal for its recognition and the fact that I can work here.”9 Finally, the point of arrival of both Nabokov’s and Walcott’s separate but parallel paths has been the development of self-confidence and determination in building one’s own identity as a writer. The first sense in which they have paradoxically become ‘central’ in Western culture, then, is by becoming emblematic of a way of composing a writer’s literary identity. The consciousness of the availability of different cultural and literary models that accompanies geographical dislocation led them to repossess their own heritage with a renewed sense of belonging, and 7 Edward Hirsch, “An Interview with Derek Walcott,” in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 62. 8 For Walcott’s position on contemporary (and not only) American culture, beside the interview with Hirsch, see also “Sharing in the Exhilaration: An Interview with Derek Walcott,” intv. Natasha Sajé & George Handley, A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 32.2 (April 2001): 129–42. 9 Edward Hirsch, “An Interview with Derek Walcott,” in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 56.

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at the same time to feel free to enrich it with elements taken from world literature. Their examples end up presenting new, hybrid identities that claim to be at the same time local and universal. “The more particular you get, the more universal you become,” Walcott has declared in an interview,10 openly relying on the same faith in the universal value of human feelings and intuitions that in his most enthusiastic essay made Emerson exhort his readers to speak their “latent conviction,” “and it shall be the universal sense.”11

Bilingualism The most powerful tool that writers like Nabokov and Walcott who set out from the ‘margins’ have in their hands is bilingualism—and in Nabokov’s case one should even say, at least, trilingualism, although Walcott, too, has claimed “a three language background: French Creole, English Creole, and English.”12 A unique knack for word-play marks the style of both authors. As Elizabeth K. Beaujour reminds us in her entry on Nabokov’s bilingualism in the Garland Companion to Valdimir Nabokov, George Steiner has rightly claimed that a polylinguistic matrix was the determining factor in Nabokov’s life and art and that “the multi-lingual, cross-linguistic situation is both the matter and form of Nabokov’s work.”13 In a certain sense, the same could be said of Walcott, who writes of being divided to the vein between his African heritage and the English tongue he loves (“A Far Cry from Africa,” CP 18), and who was born and still partly lives in the Caribbean, where a situation of heteroglossia is the rule, and only usage sanctions language,14 although he has declared that, while he has great joy in speaking and using French creole, he writes poetry in English because English is the language in which he thinks.15 This means that, though to a lesser degree, his writing is also marked, like Nabokov’s, by code-switching and polyglot communication, but also that, as bilingual writers, both Nabokov and Walcott have a particular awareness of 10 Robert D. Hamner, “Conversation with Derek Walcott” (1977), in Conversations with Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 24. 11 Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 259. 12 Edward Hirsch, “An Interview with Derek Walcott,” in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 58. 13 Elizabeth K. Beaujour, “Bilingualism,” 41. 14 Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics, 127. 15 Walcott, “Interview with Michelle Yeh,” Literary Imagination 4.3 (Fall 2002): 298.

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the inherent separability of sign and referent, which tends to develop into “a mastery of the potential for defamiliarization provided by even slight variations of vocabulary and levels of language.” “Bilinguals,” Beaujour concludes, “are particularly good at seeking out patterns, have a heightened sense of the relativity of things, and greater than usual tolerance for certain kinds of ambiguities.”16 They seem to inhabit Homi Bhabha’s cultural interstices between fixed identifications, where the possibility opens up “of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” and creative invention can be introduced into existence.17 As I have already remarked, certain postcolonial theories make use of the modernist conception of exile as a privileged state of consciousness. Paul Giles actually reads the “double vision” or “truest eye” of Bhabha’s migrant as a legacy of the modernists’ understanding of knowledge as “a transnational phenomenon giving rise to a universalism susceptible of being recuperated in aesthetic terms.”18 The rest of this chapter will explore exemplary defamiliarizing techniques that both my authors have used, and which have brought both of them to seek out new patterns for autobiographical narratives that show clear signs of their heightened sense of the relativity of things and foster a revealing kind of ambiguity. In other words, it will provide evidence of how Nabokov’s and Walcott’s new paradigm for the writer of our time has produced in them similar poetic and stylistic inclinations. My demonstration, however, will head in the opposite direction, starting with my own experience of the effects of Nabokov’s and Walcott’s techniques on the readers of their narratives.

Self-Reflexivity and Involution The most evident features that Walcott and Nabokov share are self-reflexivity and involution. The two narrative methods are in fact basically one, and their names simply indicate two different stages of the same process: operation and effect. In both Nabokov’s novels and Walcott’s narrative poems, the text’s allusions to itself are at the same time signs of an ongoing reflection upon its own status and the weapons of its own deconstruction—and Elizabeth K. Beaujour, “Bilingualism,” 37. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 4, 9. 18 Paul Giles, “American Literature in English Translation: Denise Levertov and Others,” P M L A 119.1 (January 2004): 31. 16 17

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destruction—as fiction. The term “involution” has been made familiar in Nabokov studies by Alfred Appel, who, in his introduction to The Annotated “Lolita”, has written that “an involuted work turns upon itself, is selfreferential, conscious of its status as a fiction, and […] allegorical of itself.”19 Appel has applied this definition to a significant cluster of Nabokov’s most typical writing techniques, including authorial voice (and more specifically authorial intrusions, that deny the book any reality except that of ‘book’); characters that regard their own authenticity as suspect, or that readily communicate with their creators; parody, coincidence, patterning (the logomachist’s penchant); allusion (i.e. references to art and literature); and the devices of the work-within-the-work and of the staging of the novel.20 Examples could be provided of each of these techniques in both Nabokov and Walcott, but a particularly representative one will help me unfold my argument. In the process of his own exemplification, Appel says that the ideally involuted sentence would simply read “I am a sentence.”21 An application of this formula can be found both at the end of Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins!, where the ideally involuted autobiography actually reads “I propose to conclude this autobiography,”22 and in Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound, where the ideally involuted line actually reads “I remember stairs in couplets” (7). Only the reader who is familiar with the whole text, though, can interpret this line correctly, aware of the fact that the sign “stairs,” in Tiepolo, is used from the beginning as a metaphor for the poem’s couplets, so that the selfreflexive effect here is multiplied, and meaning, in fact, involutes. Self-reflexivity involves self-reference on the part of the author and requires the reader to observe the principle of the hermeneutic circle in his interpretation of the text. In order to be able to understand and enjoy Look at the Harlequins! the reader needs to be aware simultaneously not only of the whole text, but also of its author’s oeuvre, and of his biography, too—that is, of the entire macro-text of the author’s life and work, as if this were a continuum in which the borders between fact and fiction are blurred. This means that a competent reading of the text can only be a second reading, or—better still—a third or a fourth. The text is realized through its sub19 Alfred Appel, Jr., “Introduction” to Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated “Lolita”, ed. Appel (1961; New York: Vintage, 1997): xxiii. 20 Alfred Appel, Jr., “Introduction” to Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, xxiii–xxxiii. 21 Alfred Appel, Jr., “Introduction” to Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, xiii–xiv. 22 Nabokov, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov, 1969–1974 (New York: Library of America, 1996): 745.

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sequent readings, because only its totality can illuminate the meaning of its details, which, at the same time, make up that totality. In addition to this, Walcott has a propensity for belated or postponed revelation of the connections of details to their proper context, and Nabokov has a perverse penchant for what Vladimir E. Alexandrov aptly defines as “deception through concealment,” or the “hermeneutic imperative.”23 This formal device reflects the structure of Nabokov’s epiphanies and is aimed at making the reader experience them in his/her turn as cognitive insights into a transcendental reality. Joyce is a well-known source for both Walcott and Nabokov. Walcott admires Ulysses for its “infinite sequences of epiphanies.”24 Nabokov’s epiphanies, just like Joyce’s, and Walcott’s, are made of “a sudden fusion of varied sensory data and memories, a feeling of timelessness, and intuitions of immortality,” a perceptual, psychological, and spiritual experience that is intimately connected with the writer’s conception of artistic inspiration.25 In the hermeneutic imperative, Alexandrov explains, details that are in fact connected are hidden within context that conceal the true relations among them. This narrative tactic puts the burden on the reader to either accumulate the components of a given series or to discover the one detail that acts as the “key” for it; when this is achieved, the significance of the entire preceding concealed chain or network is retroactively illuminated. This process of decipherment that Nabokov imposes on his readers has far-reaching implications. Since the conclusion that the reader makes depends on his retaining details in his memory, he appears to have an atemporal insight into some aspect of the text’s meaning; he is thus lifted out of the localized, linear, and temporally bound reading process in a manner resembling how characters’ epiphanies remove them from the quotidian flow of events within the world of the text.26

This cognitive experience is very close to the acolyte’s devotion that Walcott describes in Tiepolo’s Hound as annihilating the initiate’s sense of narrative time: Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Otherworld (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1991): 7. Sharon Ciccarelli, “Reflections Before and After Carnival: An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1979), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 36. 25 Vladimir E. Alexandrov, “ ‘ The Otherworld’,” in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Alexandrov (New York & London: Garland, 1995): 569. 26 Alexandrov, “ ‘ The Otherworld’,” 569–70. 23 24

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T HE C ROWNING OF A P OET ’ S Q UEST in that stroke of light that catches a hound’s thigh, the paint is all that counts, no guilt, no pardon, no history, but the sense of narrative time annihilated in the devotion of the acolyte. (T 58)

For both Nabokov and Walcott, the aim and effect of the hermeneutic-imperative technique is to induce the reader into the pleasure of the intellectual gymnastics he needs to engage in to make out the meaning of the text, but also to make him aware that more meanings are possible, of which the first that comes to mind may not be the best—nor may be the second. Ultimately, Nabokov’s and Walcott’s writing techniques operate on the reader’s response. Their ultimate goal is to awaken the reader’s awareness of his own perceptual activity: to make him aware of how it works and where it locates him in his relation not only to the Other—which would be the postmodern articulation of a postmodern concern—but to the entire Not-Me, in Emerson’s accurate philosophical definition of Nature, including all that faces the self in the process of knowing: i.e. all that the subject individuates as different from itself in the process of thinking.27 Ultimately, Nabokov’s and Walcott’s kind of writing affects the reader’s perception in the sense of the Emersonian transcendental belief that perception is fatal, altering not only the perceiver but also the world’s consciousness. In other words, these writers’ stylistic choices are dictated by the focus of their interest, which is a probing of the ontological status of reality. More precisely, the question would be the relationship between subjective perception and objective reality, which in contemporary writing is often dramatized as the relationship between fiction and reality. This is why the writing inevitably becomes the writing of one’s own experience and the development of one’s own consciousness of the relationship between inner and outer reality—i.e. the autobiographical narrative of an artist’s Bildung.

The Theme of Memory Both Nabokov and Walcott are deeply involved in the great modernist theme of memory and of its use in the retrieval of the past in art. Memory is the Muse of the narrator in Speak, Memory (1967), a book by Nabokov that is 27


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an overt autobiography overtly yielding to a fictive heightening of facts—a symmetrical generic variation on Look at the Harlequins!, which is an overt fiction overtly yielding to heavy autobiographical adumbration. Memory is the implicit Muse of the autobiographical narrator in Tiepolo’s Hound, where art is also presented as man’s response to his experience of the loss of things. Both writers seem to have concluded that complete recovery of the past is impossible, because the power of memory is limited. In fact, their works celebrate the power of memory: they are Romantic exaltations of the power of memory to re-create a reality, in the fictive world of art, whose value is infinitely superior to that of merely lived—i.e. received—experience. This is the core of Walcott’s complex and carefully knit aesthetic in Tiepolo’s Hound. The autobiographical narrator’s encounter with his artistic ideal in the perfectly rendered detail of the light on a dog’s inner thigh causes his quest for the same when he loses it because of a dimming memory. He comes, in fact, to doubt that he has seen the elusive, “fucking dog” in a painting by Veronese and starts tracking it in a catalogue of Tiepolo’s paintings.28 While introducing the book at the University of Milan, in 2000, Walcott recounted this episode as an actual experience he had, and which caused the writing of Tiepolo’s Hound. He thus blurred intentionally the borderline between the auctorial and narratorial figures in the book. Unable to find the inspiring painting again, Walcott reached an impasse: “Now, here’s a mystery to me. Is my memory more accurate than the thing itself? Is what I remember more accurate?” His ultimate, unavoidable, decision was to trust his memory, rather than “the real thing,” because his memory was “too overwhelming”; or to make the best of what Nabokov once termed “the logical impossibility to relate the dubious reality of the present to the unquestionable one of remembrance.”29 “Nothing, no angle, can corroborate the angle that I see when I think of the dog,” Walcott added, because the process of memory is “close to a dream” and releases the same sense of absolute reality. In fact, a stronger one: “when you get up after a dream, and you disbelieve where you are, for a while, because what is more real is what you just dreamt.” The bolder Nabokov, in Strong Opinions, had brought the idea to its extreme, expressing it in its preferred, paradoxical terms: “I tend more

28 According to Bruce King, “Tiepolo imitated Veronese’s dogs and also included them in the scenes he painted”; Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, 628. 29 Nabokov, “Ada, or Ardor” (1969), in The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov, 1969–1974 (New York: Library of America, 1996): 200.

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and more to regard the objective existence of all events as a form of impure imagination.”30 Walcott’s memory—he said in his Milan reading—was still seeing the painting, while his reason was suggesting him that perhaps he had never really seen it. He then decided to grant a firmer ontological authority to the remains of a past perception than to the evidence that could have come from the renewal of a perception. This fiction—which no one will ever be able to demonstrate is a fiction— is a figure for Walcott’s experience of the power of art to reproduce life in a special version. Art uses memory but is better than memory. It harnesses the energy generated by the emotions preserved in our memory to fuel imagination, the faculty that fills in the gaps and polishes the contours of a new representation of those same emotions. Art is the offering of the fresh perception of a lived experience through the conscious, skilful, and hidden articulation of its existential meaning. Walcott’s pursuing the “dog’s thigh” in Tiepolo’s Hound is a figure for his quest of the poetic ideal of a “colloquial stroke,” capable of eliciting a feeling of immediacy that is more vivid and credible—and finally more satisfying—than his dimmed memory. This is spur for the goal of exactitude in the poetic of writers who have followed one another diachronically but who inhabit the same aesthetic paradigm. They are visual (and visionary) writers like Dante, Emerson, Nabokov, and Walcott. In the past, their poetic images would have been compared to paintings. Nowadays, their narrative techniques are sometimes described as cinematic.

Postmodern Techniques and Romantic Creativity Just like Dante, from whom he has learned so much, Walcott writes his poetic fiction as if he were taking shots with a video camera. Tiepolo opens on a Sunday morning in the mid-nineteenth century, along the Danish arches of Dronningens Street in Charlotte Amalie, St Thomas. It stops on the closeups of two of the protagonists—a black mongrel dog and the young Camille Pissarro. Then it cuts first to contemporary Port of Spain, Trinidad, by means of a lap dissolve on a black dog, and finally to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where it zooms in on a painting whose “slash of pink on the inner thigh / of a white hound […] so exact in its lucency” stops

30

Nabokov, Strong Opinions (1973; New York: Vintage, 1990): 154.

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Walcott’s heart, and becomes the emblem of the “epiphanic detail” that in art “illuminates an entire epoch” (7–8). These sequences from two separate narrative lines, with all the time-shifts this succession involves, is the basic, most frequent device through which the fiction declares its own artificiality. In writers like Walcott and Nabokov, this self-reflexive, involuting tendency serves the purpose of communicating to the reader the author’s experience of a precise kind of creativity. This is the shaping of an artifact as an act repeating a personal cognitive experience, the profound apprehension of things in terms of a sudden revelation to one’s consciousness of the total shape of perception. Let us recall, once again, and more expansively, Emerson’s statement that “perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of time, all mankind,—although it may chance that no one has seen it before me. For my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.”31 In a spiritual condition of self-reliance, individual perception is believed to be able to contribute to the consciousness of humanity as a whole. And an act of consciousness is a fact that occurs irreversibly in our mind, a permanent, and eventually collective acquisition. Nabokov’s and Walcott’s writing techniques stage this event and the heightening of its intensity in the attempt to make it more real than life, because inner reality, after Kant, is the only possible reality, and inner reality, after American Pragmatism and European Existentialism, is more authentic than outer reality, hence preferable to it, because more valuable. This is also the core of Nabokov’s parody and deconstruction of the autobiographical genre in Look at the Harlequins! The narrator in the novel is as unreliable as most of Nabokov’s narrators. He is nicknamed McNab by one of the characters, and he tells the story of his “three or four” marriages, and of his career as a writer. This career appears to be suspiciously akin to Nabokov’s from the very beginning, but it becomes frighteningly so when McNab asks himself whether he should re-pattern his entire life, abandon his art, and take up chess seriously, or become a lepidopterist. The book ends with McNab recovering his mental health after a paralytic stroke. His healing seems to imply a definitive adjustment to outer reality, but the reader is left questioning his own sense of reality, since what the book has staged before his eyes is the creation of its historical author by his own character, who finally,

31

Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 269.

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appropriately, remembers his ‘real’ name. No need to say that this is Nabokov. “I myself am a fiction,” Walcott will say in The Bounty (50). In fact, both Tiepolo’s Hound and Look at the Harlequins! are deft and cunning manipulations of the autobiographical genre, which shape a literal, and ultimately spiritual, memoir under the pretense of being parodic revisions or reversals of the traditional form. And both experiments, by staging the fictional but apparently more real (than the real) life of an alter ego, serve their authors as a last and definitive test of their own lives: as the vivid though (or because) imaginative representation of what their “other life”—the one they almost chose or might have chosen but finally renounced—could have been. McNab and Pissarro share, respectively, Nabokov’s and Walcott’s aspirations but pursue different routes in realizing them, either in their small detours or in their main turns.32 Nabokov’s Promethean attempt to produce a gigantic act of creation in Look at the Harlequins! by substituting the reality of fiction for that of existence reveals a Romantic temperament under the ostensibly ironic and sceptical mask of Nabokov’s public figure as a writer. Nabokov and Walcott have both shown, in their ambitious constructions and in the freedom of their linguistic manipulations, an unshakeable belief in their authorial powers. No author is dead, either for Nabokov or for Walcott. He is, rather, resuscitated, and appears to be in great shape: in the grand shape of a healthy demiurge. No wonder the highest praise is accorded to technical skill and craftsmanship by both writers. Such an aesthetic necessarily rests on an idealistic world-view. Both Nabokov and Walcott have primarily metaphysical beliefs; I illustrated Walcott’s as I was demonstrating the closeness of his vision to Emerson’s. Nabokov’s belief in “the otherworld” has been recently illuminated brilliantly by such scholars as Vladimir E. Alexandrov and Brian Boyd, who have defined Nabokov’s “faith in the apparent existence of a transcendental, nonmaterial, timeless and beneficient ordering and ordered realm of being,”

32 For a more extended study of Nabokov’s parodic treatment of autobiography in Look at the Harlequins!, see Paola Loreto, “The Feat of a Non-Ordinary Memoirist: The Double Reversal of Autobiography in Vladimir Nabokov’s Look at the Harlequins!” in Proceedings of the X V I I I Biennial International Conference of the Italian Association for North-American Studies “American Solitudes: Individual, National, Transnational”, Bari, 6–8 October 2005, ed. Donatella Izzo, Giorgio Mariani & Paola Zaccaria (Rome: Carocci, 2007): 242–49.

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which is irreducible to the point of view of human experience.33 Moreover, precisely while playing with and testing the modern conception of self-identity as mutable and multifaceted, Nabokov and Walcott have kept a firm grip on the source of their discourse—i.e. their own agency. And by choosing to believe, as a human need, in the indemonstrable existence of the noumenon, they have been able to devote all their mental energies to the cherishing of phenomena, and to the exploration of the possibilities of their creative manipulation by the knowing subject. Nabokov and Walcott are writers who have been able to refashion their craft and ensure the survival of their art. One sign of this survival is the regeneration through metamorphosis of the literary genres they have tackled— the autobiography and the epic poem. Another is the infectious character of their style. Nabokov’s narrative has been the prototype for many later postmodern writers, while Walcott, despite his unfashionable aversion to attitudes that have been labelled ‘postmodern’—basically, a lack of faith in the possibility of making sense through poetry—is in the process of begetting a number of promising siblings.34 Ironically enough, Rei Terada has attributed to him both a modernist tendency to universalize—in his conception of history as contextual and relational, and in his figurative, artificial, but at the same time intelligible use of language—and the feat of a “metaphorization of himself as the figure of the contemporary American poet,” which “will be difficult to assail,” and which involves an inclination “to read Postmodernly.”35 There is, thus, a second, more relevant sense—besides that of shaping a new paradigm for the writer of the twenty-first century—in which Nabokov and Walcott have moved their marginal position to the centre. The ‘centre’ Vladimir E. Alexandrov, “ ‘ The Otherworld’,” in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Alexandrov (New York & London: Garland, 1995): 568. 34 A description of Walcott’s modernist and postmodern attitudes and techniques has been carried out by Terada in Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry (Boston M A : Northeastern U P , 1992). A similar job has been done for Nabokov by Brian Boyd, “Words, Works and Worlds in Joyce and Nabokov: Or Intertextuality, Intratextuality, Supratextuality, Infratextuality, Extratextuality and Autotextuality in Modernist and Prepostmodernist Narrative Discourse,” Cycnos 12.2 (1995): 5–12., Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1990), and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1991), Herbert Grabes, “A Prize for the (Post-)Modernist Nabokov,” Cycnos 12.2 (1995): 117–24, and David Lodge, “What Kind of Fiction Did Nabokov Write? A Practitioner’s View,” Cycnos 12.2 (1995): 135–47. 35 Rei Terada, Derek Walcott’s Poetry, 225–26. 33

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they have occupied is defined both by the wide recognition their work has received and by the undeniable quality of this work—and I am speaking of its aesthetic quality, a value that their stylistic strategies propose to defend in the face of all fashionable deconstructions, and the only one that poets looking at poets care for. In Joseph Brodsky’s terms, Walcott and Nabokov are “the men from the provinces, from the outskirts,” who do the job of holding when the centre ceases to hold, the guardians “of the civilization grown hollow in the center,” as happens to all civilizations, because they are finite, and because “the outskirts are not where the world ends—they are precisely where it unravels.”36

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36 Joseph Brodsky, “The Sound of the Tide” (1983), in Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1986): 165, 169–70.

3

The Escher-Effect in the Double Narrative of an Artist’s Bildung: Walcott’s Autobiography in Verse

The true autobiographer will cultivate the schizophrenic gift.1

The Triple Achievement of Tiepolo’s Hound

T

IEPOLO’S

H O U N D came out when Walcott had travelled double the distance that had taken him midway upon the journey of his life. Thus, it has rightly proven to be the final achievement of at least three fundamental goals of his poetic project: a life-long attempt at the autobiography in verse, as Edward Baugh has justly called Another Life, its most relevant precedent;2 the writing of his personal version of a Künstlerroman;3 and the development of a Caribbean or ‘mulatto’ aesthetic, or aesthetic of the island artist, as it has been variously labelled. Though the task of compiling an autobiography in verse had been pursued more overtly in Epitaph for the Young (1949), Another Life (1973), “The Schooner Flight” (1979), and Omeros (1990), it is true that, as Baugh affirms, “Derek Walcott’s poetry constitutes an ongoing fiction of himself,” and that his work as a whole may be regarded as one continuing fiction, a process of self-creation and self-

1 Walcott, “MS One” for Another Life, 9; quoted in Edward Baugh, “The Poet’s Fiction of Self: ‘The Schooner Flight’,” South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (Spring 1997): 313, and in Baugh, Derek Walcott (Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature; Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2006): 90. 2 Edward Baugh, “The Poem as Autobiographical Novel,” 227. 3 Baugh, “The Poem as Autobiographical Novel,” 227.

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discovery that builds a personal myth aimed at making sense of his existence.4 Baugh seems to me to have been, up to now, the most accurate observer of this process, as his four studies cited in this work, have shown.5 He interprets Walcott’s treatment of the autobiographical genre as an ongoing reflection on genre, mode, and voice; and he reads “The Schooner Flight” as the result of that treatment, the proposal of a “mode that mediates between the more subjective/lyric voice and the more impersonal/narrative voice.”6 Baugh’s conclusions offer a sound and useful starting-point for evaluating Walcott’s poetic project. Considering the further development of that “mode” in Omeros and Tiepolo’s Hound, I would add that Walcott’s point of arrival has been a revision—and a resuscitation, in Borges’ terms—of the modern epic genre initiated by Dante Alighieri, Walcott’s lifelong model in Western literature.

The Modern Epic Walcott’s “epic streak” had been noticed by Joseph Brodsky well before the triumph of Omeros. Already in 1983, Brodsky was pointing to Walcott’s “tendency to write in cycles” and to his “truly epic” descriptive powers.7 Walcott’s treatment of the epic form, though, has been widely studied and discussed, especially in response to the publication of Omeros.8 What I find relevant, in the retracing of the history of the modern epic, is that Dante’s own radically innovative revision had introduced the narrator as a charac4

Baugh, “The Poet’s Fiction of Self: ‘The Schooner Flight’,” South Atlantic Quarterly

96.2 (Spring 1997): 312–14.

Baugh, “The Poem as Autobiographical Novel”; Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision (London: Longman, 1978); “The Poet’s Fiction of Self: ‘The Schooner Flight’,” South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (Spring 1997): 311–20; Derek Walcott (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2006). 6 Baugh, “The Poet’s Fiction of Self: ‘The Schooner Flight,” 312. 7 Brodsky, “The Sound of the Tide” (1983), in Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1986): 167, 173. 8 See, among others, Robert D. Hamner, Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s “Omeros” (Columbia & London: U of Missouri P , 1997): esp. ch. 1; Joseph Farrell, “Walcott’s Omeros: The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World,” South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2 (Spring 1997): 247–74; Paula Burnett, “Derek Walcott’s Omeros” [review], Wasafiri 14 (Autumn 1991): 32; Isabella Zoppi, “Omeros ‘Ομερος: Derek Walcott e il poema epico contemporaneo,” Africa, America, Asia, Australia 18 (1995): 71–94, tr. as “Omeros, Derek Walcott and the Contemporary Epic Poem,” Callaloo 22.2 (1999): 509–28. 5

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ter—indeed, as the protagonist—of the diegesis, a precedent that in my view fully answers Walcott’s main objection to considering Omeros an epic. In 1992, in an interview with Rebekah Presson, he claimed that “any work in which the narrator is almost central is not really an epic.” In a way, though, he had contradicted—or corrected—himself by adding that Omeros was not a heroic epic: i.e. a classical epic. There followed his habitual gesture of forestalling any assumption that he might be cultivating his own personality, which I find an unrequired and unnecessary justification of his autobiographical impulse—one that also underlies, I suspect, much of his theorizing on the collective scope of poetry: “I guess that’s what I think of it, that since I am in the book, I certainly don’t see myself as a hero of an epic, when an epic generally has a hero of action and decision, and destiny.”9 Conversely, he had earlier written that all genres are really modes of autobiography, and all autobiographies are forms of fiction, so that “Those who have abandoned poetry for other forms of autobiography like fiction, the long essay and the travel book will remain split down the middle, petrified and Janus-headed.”10 And this is how he appears, in a way, in the narrative style of his most recent autobiographies in verse, which juxtaposes the autobiographical impulse with the epic. In all cases, Walcott’s own revision of the modern epic genre—which I think he has brought to completion in Tiepolo’s Hound—consists of a new, generic blending of the traditionally defined modes of poetry and prose, and of the introduction, in that of poetry, of contemporary narrative techniques. More specifically, Tiepolo’s Hound shares the experimental drive of Another Life, which Baugh had distinguished from an autobiographical poem like Wordsworth’s Prelude (Another Life’s antecedent) because of “the extent to which it moves towards the novel while remaining without question a poem.”11 Tiepolo’s Hound, in fact, is even more experimental than Another Life. For one thing, Walcott’s exploration of the “ever-fresh question of the relationship between poetry and prose”12 finally finds an answer in it and posits a new model. For another, it is not only “a poem which is an autobiography which is a novel”—as Baugh defines Another Life 13—but actually a poem 9 Rebekah Presson, “The Man Who Keeps the English Language Alive: An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1992), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 189. 10 Baugh, “The Poet’s Fiction of Self: ‘The Schooner Flight’,” 312–13. 11 Baugh, “The Poem as Autobiographical Novel,” 227. 12 “The Poem as Autobiographical Novel,” 227. 13 “The Poem as Autobiographical Novel,” 227.

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which is apparently a biography plus an autobiography – in fact, an autobiography plus a biography, or, better still, an autobiography completed on the pretext of a biography—which is, anyway, a novel, because its main fiction is Walcott telling us the story of the life and career of the Jewish-Caribbean Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro. In the second place, Tiepolo’s Hound is the final version of Walcott’s Künstlerroman, and this, again, in the experimental form of a double narrative of the lives of two artists, who were both born in the Caribbean, but who made the opposite choices of becoming an exile and a traveller respectively. This special focus in the poem’s narrative trajectory bears heavily on the third respect in which it should be considered a terminus in Walcott’s oeuvre: namely, its being the poet’s completion of a Caribbean aesthetic that has been thought of in terms of a ‘mulatto’ aesthetic. This I hold to be the only really revolutionary perspective within postcolonial discourse. In “The Muse of History,” Walcott claimed the art and literature of Europe as his own world.14 It is only by containing two worlds, I believe, that one is able to become a traveller instead of an émigré. And it is only by being able to circulate freely between Europe and the Caribbean—or the U S A and the Caribbean—that one can experience the mutual assimilation of two cultures in a new formation, which is a genuine alternative to binary logic because it has overcome all oppositional urges. I am using the word assimilation, here, in the neglected sense of learning and understanding through participation, and not in the sense that is now current in postcolonial studies, of annihilation through absorption. By living the conflict inside himself—that is, inside the individual—Walcott has managed to depoliticize it. He has become able again to look at values with an eye untainted by the struggle for political hegemony and racial domination. He has restored the cultural models he draws on—basically, the Western literary tradition—to the value they had before they were ideologically manipulated. In this perspective, the existence of ideals with which human beings can universally identify is once again recognized as possible and as positive, provided one can and doesn’t have to identify with them; provided one is free to define her-/himself through them and is not forcibly defined by them. This is like reaffirming liberty—and diversity—as an original condition: in my view, the most powerful statement possible of a postcolonial consciousness. It is also a way to evaluate Walcott according to his 14

Walcott, “The Muse of History” (1974), in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays, 63.

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own statement of intentions, of course, a tip on the method of interpretative reading that I gather from Emerson, who had found it in George Fox and recommended it to his contemporaries: “‘Every scripture is to be interpreted by the same spirit which gave it forth,’ is the fundamental law of criticism.”15

A Caribbean Aesthetic It is well known that Walcott’s way of redressing the damages—and dressing the wounds—of History’s perverse memory is to get out of it and into the realm of Art, and to talk poetry instead of politics. In an age that has put its claim for authenticity in the subject’s definition of its own positioning, I find it legitimate for Walcott to have assumed the perspective of the Caribbean artist. As such, the dilemma around which he conceives his definitive autobiography is that of the island artist: whether one feels as a West Indian artist that it is better to be in Paris than to be in St Thomas. “A thing that the West Indian artist has to contemplate all the time,” as he put it in the Milan press conference of 2001, is “the choice of going away for the sake of his work.” Walcott’s answer in Tiepolo’s Hound is quite complex, and that is why it requires four books and 164 pages to be articulated. In the first book, Walcott enunciates the question in the voice of the biographer, who wonders: “is the hope of his exile betrayal? […] isn’t his the old trial / of love forced with necessity, the same crisis / every island artist, despite the wide benediction // of light, must face…?” (24) By the end of the book, Pissarro’s choice is made and Walcott’s verdict has been pronounced in the crisp words “He had to go” (30). This means that Pissarro had no choice because “He was Art’s subject as much as any empire’s” (29). And this is where Walcott substitutes Art for History as the plane for his personal quest. The operation is heavy with consequences, because it effects a reversal of perspective, in which the subject’s needs, values, and responsibilities change completely, beginning with what dictates his sense of belonging and what relationship this has to his place of birth. My way of understanding Walcott’s entire answer to his own question “What would have been his future had he stayed?” (T 29) is that the choice of writing a biography and an autobiography was his expedient to write a double autobiography, consisting both of the narrative of the life he has lived 15


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and of the narrative of the alternative life he could have lived had he made Pissarro’s choice: i.e. the other choice (and the Other’s). Tiepolo’s Hound is Walcott’s “The Road Not Taken.” His revision of the autobiographical genre has been instrumental to his intention to give a very ambiguous account of his own solution to a life’s dilemma. Or perhaps his answer to his own life’s dilemma in Tiepolo’s Hound remains ambivalent because the very writing of this late book is Walcott’s rehearsal of all possible post-facto evaluations of a crucial choice. The speaker of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” recognizes this as the most inessential act compared to the fact that a choice has been made, which is the essential act, in the existential view of Søren Kirkegaard.

The Escher-Effect as the Representation of Empathy Walcott’s discourse on voluntary exile is complex, and it is conveyed by means of a powerful structuring principle that works at many levels throughout the book. Its main point seems to be initially that the geography of a place affects an artist’s technique. A series of passages in the poem shows how the different ambience of Paris changes Pissarro’s palette (“grey light on grey glass, / the changing complexion of his palette” 37) and his way of painting. “Since painting is the chronicle of light” (62), and the days, in Paris, “were a grey drizzle, the same days / over and over; their subtleties would emerge / from repetition” (38). One of these passages depicts at the same time the quality of the rain in Paris and the new Impressionist painting technique. Like an extended metaphor, the four couplets I am quoting below preserve both references. They simultaneously talk about the rain and painting. One could say that they are conceived like a drawing by the Dutch engraver M.C. Escher (1898–1972), in which one vision suddenly turns into another when we stumble on a revealing detail that reframes our perceptual Gestalt and re-orients our sight from a new perspective. In this case, the turning-point is the phrase “the rain’s brushstrokes,” which activates in the reader the frame of reference of painting and is, accordingly, immediately followed by a more explicit reference to Pissarro’s experiments with the new technique: There is nothing to see except the rain on beaded Paris, through soiled window glass, the water seeds in furrows, grain by grain, shrouding Raspail, erasing Montparnasse,

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but from all this, from edges indistinct as mass, through the dissolving drizzle, crowds, carriages, and linden lamps are linked by the rain’s brushstrokes, with fresher skill. (39)

Reading the same passage over will now reveal the double meaning of several words and phrases, like erase, indistinct, and even shrouding and grain by grain. They are what the rain does to the Parisian landscape, and at the same time what Pissarro is thinking he should reproduce of that landscape, in his paintings, and how he should reproduce it, by developing a technique that—in a metaphoric parallel—operates like the rain in Paris, reflects its “brushstrokes.” The hope the artist had expressed in Another Life that the two “disciplines” he was apprenticed in, painting and writing, “might / by painful accretion cohere / and finally ignite” (CP 200–201) has been fulfilled. The advantage of this stylistic device is that it allows a simultaneous double perspective. The passage quoted above starts as Walcott’s narration and gradually reveals itself to be also, contemporarily, Pissarro’s musing over his art in the newly discovered Parisian scene. So we have two possible takes on the same view, which are actually, ultimately, the author’s expression of his double sight—from his own perspective and from Pissarro’s perspective as he can empathically imagine it through the fictionalizing activity that his writing engages in. The way the same structuring principle informs the whole book, on both a larger and a smaller scale, allows Walcott to present two options for existence. In so doing, he dramatizes his inner conflict and its resolution, which is the possibility of evaluating two opposite models equally, and thus to see them as equally valid, if not equally valuable to the same subject. In the process of temporarily identifying himself with the Other, Walcott represents an authentic embrace of diversity. In an interview with Luigi Sampietro, he has neatly described the use he has been able to make of his experience as a mulatto. By avoiding the rejection of guilt in himself, he has granted himself the power of amnesia: “The final thing is to see the thing whole—to see that either side is capable of being oppressor or victim—and to realize that the black aspect of my racial composition can be just as cruel as the white can be.”16 In the process of temporarily identifying himself with Pissarro—his double, the alternative to his own life, the Other—Walcott embraces 16

Walcott, “‘An Object Beyond One’s Own Life’: An Interview with Derek Walcott,” 35.

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diversity. The Escher-like structuring pattern, then, is the expression of Walcott’s powers of empathy and those of the poet, the two personae in Tiepolo’s Hound being justly one. In the following passage, light is a metaphor for the impact on the JewishCaribbean painter of the new, French, physical ambience. At the same time, though, the attentive reader will by now recognize light as a metaphor for artistic inspiration and for the quality of artistic achievement: There was no fury in this light, no glare of exultation like his island sky; instead, its very pigment was the air, as soft in exhalation as a sigh. (33)

Now, is this Pissarro’s perspective or Walcott’s? It is simultaneously both. The use of the past tense carries on the biographical narrative mode, while the reader becomes suddenly aware that the two couplets could equally belong to the autobiographical reflection. The detail that signals the cut to Walcott’s point of view is the word “exultation”—a favorite one with the poet, and much more so because of his awareness of its being an “embarrassing” word to use in poetry, where joy and happiness seem to have gone out of fashion.17 The glare of exultation belongs to Walcott’s island sky, while the air that exhales as softly as a sigh belongs to Pissarro’s Parisian sky. Thus, the Escher-like viewing frame results in a neutral ground on which objects can assume different qualities—and qualities different values—according to the perceptual Gestalt on which the viewer is focusing. Tiepolo’s Hound forces the reader to attach new values to old words, which is the most ambitious aim and the highest achievement of a literary work. The most conspicuous example is the word “privilege.” In the perspective of History, privilege means the arrogant appropriation of power by a nation on the basis of racial prejudice and economic superiority. In the perspective of Geography, it means the bliss of being born in the midst of beauty. In the perspective of Art, it means talent and also the bold appropriation by the artist of the authority to make it new. The same treatment is given in the book, for instance, to the words empire and prodigal. Finally, the Escher-like

17 William Baer, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1993), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 206.

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framing principle in Tiepolo’s Hound seems to expose the process of attributing value as relative. Yet, I am not sure. On the one hand, Walcott seems to say that Pissarro had a right to find “home” in Paris, because “home” for the artist is where he feels that he can be creative. Walcott makes such a serious effort to empathize here that he claims for a while that one can become a native to a place by building a sense of belonging to it, a phenomenon that he explains with another, keen notation on the artist’s psyche: “for a poet, literature is stronger than life.”18 What an artist imagines in the apparent process of remembering—he is implying—is more real than his life’s realities: So too the young painter must have felt in France that the names he knew were not a contradiction for an islander but his given inheritance, as one grew more real and the other hazed into fiction. (93)

On the other hand, Walcott seems to reverse the problem and say that it is wherever it feels like home that the artist will be able to work. It is whatever place can stir the artist’s soul through the shock of recognition of awakened memory that will function as “home” for him: i.e. as the right place in which to produce art, and the right place to be. Paris is fine for Pissarro because when he experiences “the wonder / of forgotten snow” his soul stirs, as innocence whitens his window to a primed surface and the city becomes a blank canvas. He dresses, rushes out and walks through the miracle (40).

The Artist’s Quest as Everyman’s Pilgrimage Walcott gradually and quietly—in truth, almost secretly, along a very indirect path of allusions—links the question of the artist’s location and achievement to his capacity for faith. And here is where the Caribbean autobiography and the Künstlerroman come together. The hardest trial in the artist’s quest is to go through the doubting of his own achievement. In the book, both Pissarro and Walcott experience this ultimate test of their ability to trust their talent and their inspiration. Only, Pissarro seems to be constantly besieged by doubt and particularly beaten by it. Concerning this, Walcott suggests that 18 Derek Walcott, “An Interview with Nancy Schoenberger” (1983), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 89.

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the two artists’ destinies were already determined by their birthplaces: “Doubt was his patron saint, it was his island’s / the saint who probed the holes in his Saviour’s hands //… and questioned resurrection,” he writes. “Saint Thomas, the skeptic, Saint Lucia, the blind / martyr who on a tray carried her own eyes” (39). Considering Walcott’s fondness for wordplay, which dictates so many of his lexical choices, “blind” could also be a possible reference to the idiomatic expression “blind faith.” The choice of climate does the rest: the atmosphere of Paris is the place of doubt as the Caribbean is the place where doubt is dissolved, for “our sun’s unceasing glory through ghostly Decembers / consumes the core of doubt by changelessness” (69). The monodic climate of the Caribbean has no history and knows only one tense (137), like Art, and this would perhaps have cured Pissarro’s “unsettled heart”—had he stayed—which lets his head be filled with doubt (105) and paralyzes his art to the end of his life (155). At the end of the book, though, Walcott seems to absolve him on the grounds, again, of some sort of predestination: “What was his sin?” he asks, and adds: “Where’s no trust there’s no treachery.” Pissarro simply appears not to be one of the saints on whom grace has been freely bestowed. In probing the artist’s vocation in terms of his election by grace, Walcott makes the artist’s quest a particular case of Everyman’s search for maturity. He also reads this maturity in terms of spiritual salvation or justification, thus placing himself in an idealistic, and Emersonian, aesthetic tradition. The artist is that man who answers grace’s calling by offering himself as a medium for its revelation. And the revelation of grace is always an apprehension of Truth, Beauty, and the Good, the three ideas being one and the same. Walcott’s concern in Tiepolo’s Hound is to develop a unique and universal paradigm for the artist’s Bildung on the basis of his personal experience. His discourse takes off from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Caribbean and lands in nineteenth-century Europe. He begins by locating himself geographically and ends up reaffirming a Romantic conception of Art and of the artist. Moreover, he describes his paradigm in terms of an initiatory rite and of an Arthurian romance quest, thus exemplifying Bloom’s theory of Romanticism as “The Internalization of Quest-Romance,”19 in which the poet pursues an “ongoing creation of the Imagination,” “too fierce to be contained

19 Harold Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition (Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 1971): 13–35.

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by nature.”20 The description of the knight–artist’s initiatory journey is articulated in Tiepolo’s Hound in fairly clear and conventional stages, which I will describe in detail in the next chapter. Here I will merely indicate that the culmination of that journey is the artist–hero’s overcoming of self-doubt in the form of a surrender to something larger than himself. This is what makes me disagree with Sarah Phillips Casteel, who, in her otherwise useful article on Walcott’s treatment of autobiography, states that the path he had been walking from Epitaph for the Young through Another Life to Omeros was away from the Romantic individualistic re-writing of Western autobiography toward the self-articulation of a collective Caribbean autobiography. The irony of the article lies in its conclusion, where Casteel confesses that she is finally left puzzling about “the double pull of individualistic and more ‘decentred’ models of the subject on Walcott,” and admits that “the tension between the two poles of individual and community” found within “both canonical and noncanonical western autobiographies” makes it more difficult to disentangle the whole of Caribbean autobiography from its Western counterpart.21 Reed Way Dasenbrock puts the issue in wholly opposite terms, maintaining that postcolonial writers position themselves in the same way as modernist writers: i.e. as elitists committed to a canonical hierarchy in the sphere of literature. Consequently, his answer to Casteel’s perplexity would be fairly simple: “High-Modernist and post-colonial writers unite in refusing the comforting simplicities which divide the relevant traditions in terms of Western and non-Western and ask us to choose between them.”22 A precise distinction between the notions of individuality and originality would have kept Casteel out of trouble. If it is undeniably true—as Walcott himself asserts in “The Muse of History,” his clearest statement against originality—that for Walcott “influence, rather than assertion of one’s own originality, is essential to self-articulation,” this is not enough to conclude that he develops “an anti-romantic sense of self.”23 The symbolic value of the central metaphor of the book—light—would suffice in itself to negate this assumption. Light in Tiepolo’s Hound ultimately represents nothing other (and nothing less) than the artist’s divine inspiration. If there is a sense in Bloom, The Ringers in the Tower, 28, 20. Sarah Phillips Casteel, “Autobiography as Rewriting: Derek Walcott’s Another Life and Omeros,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 34.2 (1999): 28. 22 Reed Way Dasenbrock, “Why the Post in Post-Colonial is not the Post in Post-Modern: Homer – Dante – Pound – Walcott,” Paideuma 29.1–2 (2000): 120–21. 23 Casteel, “Autobiography as Rewriting,” 27. 20 21

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which Walcott’s conception of the artist (but not of Art) is anti-romantic in Tiepolo’s Hound, it is that his figure shouldn’t be romanticized. During his 2001 creative writing seminar in Milan, Walcott insisted that ‘versifier’ is a better designation than ‘poet’ for people who try all their life to learn to write good, accomplished verse.24 The artist’s privilege lies not in his status, but in his ability, or gift, as Walcott likes to call it, which is something he has been granted and for which, therefore, he can take no credit. This, though, takes Walcott’s reference even further back, to Dante’s conception of the artist as an inspired and conscientious artisan—which does not make Walcott’s aesthetic less essentialist or less pledged to the Western tradition, unless we decide to question the essentialism of Thomistic philosophy. The Western origins of Thomism could be debated, and with good reason, but this would bring us back to Walcott’s claim that man’s daemonic memory of historical events is linear, while History’s recurrences are cyclic, which rules out the possibility of apportioning blame to oppressor or victim; in History, cultural influences circulate though civilizations, and it impossible (besides undesirable) to prevent processes of assimilation. I am here arguing against John Thieme’s claim that in Walcott’s Another Life and Omeros “the dimensions of Caribbean epic and autobiographical odyssey are both part of the same quest for personal and regional self-definition in non-essentialist terms.”25 I wonder what can be made, then, of certain of Walcott’s assertions, such as “They [our great poets] reject ancestry for faith in elemental man,”26 and “What is radical in art is eternal.”27

The Autobiography in Verse Edward Baugh’s valuable study of Another Life as an autobiography in verse has proved in many ways prescient. It talked about a verse that wants to share many of the qualities of prose—like the vividness of concrete and circumstantial detail, the portrait of a society, character drawing, and an occasional colloquial tone—while unmistakably preserving the distinguishing

24

Paola Loreto & Luigi Sampietro, “Derek Walcott in Italia,” Poesia 164 (September

2002): 35–36.

John Thieme, Derek Walcott (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 1999): 154. Walcott, “The Muse of History” (1974), in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays, 40. 27 Leif Sjöberg, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1983), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 79. 25 26

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characteristic of poetry, selectivity—i.e. shape, proportion, concentratedness.28 It talked about a verse that, although it is envious of prose and wants to compete with it, has a deep-rooted love and facility in rich verbal music and the mighty line.29 Baugh concluded that Walcott had luckily failed in his hope to imitate Pound’s Cantos (which he considers a monumental failure) in sustaining “one relatively dry, plain, prosy narrative style” throughout Another Life, and that the metaphoric richness and principle had ensured the work’s unity, no matter how close the style sometimes was to prose.30 It is astounding how Walcott has fully become himself in this respect in Tiepolo’s Hound. This is true, by the way, even on the not-so-casual plane of coincidences, which saw both Another Life and Tiepolo’s Hound originate in a prose project: if, as we have seen, Tiepolo’s Hound started as an idea for an introduction by Sigrid Nama to a book of Walcott’s paintings, which somehow evolved into a long poem,31 Another Life had come out of an attempt at writing a prose memoir which eventually broke into verse.32 Moreover, in Tiepolo’s Hound Walcott has continued to experiment with that “prosaic space,” that relaxation and flexibility engendered by the presence of more caesuras in the line which he had already wanted to create for the action of the narrative in Omeros.33 His pentameters and hexameters, in Tiepolo’s Hound, pause within the couplets and take their time to tell a story as they had already begun doing in his modern epic poem (Milan Reading). They assume the tone of prose, and sometimes hit the immediacy of speech, while remaining heavily metaphoric. If the antecedents of Another Life are Wordsworth’s Prelude and Joyce’s Portrait, the antecedent of Tiepolo’s Hound is not so much the Cantos (there Walcott would have failed again) as the Divine Comedy. It is a long, epic poem that tells the story of inner and outer lives of the narrator and of some other characters, and that is even more informed by philosophical and religious thought and even more replete with that immediacy to which, according to Walcott, all poetry should aspire. In his 2001 seminar in Milan, Walcott recommended Dante’s Divine Comedy as the best model for how a metaphor should be constructed. A metaphor, he said, should have the vivid quality of detail that would allow it to be filmed. 28 29 30 31 32 33

Baugh, “The Poem as Autobiographical Novel,” 231. “The Poem as Autobiographical Novel,” 234. “The Poem as Autobiographical Novel,” 234–35. King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, 627. Baugh, “The Poem as Autobiographical Novel,” 228. Walcott, “Derek Walcott on Omeros: An Interview,” 31.

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Walcott’s individual talent within this tradition shows in his attempt to outdo his own models in his search for a substantial hybridization of poetry and prose. Tiepolo’s Hound most resembles a novel (which resembles a movie) when its narration nimbly cuts from one scene to another by means of the closing and opening of the camera on one detail, as in the agile cross-cutting between Pissarro and Monet admiring Turner’s The Fighting Téméraire in 1870 London and Walcott’s father copying the same painting in the St Lucia of the poet’s infancy (76), a placing on an atemporal plane of the artist’s discipline of mimicry. Or, for example, in the scurrilous interjection of the autobiography protagonist “The dog, the dog, where was the fucking dog?” (125), as well as in the afterthought with which the narrator opens the penultimate chapter, introducing a flashback with the beautiful, hesitant nonchalance and intimacy of an old-time omniscient narrator: “I suppose I should have told you about Louveciennes” (154)—and there is the narrative, swiftly and quietly resumed. With the same ease, Walcott continually exposes the fictionality of his narrative through the self-reflexive allusions I have already highlighted, one of the stylistic devices that have been most fashionable, for a while now, in the domain of prose, and many of which were created by Nabokov. “I shift his biography,” writes Walcott, “as he [Pissarro] shifted houses […] not walled facts, their essence” (70). He would heighten them, make out their significance. He would pursue “an altering reality for vision” (70). From Nabokov he must have learned how far this play can be pushed at the reader’s expense. When he parenthetically says of his father, “(I thought I saw him pause in the parenthesis / of our stairs once)” (12), he is pretending to refer to the physical stairs of their St Lucian home while actually alluding to his contemporary act of writing and fictionalizing his own life. The shifted meaning of “parenthesis” here is the clue to his authentic, or primary, act of signifying, while the deceptive framing in past time is his fictive, or secondary, act of signifying. The staging of this inverted process from fiction to reality can compete with Nabokov’s similar artifices, and aims in the same way at reflecting upon the limits and the potential of human perception. Contemporary writers like Nabokov and Walcott endeavour to convey to their readers the essential cognitive experience that Emerson contributed to the “American mind” a century and a half ago, and that the Pragmatists put to good use. This is a knowledge that the only possible and authentic outside is that which is per-

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ceived inside a consciousness—and that the stuff of which consciousness is made is metamorphic. The lines quoted are also further evidence of how close Walcott’s and Nabokov’s use of narrative techniques can come. An exact equivalent can actually be found in the opening of Transparent Things, which reads: “Here’s the person I want. Hullo, person! Doesn’t hear me.”34 The person whom the author is here addressing as if he were actually meeting him is the protagonist of the fiction he is setting out to elaborate, whose name is, according to the rules of involution (which can also go by phonetics), Hugh Person, of course only corrupted “Peterson,” and only by some pronounced “Parson,” as our regularly ‘reliable’ narrator promptly informs us.35 The ultimate game that contemporary fiction is now playing is the probing of the ontology of the work of art as a way of probing the ontology of reality, or lived life. In a way, there is no better space for this test than the autobiography of an artist, and there is no better subject for it than the artist–traveller, in whom a sense of temporary dislocation can foster awareness of how a place may “grow more real and the other haze into fiction” (T 93).

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34 Nabokov, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov, 1969–1974 (New York: Library of America, 1996): 489. 35 Nabokov, The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov, 1969–1974, 490.

4

The Quest of the Poet–Knight:

Walcott’s Revision of the Arthurian Matter

[…] He fell in love with art, and life began.1

The Poetic Calling as a Religious Vocation

I

“T H E P O E T ,” Emerson wrote that all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression; that the man is only half himself, the other half is his expression; and that the poet is the person “who sees and handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and its representative of man, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and to impart.” Thus, “he stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth.”2 Emerson’s conception of the poet is Romantic and idealistic, and partakes of the strong mystical cast of these two traditions. The poet, for him, is the man who fully realizes what is at the same time a potential and a need for all men because he has been granted a greater power of seeing and saying. As such, far from putting himself at the centre of his own activity, he functions as a means for all humanity to fulfil its essence. Man’s essence, in the neoplatonic cosmology Emerson’s thought was subsuming, is to be the ring in the chain of being that welds the earthly and the divine, the material and the spiritual, the multitudinous and the one. All men can have insights while they are alone in nature, according to Emerson, and feel like a “transparent eye-ball.”3 Only poets are able to derive their intuition for creation from these single

1 2 3

N

Walcott, Another Life (CP 186). Emerson, “The Poet,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 448. Emerson, “Nature,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 10. See above, 4–5, 19.

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illuminated moments of direct contact with the divine mind.4 Only poets can grasp the ecstatic moment and report it to other men, liberating them by activating their imagination through the use of “tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms.” Poets are “liberating gods” because “the use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men.”5 Walcott has clearly expounded his conception of the poet in his numerous public pronouncements. For him, too, poetry needs nature in order to be. In answering a question I posed during his meeting with the students of the University of Milan after he had read from Tiepolo, on 15 May 2000, Walcott repeated the “weird thing” Robert Graves once said. In his own words: He [Robert Graves] said that only in a society where there are cranes and horses can poetry survive. Can you think of that? Is not that stupid? A culture survives in poetry only if it has cranes and horses, for whatever reason. He’s saying a huge thing. He’s saying something basic: that poetry in itself cannot survive in cities. That everything that comes out of cities has to be fed by nature. That is not different from the concept of Antaeus, the idea of the spirit touching the earth for it to produce.

For Walcott, too, as for Emerson, poetry is a divine gift, “however foolish that may sound” in our times.6 In an interview, he remembers how, in Another Life, he described the ecstatic experience of a young poet contemplating nature in terms of a sense of dissolution, “a sense of mortality or rather immortality, a sense of gratitude for what you feel is a gift and for the beauty of the earth, the beauty of life around us.” “The body feels it is melting into what it has seen. This continues in the poet,” whose task is to express that sense of beauty, that gratitude, and that sense “of the ‘I’ not being important,”7 of suddenly being an element, not because the self is dissolving, but because it is joining something larger than itself. “This feeling is there in every poet,” Walcott believes, and he remembers having found it in Words-

4 Vivian C. Hopkins, Spires of Form: A Study of Emerson Aesthetic Theory (1951; New York: Russell & Russell, 1965): 9. 5 Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 461. 6 Leif Sjöberg, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1983), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 84. 7 Edward Hirsch, “The Art of Poetry X X X V I I : Derek Walcott” (1986), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 99.

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The Quest of the Poet-Knight

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worth and in the radiant ending of Shakespeare’s The Tempest,8 two texts that could have been another route of his and Emerson’s separate but parallel assimilation of the same idealistic conception of poetry. For Walcott, as for Emerson, the faculty of being creative is given and cannot be acquired. It is an assignment by grace, grace’s free election to a task, predestination. Walcott once said that he grew up believing that the writing of poetry is a vocation, a religious vocation,9 and that inspiration—in which he candidly confessed to believe—is really “a kind of fleeting grace that has happened to one,” and that can by no means be induced.10 According to the most pristine Calvinist doctrine, the saint’s task is to answer grace’s call and follow God’s design. “I am a believer, and my gratitude is to be honest by his gift.”11 Consequently, “any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic”;12 and the poet’s attempt is to say thanks by performing the ritual of writing poetry. “You write poetry in praise of God,” Walcott has also said,13 and that he has never separated the writing of poetry from prayer.14 “There is something votive and humble and in a sense ritualistic” in the gestures of preparation that all artists and all writers perform “before they begin their working day or working night.”15 Since he sees the poet’s calling as religious, and the writing of poetry as the performance of a ritual to honour and give thanks for received grace, it is only natural that Walcott should resort to the Arthurian lore of the knight’s quest as an intertextual myth. His attraction to this imagery and his allusions

8 J.P. White, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1990), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 162. 9 Hirsch, “The Art of Poetry X X X V I I : Derek Walcott” (1986), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 99. 10 Hirsch, “The Art of Poetry X X X V I I : Derek Walcott” (1986), 100–101. 11 Leif Sjöberg, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1983), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 84. 12 Edward Hirsch, “The Art of Poetry X X X V I I : Derek Walcott” (1986), 100. 13 J.P. White, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1990), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 162. 14 Hirsch, “The Art of Poetry X X X V I I : Derek Walcott” (1986), 99. 15 Hirsch, “The Art of Poetry X X X V I I : Derek Walcott” (1986), 100. Alix Walcott raised her children in the Methodist religion. From his mother Walcott probably absorbed the belief in one’s talent as God-given and meant for the glory of God, together with his dedication to daily hard-work and self-improvement (see also Bruce King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, 19).

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to it are an old habit with him. In Tiepolo’s Hound, though, they become consistent and coherent and build up another narrative on a symbolic level. During the 2001 press conference at the Brunelleschi Hotel in Milan, I asked Walcott if he felt he could confirm my interpretation. I told him that I thought that in Tiepolo’s Hound he was trying to describe the artist’s Bildung, or growth, as an initiatory rite, with preparatory rituals, an apprenticeship, and trials that culminate in a sense of doubt about his achievements. Walcott’s answer was richly articulated and sounded like the transposition of a passage from Tiepolo’s Hound. I cite here, in tandem, his words from the interview and the poem: The man I painted with all my life was Dunstan St Omer, who was a very vigorous painter, and has done frescoes and so forth, in St Lucia, one or two magnificent. Whenever we painted, whenever we went out painting—he’s a Catholic, and whenever he started painting he would do this [crosses himself]. It’s like the guy playing tennis yesterday, you know. He did it a little too often, because protestants can win tennis matches too, you know. But Dunstan always crossed himself before he painted. And that ritualistic thing of preparation… I think there’s a variety of preparations, but certainly, however momentarily it is before you start, I think it is a votive act beyond yourself. And certainly in the ritual of putting your paints out, of selecting the brushes, pouring the oil out, setting up the canvas, that’s very much like, to me, the equivalent of preparing a Mass in a sense. I’m not a Catholic, but it’s the same layout, it’s got the same incantatory quality in it. It’s got the incantation. And then, of course, there’s this great terrifying moment, equal, in a way, to when you put the first word down: it’s when you put the first direction of where you drawing is going to… happen. And that happens, and once that surface is scratched by the charcoal or by whatever, then you’ve begun something that is frightening, in a sense. But frightening in a religious sense. It contains something beyond yourself, which is the hope that the work is bigger than you and will be better than you. The unblest rituals of preparation. Running tapwater over paint-crusted cells then scouring with your thumb until they shine as white as eggshells, from the braced pencils next to the paper’s stiffened sail, select the gentlest, the paper has been drenched

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bravely, alarmingly; lay it flat or else it warps from undried pools. Your heart is wrenched by terror, you float on a wind of fear, […] […] pray that your narrowed eyes will not betray you with the old result of vigorous approximation, not the whole delight of action, smell, the bracing salt, the shallows’ mesh, whose pattern snared my soul. (97)

The rituals of preparation, then, are not only a thanksgiving prayer, but also an incantatory rite, repeated gestures invoking a good omen and exorcising fear of failure. They constitute the core of the artist–knight’s Bildung, the crucial moment in his quest: his confrontation with the krisis—in the etymological sense of the opening-up of a space for ‘discrimination’, or a ‘decision’—that will bring about either an actual failure, or accomplishment, success, maturity, and salvation.

Tiepolo’s Hound as a Künstlerroman Tiepolo’s Hound is a Künstlerroman because it is the narrative of the artist’s response to the experience of life. In Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott’s brings to perfection his own version of the form by intertwining the autobiographical and the biographical, the subjective mode of the lyric and the impersonal mode of the epic, narrative and colloquial registers. Moreover, in the book he fuses poetry and prose, painting and verse, thus fulfilling his original vow as an artist (Another Life, CP 200). Tiepolo’s Hound is the accomplishment of its author’s Bildung and the staging of the same in the guise of a personal fiction, which assumes emblematic value. This is Walcott’s aim in mingling the autobiographical and the biographical narrative lines. By narrating, in the first person, his own Bildung, and, in the third person, Pissarro’s Bildung, Walcott starts from two life-stories and from the Caribbean. The artist’s initiation is thus doubly exemplified and doubly tested. The results of this experiment are a gradual transposition of the meaning of the life circumstances of two particular artists onto a psycho-

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logical and existential—and ultimately spiritual—level and its final falling into a universal pattern, whose validity is assumed for all humanity. The model for this essential plane of discourse is always Dante and his Divine Comedy. The realization, though, differs in the splitting of the narratives and in the author’s identification with both his protagonists. In a way, Dante, too, tests his un-lived possibilities through the life histories of his multitudinous characters. In fact, the enormous number of characters in the Divine Comedy serves the purpose of representing, almost by classification, all the possible qualities of human nature and varieties of human behaviour. Dante’s narrative, too, continually moves from first to third person, and from the interior of his mind to the exterior of the diegetic events, from subjective to impersonal narration, from a character’s to the narrator’s point-ofview shooting. Dante’s editing, though, is continuity cutting, while Walcott’s is a mixture of discontinuity techniques. The self, in Dante’s age, and in his representation of its cosmology, is still unitary. In Walcott’s times, it has acquired an awareness of its own fluxional nature, and sees itself as fragmentary. Walcott is only the latest modernist to attempt to find an aesthetic form that can mirror the modern self and, in this attempt to articulate his self-awareness, to find a new form of integrity. The success of modernist art often lay in the precision with which it managed to reflect the failure of existential aspirations to wholeness. Tiepolo’s Hound can be thought as a modernist poem that stages the pursuit of an artistic career as the only possible and open quest for an ideal form of wholeness. Or it could be that Walcott, in his own announcement of the fictive quality of identity, is being overwhelmed by an excess of Eliotic influence and is giving in to the moral categorical imperative of impersonality. Several of his recommendations as a teacher turn on the need for self-effacement in writing a poem and on finding an objective correlative for one’s emotions, as if the renewal of the poet’s anonymity16 at the moment of composition in order to make space for the expression of his insight were not a spontaneous impulse. I found it rather anti-climactic, after reading Tiepolo’s Hound, that in his creative-writing seminar he should suggest substituting the word ‘versifier’ for ‘poet’, because—he said—what one can hope to become, at best, is an artisan who can handle prosody. I still attribute this recommendation of his to the seriousness with which he now takes his task as a teacher and

16

Hirsch, “The Art of Poetry X X X V I I : Derek Walcott” (1986), 100.

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master, which is the natural extension of the seriousness with which he once took his task as a pupil. In Tiepolo’s Hound, however, the double narrative of Camille Pissarro’s and Derek Walcott’s lives as artists functions as an experiment testing the relation of life to art, instead of as the traditional focus on the effects of art on an artist’s life. The narrative of Pissarro’s life is the allegorical staging of an existential journey in which fear and death are confronted with doubt, while the narrative of Walcott’s life is the grateful homage of a believer who is back home from his initiatory journey. The poet Walcott is fulfilling his task by articulating the growth of the elemental man’s consciousness of his spiritual journey with the wonder of an acolyte, whose model here could be John Bunyan’s pilgrim. The poet Walcott is telling the personal narrative of his own salvation and projecting it onto the ground of a parallel hypothetical narrative of the same adventure, but lived with less faith and more doubt. Finally, Tiepolo’s Hound is Walcott’s profession and representation of his belief in a protestant theology founded on the tenet of predestination. This is what the narrator seems to suggest when he comments that the destiny of the two young Caribbean would-be painters was written in their origins: in the names of their places of birth—St Thomas, the saint who couldn’t believe without seeing and touching; St Lucia, the saint who sacrificed her eyes because she believed, and who could see better without eyes.

Tradition and the Individual Talent There is a memory of the imagination in literature which has nothing to do with actual experience, which is, in fact, another life, and that experience of the imagination will continue to make actual the quest of a medieval knight or the bulk of a white whale, because of the power of a shared imagination.17

This passage from the mid-1970s shows how long Walcott had been figuring in his mind the poet’s growth as a re-birth, or an initiatory first birth, into a ‘real’ life, which he paradoxically opposes to biological life. Another Life had been the first rendition in verse of his musings on this idea; Tiepolo’s Hound its coherent and fully conscious formulation. The title of Another Life names the essential idea: the life of art is another life. In his first instalment of his 17


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autobiography in verse, Walcott is still putting it in exquisitely, unchecked, Romantic terms, which state that (real) life began for him when he fell in love with art (CP 186). Then the journey began into the life of the imagination, more real than actual experience, working with a memory that is operated by the emotional import of facts. The life of Art is another—in fact, the true—life because it is ultimately a teleological journey. It is a life of devotion, a life dedicated to a goal. This is why the “memory of imagination in literature” pictures it as a religious and chivalric quest: “My calling as a poet is votive, sacred […] it was a cherished vow taken in my young dead father’s name, and my life is to honor that vow. I believe this through all adversities. I have been blessed.”18 The poet–knight feels blessed with the election of grace, which is the grace of election, of being called to a task. He takes his oath of loyalty to it, by swearing to answer his calling and pursue his vocation on a quest-journey on which he will search for the Grail of his own art and the forms of its accomplishment. The island poet is assigned the particular aim of getting down the true tints of his island, the place that he is leaving now but to which he will return and confirm, or consciously elect, as his place of belonging. This is why his sense of being blessed includes the good fortune of being born in the Caribbean at the right time.19 The shape of the artist’s Bildung through his quest is already there, in a nutshell. In Tiepolo’s Hound it will unfold in an enticing, dramatic, full-blown narrative that is delivered in the already found Grail of Walcott’s appointed, and accomplished, style. I will now retrace that narrative through Walcott’s references to the Arthurian legend in the book, following its trajectory in Pissarro’s and Walcott’s semi-fictional life-journeys. I will also endeavour to show how Walcott realizes his aesthetic principles in the book by making the reader experience as real—and live vicariously, through Walcott’s fictionalization—the dilemmas of Pissarro’s and of the author’s own lives. My own task will be to describe the whole shape of the artist’s quest in Tiepolo’s Hound; to show how coextensive it is with Walcott’s pronouncements and personal reflection on it in his actual, historical life; and to bring to light the myth’s reference to a universal psychological and existential experience.

18 Leif Sjöberg, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1983), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 85. 19 Sjöberg, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1983), 85.

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But before all this, I will mention the salient movements in the Arthurian legend’s assimilation in American literature, in order to place Walcott’s treatment of it in relation to its proper background. My main source here has been Alan Lupack and Barbara Tepa Lupack’s King Arthur in America (1999), on which I have drawn heavily for the next few paragraphs. The Arthurian legend has had a large fortune in the U S A . The use of the legend by American writers has been—like their use of the rest of the European literary tradition—wholly free and pragmatic. In their thoroughly American, practical approach to the earlier material, these writers have discarded whatever features of the legend they have found inconvenient, and created new ones as they needed them, also mixing the Arthurian matter with other myths and traditions.20 The earliest and most common motifs in American Arthurian literature are the power of Merlin and the quest for the Holy Grail, probably because Merlin, “like the mythic American, has the potential to create a new world and because the quest for the Grail is like the quest for Edenic perfection that is such a common metaphor for the American Dream.”21 The development of the legend on American soil has been successively determined by a group of writers whose treatment of the traditional material has left a permanent mark on it. Walcott is familiar with the most important among these writers. His own treatment of the Arthurian legend is, again, a perfect example of the position he has taken on the issue of “literary tradition versus literary originality,” and further evidence of his inheritance of both literary cultures, British and American. In this case, the assimilation of tradition by the individual talent follows Eliot both in form and in content. But before Eliot, Walcott is surely indebted to Emerson and James Russell Lowell for having prepared the ground for his own revision of the legend. Emerson’s elaboration of the legend focuses on the figure of Merlin, whom he transforms into a type of bardic power and vision. In his poems dedicated to the wizard (“Merlin I,” “Merlin II,” and “Merlin’s Song,” 1846), he makes him a symbol of the visionary, self-reliant individual, whose power lies in his poetic and prophetic abilities.22 In so doing, he first incarnates in an Arthurian character the poet’s power of insight and his ability to create a

20 Alan Lupack & Barbara Tepa Lupack, King Arthur in America (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999): 5. 21 Lupack, King Arthur in America, 3. 22 King Arthur in America, 7.

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world that has the hyperreal feel of dreams and magic, which is the reason why he represents an important precedent for Walcott’s use of the same material. Even more important, perhaps, is Lowell’s de-emphasizing of nobility and emphasis on simple morality in the Arthurian legend, which turned the world of romance into a model for the common man, and the Grail into a symbol accessible to a large number of Americans, thus establishing the fortune of the legend in American literary and popular culture. Lowell’s Vision of Sir Launfal (1848), in fact, became one of the most beloved and best-known American poems of the second half of the nineteenth century.23 The way Lowell departs from Arthurian tradition is by choosing a minor knight for his hero, by severing his world from the regal court of Arthur, and by making it a sort of new Eden as a consequence of the natural charity that Launfal learns from his vision. The achievement of the Grail comes to represent the acquisition and practice of a power to empathize—a transforming charity, in the Christian terms of its romance tradition—that appears not to be limited to Arthur’s time and place or to a few good men, but to be a faculty potentially within the reach of all men.24 As the Lupacks observe, after Lowell King Arthur disappears from American Arthurian writings.25 The Arthurian hero becomes an Everyman on the basis of a democratic notion assuming that certain universal—i.e. permanent—qualities pertain to human nature. The same assumption lies behind T.S. Eliot’s use of the legend as a subsumptive myth in The Waste Land (1922), as George Williamson has called the use of the Grail story that Eliot derived from Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920).26 Eliot learned from Weston the essential idea that the Grail story subsumes a number of myths and made it the central myth and a basic system of metaphors for his poem.27 As the Lupacks have remarked, however, Eliot interweaves his mythic references with passages of psychological drama, so that the Grail legend can function as a key to the

Lupack, King Arthur in America, 13. King Arthur in America, 13. 25 King Arthur in America, 13. 26 George Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis (1967; London: Thames & Hudson, rev. ed. 1971): 119. 27 Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot, 119. 23 24

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meaning of the poem “without having specific Grail allusions occupy much of the text.”28 The Waste Land may well have been Walcott’s direct model for his use of the Arthurian legend in Tiepolo’s Hound. Besides being one of the most influential Arthurian poems in America, it has a slight Arthurian content, just as Tiepolo’s Hound does. Walcott seems to have drawn on Eliot’s use of the Arthurian legend not as romantic lore but as a frame of reference that would allow him to articulate, symbolically, his own experience of the psychological drama of human existence as he wished to express it in Tiepolo’s Hound. The Waste Land served him a model for the linking of the psychological meaning to the vehicle for expressing myth. Literary representations, in order to function as myths, must refer to a psychological experience that is recognizable by a large number of individuals belonging to a community, which was originally local and is nowadays potentially global. This, as George Williamson reminds us when commenting the use of myth in The Waste Land, “testifies to something permanent in human nature, which may be repeated in individual experience.”29 This site of permanence is the remotest place that Walcott’s devotion to particularity may reach and it is the springboard for his projection of the particular into the universal. In addition, the Fisher King in The Waste Land—as in its source myths—is linked to his land in physical (and psychological) health, a detail that could only prove of essential interest to Walcott’s perspective as a Caribbean artist. More than this, The Waste Land inaugurates the treatment of the same figure as a kind of Everyman, or at least as Every Modern Man, as the Lupacks rechristen him,30 and one for whom—The Waste Land suggests—redemption must come from within, a view that Walcott certainly shares and propounds in Tiepolo’s Hound, his most ‘Arthurian’ poem. The other model that furnished Walcott with a fundamental redrawing of a feature of the Arthurian legend is Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Arthurian trilogy. While it is an indubitable fact that Walcott not only read The Waste Land but imitated Eliot in his poetic apprenticeship, I am convinced that he is also familiar with some of Robinson’s Merlin (1917), Lancelot (1920), and Tristram (1927). According to the Lupacks, Eliot and Robinson changed the dominant mode of treating the Matter of Britain in twentieth-century Amer28 29 30

Lupack, King Arthur in America, 115. Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot, 119. Lupack, King Arthur in America, 118.

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ican literature by de-romanticizing it in the post-World War I period.31 A deromanticization of the traditional material is surely more in tune with Walcott’s taste. Robinson’s re-writing of the legend, though, contributed more precious elements to Walcott’s treatment. First of all, in his effort to modernize, americanize, and de-romanticize the legend, Robinson created modern and highly self-aware heroes who assume a high degree of psychological reality and intensity and move in a world of moral and emotional subtlety, which is “more redolent of the age of Proust than of the age of Malory.”32 Secondly, in his treatment of the Grail, Robinson eliminated the marvellous and miraculous and made the image the symbol of a light that leads men to an ideal, thus transforming the Arthurian story from a tale of lawless passion, treachery, and revenge to “one of a passion purified by suffering, of joy beyond sorrow, and of the slow growth of wisdom.”33 The quest motif became what it would remain for Walcott: an account of a private, spiritual salvation, one that also implied—exactly as in Tiepolo’s Hound—a less private, more universal spiritual salvation. The Lupacks note that in Robinson’s Lancelot the most important thematic element is the light that haunts Lancelot, a symbol that is demystified and dimly defined but surely stands for some higher truth that is difficult to obtain. More precisely, as in Tiepolo’s Hound, in Lancelot the light demands of its quester purity of character, singleness of purpose, and ability to persevere: i.e. total commitment and single-minded resolution (122). Artists being the ‘heroes’ of Walcott’s contemporary quest, in Tiepolo’s Hound the pursuit of light is, accordingly, the symbol of the pursuit of one’s aesthetic ideal. Walcott chose the central symbol of his book carefully and aptly, although it might be said to have always been there, in his imagination, since its use can be traced way back in his oeuvre, as I will show in the next chapter. Robinson once commented on the significance of light in his Merlin, explaining that “Galahad’s ‘light’ is simply the light of the Grail, interpreted universally as a spiritual realization of Things and their significance.”34 This is what light Lupack, King Arthur in America, 113. King Arthur in America, 119. 33 Frederic Ives Carpenter, “Tristram the Transcendent,” in Appreciation of Edwin Arlington Robinson: 28 Interpretive Essays, ed. Richard Cary (Waterville M E : Colby College Press, 1969): 82. 34 Edwin Arlington Robinson, Selected Letters of Edwin Arlington Robinson (New York: Macmillan, 1940): 113. 31 32

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does in Tiepolo’s Hound, where the artist’s attempt at rendering with exactitude the light that falls on things stands for his task of revealing the beauty and holiness of the ordinary. The pursuing of light, in Tiepolo’s Hound, is the artist’s quest for the Grail of his poetry, which is the faculty to see, and the skill to reveal, the meaning of things, finally found to be spiritual. By the same token, the “invariable work of wisdom,” for Emerson, was “to see the miraculous in the common.”35 In conclusion, Walcott may have been exposed to the Arthurian legend and to its elaboration on American soil through many channels, ranging from Lowell to Emerson, from Robinson to the novelists of the Lost Generation (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner), who were fatefully introduced to the legend by Eliot’s pathbreaking treatment in The Waste Land. Other sources are left to investigate, such as Walcott’s Arthurian readings in British and in European literature in general, a possible instance being Paul Verlaine’s sonnet “Parsifal.” My greater interest here has been to demonstrate Walcott’s awareness of the legend’s development in the U S A , because I believe this to be the background and starting-point of his own revision of it, which is the object of the description that follows. Eliot remains, unmistakably, the strongest influence on Walcott. Also, his is the model of greatest consequence, as it suggested to Walcott a way of applying the legend by joining the psychological and the archetypical planes of reference in elaborating his own personal symbolism in Tiepolo’s Hound. Or, perhaps, it merely served to confirm a use he had already explored in Omeros, where he had employed the Homeric characters as “ordinary symbols,” “simple associations that everybody knows,” each representing a quality of human nature that would be widely and promptly recognized because it reposes in the broadly shared, collective memory of literature for which Walcott cares so much.36 In fact, there is evidence of his emblematic use of both epic and romance figures in a reflection on Omeros in which he freely and almost inadvertently superimposes the two traditions: “Epic is about wandering in search of something and finding (or not finding) it. You know, the knight leaves, goes forth and encounters different dragons, et cetera, on his quest.”37

Emerson, “Nature,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 47. Walcott, “Derek Walcott on Omeros: An Interview,” 38. 37 Gregson Davies, in The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives, ed. Davies (Special Issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly 96.2, Spring 1997): 235. 35

36

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The Shape of the Quest Tiepolo’s Hound is imbued with religious language, especially that evoking a sacramental ritual and spiritual salvation. The Arthurian myth is the frame of reference that allows Walcott to talk about poetry in a religious and vocational sense. The conception of poetry as “the beginning of a new religion”38 is clearly embodied in the imagery of the poet–knight’s quest, which presents the practice of poetry as the practice of a form of religion. Walcott’s several allusions in the text to a secular religion only serve to distinguish the new cult of Art from traditional forms of piety. Art, for Walcott, is a secular form of religion in the sense that Elvio Fachinelli illustrates in his study on the “ecstatic mind.” In La mente estatica (1989), the Italian psychoanalyst and writer presents the ecstatic experience as an essential mode of human perception and knowledge, which in the contemporary age, and in Western societies, has left its traditional dwelling-place, religious experience, to move to new areas of cognitive apprehension, such as poetry, or other artistic disciplines.

The Calling If poetry is the expression of religious experience that privileges the ecstatic mode of encountering truth, or the divine, its calling will start with an epiphany. An epiphany is the experience of a revelation. As Stephen Dedalus clearly describes it in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the object of our observation suddenly emanates a sort of radiance that manifests its essence. A detail becomes so vivid and radiant that its whole meaning becomes apparent. In Tiepolo’s Hound, the narrator’s experience of epiphany is reported in section 3 of the opening chapter, and presents him with the object of his quest, an aesthetic ideal that will be carefully defined in the course of the quest. Here Walcott recalls his first visit to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where he realized that “light was [his] first lesson” (7). His memory focuses on the astonishment he felt before Paolo Veronese’s The Feast of Levi: “I remember being // stunned as I studied the exact expanse / of a Renaissance feast, the art of seeing” (7). The first cause of astonishment is the realization of the painter’s ability to see, which is found to be an art in itself. Obviously, the means of the realization—the observing of a painting—implies that the painter–artist has also been able to render, in his turn, his own perception of a revelation. In Emer-

38

Walcott, “Derek Walcott on Omeros: An Interview,” Caribana 3 (1992–93): 36.

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son’s tradition, the artist is a channel through which revelation circulates: “His health and greatness consist in his being the channel through which heaven flows to earth, in short, in the fullness in which an ecstatical state takes place in him.”39 As Emerson also put it, the poet, once inspired by the infinite, “is himself the creator in the finite.”40 The couplets that follow the epiphanic moment and explain it, in section 3 of the first chapter of Tiepolo’s Hound, bring into focus Veronese’s ability to reproduce with exactitude the impression of light hitting the inner thigh of a white hound in a given position. The painter’s dexterity lies in his having realized the detail with the highest possible degree of vividness, and with a single “stroke” or “slash” of colour. The second motivation for Walcott’s astonishment, then, is Art’s capacity to reproduce life with such precision that our senses can believe its representations—or “trust” them, as Walcott once expressed this idea (in his Milan reading)—more than real life. Walcott’s heart stops at this point, much as Emily Dickinson’s body froze when she found herself in the presence of poetry:41 Then I caught a slash of pink on the inner thigh of a white hound entering the cave of a table, so exact in its lucency at The Feast of Levi, I felt my heart halt. (7)

Finally, the explanation for the “sacred shock” comes: “So a miracle leaves // its frame, and one epiphanic detail / illuminates an entire epoch” (8). It is the mechanism of metaphor that produces the wonder, the capacity of the smallest, discrete part to stand for the infinite, seamless whole. The metaphoric device is not merely one of the tools in the hands of poets, but the common man’s mode of knowing, of operating with sense-data by expanding their meaning in order to make sense of the world. Light is the medium of most powerful reaction to the action of our senses. Metaphor is the instrument that directs our attention to the coupling of details, to the association of shapes, in which our way of appropriating the world consists. Poets are simply men who can handle analogy consciously instead of only being Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, 1845? Emerson, “Nature,” in Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, 41. 41 The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson & Theodora Ward (Cambridge M A : Belknap Press of Harvard U P , 1958), vol. 2: 474. 39 40

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passively, and occasionally, struck by it. Wallace Stevens wrote that poetry is accuracy in the reproduction of the structure of reality—“because reality is the central reference for poetry”—and that “one of the significant components of the structure of reality” is “the resemblance between things.”42 The similarity to Walcott’s poetic is, I believe, no mere coincidence, if we think that the core of the speaker’s proposal of a new religion, in Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” is also a sublime heightening of reality, just as, in Walcott’s account of his calling to a life of Art, his “awe of the ordinary” (T 8), plays a central role and will dictate the artist’s task “to touch the sublime, // to heighten the commonplace into the sacredness / of objects made radiant” (T 98). For Stevens, the poet’s special power to detect resemblance “touches the sense of reality, it enhances the sense of reality, heightens it, intensifies it,” because, inasmuch as resemblance is “a partial similarity between two dissimilar things, it complements and reinforces that which the two dissimilar things have in common. It makes it brilliant.”43 Moreover, “if the savor of life is the savor of reality,” the process operates in a double direction: not only does the seeing of a resemblance create a heightened sense of reality, but “the intensification of the sense of reality creates a resemblance […] that […] of its own is a reality.”44 “Sublime,” for both poets, means “awful” in Dickinson’s sense, or in Rudolf Otto’s sense of the religious terror of the creature facing the mysterium tremendum of the creator. Stevens also linked aesthetic perception of the sublime to a religious feeling. In his reworking of pragmatic thought, he conceived of poetry as the supreme fiction that in the modern age had replaced the myth of Christianity in the function of satisfying man’s need to believe.45

The Oath Thus, the first step in the artist’s Bildung is the realization that there is a way of looking at things—which is very slow and, like a form of contemplation, nourished by heightened, unrelenting attention—that one may learn and 42 Stevens, “Three Academic Pieces” (1947; The Necessary Angel, 1951), in Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode & Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997): 686. 43 Stevens, “Three Academic Pieces,” 690. 44 “Three Academic Pieces,” 691. 45 Stevens, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” (1942), “Response to an Enquiry” (1944), Adagia (in Opus Posthumous, 1957), in Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Kermode & Richardson, 330–31, 349, 814, 903.

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then pursue in order to see things properly, or see them release their fullest meaning. The second step is the taking of the oath: i.e. the promise to dedicate one’s life to the learning of the art of seeing and making other people see. For the island artist, it implies the promise to devote attention to the ordinary details of his place of birth, which are still waiting to be sung in verse. In the shuffled time structure of Walcott’s ‘involuted’ narrative, this stage of Bildung is reported in a flashback: “I swore: I shall // get their true tints someday” (94). The island artist finds in the “ruined lanes, and rusted roofs,” in “the dark lives / in sour doorways” of his island, not only his materials, but also “a language, light […] a dialect forged / from burning asphalt,” all of which feels to him like “privilege” (10). “What should be true of the remembered life,” though, is always “a freshness of detail” (10): the highest degree of fidelity to life will be given by the intact quality of the memory of the detail: i.e. by the precision with which it is rendered and given back. This establishes the dimension, the duration, and the rhythm of the artist’s patient, self-disciplined quest: “Time, in its teaching, / will provide the bliss of precision, not botanic truth // or museum postcards but the beat of the brush reaching / into its creamy palette” (94).

The Apprentice’s Discipline The artist–knight’s vow is to dedicate his whole life to the pursuit—the learning—of his art. The object of his quest, his Grail, is the form of his craft. The task that will lead him to his Grail is the practice of a strict daily routine, whose beginning is apprenticeship to the masters. There is a record in Walcott’s essays and interviews of his awareness of having gone through this first step in his personal Bildung. The language he uses hints, even here, at an Arthurian knight’s quest. In “The Muse of History,” Walcott mentions his particular dedication to his art: “I had decided to make the writing of poetry my life, my actual, not my imaginative life.”46 In an interview, he professes to “have always believed in fierce, devoted apprenticeship. The old masters made new masters by the discipline of severity.”47 In another, more

46

Walcott, “The Muse of History” (1974), in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays,

62–63. 47 Leif Sjöberg, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1983), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 83.

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recent one, he declares himself to be still promoting apprenticeship in his creative-writing classes, and that the apprenticeship I’m talking about is not only an apprenticeship to the craft, it’s an apprenticeship of the spirit because it does involve humility, and at the beginning of apprenticeship you have to begin with humility. But I think a lot of writers have dismissed that idea, the idea of imitation, of surrendering to a master, which is a very Asiatic thing, not a thing in the European or American context.48

It appears, though, that it has not always been so, in Europe, either. In Tiepolo’s Hound, Pissarro is Melby’s pupil and Cézanne’s master, and “masters are still learning with arthritic fingers […] their disasters / our masterpieces,” in the never-ending, uniform process of Time (94). Pissarro keeps “a routine strict as a metronome” (48). Devotion copies “in the ministry of apprenticeship,” and the imitation of European masters is declared not to be a betrayal of the race for the island artist (13). In a way, in Tiepolo’s Hound the Caribbean artist becomes an ideal standard because his composite heritage sets him free from a bondage to a monolithic influence. Walcott’s father is remembered copying “the lyrical, light precision” of English draughtsmen (Girtin, Sandby, Cotman, Peter de Wint), having acquired, already, “more than a learner’s // skill […] more than mimicry, a gift” (11). Walcott is suggesting here that craft is not art, although he makes it a requirement for the fulfilment of artistic vocation—although mimicry can already be, if “a regeneration of making it new,” “an act of the imagination.”49 Patience and building are necessary in any craft, Walcott once said.50 Artists use daily work to train their minds to be more receptive and their souls to be hypersensitive.51 In Tiepolo’s Hound, Pissarro’s practice of a daily routine of work is aimed at acquiring a confidence of style that will enable him to catch “the truth of elusive joy, a transient rupture / of hectic strokes” (66). Walcott seems to imply that an instrumental belief in craft for its own sake is misplaced and perhaps a sign of “a conspicuous ambition” (83); while PisWalcott, “Interview with Michelle Yeh,” 299. Walcott, “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” (1973), in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, ed. Hamner, 55. 50 Edward Hirsch, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1979), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 60. 51 Hirsch, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1979), 63. 48

49

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sarro is set upon becoming an accomplished craftsman and is focused on the work of his eyes and hands, he lacks a spiritual vision. In the Impressionists’ faith, light replaces God, instead of standing for and leading to God, and this, for Walcott, is only an ephemeral enthusiasm for a fashionable form of originality. In the poem, he qualifies the Impressionists’ faith in light by exposing it as a faith in a diminished manifestation of Light and an instrumental exploitation of physical light in the narrow space of a painter’s studio: “light was their faith, a shaft in an atelier” (45). Pissarro and Monet are “two masters of weather / who earned a reckless confidence of style” (76); but reason and calculation replace faith in the Impressionists’ poetic: they have “theories, instead of faith, geometry, not God” (45).

The Trials and The Tasks It is only at the climax of suffering that Pissarro learns the true meaning of the artist’s daily rituals. On the occasion of his beloved daughter’s death, he discovers that “all the light in paint could not restore / her short life” (86), and understands that we learn nothing from repetition by example, “no reason for our grief / if there is none for our happiness” (84). He reaches the peak of his crisis when his self-doubting makes him feel guilty for his choice of art as a vocation and career. Then he comes to think that little Jeanne is “the ransom paid to transience” (85), the transience of which he is enamoured and to which he has devoted his life as an artist. The task of the artist is found to be the essential task of Everyman: to discover “how to keep joy in his vision innocent / when his heart-shaped palette trembled with disaster” (64), or to learn to “endure affliction with no affection gone” (159). “What to do with a diminished thing” is how Robert Frost, a favourite poet of Walcott’s, had once put it. Right at this moment, though, Pissarro experiences “the joy beyond sorrow.” One morning, “inexplicably, aspens with one noise / silvered her name, a joy without a warning” (86). He resumes his daily routine with a deeper comprehension of its meaning: “every stroke he made // absorbed her absence; with calm, even / paint he built its blue. This was the way he prayed” (86). The Rituals The artist’s rituals of work are a form of prayer. His art is a quest that does not look for a pre-established and self-imposed object, but ends with surrender to a calling in the form of a grateful profession of awe. Poetry, for Walcott, in its repetitive, rhythmic nature, is an incantatory celebration of

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astonishment.52 It is an exercise in thanksgiving for having been granted the experience of beauty. Like all art, it is a religious call to belief. All art, for Walcott, is abandonment to faith. The artist’s rituals are a form of preparation for the “renewal of anonymity,” which, as we have seen, consists in the ecstatic disposition of the mind that is making space for the onset of epiphany. Walcott has described this further task of the artist with words that echo those of the mystics reporting the moment of Abgeschiedenheit along the path of askesis: “If one thinks a poem is coming on […] you do make a retreat, a withdrawal into some kind of silence that cuts out everything around you.”53 This retreat also serves the purpose of creating the conditions for the self-discipline that is necessary in the apprenticeship of craft: “The more intensity and the more devotion one has to the idea of self-isolation in the hope that one could make a better craftsman of oneself, the more I respect that and the more that has to be done.”54 The poet’s tasks thus include retiring into solitude, to make space, and silence, for the reception of an insight. Moreover, his quest—like all quests— requires that he leave his original community, because “separation brings sharper definition” (99) by activating the process of memory: “the painful precision / of exile” is “detail’s mound of exact increase, / not as one thought or read, of dimming vision / by distance, but its opposite” (99–100). For the island artist, the trial is even more severe. As has already been noted, he has to face the dilemma of going away or staying for the sake of his art. Thus, Pissarro elects Pontoise, France, as his new home and hermitage, where he starts his daily work routine (51). Thus, Walcott chooses, instead, to become a traveller who can enjoy the privilege—and use the advantage—of distance at his will, without having to give up his original sense of belonging. In sum, in Tiepolo’s Hound the artist’s quest exemplifies Everyman’s quest for spiritual salvation, and the link between the example and its universal value is provided precisely by the text’s references to Arthurian legend. Starting from Pissarro’s and his own life narratives, Walcott suggests that the growth of every man requires an encounter with some divine principle in the guise of a calling to a lifelong task, the performing of which is a form of acceptance of, and thanksgiving for, this appointment to an assigned end, the

Walcott, “Derek Walcott on Omeros: An Interview,” 36. Hirsch, “The Art of Poetry X X X V I I : Derek Walcott” (1986), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 100. 54 Walcott, “Interview with Michelle Yeh,” 301. 52 53

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sign of one’s election. This usually entails a journey—physical and/or spiritual—that temporarily separates the acolyte from his original community, and on which he meets with death. The spiritual arms of the knight in his trials are devotion to his cause and perseverance in his quest—in other words, faith. The tools of the artist–knight are his daily work routine and his lifelong apprenticeship. If rituals are a form of prayer that advances poetry toward its goal of glorifying God,55 apprenticeship, too, has a deeper meaning than the passing down of craft or the inheritance of tradition. Imitation is an exercise in the temporary annihilation of self for the development of one’s powers of empathy. In one of his seminars in creative writing, Walcott made us re-write Stevens’ poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” and recommended, as an exercise, that we try to write in the manner of Eugenio Montale, Italy’s greatest contemporary poet. To be able to affect another poet’s voice requires a capacity to listen to it carefully, to identify with the personality that produced it, and then to try to talk like one’s model. Poets who are masters of language, technique, and style, like Richard Wilbur, are also ventriloquists, who can produce admirable translations. Empathy, perhaps the most essential quality pertaining to the poet, is also the essential human quality, and the Christian virtue that questers like Lowell’s Launfal would start out pursuing unconsciously, then consciously achieve in their quest. Spiritually, it is the most appropriate response to the calling of grace. Artistically, it functions on the double plane of inspiration and craft. A strong power of empathy makes the artist highly receptive to the occurrence of epiphanies and to the multitudinous and fluxional forms of life. Skill in imitation, or mimicry, provides him with the appropriate means to express his insight, the possession of which is Emerson’s (and Coleridge’s) condition for the realization of a work of art. Means of expression must be adequate to inspiration—Emerson’s “passionate and alive” thought—so that form will interfuse with content. In the same way, there is a profounder level on which the essential man and the artist share the hardest trial of the quest. For both, trials seem to begin with the necessity of separating from a community and retiring into the isolation of an inner journey, and to culminate in the definitive separation brought by death. For the artist, however, who has chosen to devote his entire life to the single purpose of acquiring mastery over his art, the hardest trial is the anticipation of failure. The moment of severest crisis, for Pissarro 55

Walcott, “Derek Walcott on Omeros: An Interview,” 35–36.

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as for Walcott, is the moment of doubt about their achievement as artists. Here is how Walcott pictures Pissarro’s experience of doubting as a défaillance in the artist–knight’s quest: “Doubt made him yield, // his brush a sword reversed; when dusk came, / he set down his bleeding palette like a shield” (40). This disruptive self-doubting entails, once again, a sense of guilt concerning one’s most difficult and most courageous choices, those that have been induced by the calling. Pissarro starts imagining himself to be “cursed for abandoning the island” (80). His own work turns back upon him “as a betrayal” (80). His doubt becomes desperate; desperate frustration engenders rage; the object of passion is turned into the object of hate: Insomniac, cynical, shaken by panic by a gradual rejection of all his work, by the implacable conviction that he was sick of his own style, with rage that left him weak, his panic increases. (81)

Fear and discontent besiege Pissarro until he is saved, once again, by the ritual of his daily work routine as an artist—his faithfulness to the vow taken: “The repetition of work preserves his reason” (82). The place where Walcott links this experience more clearly to a universal experience of anxiety of performance—or, rather, of accomplishment—is the beginning of the tenth chapter. Here Walcott first skilfully depicts Pissarro’s feeling of useless effort, dumb ache, increasing frustration, anger, and frenzy at the repeatedly unsuccessful attempts to obtain recognition for his work, and then opens a lyrical parenthesis on the profound, paradoxical human feeling of attraction to failure, depression, surrender to the temptation of separation from the ground of being. The divines of seventeenthcentury New England would have readily recognized the feeling, called it by its proper name of ‘holy desperation’, and treated it spiritually. Psychologically, Walcott associates it with the stasis of death. Emily Dickinson had already represented the apparently irrational, incongruent, incomprehensible temptation of life by death in the hemlock that in one of her poems likes to stand upon a marge of snow.56 Both poets have managed to convey the 56 Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge M A : Belknap Press of Harvard U P , 1955), vol. 2: 403 (P525).

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correspondent, ambivalent feeling of sweetness and infinite sadness with which this paradoxical intimation inspired them. Here below I quote Walcott’s version, in which his echoing of Dickinson is manifest—perhaps, in fact, an homage. In the passage, we can find Dickinsonian images, such as the death parlour, and the indefinite shaft, or slant, of light fumbling at the surfaces of a room. Perhaps Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” too, is at the back of Walcott’s mind: There is a kind of ecstasy to failure, just as, at the heart of desire, is a core of sweetness, the worm that whispered its lure in white orchards. Crows with their critical caw. The studio, with its stillness of failure, was like a parlour where there has been a death; shrouds of despair covered the atelier; each canvas stared back, drew its last breath and expired. They died on him, one by one, they repeated their dying when he tried to find the way that a desolate day seeks a streak of sun on a strip of pavement, a spire, a window blind. (61)

The narrative of Pissarro’s life is constantly juxtaposed with the narrative of Walcott’s own life in a cross-cutting technique that emphasizes how their Bildung each took its own different—indeed, opposite—route. Pissarro leaves the island and elects France, a European country, as his new home. Walcott confirms the island—his place of origin—as his home, and elects world literature—especially the British and later the Italian—as his literary model. Pissarro stubbornly focuses on technique, pursues recognition in the capital of Western art, and follows the latest fashionable school of experimentation; Walcott enters the school of the Classics and finally gives up hope of quicker recognition for the sake of his artistic achievement. That is, in fiction. In real life, it would be correct to say that he expressed the conviction that success should not be a priority in pursuing one’s art when he had become the most prominent writer of the Caribbean and had confirmed that region’s literary excellence and his own reputation on the world literary scene.

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In his narrator’s voice, at any rate, he reports the Parisian Academy’s disparaging criticism of the Impressionists’ work, linking the dissolution of classical form—a change of poetic—with the loss of faith—a change of vision (44–45). Assuming the point of view of their “refusers” and “accusers,” Walcott uses religious language to dub the new experimenters—who derive their techniques from scientific theories—as “shallow heretics, unorthodox painters” (45). “They were heretical in their delight,” he adds, “there was no deity outdoors, no altar, // in the rose window of the iris” (45). The Impressionists trusted reason more than emotion, scientific evidence more than belief. Further on, Walcott becomes even more explicit, and shifts the narrative point of view from the Parisian Academy to his only partly construed self as a narrator. Thus, expressing his own opinion, he affirms that An age, the size of a cloud over a wood, erased all myth; slow intellectual doubt diminished awe. In groves whose oaks once showed a pillared piety, faith was going out (53)

while “the hallowed pastorals were besieged / by factories, stations, by the charred verticals // of factories’ chimneys” (53), implying that an art which separates itself from nature will lack the faith necessary for its achievement. The setting of the fiction of Pissarro’s existential parabola against Walcott’s gains its most powerful effect when Walcott’s meeting with his hardest trial, his most insidious doubt, is represented. Coherently pursuing the elaboration of his metaphor, Walcott expresses his uncertainty about the final result of his own quest thus: What if at the maze’s end I did not encounter the hound, in profile and graceful in its arc, with its brightened thigh? At least I could recount the flame that had led me (120)

The hound is confirmed here as a symbol of the object of Walcott’s quest: the shape of his poetry. Its image is an indissoluble complex of features, here including the arching line of its body’s profile, which in the book becomes a symbol for metaphor, strongly reminiscent of Emily Dickinson’s circum-

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ference and Hart Crane’s bridge; and the right slant and slash of light that strikes, illuminates, catches its thigh. As I will show in the next chapter, this latter proves to be the central metaphor of the poem, the self-reflexive, metapoetic image for the device of metaphor itself, and at the same time the fullest realization of Walcott’s ideal of metaphor. The flame that has guided Walcott’s quest perpetuates the tradition of the Grail’s meaning inaugurated by Lowell’s revision of the legend, and, with its following apposition, “a tongue in the dark,” hints at Dante’s Inferno. “The growing cloud of doubt gather[s] its pace / across intellectual brightness,” continues Walcott, until he is “scared to death” (121). Then he reiterates the opposition of faith to intellectual reason, condemning contemporary, postmodern disbelief in lines that maintain the Arthurian imagery, and depict the risk entailed by the hardest trial as a temptation to drop the quest and fail in perseverance: Devoted as a candle to its church, the thigh flared steadily, more affliction than quest now, I would end my search, if faith were just the fiction of a fiction. (121)

In a typical—but, I suspect, calculated and amused—postmodern move, Walcott confesses to having come to doubt “the very beast’s existence / as much as mine” (121): i.e. not only the ontological foundation of the object of his cognitive enquiry, but that of its subject, too. The way out of this impasse, as Walcott publicly declared in the diurnal wake of his reading in Milan, was to trust his memory as the instinctual, largely unconscious repository of his emotional life—Intuition’s channel, or the Over-Soul’s channel through man, according to Emerson. “Preserve it with the details of a dream, / as in a dream,” says Walcott to himself, referring to his vision of an astounding feast and work of art (121). Memory attaches to the images it sends to the artist’s mind a qualitative sense of superior reality. Mnemosyne is the artist’s Muse. “Memory was my painter,” Walcott repeats two pages later, when he admits that he cannot recall his first love’s features. And about the white woman he has admired in Veronese’s Feast of Levi (an optical and mnemonic superimposition on his white first love), he affirms that “she lives in paint that cannot change its tense” (123). Walcott’s quest for his poetic is a hunt

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for the ideal of a steady light with no seasonal change, for the illuminated transcendental shaft that shines through all things and reveals them, making men see. Unlike the Impressionists, and like the Classics, Walcott is after an ideal of permanence, not an idol of transience. Chapter X X of Tiepolo’s Hound is a pivotal chapter, dense with the revelations of the book’s references. In its second section, the reference to the essential plane of humanity is openly declared. At this point of the autobiographical narrative, Walcott is overcoming the temptation to doubt and resuming his search for the hound by ravaging a volume on Tiepolo. Then he self-consciously admits: “I was searching for myself now” (124). In Tiepolo he has found “a fixed sublime […], / whose light is always a little before sunset […] a vision so acclimatised to faith / and orthodoxy” (126–27). In section 4 of the same chapter, Walcott’s narrative becomes almost literal in the transparency of its tropes. He tells us of his discovery that his initial epiphany has led him to an encounter not with the white, elegant wolfhound, but with a bellowing Minotaur, which he has pursued and slain (thus slaying himself), and which is the real cause of his hardest trial, his fiercest opponent on his way to the achievement of the artist’s empathic power: History, “a beast / that was my fear, my self, my craft” (127). In the individual named Walcott, existential fear has assumed the guise of an anxiety concerning his craft; in fact, the problem lies with the spiritual growth of his self. The beast he had to fight and kill was a private and at the same time collective monster. The terror of failure surrounding the artist’s work is here unmasked as the fear that his work will not be recognized. The hero finds the strength and conviction to give up this delusory motivation. He distinguishes the grace he is pursuing from his desire for fame. Put difrently, he distinguishes between the two meanings of the word “success,” and adheres to that of “achievement.” He focuses again on the collective scope of his goal, kills the beast of vanity within himself, and once again attunes the scansion of his verse and the pacified beat of his heart to the regular rhythm of an eternal temporal dimension. Prayer and poetry start flowing again: If recognition was the grace I needed to elevate my race from its foul lair by prayer, by poetry, by couplets repeated over its carcase, I was both slain and slayer.

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Time swung its pendulum’s axe through any weather, it swayed inside my heart. I heard it where the dial stared, then brought its palms together at noon and midnight in a steepled prayer. (128)

Within the frame of a Tiepolo painting—which represents Time “with a capital letter,” writes Walcott in the following chapter—he is learning, too, “both skill and conversion watching from the painting’s side” (129). The painting’s side is, of course, his master’s point of view, which held a vision of art that was informed by a religious conception of the world and included an artist’s craft. Walcott’s profession of faith in and fidelity to the island unfolds in an increasing lyrical mode in the denouement of the book. By observing the example of Tiepolo, who let faith raise the scaffolding in the churches he covered with his frescoes (130), Walcott has freed himself from the selfdelusion that motivated his search for a white hound with the pretext that it was for sake of his art. In a subtle shift to the metaphor of liturgical music, he confesses his love for the island, on which he can find the sublime of a “monodic” climate, indifferent to “seasonal modulations” (132), and begins a new search, a more authentic quest for a “craft confirming images”: i.e. vision. This, he now knows, he will learn from looking at both a Caribbean mongrel dog and a “challenging ceiling of cloud” that reminds him of Tiepolo (132). The last six chapters of the book rehearse, summarize, and make explicit all the clusters and structures of reference that Walcott has been building through his double narrative, thus bringing to completion his readerresponse-oriented technique of the hermeneutic imperative. The two narratives are brought together in a unitary conclusion that foregrounds the quest pattern and its symbolic significance. Pissarro, as I have already pointed out in discussing Walcott’s elaboration of a mulatto aesthetic in the book, is finally judged guilty of having falsified his origins and betrayed his island, although some kind of excuse is given for his behavior in the observation that his ancestry was, in fact, white, and so was, by consequence, his Muse. Shifting his point of view to Pissarro’s, Walcott is able to see himself and his own people with the eyes of the Other—a European white painter—as from his perspective. From the standpoint of a white Muse, “what was there, to paint” in St Thomas, “except black skins?” (143) Apparently, the comment is

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aimed at distinguishing between a sense of belonging by birth and a sense of belonging by race. But the reader who is aware of Walcott’s position on ethnicity will know that this distinction is in itself an ultimate verdict of guilt, at least of being guilty of a mystifying ideology. Race, for Walcott, is a concept pertaining to History and its linear thinking. Belonging is an instinctual notion dictated by nature in a particular geography. Race can take one away from his place of origin. Belonging will send him away, only to lure him home again, after a while, overwhelmed by a feeling of Sehnsucht. The conclusion of Walcott’s reasoning about Pissarro’s choices as an artist is, accordingly, that “St. Thomas stays unpainted,” and that “This is not fair” (143). In the attempt to justify Pissarro, Walcott definitely condemns him. In the effort to understand him, he sees that “in his own day he saw no solution // except escape […] from a dividing shadow.” “What was his sin?” Walcott seems to ask in the end, apologetically. The answer, though, is rhetorical: behind an apparent justification, it conceals an actual judgment of nonelection: “Where there is no trust, there is no treachery” (162). No man is responsible for not being an elect. He can only feel desperate about it. As for himself, it is in the autobiographical narrative that Walcott voices things entirely and openly. Wherever he has travelled, even in the most picturesque countries, like Italy or France, he has felt “homesick for my acre” (a reference to physical geography again, 152). Talking in the first-person plural to move his narrative onto a collective plane and strengthen, emotionally, the rhetorical tone of his assertion, he claims that a people is nothing without the slow belief in their own nature, and that an authentic search will lead them to where they began: to islands, back home (157), where Geography opposes History. “My monodic climate has no History,” he writes (137). The “tireless sea” has one tense in the Caribbean, an endless present: “one crest” appears “where the last was,” erasing any sense of an ending (137). Time has no scansion, either in seasons, or epochs (137).

The Achievement of the Quest The turning-point in Walcott’s autobiographical narrative comes at the close of chapter X X I I , where the poet stages a second epiphany, which solves the severest fit of doubt about the path his quest has taken. In a few lines he questions, fictionally, his own aesthetic construction; in fact, he reformulates it in synthesis. Through an apparent private reminiscence, he tells us of his waking up to the gradual terror that all he had written of the hound was false—a narrative trick suddenly overturning the basic event in the narrative

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and undermining the narrator’s reliability; a trick, by the way, that may easily remind the reader of the fun Nabokov used to make of his own readers. The basic principles of Walcott’s poetic are enumerated again as they are questioned and doubted as possibly a delusion (134): the use of Memory by Imagination; the substitution of the sensual knowledge produced by poetry for the barren notions furnished by Reason; and the rendering of the vividness of detail by a technical and imagistic Accuracy that would turn a fact, a sense perception, into myth: i.e. a whole and coherent system of meaning. “And yet,” concludes Walcott, “I hold my ground and hold it till / I trace the evasive hound beyond my fear // that it never existed, that exhaustion will / claim action as illusion, from despair” (134). Once again, the ultimate plane of significance is existential and spiritual: we lack faith when we abound in exhaustion. Fear overwhelms us at the lowest of our (creative) energies. But perseverance here assists the hero-quester and makes him overcome his trial. And the poet-quester believes his aesthetic ideal into existence. Walcott’s second epiphany occurs towards the end of the book and is apparently a parody of the initial one, but actually the real, authentic—i.e. Caribbean—moment of revelation. The Escher-effect device is always at work, so that we have a simultaneous, double perspective, black and white, denying the possibility of an exclusive point of view, but at the same time affirming the necessity, for the subject, to choose one: to position himself and elect his place of belonging in order to be able to say anything about the world. Once again, the movement that is indicated as healthy is not linear—a going away—but circular—a coming and going from one’s centering at home, which allows consciousness to keep awake and alert to the independent metamorphosis of the Not-Me. This second—actually primary— epiphany substitutes a black mongrel for the white hound as the object of the island poet’s quest. It is “a starved pup trembling by the hard sea” (and not a cosseted lapdog in its satin seat), a “tottering, abandoned houseless thing, shaking with “local terror” (my emphasis), gathered in compassion, “the parody of Tiepolo’s hound […] requiring no research, / but something still unpainted, on its own ground” (139). The mongrel’s heir does not dwell in a great fresco. It is “bastardy, abandonment, and hope, / and love” (139). It is a calling to an exercise in charity and care that will help it survive, together with Walcott’s entire ancestry. “The hound was here,” ends the chapter. The end of the journey is where it began. Walcott refuses to make “a change of Muses [with] a change of light and custom” (135). His muses remain the “basket-balancing illiterate women” of St Lucia, with their native grace,

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“their earth-rooted stride,” and their load / an earthen vessel, its springs of joy inside” (136). Walcott is so honest as to recognize and thank his helpers, the characters, in his spiritual autobiography, who helped him “to cross a treacherous sea / to find a marble hound,” while a black mongrel was mutely pleading outside (145). In a playful superimposition of his destiny on Pissarro’s, he pays homage to the Swedish Academy, who granted him the Nobel Prize (his marble hound achieved) by calling their appointment an “invitation to Salon, Academy” (145). Here again, a judgment is clearly passed on Pissarro: “the lectern for the elect” (145) is offered to Walcott as it never was to the Jewish painter. The book closes on a note of reconciliation and thanksgiving. Walcott refers directly to “the pilgrimage I have made”; on coming home, he intones a psalm to the island: “this is my peace, my salt, exulting acre: / there is no more Exodus, this is my Zion” (162). There follows a prayer of thanks (“For leaves and horses, thanks” 163), a habit that reports a life custom: “If I feel I have done good work I do pray, I do say thanks.”57 Under “the studded collar of Tiepolo’s Hound,” probably the Canis Major in the constellation of Orion, the image and phrase that closes the book, Walcott the narrator and poet prophesies that “all the sorrows that lay heavily on us, / the repeated failures, the botched trepidations, // will pass” (163). At this point he has obviously overcome his own personal anxiety at failure, and the hardest trial of his quest. “It is not for God to perform for the good of the poet,” he once said in an interview, and added that “poetry, in a way, is a quarrel with God.”58 In the Arthurian legend, the hero was bound to ask a question that would restore the Fisher King and his land to health and fertility, the motivation and purpose of his quest. The right question the poet–knight should ask in order to achieve his quest is not “will my work be acceptable in God’s eyes?” This is his doubt, which he should be brave enough to keep to himself and overcome as one of his trials, testing his vocation, courage, and strength. The right question is: “How should I make my work acceptable in God’s eyes?” And the answer is “By working”:

57 Hirsch, “The Art of Poetry X X X V I I : Derek Walcott” (1986), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 100. 58 Leif Sjöberg, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1983), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 84.

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i.e. by living in a thankful, surrendering disposition of the soul: by living in faith. At the close of chapter X X V , the rituals of preparation are presented as a sacrament, the equivalent of a Catholic Mass, as Walcott confirmed in our interview. They are also the remains, through the Arthurian legend, of that Eucharistic sacrament that was at the core of the nature cults from which, according to Jessie Weston, the Christian symbol developed. As befits a ritual, whose essence is the repeated performance of a gesture, the incantatory praise of prayer, Walcott reiterates the description of the painter’s preparation at least for the third time in the book (see pp. 17 and 97), reflecting its rhythm in the structure of the narrative. Moreover, the cadence of these lines is in itself incantatory in its poised pace, and in the soothing tone of the self-addressed, encouraging, imperative mode: Swivel the easel down, drill it in sand, then tighten the canvas against vaps of wind, straddle the stool, reach for the brush with one hand, then pour the oil in trembling sacrament. (158)

There follows, immediately, the utterance of the acquired, secret knowledge of the acolyte, whose initiatory journey is now complete. Assurance of the acceptability of one’s work, to which the artist once felt himself called and to which he has dedicated all his life, lies in surrendering one’s achievement to God’s will. In an essential, eschatological perspective, assurance of salvation can only be a state of the heart that has been touched by grace, the sign of which is a feeling of gratitude in the form of overwhelming joy. In the perspective of the artist’s Bildung, accomplishment lies not in the artist’s hands. The artist is not alone in the creative process. His role is the effort, the quest, the readiness to answer, the grateful response to a call. This will justify him and his work in God’s eyes: There is another book that is the shadow of my hand on this sunlit page, the one I have tried to write, but let this do; let gratitude redeem what lies undone. (158)

What matters is the growth of the soul that follows the Emersonian spirit:

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T HE C ROWNING OF A P OET ’ S Q UEST … what is crucial was not true ascription to either hand [Tiepolo’s or Veronese’s]—rather the consequence of my astonishment, which has blent this fiction to what is true without a change of tense. (133)

The consequence of the narrator’s astonishment in the autobiographical narrative is his pursuit of the ideal of beauty that has manifested itself to him in his first epiphany. In a daring self-reflexive observation, Walcott is declaring in these lines that the book we are reading has been brought into existence by that emotion and is the product of the joint operations of his ability to fictionalize facts and of a permanent, immutable, larger truth.

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The Fulfilment of the Aesthetic of Light in the Achievement of the Metaphor of Light

O somma luce che tanto ti levi da’ concetti mortali, alla mia mente ripresta un poco di quel che parevi, e fa la lingua mia tanto possente, ch’una favilla sol della tua gloria possa lasciare alla futura gente — Dante, Paradiso X X X I I I :67–72

I

T I E P O L O ’ S H O U N D , Derek Walcott perfects his aesthetic of light. While his poetry has always been rich in light imagery, Tiepolo’s Hound is saturated with light. Light is the central metaphor of the poem, where it unfolds in a complex and rigorous design, which provides the final formulation and the clearest exemplification of Walcott’s aesthetic of the island artist. The treatment of the image of light in Tiepolo’s Hound shows all the modes of application of the core of that aesthetic, which is the universal value of the poet’s expression of his individual experience. Walcott draws his models freely from the Western literary tradition. He freely revives or re-invents canonized formal features. He professes his attachment to the geography and the ordinary scenes of his island. He confesses his belief in the existence of a transcendental entity that informs all that is and inspires the artist to act as a medium of spiritual truth. He enunciates his conception of art as a form of knowledge that is operated by intuition. He articulates his conviction that the work of art can embody memories of past life, sublimating them, heightening their meaning. Thus, he claims that art can be an answer to loss and death. He experiments with contemporary reader-oriented techniques of narration that require an interpretation based on the principle of the hermeneutic circle. He has a penchant for intertextuality. He fashions an epic narrative space for the development of a complex, polyN

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semous metaphoric structure. He exults in an irrepressible love for wordplay. He repeats his love of painting and attempts a final form of coalescence of the two disciplines of painting and writing. As Walcott explained in 2001, at the press conference at the Brunelleschi Hotel in Milan, the artist’s choice of the light he wants to paint in is the dilemma from which the book arose: Pissarro was born in St Thomas, in the Caribbean. He was born in 1830, and his life is about growing up in the Caribbean and then moving to France, to Paris. He painted French landscapes and French cities, but theoretically, he was born in the Danish island of St Thomas, so by birth and by some growing up he’s West Indian. I’m not sure he wanted to call himself that, but the reality is that he is, so part of the book is what might have happened if he painted the Caribbean instead of Paris. […] That’s a thing that the West Indian artist has to contemplate all the time. The choice of going away for the sake of his work.

As we have seen, Walcott’s answer in the book is that the artist is free to choose because he is “Art’s subject as much as any empire’s” (29), and that, paradoxically, the more strongly he expresses his sense of belonging to a particular geography, the more clearly he connects his art and culture to the Western tradition. The most relevant reason Walcott gives for his own choice to belong to the Caribbean and Pissarro’s choice to belong to France is the experience of light as epiphany. This is interpreted in accordance with the models offered by Joyce and Dante, both of whom subsume the thought of Thomas Aquinas. At the same time, the treatment of the image of light in the poem applies Walcott’s theory of metaphor, to which one of its meanings refers. It is the means of the poet’s fulfilment of his quest for that paradoxical flash of an instant in which every facet would be caught in a crystal of ambiguities. Light, in Tiepolo’s Hound, becomes a metaphor for metaphor itself: an elusive, ubiquitous medium conveying significance by means of the analogy of its own substance with the substance of things both natural and spiritual. And we are back to Aquinas by way of Dante and Joyce.

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A Long-Pursued Symbol The development of the imagery of light through Walcott’s work illustrates his privileged mode of knowing and communicating knowledge, which he himself defined in an interview as “the integrity without logic” that one can find in the creative process of a poem, and in dreams.1 Walcott has been thinking in metaphor about light during his entire career. In a sense, he has been shaping the metaphor of light that we can now enjoy in Tiepolo’s Hound throughout his oeuvre. To do this, he has followed the poetic procedure of accumulating the repetitions of a few fundamental ideas. Gertrude Stein (in theory) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (in practice), however, have taught us (and Derek Walcott) that pure repetition does not exist, and that the subtle variations involved in every subsequent formulation of the same intuition are the stuff our knowledge is made of. Every new poem by Walcott, and every new image in each of his poems, has been an attempt to express again, better, or simply in another way—we could say: in another light, as in an Impressionist painting—what he had expressed before, taking in at the same time the perception of a slight atmospheric difference. On the one hand, then, Walcott’s aesthetic of light can be said to have been present in his mind and in his work from the very beginning; on the other, it is only in the final perspective of Tiepolo’s Hound that it is fully articulated and made manifest. A few examples, taken from Walcott’s most ‘lighted’ works, will suffice. Another Life (1973), Walcott’s portrait of the artist as a young man, is a book that is full of light and already contains the core of Walcott’s luminary aesthetic. One of the principles of this aesthetic is that light has a shaping power, as the image of the sunlight plating Anna’s body shows: “The sixteen-year-old sun / plates her with light” (229). We can find the same image in the later “The Light of the World,” from The Arkansas Testament (1987): “I could see where the lights on the planes of her cheeks / streaked and defined them […] these lights / silkened her black skin” (48). Only in Tiepolo’s Hound, though, is the principle explicitly stated. It becomes, in fact, one of the leitmotifs of the book, as the following passages show: “light knits her hair / in a garland of sculpted braids” (9); “light defined his delight in the wharves, / like a Dutch engraving” (28); “light shaped the square” (116); “the light’s soft argument […] with its power of definition” (148).

1 Sharon Ciccarelli, “Reflections Before and After Carnival: An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1979), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 37.

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The case is even more evident with the fundamental conception of light that sustains Walcott’s imagery and links it to a whole cosmology. First light is viewed, in Another Life, as a universal attribute, but still in a personal perspective: “Gregorias, listen, lit, / we were the light of the world!” (294) Then this intuition becomes the result of aesthetic contemplation in “The Light of the World”: “O Beauty, you are the light of the world!” (48) As we shall presently see, the manifestation of Beauty in the garb of light in the things of this world is one of the tenets of Stephen Dedalus’ and Dante’s world conceptions, which rest on the teachings of Aquinas. Moreover, “The Light of the World” ends with another statement that formulates, intuitively and succinctly, the poetic that will emerge full-blown in Tiepolo’s Hound: “There was nothing […] I could give them / but this thing I have called ‘The Light of the World’” (51). The poet’s perception of beauty is followed by his attempt to express it, or give it back. At the time of its first becoming conscious, this attempt is already accompanied by the anxiety concerning its sufficiency and worth. The image of light beautifully shaping and colouring the face of a woman is presented again in Omeros (1990): “I saw how light was webbed / on her Asian cheeks, defined her eyes with a black / almond’s outline” (14). The verb “web” here reveals how Walcott is often thinking in terms of painting, and learning from painting, as is intimated by another line, where “light nets the waves” (13) – the shaping power of light operating as in cross-hatching, a drawing or printing technique for shading. Omeros opens with a sunrise scene that establishes the primeval light of the narrative. Light illuminates the world of the island’s community of fishermen, and takes on some of the meanings that will proliferate in The Bounty and finally cohere in a unified aesthetic conception in Tiepolo’s Hound, where Walcott returns to his habitual positive view. In Achille’s world, light is mercilessly clear and as wide as the sky: “the light was hard overhead / and there was a horizon” (8–9). It brings elation: “This was the light that Achille was happiest in” (9). It is a mythic, divine power surrounding the narrator—a character of the same world—with delight, and allowing him a further sight: “O Sun, the one eye of heaven, O Force, O Light […] encircling delight […] that other sight” (298). It is, of course, as in Tiepolo’s Hound, the light of the Caribbean, and particularly, as in the book’s autobiographical narrative, the light of St Lucia. A chant to St Lucia, in chapter L V I I of Omeros, recites that “It was a place of light with luminous valleys” (286). St Lucian light—the narrator has just revealed—can dissolve the poet’s ego, and make his body

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so transparent that it casts no shadow but projects the “inward vision” of the island: “I saw no shadow underline my being; / I could see through my own palm […] since I was seeing // the light of St. Lucia at last through her own eyes, / her blindness, her inward vision” (282). Some of the meanings of light anticipate Walcott’s more explicit attributions in the unfolding of his aesthetic in Tiepolo’s Hound. One is the relationship of light to memory, as a means of clarification and empowerment: “the sunrise brightens the river’s memory” (4); another one is the use of light as a symbol for Walcott’s ideal of clarity in art: “My light was clear” (294). The Bounty (1997) is the last book by Walcott preceding Tiepolo’s Hound, and it is also full of light. Ideas are repeated and reformulated in the poems. Light is a symbol of energy constantly renewing itself in cycles: “the bounty returns each breakday” (4). It falls on everyday objects, redeeming their ordinariness or, rather, unveiling the sublime in them, as in “the light’s bounty on familiar things” (16). The perception of an exact quality of light is said to activate the process of memory: “Days change, the sunlight goes, then it returns, and wearily, / under intense mental pain, I remember a corner / of brilliant Saddle Road” (27); or, differently, light has a connecting, bridging, metaphorically associative power: “There is the same high ardour / of rhetorical sunsets in Sicily as over Martinique” (75). Finally, verse should be shining with light: i.e. should convey the immediacy of life, as in the following lines: “lines that shine with life” (69), “let these lines shine […] a shining language” (72). The meaning of light, however, is still described in the mode of simile, which Walcott deems an inferior form to metaphor.2 Moreover, it is named explicitly in the title of the book, and throughout it, as God’s bounty. On the other hand, Walcott already conceives of the element of light in a religious perspective, which is the last step toward the world-vision that will be fully articulated in Tiepolo’s Hound under the guidance of the philosophical musings of Stephen Dedalus and Dante. And we are back with them for good.

The Meaning(s) of Light There is no need to demonstrate Dante’s influence on the thought and poetry of Derek Walcott, but a single passage from a reading I attended on 7 2

Paola Loreto & Luigi Sampietro, “Derek Walcott in Italia,” Poesia 164 (September

2002): 37.

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July 2001 at L’8 di Saffi in Parma will serve as an introduction to my use of Dante as an interpretative key to Walcott’s world-view and its corresponding poetic: All works of art represent light, including architecture, which shapes light. The same thing I think is true of verse: that the sensation that must convey the creation of any work of art is the sensation of light. […] The most moving, the greatest achievement for me in verse is I think the X X X I I I canto of Paradiso, which begins “Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio.” And it’s all about light. It is a light that is not of the sun: it has no shadows. And the light of course is the light of love.

On the same subject, in 1990, Walcott had stated that love “is embodied in the figure of Christ. Or it takes you as far as Dante, because the horrors through which Dante goes are finally sublimated in love, a radiant light that swirls backward into a center,” and he was talking here about “the is, the light, the is, the thing that is at the heart of being.”3 Even more explicitly, Walcott has said that one can substitute ‘light’ for ‘God’, as frequently happens in Dante.4 Besides being further evidence of Dante’s relevance as a source for Walcott’s elaboration of his own light-imagery, these remarks by Walcott show that his thinking about the meanings of figurative language is oriented by Dante’s classification of four levels of poetic significance. This grid I have found very useful in my own interpretation of Walcott’s metaphoric construct of light in Tiepolo’s Hound, so I will use it in describing its wide range of meanings. Dante expounded his theory of interpretation in Convivio and in De Vulgari Eloquentia. He derived his exegetical scheme from the contemporaneous method of interpreting the Scriptures, which prescribed that a text should be explicated according to four meanings: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical. It is of vital importance, says Dante, that the poet and the reader of poetry distinguish between the literal sense, or “the fine forgery” (bella menzogna), and the “allegorical,” or “other,” sense, by which he means all figurative meaning, or “the truth that is hidden beneath the fine forgery.” In the case of certain literary texts, such as his own Comedy, all the four senses that were then being used by theologians are useful, including the 3 J.P. White, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1990), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 155. 4 Walcott, “Derek Walcott on Omeros: An Interview,” 36.

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moral sense and the anagogical, which is an “over-sense” pertaining to the spiritual sphere and revealing the “supernal things belonging to the Eternal Glory.”5 To begin with the literal sense, then, light in Tiepolo’s Hound, as in most of Walcott’s verse, stands for itself: for the physical phenomenon that in the Caribbean colours sunsets like so many “Tiepolo ceilings,” and every morning ushers in the exhilarating feeling of its touch on the body.6 The book was born from its author’s “customary” astonishment at sunrises in his native St Lucia and from his discovery that his sense of awe was equally elicited by the light of the Mediterranean, either falling on the “sparkling Straits of Sicily” or on the inner thigh of a white hound in Paolo Veronese’s Feast in the House of Levi (T 7, 58). But not by the light of Paris, or Pontoise, which is “grey,” “reticent,” and “capricious”; “subtler, riper and ageing”; which has “no fury,” and “no glare / of exultation” (T 33, 68). This was the realm of Camille Pissarro’s epiphanies and painting. The image of light takes on its ‘other’, or figurative, sense from this juxtaposition. While the biographical narrative of Pissarro’s life explores the effects of physical light on the quality of his painting by following him in his exile from the Virgin island of St Thomas to the city of Paris, the autobiographical narrative of Walcott’s life explores the nature of artistic inspiration by representing it in the guise, or “bella menzogna,” of the exact stroke of light he once saw on the inner thigh of the white hound in Veronese’s painting. Walcott’s “brilliant lie,” as he calls his own fiction, or literal sense, in Tiepolo (58), is that he was astonished by the masterly rightness of that stroke and is now hunting for the dog, and that, since he has ever since been unable to track down the painting, he now thinks he might even be wrong in attributing it to Veronese, and starts hunting for it in a Tiepolo catalogue. As we have seen, the ‘lying’ in art is merely a heightening of facts. Accordingly, in his Milan reading of 2000, Walcott presented this fiction as an episode that had happened in his real life and had triggered his meditation on memory in the book, which was an effective way of affirming the continuity, in his consciousness, between the life of art and the art of life. The author and the protagonist of the fiction, then, are both left facing the fact that the intense sensory and emotional impression their mind once received is now confined to their memory. “Memory was my painter,” says 5 6

Dante, Convivio I I , I ; my tr. Walcott, “ ‘ An Object Beyond One’s Own Life’: An Interview with Derek Walcott,” 26.

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Walcott in Tiepolo’s Hound (123). Memory, for him, nurtures poetry. It presumes loss and promotes preservation. As in Emily Dickinson’s “economy of desire,”7 in Walcott’s strategy of aesthetic perception “Separation only brings // sharper definition” (99), and the pronouncement, here, is made in the same oracular tone characterizing certain poetic utterances by Dickinson. Memory, for Walcott, works like a dream, by subtracting details of circumstance while exalting details of sensation. This is why “the craft of painting can certainly help the craft of poetry, but I don’t think that the craft of poetry can help the craft of painting” (Parma reading, 2001). Poets can learn from painters the importance of the exact rendering of light, because paint is so sensuous that its fruition is whole and simultaneous, and a single stroke can be “so exact in its lucency” that it evokes a whole ambience and milieu (T 8).8 Painting, in other words, does justice to light’s power of exalting simultaneously all our sensual perceptions, so that our remembering a detail of light brings back to life, as in synesthesia or synecdoche, a whole scene or experience. “The light had substance,” says Walcott in Tiepolo’s Hound; and points at “a still life that could / share with the ham and bread the taste of colour” (47). Like the amber light that in Walcott’s poems glazes things and makes them radiant (T 98, Another Life, CP 145), memory operates in time, by gradually losing its content and prompting the action of imagination. Edward Baugh has written that it works paradoxically, actualizing and idealizing its object at the same time. In fact, what Baugh goes on to say is more correct: for someone who, like Walcott, though belonging to our century, still partakes in an idealistic world conception, the artist’s memory, rather, “catches and holds the remembered object in its quiddity.”9 In other words, it renders the psyche’s reality more accurately, which is one of the fundamental points that Walcott wanted to make in the poem, as he explained in his Milan reading of 15 May 2000:

7 Richard Wilbur, “Sumptuous Destitution” (1959), in Wilbur, Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953–1976 (New York & London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976): 11. 8 See also Walcott’s interview with Edward Hirsch: “the act of painting is not an intellectual act dictated by reason. It is an act that is swept very physically by the sensuality of the brushstroke”; Hirsch, “The Art of Poetry X X X V I I : Derek Walcott” (1986), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 102. 9 Edward Baugh, “Painters and Paintings in Another Life,” Caribbean Quarterly 26 (March–June 1980): 89.

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So, if the dog I’m thinking of, if I have turned that dog’s angle, because my memory says that’s how it was, who do I believe? The real thing, or my memory? I have to trust my memory, because it’s too overwhelming. Nothing, no angle, can corroborate the angle that I see when I think of the dog. I can think of nothing else surrounding the stroke and the angle, and the whiteness of that dog in the painting. So, the mystery remains. Nor am I going to go in pursuit of it. But perhaps that’s the exact process of memory. It’s so close to a dream, like when you get up after a dream and you disbelieve where you are, for a while, because what is more real is what you just dreamt.

Which is also a powerful statement, again, of a Romantic aesthetic. According to Lillian Furst, there can be no stronger evidence of the Romantic valuing of imagination than the absolute assertion of the validity of the inner vision at the expense of outer reality.10 In “The Muse of History,” Walcott endorsed his adherence to the Romantic tradition by affirming that memory depends on imagination, and implying that this is the reason why the senseperceptions stored in our memory are more real than those that presently activate our sense organs. Talking about the snow and daffodils he has never seen, but only read of in the English literature he has naturally inherited, he says: “They were real, more real than the heat and the oleander, perhaps, because they lived on the page, in imagination, and therefore in memory.”11 In Tiepolo’s Hound, the narrator riffles through a “derisive catalogue” that is refusing to yield the reproduction he is hunting for, “determined that the fact was not a vision.” In a colloquial access of frustration, he adds: “(The dog, the dog, where was the fucking dog?) / Their postures wrong. Nothing confirmed my version” (125). The fictional paraphrase stands for a simple statement, positing that for a poet vision is fact. Memory is an urge to say, to render as vividly as possible those remnants of a powerful cognitive experience that have imprinted themselves on the mind, like the “passione impressa” (imprinted passion) which in Dante’s Paradise is left on the mind after a dream and which is the source of the poetic impulse: “Even as he is who seeth in a dream, / And after dreaming the imprinted passion / Remains […] Even such am I” (Paradise, X X X I I I .58– 61). Imagination (fantasia), for Dante, is an organic faculty that translates perceptual memory into intellectual intelligibility: our intellect “draws what it 10 11

Lillian F. Furst, Romanticism in Perspective, 119. Walcott, “The Muse of History” (1974), in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays, 62.

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sees” from “an organic virtue, which is fantasy”12—an operation requiring strength: “Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy” (Paradise, X X X I I I .142). On a larger, collective scale of reference, Walcott has also said that the making of poetry is the remaking of a fragmented memory.13 In the context of this aesthetic, the ‘moral’ sense he assigns to the metaphor of light in Tiepolo’s Hound is that the poet has a double task. As we have seen, he must first of all follow the light that is congenial to his inspiration, and choose the place where he can build his sense of belonging. This will be signalled by the occurrence of epiphanies, which can happen in all climates, as Walcott takes pains to demonstrate. He has Pissarro experience one in Paris, when the painter first feels “the wonder / of forgotten snow,” a “miracle” that stirs his soul and turns his physical surroundings, the city, into a primed canvas on which he can paint the world his vision has framed (40). And he recounts his daily experience of epiphanies in the “sun’s unceasing glory” of the Caribbean, that “consumes the core of doubt by changelessness” with its vermilion and gold strokes of pouis and cocoa (69–70). His own art, in fact—and faith—need a “monodic climate” and “its sublime indifference to seasonal modulations” (132), because this alone allows “the concentrated gaze / that [takes] in every detail at a glance” (43) and permits the poet’s memory to be true to the freshness of detail of actual life (10). Secondly, the artist must acquire that “astonishing mastery” of technique that will enable him to report his epiphany: those “details / revealing themselves to rapturous examination” (14), “the texture of grass in light, its little shocks” (20). Walcott’s aesthetic ideal is clarity, which he has symbolized in Tiepolo’s Hound in the single, divinatory, blessed stroke of light he once met in a painting and now wants to transfer into writing. In trying to give reasons for his tendency to strip his style, and for the spareness of Midsummer, Walcott spoke of a “clear concentration” that “can reflect an entire universe,” of a “clarity that one wants and never will get but one lives all one’s life for.”14 “Mastery in any art,” he said in 2000 at the University of Milan, consists in the “economy of the stroke and the economy of the phrase,” and he added that Dante’s “single-stroke kind of writing” is the highest example, because

Dante, Convivio I I I . I V . Walcott, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory; The Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993): 69. 14 David Montenegro, “An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1990), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. 145. 12 13

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the stroke “is by nature colloquial.” Crispness of dialogues in the clarified and relaxed space of a lengthened line is indeed one of the necessary ingredients for both a revived epic and a revived theater.

The Epiphanic Influence But what is an epiphany for someone who “recognizes the sacrilegious Stephen Dedalus as his idealist hero,”15 and who mentions Dante as the greatest achievement in verse he knows? There is at least one text that one cannot help recalling when thinking about epiphanies, and another one that immediately comes to mind because it shares with the first the aesthetic ideal of clarity. Epiphany is what Stephen Dedalus calls claritas, and clarity is the third quality of beauty in Thomas Aquinas’ aesthetic. As such, it also underlies Dante’s Scholastic cosmology in the Divine Comedy. Both in Stephen Hero and in the Comedy, clarity implies the existence of an all-encompassing Unity. As in Aquinas’ conception, aesthetic experience is a cognitive apprehension of the ultimate cause of things. In Aquinas’ terms, goodness and beauty, being both based upon form, are fundamentally identical. So goodness may be praised as beauty, which relates to the cognitive faculty, because “beautiful things,” says Aquinas, “are those which please when seen” (pulchra sunt quae visa placent; Summa theologiae I, q. 5, art. 4). Beauty consists in due proportion, because the senses are satisfied with things duly proportioned: i.e. by a broader Divine Order or Unity. Sight and hearing are the senses that best serve reason, but they enjoy delectatio (delight) only if the object of their apprehension shows the three attributes of beauty: integritas, consonantia, and claritas. In Stephen Dedalus’ words, integritas—or wholeness—is the apprehension of the aesthetic image as one whole, while consonantia is the subsequent apprehension of its complex and harmonious structure. “Having first felt that [the object] is one thing,” says Stephen, “you feel now that it is a thing.”16 His definition of claritas, though, has been the most debated point in Joyce’s aesthetic, because it changes from Stephen Hero to the Portrait, deviating from Thomistic principles in order to establish a religion of art that is thoroughly secular. The way Joyce uses and abuses Aquinas to substitute intellectual and Robert D. Hamner, Epic of the Dispossessed, 11. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914–15; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992): 230. 15 16

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psychological obligations for religious commitment in establishing art as a discipline and the artist as a responsible creature was brilliantly illustrated by Maurice Beebe in 1957. In the earlier, rejected version of the Portrait, claritas is still revealed in the experience of epiphanies, and epiphanies are still “sudden spiritual manifestation(s).”17 In the Portrait, Stephen refuses the interpretation of claritas as “the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything,” and describes it as “the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that [the object] is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which [Aquinas] speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing.”18 As W.K. Wimsatt pointed out long ago, Stephen is here confusing quidditas, which in Scholastic philosophy means ‘specific essence’, with haecoeitas, or ‘individual thisness’,19 a sign of his growing attachment to the material beauty of things rather than to the outer radiance of the soul of things, which was Joyce’s orthodox interpretation of claritas in Stephen Hero.20 In Paradiso, the light-imagery unfolds in the representation of a thoroughly orthodox Thomistic world-view. God is the ultimate cause and the life principle that permeates and shines through all that is, under the appearance of light. Light is life and it is love. In the last canto, where Beatrix leads Dante to the vision of God in the ultima salute, light becomes lumen gloriae: a special virtue God infuses in the contemplating creature to intensify and potentiate his sight (Paradiso X X X I I I , 109–1421). After this, the task of the poet Dante is to report the ultimate ecstatic experience as precisely as he can, unravelling the thread of his memory as if he had just woken from a vivid dream. Walcott’s own concept of aesthetic perception filters Thomas’ doctrine through Joyce and Dante. In fact, Dante is a fundamental junction in the lines of philosophical thought that have been handed down to Walcott through the centuries, and may well be the explanation, as a common source 17 Joyce, Stephen Hero: A Part of the First Draft of a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Theodore Spencer (1944; U S A 1963): 211. 18 Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 231. 19 W.K. Wimsatt, “Poetry and Christian Thinking” (1948/51), in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954; Lexington: U of Kentucky P , 1967): 270–71; Maurice Beebe, “Joyce and Aquinas: The Theory of Aesthetics,” Philological Quarterly 36 (January 1957): 20–35; repr. in James Joyce: “Dubliners” and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, ed. Morris Béja (London: Macmillan, 1973): 165, 170. 20 Joyce, Stephen Hero, 213, Beebe, “Joyce and Aquinas: The Theory of Aesthetics,” 166. 21 See also Aquinas, Somma contro i gentili, ed. Tito S. Centi (Turin: U T E T , 1975), I I I : 546.

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of derivation, for some of the basic similarities between Walcott’s and Emerson’s aesthetics. Both, in fact, are a mixture of idealistic—i.e. originally Platonic—and Aristotelian features. The synthesis between Platonism and Aristotle’s nature philosophy had first been made in the thirteenth century by the School of Oxford, of which Roger Bacon and Robert Greathead were the main representatives. Greathead (c. 1175–1253), in particular, developed an aesthetic of light according to which light is the first substance created by God, hence the structure of the universe, and the medium that reveals its form and beauty. The imagery of light elaborated by Dante in the Comedy shows the Italian poet’s familiarity with Greathead’s theory. The poem also shows, however, that Dante shared Aristotle’s notion of art as tekhnē (acquired knowledge and ability) and his concept of mimesis as art’s creative imitation of nature. Although Walcott has evidently inherited from Dante a conception of art as apprenticeship to a craft and training in a skill, and privileges a mimetic notion of representation, in the furthest level of significance he attributes to the image of light in Tiepolo’s Hound—the anagogical—he seems to subsume the Augustinian concept of divine illumination, which sustains the Comedy and which constitutes the basis of Greathead’s philosophy. In this ultimate meaning, the metaphor of light in Tiepolo’s Hound functions as what we nowadays would properly define as allegory, a technique that was typical of medieval didactic poetry. As such, Walcott’s epiphanies ultimately remain pure insights into spiritual essence—in his formulation, “slow surrenderings” or “astonished groans” at “irresistible light” (117), where the word “irresistible” denotes the unquenchable desire of the creature for his or her creator. In its eschatological reference, Walcott’s light has substance and casts no shadow (147, 149). It has a gentle power of definition (147–48) that shapes a square in Venice (116) and knits a woman’s hair (9). It defines Pissarro’s and Walcott’s delight in the wharves of Charlotte Amalie, the capital of St Thomas (28, 58). It activates sight (“this was his light, this where his sight began” 147). It is pure energy, unceasingly creative, and an eternal life principle. And Walcott the poet–protagonist of the modern epic is also ready, like the same figure of Dante in the Comedy, to “trace the thread that carries memory / back to the original” (115), and to render his epiphany “with the details of a dream, / as in a dream […] as I remember them” (121). Yet, in Tiepolo’s Hound, too, we can find a trace of Stephen Dedalus’ heresy, or sacrilegium. Sharon Ciccarelli’s interview with Walcott showed that he had long been familiar with Joyce’s use of Scholastic concepts in Ulysses,

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because he referred in it to the Irish writer’s belief that the accretion of detail and the creation of infinite sequences of epiphanies would make any object radiate its “whatness.”22 If the assimilation of Dante’s features is responsible for Walcott’s adherence to Thomistic orthodoxy, the anxiety of the island artist which is in him (as it was in Joyce) makes him yield to the temptation to express the haecoeitas of the Caribbean, the ‘here and now’ that God has always invested with light, but which has never been named, or sung in verse. With a powerful device in which he turns his own aesthetic into practice, in section 1 of chapter 2 Walcott names elements of the Caribbean landscape in a manifest attempt to be true to the “freshness of detail” of his “remembered life”: What should be true of the remembered life Is a freshness of detail: this is how it was— The almond’s smell from a torn almond leaf, The spray glazing your face from the bursting waves. And I […] […]

felt a steady love

growing in me […] […] watching its black hands move, saw in the shadows in which it believes, in ruined lanes, and rusted roofs above the lanes, a language, light […] (10)

Walcott’s epiphanies, then, often connote his earthly attachment to his place of origin and to his people. They are “the shadowy ecstasy of a black mongrel” (153), whose impulse is to give back the light he perceives on familiar things in a way that at the same time conveys his sense of their individual essence or ‘whatness’, as the last couplet of the quoted section shows: “not for these things alone, and yet only / for what they were, themselves, my joy comes back” (11). For Walcott, the materials of art are the materials of which

22 Sharon Ciccarelli, “Reflections Before and After Carnival: An Interview with Derek Walcott” (1979), in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. 36.

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the earth is made and which the poet sees and expresses in the sublime, trying to make other men see. This is what the poet Walcott does in the chant to the “ordinary” he intones in the penultimate chapter of the book: some critics think his work is ordinary, but the ordinary is the miracle. Ordinary love and ordinary death, Ordinary suffering, ordinary birth, The ordinary couplets of our breath, Ordinary heaven, ordinary earth. (155)

In the Portrait, Stephen Dedalus shows evident trouble giving up material beauty; his soul frets in the shadow of a language that is not his language; and he thinks that the image of beauty the artist struggles to express is pressed out “from lumps of earth,” “from the gross earth […] from sound and shape and colour.”23 In Tiepolo’s Hound, Walcott affirms that “stroke or word or note presume their intent / because of what they are: shape, sound, and stain, // compelled to one direction.” The same happens, for him, in Paul Cézanne’s “visible syntax,” which he opposes to Impressionism (57), and in Gertrude Stein’s word arrangements. Cézanne’s “gross ecstasies” were realized by an undeniable instinct that knew “one empire only: light” (57–58), the same light “itself” that “a writer has to have in his wrist to produce clarity,” says Walcott in his essay on Ernest Hemingway.24 In Parma, in 2001, he linked Hemingway to Gertrude Stein to Cézanne in an ideal line of apprenticeship in the painting by slow repetition of strokes instead of washing: I think, for instance, that it is obvious that Gertrude Stein learnt from Cézanne. And Hemingway from Gertrude Stein. Because Cézanne did not do wash. He worked in strokes, because for him the surface of the canvas did not really have depth. And if you make a parallel of depth of perspective and narrative, then you have an example in Hemingway of slow repetition of strokes just as you have in Cézanne’s watercolors or oils. All works of art represent light.

23 24

Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 205, 224. Walcott, “On Hemingway” (2001), in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays, 109.

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Walcott is indeed incapable of conceiving a language that is deprived of its physical reference. His treatment of the theme of voluntary exile is figured through Pissarro’s and his own pursuit of the right light in which to paint and write. The whole issue of the artist’s belonging to a place is thought of in terms of the relationship between his craft and light, which is gradually revealed to be a relationship between Light and his psyche—or soul, in a more traditional interpretation of the text. While Walcott has Pissarro pursue a new ideal of light and light rendition in the foreign country and fashionable techniques of late-nineteenth-century France, he continues to be a faithful believer in the light of the Caribbean and in an orthodox apprenticeship to traditional models. Beyond the apparent residue of ambiguity in his position that I have tried to reveal in chapter 3, Walcott betrays his formed and firm opinion on this as early as the beginning of chapter I I I , where he devotes himself to the same “light of redemption” that Paul Gauguin captured in tropical landscapes. He calls Gauguin, by election, “our Creole painter of anses, mornes, and savannes,” (16) and “Our martyr” (17). In this way, he reveals that to him there is an absolute quality to the light an artist pursues, and that this makes him morally responsible for his vision. In the following lines, Walcott sets out to show how a different conception of light can induce in the artist a different measure of doubt. Once again, he is trying to imagine and reproduce Pissarro’s mind while it transposes an atmospheric perception into a manner of painting. Once again, in beautifully scanned pentameters that rival Stevens’ meditative verse, he shifts the reader’s perspective to the narrator’s vision, while his own voice and judgment briefly assert themselves over Pissarro’s reported but untagged interior monologue: Since light was simply particles in air, and shadow shared the spectrum, strokes of paint are phrases that haphazardly cohere around a point to build an argument, vision was not the concentrated gaze that took in every detail at a glance. (43)

These three couplets formulate a statement of equality between two conceptions of light producing different painting techniques that result in opposite

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world descriptions. Only, one term of the analogy is missing: if to paint light as particles in air, and to paint in shades instead of colours, results in an incoherent, unfinished attempt to represent reality, what is the conception of light that underlies the vision produced by a concentrated gaze, able to take in every detail at a glance? At the moment when he is most consumed by doubt—by the lack of belief that comes from fear and exhaustion—Walcott has Pissarro remember the “untainted health and clarity” of the other eye with which he can look at things (80). We could call this his Caribbean eye. But what should also catch our attention here is the recurrence of the word “clarity.”

Light as Clarity Clarity, in Tiepolo’s Hound, finally appears to be an attribute of the Caribbean eye, and the answer both to the particular trial of the island artist—the dilemma of voluntary exile—and to the most arduous trial of the universal artist—his confrontation with doubt. In his authorial position, joining the local and the universal, Walcott describes the aesthetic experience in terms of integritas, consonantia, and claritas, but finally avows that the only ambience in which he can envision that experience is “the light of islands” (59), “landscapes with no tenses, views that know / that now, as always, light is all we have” (161)—“a climate where beauty is ordinary,” as he had written before (The Bounty 71). Only light which is hard, overhead, and has no season but a horizon (Omeros 8–9) can produce that concentrated gaze taking in every detail at a glance of which Walcott has such a familiar notion, and that indeed sounds like an orthodox version of integritas. And even though consonantia can be found in “huge frescoes with ecstasies of precision, / their delight in balance” (105), and delectatio is in “the flash of a hound’s thigh in Veronese,” which “can gladden the mind” (98), the subject of the aesthetic experience can only be an eye whose health and clarity remain untainted, an eye which needs “the wide benediction of light that falls on every island artist” (T 24)—the light in which Walcott and his heroes have always been happiest (Omeros 8–9). The epilogue of the book is as full of light as the last canto of the Divine Comedy Walcott admires so much. The image, symbol, metaphor, and allegory of light have been working so fervently and in so many directions that few words can be pronounced without having their meanings reverberate through the text. A new world has also been posited, as it had been at the

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end of Omeros, so that names have acquired an ontological weight. A new perspective has been defined, so that words have new meanings. In another Escher-like drawing, whose extraordinary effect is again to allow two hermeneutic contexts to operate at the same time, thus granting the reader a double vision, the narrator muses about internal division and unity as related to one’s sense of reality and geographical belonging. The following lines are a good example: The soul is indivisible as air. Supposedly, all things become a dream, but we, as moving trees, must root somewhere, and there our separation shows its seam, in our attachment to the nurturing place of earth… (160)

In this frame, the word “seam” functions as the detail that, at the end of one visual perspective and at the beginning of another, leads the eye to a new act of perception, coexisting with the first one. That detail is actually what makes the viewer experience the simultaneous presence of another way of looking at the same set of signs and to interpret it according to a new visual Gestalt. It is relevant to the point to remember that Tiepolo’s Hound is full of frames, ranging from window and canvas frames to the frame of memory. In this case, the same sign, “seam,” can be interpreted either as a laceration or as a joint. A “seam” can be a scar or it can be a sewing, a stitching. In the Creole view from which Walcott speaks, it is always the emerging of a new, positive meaning from the ironical awareness of the negative meaning words have always had in an imperial culture in which unity, homogeneity, and linear descent have been the dominant values. These couplets make the reader aware that words can have opposite meanings if they are pronounced from opposite points of view: that of a divided self or that of a self which is whole; that of an experience of separation or that of an experience of unity. The Escher-drawing device functions here as Walcott’s strategy of cultural subversion by means of a revolution in linguistic usage. Reconciliation is the tonality of the last chapter. The artist–knight stops doubting the sufficiency of his achievement, and is finally able to rest on the acquired knowledge that “what lies undone” will be redeemed by his own feeling of gratitude (158). The island artist intones his chant to the ordinary,

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and concludes a search that will lead him where he began: to islands (157). Here is Walcott’s peace, because “what lights the mind […] is a remembered happiness” (162): what illuminates the mind is the preserved memory of a moment of elation. The book closes with the sunset light igniting the islands and catching the light of the stars. The poet raises his eyes and beholds “the studded collar of Tiepolo’s hound” (164), probably one of the two hunting dogs accompanying Orion in the constellation of Canis Major. Orion, or the Hunter, can be seen in both hemispheres from October to March, but is best seen in January, the month in which Derek Walcott was born. Like Odysseus, it is here at home, after a lifelong apprenticeship, that the poet has found the most intimate correspondence—essential and sensual—between his inner creative impulse and the external objects that were created, and this on the ground of their origin in the same, coextensive light. The choice of light as metaphor is the closest Walcott could come to a sensuous representation of poetic metaphor. Besides celebrating, in the image of light, the distinct, palpable light of his Caribbean, he must, at a certain point, have conceived of the idea of light as the ultimate metaphor, or the metaphor for metaphor. In Another Life, his portrait of the artist as a young man, he was seeking a crystal-like word that could name the paradoxical quality of his simultaneous perception of the complexity of things (200). In his portrait of the artist as a mature man, he has conquered the object of his quest by mastering an element that is able to suggest—ambiguously, paradoxically—multiple, possibly infinite, meanings by the sheer metamorphosis of its substance, by the revealing power it can exercise over the objects on which it falls, each moment differently, never in the same way. At the end of Tiepolo it is impossible to read the word “light” without apprehending, simultaneously, the ideas of sight, and life, and love—all monosyllables and all echoing with the same sounds: adjacent forms of one continuous substance. Light is the sign that can create a livable space in language for a presence in the perception of which our knowledge essentially consists, according to Walcott. To harbour, or name, that presence is the poet’s task. “If you substitute, say, ‘light’ for God—and it happens there is a lot in Dante of the same thing—I think a poem is a commemorative act, and an act of gratitude.”25 After all, the Bible says that God is the Word, that He is life, and that, as such, he is also light (John 25

Walcott, “Derek Walcott on Omeros: An Interview,” 36.

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1:1–4), as Walcott remembers in “The Muse of History,”26 dropping, in his

metaphoric construction, the middle term of the analogy: “God is light, and in Him is no darkness.”

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Appendix Walcott in Italy, 2000–2001: Transcriptions of Recordings

T

are given in the closest possible form to the original, recorded version. Hesitations, repetitions, incomplete sentences and colloquial diction have been preserved with the intent of documenting Walcott’s style in communicating to different audiences on different kinds of public appearance. I give the names of the people taking part in the events when I know them. HE TRANSCRIPTIONS BELOW

Derek Walcott Meets the Students University of Milan, 15 May 2000 Luigi Sampietro: As this is not going to be a formal lecture but a question-andanswer session, and since I do not need to introduce Mr Walcott to you, I think that we can start right away. Mr Walcott would like to take a few questions, to begin with, so that he can figure out the level of your intelligence [audience laughs], the knowledge you have of poetry and English, your sophistication in aesthetic matters. So could some of you please ask one, two, three, four questions? DW: All right. First of all, it’s very impressive to turn out here. It feels as if you were expecting somebody else, but evidently… [audience laughs]. If you haven’t, or if you have prepared questions, I’d much rather have it… I didn’t think it was going to be such a large class or attendance, but it’s okay. But I still want to treat it in the same way as if it were a casual, informal seminar. So, I would answer questions not about my work particularly, but anything very broad—it doesn’t matter from what period of English or American literature or who you’re talking about or what the question is only. Because

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sometimes… I mean, I teach, and somebody suddenly saying “Ask some questions” may be intimidating. But you may have at the back of your mind some question related to what you are studying, or what you have to talk about, or teach. I think that the advantage of my being here is that as a writer I can help. I can answer things that may be very illuminating because they may be a very small detail of something. So it’s good to begin with your being shy, because you think that the question you’re going to ask is silly, but it is silly questions that are crucial—the ones that you think you shouldn’t ask that are the ones that you should ask, like ‘How tall is Seamus Heaney?’ I can tell you that [audience laughs]. So if there’s anyone to start from anywhere to ask a question, I prefer to get that intimate, that warm. Alessandro Vescovi: One of the major difficulties we have when we try to interpret your poetry, and especially your theatre, is that to a certain extent we can understand what you’re doing with the English tradition, whereas it is very difficult to assess your use of folklore, or whatever comes from the Caribbean, whatever is native to the Caribbean. We saw a video today, and there were lots of songs and different rhythms and things that were obviously Caribbean—that was something we knew, but, for instance, what you do with voodoo culture, folkloristic tales… DW: It is very difficult to look at a play on a video performance. It’s tiring and desperately boring pretty rapidly. Because you’re not watching the actors. It’s neither one thing or the other. It’s a record of a performance. And you can never get the power and intimacy that you get from a live performance on a video. So, no matter what the play is, pretty soon it’s exhausting to look at it. That’s one thing. So, although the company—the Trinidad Theatre Workshop—are a terrific theatrical company, a terrific ensemble, they can’t fight what is the nature of video, especially of a film performance. I don’t quite know if that was a question, but I think you want me to tell you something about how much I use the folklore of the Caribbean? AV: Yes, because it’s very difficult for us to evaluate, to assess that use. DW: Certainly. I think you probably have two problems. One is the language, the melody of the language and the vocabulary of the language. Because every island in the Caribbean has its own—I don’t call it dialect, but language, its own melody. So that a Barbadian—somebody from Barbados—would talk with a particular melody and even vocabulary. And some-

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times a Barbadian—and you have the same thing here probably in your provincial dialects, or languages—but it can happen that a Barbadian may not be comprehensible to a Jamaican or someone else. Because the presence of languages in the Caribbean include French, English, Dutch, Spanish, Indian—meaning Hindu— and so forth. All these languages, these primal, or original languages exist in the Caribbean, and out of each language another language comes, which is like a dialect of that language. So, in other words, in St Lucia you would have—based on French—you would have French creole or patois; you have English, and then you have a St Lucian English. So, in effect, you have at least four languages in every island, because I’m calling what you would call dialects or patois—I’m calling that a language, because they are languages. So, on that level of comprehensibility, it’s very hard for someone from outside to follow the tone of that language. That’s the language itself, and the West Indian writer has a problem in terms of choosing for veracity, especially in theatre. You see, in fiction it’s okay to modify. But in theatre you want the characters to sound as if they come from where they come from. In other words, if you are writing about a Sicilian you expect him to have a Sicilian melody, and so forth, and the same thing would be true if you were writing about a Barbadian or someone else. So we have all of those things existing. But they are not crippling, they are not a limiting experience. In fact, they are a rich experience, because the choice you have is so wide that you have more choices than the average European or American writer, who may have only one language to write in. We have a larger width of choice. The difficulty of comprehending is something that a Caribbean artist faces, which is to say: who do I write for? Do I write in terms of translating a language so that somebody in Paris, or somebody in London, or somewhere else is going to understand what I’m saying, or do I write with the truth of the melody and vocabulary of the place I’m writing about? I think that one of the answers that solves that is poetry—poetry does do that—because in the mixture you have of the sources of poetry the actual language itself does not count. If that were not true you would not have the language of Shakespeare, or the language of any other great poet, because what is important is not the provincial accuracy of speech but the richness of the poetic text. And that’s important. If you’re dealing in prose, then you are writing to explain an experience. If you come from another country, though, I can understand that it would be difficult to understand what is being said. But it would require some kind of research, maybe, as a scholar into what you’re doing, but

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if it’s a performance it should be easy enough to follow, that whatever is happening is rich enough for you to understand the plot of what is happening. I think in the particular case of watching a video of the two plays, you have to tune your ear to the melody of what is being said. But the melody of what is being said is rich and should not be—not that you do that—should not be considered an inferior way of speaking the English language, because every language, as we know, is a bastardized version of Latin. So the provinciality of certain languages is really the same experience of an imperial language mispronounced by different tribes. So I understand the problem. How much do I use it? I have used folklore, because I’m writing directly for a people who understand the folklore. Without making a comparison, you have to remember that the Greek theatre rewrote the same themes over and over. The Greek theatre repeated the same stories over and over, to the same audience, and the variety of that was who was a better poet—that was the competition, not in the invention of new plots but in the variation on plots common to all the playwrights. In a sense, what I’m saying is there are certain things that are caught in the Caribbean experience that are, of course, the background of what you call ‘voodoo’, but is really not voodoo, except you mean it in a … voodoo is a religion, so the expression of that is a religious expression. Not that you’re saying it, but voodoo is generally associated with some sort of barbarism of some kind. But Vodoun is a God and voodoo is a religion. Good question, thank you. Question: My first question is: the Caribbean world is a mixture of languages, cultures and so on. Does this Caribbean world represent a sort of model for the world to come in terms of integration? And then I would like to ask you this: the difference between the Caribbean and the European cultures is best understood for me in music, because listening to Caribbean music we feel a different pulse. Generally Caribbean music is syncopated, and this is the major difficulty for us in playing that music. How can it be transferred into a European language, this beat, just from the point of view of the poet? DW: First of all, everybody here is too intelligent. Ask me some stupid question. [audience laughs] That’s a good question—a very good question. Okay. In a Caribbean island, on a evening, with a live orchestra, and drummers, you may see a few people, including a couple of waiters, smiling at what a couple of white people are trying to do—you know what I’m saying? Trying to keep the beat. It’s a sort of reverse cliché of saying ‘White Men Can’t Jump’, right?

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That’s not really true. You’d have to be very careful because you’d have to say ‘Everybody in the Caribbean can dance’: I don’t dance. I’m not sure every Italian can sing opera. But it’s more profound that that. The rhythm… that’s a brilliant, brilliant, tough question. The different melodies that exist in Caribbean music sometimes come from a European source. There’s a dance in St Lucia called the bel air, which means ‘nice tune’. Now it’s called bèlè. It’s a very formal beautiful dance based on a square pattern, like squaredancing, but to a waltz beat. So this is not an African beat, this is a waltz beat. When you have that played by instruments that have been adapted like a French violon, or an instrument which has a very lovely name in French creole, a violin, a small violin which is called en bas gorge: ‘under the throat’— that’s a terrific name for an instrument…. The way it is played, though, it is played almost percussively, so you hear the violin notes having almost a percussive beat to them. So, here you have a French tune, played by West Indians, by an African band bringing that rhythm over that French tune and different design of dancing. So what you have is an adaptation, a mixture that happens from that melodic line. It doesn’t mean that all the melodic lines are from France, are from England, or from somewhere else. They may be African melodic lines; sure they are. But how they are interpreted is: what are the instruments that are being played? The principal instrument… you could probably play a bèlè without an African drum. That was not meant—a waltz was not meant for an African drum. So what would happen to the lilt of the waltz would be more like: [drums the beat on the desktop] This would be the beat. The drum is the basis of the melody: that’s the African presence in the music. Now, you can take that presence, that can vary in terms of this rhythm, but underneath all of it, because the principal instrument is the drum, and the voice, then that’s a very African thing. Does that mean that musicians cannot play that beat? Sometimes no. I was working once in a troupe, and a terrific jazz drummer, an American jazz drummer, had a very hard time playing that rhythm, which to me is fairly simple. But there was something missing in terms of how to hit the beat, and all of that. The reason why this is crucial in terms of answering questions about the rhythm of language is, first of all, on two levels: one is on the linguistic level, in the same way as you might say it may be on the melodic level. The source of the music is on the melodic line. Do you know a music called zouk? Have you heard of zouk? Anybody here? You have, okay. Are you a musician? No? Zouk comes from, principally, Guadeloupe and Martinique. And what is great about it is that it combines a lot of different elements of music,

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including, for instance, the polka. That’s part of the whole force of Caribbean music—when a music indicates where it’s going, that indicates where the culture is going. That’s very strong. So, the question that one’s generally asked is whether there’s a premonition or prophecy of some kind of the direction of, say, a world culture? I would say, yes—that it indicates that the musicians in Guadeloupe and Martinique, who felt that they would like to include very naturally—just from natural curiosity of what could happen if we had a polka rhythm inside a rhythm that was beginning to be made by the drummers themselves of a French source or a German source— whatever—and mixing that up into a medley that becomes Caribbean, that has all these different strains: definitely. Some of the most powerful drumming you can get now is… Everybody knows what tassa drumming is. Tassa is an Indian drum. There is a festival in Trinidad, the Festival of Hosain. This is the Festival of the Prophet, of Muhammad Hussein. But it’s called Hosay in Trinidad. And what is great that happens there is you take this fantastic Indian drumming, which is by itself astonishing—you know what Indian drumming is like—but you have it played now by black Trinidadians, and what you have is a fantastic, hair-raising experience, of hearing Africans playing Indian music. And you’ve never heard drumming like that anywhere in the world—the equivalent of that combination of melody. I would say, in the same strain, that this does happen in Caribbean literature; it does use all these various strains. But the thing that I think one resents in criticism about Caribbean literature or Caribbean music or Caribbean anything, or Caribbean society, is for emphases always to be pointed out by people, saying: ‘Oh I see this is from there, and that is from there, and that is from there, and therefore I see that this is you trying to find an identity’. No! The identity is in the mixture. That is the solidity of the identity. The mixture is the identity. It’s not a matter of tracing the strains. So, if somebody says to a Caribbean person ‘You have Chinese in you?’ yes, I can see that. But everybody is speaking one language. Yes, I think that it is evident that it is possible. The unity of races is self-evident in Trinidad. What is dangerous always is that politicians exploit difference. In other words, it can be a dangerous situation in Trinidad if the Indian strain is exploited. What you see in Trinidad, Muslim and Hindu live quite peaceably next to each other. There’s no hatred. There’s no audible or visible distinction between Muslim and Hindu. So, in terms of the validity of Caribbean experience as world experience, as an example of the fusion that can happen—absolutely. And I’ve tried to say this very often in the essays that I have written. The richness of this variety is

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there in the Caribbean, not only in the presence of the different races, but even historically. Question: Taking into account the controversy both before and after the runup choice for poet laureate in England, what’s your opinion on the relevance of such a title in the United Kingdom nowadays? DW: Did you hear the question? No? I think: What, to me, is the significance of the idea of the poet-laureateship in England? Do you know what that is? The Poet Laureate is supposedly but not directly appointed by the Queen. It’s a lifetime appointment. The United States have a Poet-Laureateship, but it happens every year, I think, but now it’s been extended to another two—one, two in all. The Poet-Laureateship is an old thing. The first Poet Laureate, I think, was Ben Jonson. And then Dryden was Poet Laureate, Tennyson was Poet Laureate, and so on. So it is a prestigious appointment. In the last selections of a Poet Laureate—it was a year ago and there were various candidates—and my name was one of the candidates. And I didn’t know whether, if I was offered it, I would accept it, for different reasons. One, according to tradition, it’s a sort of a kiss of death to be appointed a Poet Laureate. And for some people it’s like the Nobel Prize: you get it and you finish. [audience laughs] No. But that’s been the attitude to the Poet-Laureateship. For instance, Ted Hughes, who was Poet Laureate before Andrew Motion, who was made Poet Laureate—Ted Hughes was a great poet. But Ted Hughes had an attitude that I think is very commendable. He felt: ‘I’m Poet Laureate, and expected to write poetry on different occasions’, you know, like the fact that Prince Andrew has pneumonia, or something like that—not quite, but on some major events. He did write a couple of poems— one of them is pretty good, in Ted Hughes’ strength, for the Duchess of York. But most of them were pretty bad. All of us were a little embarrassed. But what I liked about Ted’s determination was, it was very English: I have a job to do, and this is part of the job, and I’ll do the job. And he did it, and of course that’s commendable. In terms of accepting the idea of the Poet Laureateship, what I thought was good was the fact that England could distend its alleged provinciality to include someone from outside, in the same way that I’m still shocked that an Indian can be captain of the English team. I never thought in my life that I would hear England would permit one of those people to be in charge of our cricket team, but there it is. So, that may be the same thing. It may be the expansion of a sort of constricted ex-

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Empire. But I didn’t feel that I wanted to do that. The significance of it is this: Do I believe or does one believe in the idea of a poet being attached to a government? Yes, I think so. I think that what that poet is supposed to contain is the best hopes of that regime, of that kingdom, of that rule, in the most idealized manner. Now, that can be, perhaps, patriotic poetry. But anything that has a job for a poet, I approve of. Paola Loreto: I’d like to know how a poem gets started with you: where the first line comes from—whether from an idea, or an image, or an emotion (a strong emotion), or a detail in your observation of things. And then, possibly, how you develop it, how you go through the entire process of writing a poem. DW: Robert Graves, whom you should read, is a great critic and a very fine poet, who’s not read much now, but who remains a permanent great poet. He once said that… well, he said a lot of things, but he also said a weird thing. He said that only in a society where there are cranes and horses can poetry survive. Can you think of that? Is not that stupid? A culture survives in poetry only if it has cranes and horses, for whatever reason. He’s saying a huge thing. He’s saying something basic: that poetry in itself cannot survive in cities. That everything that comes out of cities has to be fed by nature. That is not different from the concept of Antaeus, the idea of the spirit touching the earth for it to produce. In terms of the beginning of a poem, well, he has other illustrations of meter, that all meter comes out of work responses. In other words, when you really examine it, you can see how true a lot of the sources are. That blues, American blues, comes out of work—of the chain-gang, of work. For instance, the hammer hitting, the lifted hammer going down, right? This beat [beats on the desk], right?, that’s the rhyme. You go like this and like that. “Many nights of sorrow / Many nights of woe / And a bowl and a chain / Wherever I go.” You hear it? And you hear it in the blues songs, and you hear it in the spirituals. These are all iambic couplets. But the guy who is hitting a hammer in the real life is not saying ‘Hey, I’m making an iambic couplet!’ The form comes out of the work. This is also true of rowing, right? That you lean forward and you pull back. Between the stroke forward and the stroke back are the syllabics of the lines, of the line going forward and the line going back. I don’t think it’s confined purely to a primal time—in other words, that meter is strictly a prehistoric—or, whatever: an uncivilized or pre-civilized—

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thing. Because in folk music—as well as in pop music, as well as in music that is sung in big arenas, where it is sung by a stinger or some other kind of performer—it’s the same thing. It really is the beat of the foot. When you keep a beat, that’s related to… the source of that comes out of that idea of work—the meter comes out of that. So, throughout the world you have almost a consistent thing, and the work-song comes out of that particular rhythm. In between, that is orchestrated, and that can be illustrated by the fact that what you have in all cultures is a chant and a response, a chant and a response. Now, this would vary according to what the instrument is that is being used. The basic instrument of any culture is what you use as a source—that’s a source of your rhythm. In other words, the best example of a great poet sticking absolutely close to his source, because he played the guitar, was Lorca. One of the greatest elegies of the twentieth century or of any time is Lorca’s “Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” which is patterned on the chord to that: “At five in the afternoon.” That goes: ‘dran’. “It was exactly five in the afternoon”: ‘da da dran’. And then the variations on that, that may be longer: ‘da da da da dan’—follow? But that’s all the guitar. It is not only that. There are other things happening. It is also—which is miraculous—it is also the chant of a priest. It is a church chant: “It was five in the afternoon.” “It was exactly five in the afternoon.” “It was five in the afternoon,” ‘da dan da dan da dan’. All designed from church responses. It’s also Greek. It’s fantastic in terms of its sources. And in terms of flamenco, when the cry comes out, finally, when he says: “No, I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see the blood of Ignacio.” That’s a scream, that is there in the flamenco. So the whole poem is modelled on the beautiful design of the up and down that can happen in flamenco. Well, that’s an example of a poet using a form directly related to sound, to work. Even the pastoral, the Latin pastoral, is related to this thing of going in a long line and a shorter line. And that is based on the flute. That’s the source of that, the instrument. So that the flute might go: ‘ru ru ru ru ru ru ru’. Shorter one: ‘ru ru ru ru’. When any culture loses touch with rhythm, the meter is doomed, and the culture, in terms of poetry, is doomed to a kind of dryness, a barrenness, a lack of melody. What Graves also said—and you cannot separate that from cranes and horses, from birds and horses—what Graves also said about the origin of a poem, which is very good for practising writers of verse, is that a poem is made of (certainly in English) half of a first line. Not the beginning: the be-

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ginning of a line would be prose, because you would know what you’re going to say, right? If you started on the left-hand side saying ‘I went up this morning? I…, etc.’, it would be the declaration of an experience that happens. Or you would narrate in sequence, in chronological temporal sequence. You go: ‘this, that, that, that’…. That’s plot. Poetry doesn’t begin with plot. It begins from out of that thing that Graves was saying, that it seems to start from half a line, not necessarily the beginning of a sentence. It may be a phrase. From that phrase, which is the end of the first line, but the front part has not yet been defined. It may be… toward the end. It’s not quite the end, and it’s probably not the beginning. It’s probably somewhere in the middle, a little to the top, a little to the bottom of where the poem has begun. But the next line is what gives you the meter. So there’s half, and then there’s the next line. It doesn’t matter about the length of the line. It may be a very short line in terms of the poem’s shape. It may be just three syllables, but what he’s saying is that it starts with a half of that line, and then the next line is the full line. And what seems to happen is that it grows in any direction. It grows maybe backwards to the beginning—you know what I mean?—that way, or it may grow that way. That’s one of the most practical things that one could say in terms of writing a poem. Possibly that sounds quite true. That seems to be what happens when one tries to write a poem—that it is not the process of prose, that begins with abcd, and in design it may be anything. It may be cd, and then a and b can come afterwards. The mystery that computers can never create is that beginning. And I don’t think that the process is different from the process of music. I have worked with composers—I haven’t asked them how they begin, but they probably had the rhythm before the phrase. But if we are talking about melody, I don’t know how that would begin, either, in terms of whether you have the phrase and the melody, or whether the two things come together. But I imagine that the phrase that one might have—which may be a phrase that floats and doesn’t say what it’s about—that out of that something begins to engender itself. So I suppose that one could say ‘Well…’. Some scientists might say that what happens is because of memory, because of association, because of whatever. But it is mysterious, and it continues to be mysterious, and when it is mysterious and successful, then it is magical. And all poetry is based on this idea: ‘Can I make it that magic?’ And you spend your life writing verse, hoping that you can have luck and have that magic, whether it’s narrative or elegy writing.

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In terms of the process of writing poetry, no machine can do it. It can’t do it, because machines have to be responsible. And creation of a work of art is the opposite of responsible. It’s irresponsible. It doesn’t obey responsibility. Question: […] [the question is not clearly audible] DW: The question was, how much of an influence have Yeats and Joyce been on my work. Well, considerable influence, like almost any modern poet. I think I’d only jump to quick conclusions, but the political situation is similar. Yeats and Joyce came out of Ireland, which is a very divided country, bilingually and historically. And Joyce and Yeats, particularly when I was younger in St Lucia, were examples of the spirit of Ireland fighting against the oppression of the British—but I may be making too much of that. Certainly it wasn’t the political aspect of Yeats and Joyce, but obviously the stylistic influence of Yeats. Yeats is a very, very hard poet to get rid of melodically. But it isn’t always the duty of a poet to get rid of an influence. The duty of a poet is to go through that influence—in other words, to work your way very hard out of the qualms that you have when a great poet is such an influence on you, that you can only go through that great poet and emerge on the other side. The best example I give everyone of apprenticeship is, in the Renaissance, of Italian painting. Maybe some great painter said to Verrocchio: ‘Okay, today you do the nails’, and he paints the nails, and he’d rather paint the nails in the style of Leonardo. He can’t just do his own nails. That whole idea of originality is best dismissed by the idea of the master–apprentice. And soon the apprentice breaks out of that learning and becomes his own identity, his own painter. So that all that variety of Renaissance painting is not based on individuality. It is based on the sacrifice of the identity and the submergence of the identity to some master. And that’s a lesson that was gone out of contemporary or modern life for a long time. So, what happens in art is that every young artist is told: ‘Assert yourself’. That’s the most silly advice you can give to any young artist of any kind. Because, actually, your identity as a young artist is absolutely of no consequence, unimportant. Your identity is crap. You don’t need it. What you need is better painting. So don’t try to express yourself. Expressing yourself is a kind of egotism that has dominated twentieth-century—twenty-first-century again, I guess—painting. The idea of the artist as an individual is a very, very late concept. It doesn’t mean that you submerge your alleged identity, about

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which everybody is worrying, getting up in the morning: ‘Oh my God, I wonder what his identity is doing’, you know—that doesn’t happen. So I learned very early to submerge myself, to work my way through whatever I could, particularly in terms of verse, and in terms of Joyce. Joyce I think of primarily as a poet. I wasn’t interested so much in the fiction of Joyce as in the great language of Joyce. So that, at the beginning, when I printed my own poems I used to model my verse on immediate predecessors. In other words, I would write a poem in the style of Louis MacNeice on one page of the exercise book, then the other page would be the style of Dylan Thomas, and the next page might be the style of Eliot, and the next one might be the stage of a fragment from Dante—everything. I was learning. I knew I was an apprentice, and I didn’t see anything about my identity. So, what would happened is, when these poems came out critics would write things saying: ‘This is very much like Eliot’, and ‘This is very much like someone else’, and I would say ‘Yes, but that’s the point: I’m trying to do that’. Until, finally, when all these different sources got mixed up into one, they said: ‘Oh, here’s an original voice’. But that original voice was everybody’s voice, not only mine. And that’s how eventually it broke through into something that could sound like my own. So the presence of Yeats was a model that I definitely had, and certainly Joyce in terms of temperament and the richness of the language—absolutely. Cristina Fumagalli: Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf is still a best-seller in the U K . I just wanted to know, because of what you were saying right now, have you ever thought about translation yourself, and doing something of that kind? Maybe Dante? DW: No. CF: Why not? DW: I’m too lazy. It’s a great thing that Seamus’ translation is doing well both in America and in England. You have to wonder why. Without saying anything about the presence of Seamus, when a book like that takes off you wonder if it’s part of a thing to do—in other words, to have a copy of it may be the right thing to do; which is okay; very good for poetry. On the other hand, you want to know how many people really read the book instead of having it, you know? I’d like to be very convinced that it was widely read. But it is good that this has happened.

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In terms of an instinct for translation, this is an age of a lot of translations, certainly in English, and certainly in America. W.S. Merwin has just done a translation/adaptation of Purgatorio, Robert Pinsky has done Inferno. Sting is going to do Paradiso… you missed my joke; okay. [audience laughs] I had begun a couple of translations. I once started to do Aimé Césaire. I just got very tired. I don’t think I could stick to the discipline of translation. I probably would do something that infuriated a lot of critics, that would be closer to an adaptation of what I’m trying to do. And since you can’t do better than the original, I don’t do it. So I don’t have the instinct for sustained translation, but I admire writers who do. Luigi Sampietro: It’s the last question and then we’ll talk about the new book. Question: I’d like to know what is, to you, the relationship between what is ordinariness and the conceit that is behind history and behind poetry, which is to elevate the ordinary to immortality and to the extraordinary. And I ask that because it seems to me—maybe I’m wrong—that in your poetry—I’m thinking about Omeros, at the moment—this is a central theme. I mean, there are two main characters, Plunkett and the narrator himself, the poet, who try to elevate a woman to the image of Helen of Troy. And the answer to both of them is, maybe, that this woman does not need that. DW: I think that answer is in the book. The poem turns around and accuses the narrator of trying to elevate a beautiful black woman from St Lucia into a mythical figure. And there is a section in the book that says ‘Why don’t you stop that? that’s as bad as Plunkett trying to find a justifying historical excuse for her presence’. And it does emphatically say: ‘This is not Helen of Troy, and what you’re doing is, in a sense, condescending: to hope through poetry to elevate her to a status that she does not want or deserve—not deserve, doesn’t need’. And this is also true of Plunkett. So that two people—both art and history—are guilty of elevating a human being into something—into what? Into art? Into history? No: into something that is there for what it is. You see, I think this is a very profound response to something that is there in… another example: in the same way that Morandi just kept painting bottles. Enough bottles, right? What is he looking for? There’s a vibration that is there, that is beyond the bottle that is painted. It is always there, and he will always keep looking for it. It’s the same thing in Cézanne’s apples—that no matter which he painted, he never got them right. It’ll drive you insane, to look for that. In a sense—this is like a kind of majestic comparison, but in a

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sense, that’s what the book, in a way, is saying. If you go to a place in St Lucia, and you’re a poet, and you see a beautiful woman sitting down there, in a couple of days, looking heroic, your instinct is to say ‘Okay, I’m going to make you a beauty, a memorable beauty’. The pompousness of your intention takes you into the picture. You want to be applauded because you made this woman a beauty. The same thing is true of…. What Morandi and Cézanne are doing, they’re trying to annihilate their personality. That’s what they are trying to do—to get rid of the artist, by painting something that is consistently there. It’s the same thing. The other quotation that is there to confirm it is in Rilke. In one of the last Duino Elegies, he says ‘Why are we here? We are here so that we can write ‘flower’, ‘water’, these nouns’.1 To write these nouns until they are there for themselves, and they shine. They are there. Rilke is not there, but I’m here to write the noun, whatever the noun is. So that noun becomes something that is not interpreted by the presence or personality of the poet. And not only the poet, but every human being exists to be able to write ‘bread’, ‘water’, ‘flower’ as if it were absolutely pristine, and the word itself emerged, the name itself emerges, as a noun. And that is… Larkin also says in a poem, that goes: “If I were called in / To construct a religion / I should make use of water. / […] / And I should raise in the east / A glass of water / Where any-angled light / Would congregate endlessly.”2 That’s terrific. You see a glass of water in which the prism of experience, the clarity, the prism of experience, “would congregate endlessly,” and the “endlessly,” of course, is the repetition of the prism’s colours, but it’s plain water, something sacred and religious, which is identical to what Rilke is saying. Question: Reading your books, even when the description of the subject is war or destruction, at the end of the line, or at the end of the page, there is always a reference to light. Can that be symbolic of the Caribbean?

1 “For when the traveler returns [...] he brings [...] / some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue / gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, / bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window”; Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy,” from Duino Elegies (1923), in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. & tr. Stephen Mitchell, intro. Robert Haas (New York: Random House, 1982): 199. 2 Philip Larkin, “Water” (1954), in Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (London; Faber & Faber, 1964): 20.

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DW: The reality, the physical reality, of the Caribbean is of consistently astonishing beauty, physical beauty, which you cannot turn your face away from. At my age, and for the length of time that I have lived in the Caribbean... it isn’t because I paint, it is because it’s there, that and I go down to the beach and the colours that are there in the water are incredible, astonishing. You don’t believe it, that these colours exist, and that you see them. And what you often feel when you go into the water is that if you to go into the water, the water might stain you, like paint—it’s so bright. And this happens without a change of seasons. But in reality Caribbean history is a horrible history. It’s a history of massacre and disease with the original inhabitants of the Caribbean islands, none of whom, or very, very, very few of them, are left—I’m talking about the indigenous Indians—followed by slavery for hundreds of years, followed by indenture, and so on. So that the pain of the Caribbean, the historical pain of the Caribbean, is almost in direct contrast to the beauty of the Caribbean. So that behind the postcards, and behind the hotels, there’s a very deep sorrow of races, a lot of exile and separation, and so on. Can the landscape redeem that past? I think so. I think so because I think that what one is astonished by… the combat of man is not astonishing. A great Latin poet said it, and it’s true: “Man is wolf to man, and will always be a wolf to his brother.” And when you think of what horror happened in the Caribbean, or what a horror is happening anywhere in the world, it’s just Horace being repeated. But what is very possible is the joy that you can feel, the physical joy that comes out of that particular landscape, which in its extreme is paradisal. So I think that the strength and the humour and the resilience of the Caribbean people has to relate to the light that they’re living, to the colours and the stuff that they’re living. It’s a very corny statement, but it is true. If someone gets up in the morning to the idea of a Caribbean sunrise…. You see, Caribbean music is full of that glorification, is full of that joy, and that joy, I think, is a physical form of contact with the presence of being in the Caribbean. 

Tiepolo’s Hound: Reading and Book-Signing I’ve been asked if I’d like to read something from a new book called Tiepolo’s Hound. I’ve told people that I’m trying to make some money from the apo-

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strophe, because you have Angela’s Ashes, somebody’s something, and so on. [audience laughs] I’ll have to talk very quickly. It’s one long poem. The painter Camille Pissarro—the Impressionist painter; do you know his work?—well, he was born in the Caribbean. He was born in the island of St Thomas, which was Danish. But his family were French, and he was a Sephardic Jew. It came about that we had some painters who were talking about Pissarro one night, and one of them was saying, You know, he’s a Caribbean painter. Well, he’s a painter who was born in the Caribbean and he did paint there, but then he went back to… he was born in St Thomas, and he went back to France a little later, and then became a well-known painter, and was in a way the father of Impressionism, because Cézanne studied with him. Cézanne said how much he owed him. So did Gauguin, and so did a lot of French Impressionist painters who had a great respect for him. It’s a kind of a preposterous claim to think that the quality of his light must have come from his experience of the light and colour in St Thomas, but that is also possible. That’s something that Cézanne hints at. So part of the book deals with Pissarro leaving St Thomas and going to live in France. That’s one aspect of the book. It deals with him going to France—his absence from the Caribbean: whether that absence had any influence on his work or not. The other thing is something that happened to me when I first went to New York. I remember going… now memory starts to fade about precision and that’s part of the point, about memory: losing facets of one’s memory. I remember—and I say this in the book, in the poem—I remember going and seeing a fantastic painting, probably by Veronese. Probably by Tiepolo— more Veronese, likelier than Tiepolo. But there was a dog, in the painting. And the dog in my memory is looking inward in that direction, so that the drawing of the dog has… the back of the dog… the light comes in and strikes the inner left thigh of the dog. There is light in the flesh of the inside of the dog’s leg. And that was done by… one stroke caught the exact colour of what light would be on the flesh of a dog, the inside of a thigh. That’s how you know mastery in any art: the economy of the stroke and the economy of the phrase. And the greatest exponent of that single-stroke kind of writing is Dante. That is the equivalent of that—that single stroke. Which is by nature colloquial. The stroke is colloquial. It’s not academic. It’s the immediacy of the thing that makes it colloquial, and that’s where the greatness of Dante is.

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But I never found that reproduction again. I had it in the back of my mind and then I began to think about it, and I thought: “Where’s this dog? Who did it? Is it a painting by Veronese—you know The Feast in the House of Levi, the big one?—or is it in something else? And then, why do I think of Tiepolo when I think of the dog?” So this image is there and I never found it. Now here’s a mystery to me. Is my memory more accurate than the thing itself? Is what I remember more accurate? Because that’s not the angle that the dog… I’ve never seen it. Someone suggested: “Oh, I know where that’s from: that’s from Caravaggio.” And I said: “No, I know it’s not Caravaggio.” It might have been, but it’s not. So, if the dog I’m thinking of, if I have turned that dog’s angle, because my memory says that’s how it was, who do I believe? The real thing, or my memory? I have to trust my memory, because it’s too overwhelming. Nothing, no angle, can corroborate the angle that I see when I think of the dog. I can think of nothing else surrounding the stroke and the angle, and the whiteness of that dog in the painting. So, the mystery remains. Nor am I going to go in pursuit of it. But perhaps that’s the exact process of memory: it’s so close to a dream; like when you get up after a dream and you disbelieve where you are, for a while, because what is more real is what you just dreamt. Especially if the dream is fairly ordinary. And I think that this includes the experience of how you remember the dead. I think it is an experience of why we think we’re in love. All of those things, I think, are contained in that idea. Anybody could see… it’s idiotic. There are so many paintings by Tiepolo, there are so many paintings by Veronese: check it out and see who did what! I didn’t want to do it, and then I thought: Do it! I kept looking, and I never found that particular angle. What do I do? Do I abandon the idea? Or maybe I write a book about not being able to find it. That’s one aspect of it. So, it’s Pissarro, and it’s me, and so forth. The section I’m going to read from is…. One of the things you have to understand, I think, in a younger writer or a writer from another culture is this: I had sworn to myself from young that I would never write anything about Venice. Who needs anything more about Venice, right? I don’t need Venice. I live in the Caribbean: it’s terrific, right? I know how much you feel offended, but I’m telling you: I don’t really need Venice. Right? So, I did go to Venice, and what happened, of course, was the inevitable fate of seduction of Venice. So it’s there. I hate to be another one joining the queue, saying, you know, ‘Oh, my God, Venice… there it is!’

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But I also went on the anniversary of Joseph Brodsky’s death and I stayed at the same place that he stayed at, and part of it was paralleled by that experience. So the section I’m going to read here is Book I V , and it’s just an idea to give you of the…. This is not going to be definitive or illustrate anything. Let me describe the design of it. But I’ll make a couple of parentheses, here. It is roughly in iambic pentameter, and the design of the rhyme is abab, but it’s separated into couplets. Maybe you can see, now, the text. [shown on a screen] When I was working on Omeros I knew a couple of very straightforward technical things that provide the momentum for the poem and the fact that you can go to work… this is if you are going to an office. You know that today you are going to be doing a hexameter with the design or the pattern of ab or whatever. So I go into a job, which is great if you are working on something long. But because of the Homeric tribute—I tried to pay tribute, as an English poet, or a poet writing in English, to great poets of European culture—then the long line, the hexametric line, which was wider than the iambic line, and in that sense, it was like a horizon. The line had a succession of strokes, in terms of the scansion, which would be like anything—like a sail. The hexameter would give you more than one rest, one caesura. You could have a couple of caesuras in a hexametric line. So you could rest, like prose, and telling a story. So in terms of the other tribute, the design was in terza rima, roughly, so it was a tribute to Homer and to Dante. Why? Because that’s a source of a lot of literature, including my literature. There’s no point pretending that I’m an African who suddenly comes out of somewhere and starts doing something. That’s not my background. And that’s not the Caribbean, only background—if it is. However, with that design of the hexameter, and the rhyme scheme of the terza rima, I thought it should not be in quatrains. There would be something too conclusive about quatrains. If I took away the last line, then I’d have three lines, which is the same design as Dante, but I took it out, too. That gave me more space, so that the space between the three lines—and poets do think like that—was more spacious and would give you the sense of wind that could go through the land, or the sea that could break over the land… that magmatic thing was very present in the book, in Omeros. In this one, what I felt was an image of continuity. It was the image of furrows that you might see on a hillside and that is there in Pissarro’s paintings around Pontoise. You see a hillside, and the hillside has furrows of

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planting, so it’s like that, the lines are like that. So those couplets made a space like planting. Another space in couplets that was there. And once that happens, then there is a momentum that goes with the long poem, because you know that’s what you’re going to be doing. So although ahead this is set in Venice, the design is still kept in terms of those two things that you see on the page. The backfiring engine of the vaporetto [p. 115, reads up to“Saint Mark’s lion grips,” p. 116]

This is just an idea of, metrically, what the poem sounds like. I’m going to read another section, and this is where I keep looking for the dog. I ravaged a volume of Tiepolo later. [p. 124, reads all of section 2 of ch. X X ]

And the last section is to deal with Pissarro in old age—this is towards the end of Pissarro’s life: he died in Paris. Before that, I’d like to do one passage of page 147 from Book I V , because there are people here that are in the book, and I think it may be cute to do that. One of them is blushing already. The sunrise brightening the roof’s cold slate, [p. 147, reads up to “Mayrah and Luigi, / at our own open feast, their sunstruck faces.”]

Page 155. Someone asked me earlier about the ordinary, how the ordinary is sublimated. And this refers to Pissarro’s choice of subject. He had very bad eyes towards the end of his life. He’s in Paris. Affliction: inflammation of the eyes [reads up to “the rasping surface and a boulevard’s noise,” p. 156] The swallows flit in immortality, [p. 159, ch. X X V I , continues from the beginning of chapter up to the end of p. 161]

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Reading at the Celebrazioni Verdiane Parma, L’8 di via Saffi, 7 July 2001 DW: This poem “A Sea-Chantey” is simply a poem whose rhythm is a rhythm of thanks. It’s set in a marina, and the rhythm is that of water lapping, or of boats at anchor, bobbing up and down. The epigraph is from Baudelaire: “Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté…” This next poem, “The Glory Trumpeter,” happened because one night long ago I was in a nightclub with some actors in the island of Barbados. We were all in the theatre and we were staying up late celebrating our visit to Barbados. And there was a man there who played the trumpet. And at some point in the night he got up and he began to blow his trumpet. And he moved to the window and played in the direction towards the harbour. He had lived for a little while in America and came back home. He was a black man, a Barbadian, and he must have felt the experience of racism in America. But now he was back in Barbados. It is an ironic thing that all the suffering that has gone into the black experience in America produces such beautiful music. So whatever he played, that music comes out of spirituals and blues. But perhaps, as in Rigoletto, the highest expression of tragedy can be in music, just as the blues comes out of that suffering. “The Glory Trumpeter.” Old Eddie’s face, wrinkled with river lights…

At one point, like everybody else in New York, I got mauled. I’m not sure he was a young Italian. [audience laughs] But all is forgiven. What I remember about this is that I had just bought a new jacket and that I was living in a cold apartment in the Village, in some area, in the same… it was near Christopher Street. The biggest thing, though, was I had just bought this new green jacket. So while they were beating me up I was thinking “Oh God, don’t let them tear the jacket.” So even then I was aware of Italian fashion. [audience laughs] Maybe they didn’t like the jacket. Those five or six young guys…

I don’t know what this poem means. It’s up to you to work it out, I think. Sometimes it is better if you’re not too sure what your poem means. I think it has to do, though, with steadiness, a consistency, a fixity of something, and that something is probably love. “Star.”

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If, in the light of things, you fade…

Three short poems whose theme is the end of love. I think all human beings think that they can never survive the end of individual love. I don’t think it can be translated spontaneously, but I’m going to quote a few lines from W.H. Auden. This is Auden: “What mad Nijinsky wrote / About Diaghilev / Is true of the normal heart; / For the error bred in the bone / Of each woman and each man / Craves what it cannot have, / Not universal love / But to be loved alone.”3 The series is called… the first one is “Endings.” Things do not explode…

“The Fist.” The fist clenched round my heart…

“Love after Love.” This is when the lover, having lost his beloved, finds that he has to return to himself, and that maybe that love not of the self, but the experience of having lost love had strengthened one’s love—not love of the self but some meaning of what love is to the individual. When the identity begins to recognize itself in a mirror. The time will come…

There was a time when the death of a friend came as a shock and a surprise. As one gets older, we just take that loss for granted, we expect it daily. When I wrote the first line of this poem called “Sea Canes,” the line is “Half my friends are dead.” I felt: “Well, that’s a little too much, a little melodramatic.” But of course the real progress is “Nearly all my friends are dead.” And of course the line eventually will be: “All my friends are dead, and me too.” So somebody else is going to read the poem. Half my friends are dead…

3 W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939,” in Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays, & Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelsohn (London: Faber & Faber, 1977): 246.

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The last poem is called “Map of the New World,” and the first piece is called “Archipelagoes.” In Pasternak’s autobiography, there’s a beautiful sentence. What he says is “If the reader continues to read this sentence, a snowstorm will begin.” And my image of that is that as you move along the sentence the first snow begins to fall; when you come to the end of the sentence the page is all white, and therefore a blizzard has arrived. One of the sights of this poem is that you can look at the horizon in the Caribbean and it’s beautiful to see the definition of the rain as it goes along the horizon. The sentence is written this way, in that direction, which in geography is the direction of Homer, and the Odyssey, so that you see the sentence is like the horizon. At the end of this sentence, rain will begin…

 A question-and-answer session followed Walcott’s reading. The questions were put in Italian. I have translated them into English, with the Italian original in parentheses. Question: I wanted to ask Mr Walcott how the great love for the Mediterranean that one can sense in his verse was born in him—that is, in someone who, like him, is from the Caribbean, from the other side of the great ocean. The Mediterranean seems to me to be very far from his islands, and at the same time very close to them in terms of their horizon, their history, their experience, which is that of the Odyssey, of the myth of Ulysses: that is, of the most ancient story of our Mediterranean civilization. How does this love for the Mediterranean get engrafted onto the beautiful, natural and faraway fruit of the Caribbean? (Chiedevo a Mr Walcott come nasce in lui che è dei Caraibi, della parte al di là del grande mare oceano, il grande amore—perché ce l’ha e traspare dai suoi versi—per un Mediterraneo altrettanto distante dalle sue isole, eppure così vicino come orizzonti, come storia, come vissuto, che è quello dell’Odissea, del mito di Ulisse, della più antica storia della nostra mediterraneità. Come si innesta in lui questo amore per la mediterraneità in un frutto così naturale e così lontano come il frutto bello e bellissimo caraibico?) DW: All islands have the same age. So the Caribbean existed just as long as the Aegean islands. Fishing existed in the Caribbean and at the same time it existed in Greece. The sea is the same age all over the world. And no sea is superior to another sea. In the Caribbean, if I get up in the morning and I

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look out to sea, and I see a single sail, I think perhaps of the Odyssey. So every fisherman who goes out and comes back is an Odysseus. Because that is what the Odyssey is: a sailor passing a number of islands. What makes that experience great is the poetry of Homer. But a fisherman in the Caribbean doesn’t have to know the Odyssey. He will know the rain, he will know the sun on his skin, what it is like to dive into the sea. So I’m trying to point out that concepts of time in culture are very dangerous. And a reverence for Odysseus’ myth is not a reverence for the Mediterranean. It is a reverence for the great poem that the Odyssey is. And we must make a distinction between poetry and archaeology. Question: Good evening. I just wanted to ask one thing. I wanted to ask Mr Walcott if he can briefly remember another great poet, who was Joseph Brodsky. If he feels he can tell us something about him. (Buonasera. Volevo solo chiedere una cosa. Volevo chiedere al signor Walcott se poteva darci un piccolo ricordo di un altro poeta grandissimo che è Josif Brodskij. Se si sente di dirci qualche cosa.) DW: Joseph Brodsky was my brother. He was like a brother. His example to me… he was much younger than I, but his example to me was the fact that he was the person who would work, every day, at his verse. He was a hardworking poet, and I realized how lazy I was in comparison to his industry. It’s very hard for me to talk of Joseph in the past tense. But when someone is a great poet, then there is no past tense—I think of both him and his poems in the present tense. There is some version of immortality in art. There’s no point about talking of mortality and immortality. But Horace said it very simply: “Exegi monumentum aere perennius.” ‘Ho costruito un monumento più duraturo del bronzo’. He is not boasting. He’s not saying ‘I, Horace, have built a monument more lasting than bronze’. He is saying: ‘There is something which is more lasting than bronze’. And it is proven, because the ruins of Rome are proof of that: Rome has been in ruins, but the poetry of Horace has not. But it is not Horace alone. He is talking about the craft and blessing of verse. That’s what I think when I think of Joseph, and though it is a personal loss, death may have elevated Joseph Brodsky. Question: [addressing Luigi Sampietro] I’d like Mr Walcott to talk about the evocation of myth in modern language. He mainly employs classical myth, but also mythos: myth as language.

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(Volevo che Mr Walcott mi parlasse dell’evocazione del mito nel linguaggio moderno. Lui utilizza soprattutto il mito classico, ma anche il mythos, il mito come linguaggio.) DW: Myth involves belief. I don’t think that Homer entirely believed in the gods. I think he came at a point when complete belief in the gods was fading, and he represented a question, a query of the gods in the same way that Odysseus represents that question. These are not really my myths. They are my myths in the sense that the language that I use depends on them to some extent. The myths that are valid in the Caribbean have faded. Most of the Greek myths are obscene. They are obscenities of a peasant imagination. They are basically dirty jokes. A bull and a woman, etc., a swan and a woman, etc. But nobody calls them bestialities. They call them myths. And then you do it on marble and it’s fine. But they are representatives of the human imagination, even though that imagination may be a corrupted one, if you want. In the Caribbean, we still have blood sacrifices in certain rituals. In my youth I saw a ritual sacrifice of a sheep, I think it was, and it was with drumming and a blood sacrifice: the sheep was killed. But that was considered to be barbarous. But a very common thing in the Odyssey and in the Iliad is blood sacrifice for good luck. When black people do it, it’s superstition; when white people do it, it’s the classics. But it’s based on religion. All religions are based on blood sacrifices. So maybe myth is the past tense of superstition. Question: A last word on painting… [Luigi Sampietro intervenes and expands the question] I’d like to ask, for my part, taking up the question that was so succinctly posed—but we talked about this before—what the relationship is between painting and poetry in your career, and especially in your theatrical career, which is the place where the art of words and the art of colours conflate. And, finally—and I am adding this—if painting may affect poetry and vice versa, and in what measure. (Un’ultima parola sulla pittura…. Io vorrei chiedere da parte mia, riprendendo la domanda che era espressa in una sola parola—ma ne avevamo parlato prima—qual è il rapporto tra la pittura e la poesia nella sua carriera, nella sua carriera teatrale che è il punto in cui convergono l’arte della parola e l’arte del colore. E infine—questo lo aggiungo io—se è possibile che la pittura abbia influenza sulla poesia e la poesia sulla pittura, e in che misura.)

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DW: I’ve answered these questions several times, and I’d have to take a long time—which I will not now—to explain certain things. I think, for instance, that it is obvious that Gertrude Stein learnt from Cézanne. And Hemingway from Gertrude Stein. Because Cézanne did not do wash. He worked in strokes, because for him the surface of the canvas did not really have depth. And if you make a parallel of depth of perspective and narrative, then you have an example in Hemingway of slow repetition of strokes just as you have in Cézanne’s watercolours or oils. All works of art represent light, including architecture, which shapes light. The same thing, I think, is true of verse: that the sensation that must convey the creation of any work of art is the sensation of light. If you take a painter who paints very thickly, and there’s no chiaroscuro, what he is painting is the sensation of the absence of light. The most moving—the greatest—achievement for me in verse is, I think, the X X I I I canto of Paradiso, which begins: “Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio,” and it’s all about light. It is a light that is not of the sun: it has no shadows. And the light, of course, is the light of love. All right, I know I’ve gone very far just to answer a simple question, but in the composition of even a short lyric poem the writer has to feel that he may have made the poem because light has entered the poem. That’s why, for instance, Rimbaud calls his poems Illuminations. One can paint… if you have practised painting and you were describing something, when you paint you know the exact hue, the exact tint, of what you are writing. Hemingway has a sentence in his A Farewell to Arms, in which the sentence is “and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.” And when that stroke of blue comes on the page it is exactly as the brightening of the stroke in Cézanne. So I’m saying that the craft of painting can certainly help the craft of poetry, but I don’t think that the craft of poetry can help the craft of painting. 

Creative Writing Seminar, University of Milan first class, July 9, 2001 The seminar was in creative writing but largely also in American poetry reading and translation. The people who took part in it were a group of scholars and students either belonging to or associated with the Caribana editorial board, or completing their thesis for an MA in English at the University of Milan. They were Luca Tomasi, Isabella Zoppi,

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Roberta Cimarosti, Patrizia Villani, Matteo Campagnoli, Alessandro Vescovi, Luana Gazzola, Evelina Anelli, and Paola Loreto. Professor Sampietro also attended our classes and shared with us his expertise. Where parts of the seminar are missing in the recordings, I provide the links between the recorded parts by means of brief summaries. I also smooth out whatever incongruity might have arisen in our use of language—English or Italian. Derek Walcott began the seminar by saying that one way of learning to write poetry was to practice translation. DW: […] You have to be capable of getting not only into the meter and the subject but also getting into almost the personality, the identity. This is not a class in translation. It may not even have to have a name. It may be closer to what Lowell called “imitations.” Do you know the book, by Lowell? All: No. DW: Okay, you should definitely—except it’s out of print—you should definitely get that book, Imitations, by Robert Lowell. I hope it is not out of print. But how would you get… It can be ordered, right? It’s not out of print. Luigi Sampietro: We have a couple of copies, one here one there. Paola Loreto: It’s here, anyway. [Takes the book out of her bag.] DW: [jokingly] Oh, you have one! You are a genius. You’re brilliant. You’re appointed class prefect. Any complains you have, you will refer to me. Right? Any questions of discipline, and that sort of thing. You and I will decide on the punch. Ten dollars if they lay. Too much money? PL: No, no. It’s fine. DW: So you have to get this book. It’s terrific. [To PL:] You know it? PL: [laughing] Not yet! DW: Anybody here has read it? Everybody: No. DW: Wow. I like it when nobody’s read a great book. Because then I know the excitement that they’re going to have. I’ll tell you why this book is great. It’s very honest. What Lowell wanted to do was to say the same thing all poets feel, that an envy of a great poem—we have a kind of envy… in other words, saying… not ‘I wish I had written that’—that’s not quite it, that’s like

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stars. It’s not theatre. It’s not films. It’s not: ‘I wish I had done that’. But there’s a kind of longing—that is not entirely envy—that has to do with a great poem, because it enters a poet differently from an ordinary person in the sense of what the poet is admiring. Sometimes, no matter how experienced the poet, the poet is astonished by merely the technical. Other artists are astonished by technique, more than anything else. And it doesn’t matter what a critic tells you or some allegedly great critic says. It is the technique of the work. In other words, the reason why you go ‘Wow!’ in front of Rubens is because the paint is so great. And that’s important, right? It’s more important than the subject. Because the corner of a Degas is as good as the subject, which may be the Crucifixion. It’s not the subject, it’s the technique. It’s worth repeating that. Because, first of all, the great thing is that you are potentially good translators—that is crucial: that you are potentially good translators. But you can only be good translators if you have the gift or the development of your talent as translators into knowing as much as possible about not only the tone of the language—and its immediate tone—but as to know the temperament of the writer you’re translating. Joseph Brodsky did bilingual writing— he wrote in English and he wrote in Italian. Now, a lot of critics have said that his English is terrible, in terms of his translations. But part of that is the identity of Brodsky: he is supposed to be kind of a little terrible because he’s Russian. And I don’t want to feel that he’s trying to become an American, right? In temperament he can’t be, and he shouldn’t try to be American. But sometimes—and this is an example of his idiosyncrasy—a lot of his deliberate clichés are a little dated. It’s as if he’s a little frozen some distance back in feeling or in conversation. But the knotted kind of syntax that he has in his English is valuable. It’s valuable to an English writer in the sense that you are aware of the process of becoming English or of becoming American in the writing. If a point isn’t clear, ask me. Was it clear so far? All: Yes. DW: Okay. But Joseph was capable—I wouldn’t use him as a shining example of bilingual writer—but he was capable of writing poems in English that were excellent, very good. Right? So, to repeat the point: a valuable translation is invaluable in the sense that what it does, it does for two languages. So that if you are an Italian and you are translating anybody—an English poet, let’s say Frost. What happens if you’re going to do Frost? You can’t go only by saying ‘Oh yes, Frost is

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conversational, and so I’ll start on that pitch’,” okay? ‘I’ll start on a gestural pitch’. Because Frost’s voice, which you can hear in the poetry, goes like this: [mimics Frost’s way of speaking, the intonational gait of his verse]. That’s what you hear, if you listen, in Frost. The Yankee and American thing that goes on. Do you have something like that in Italian? PL: No. DW: No, wait, wait. If you say no, then you can’t start. You can forget the idea. So what you have to look for is what is, not the parallel, not the exact parallel, tonally, but something ancillary to that. Now, maybe Italian… Italy is full of provinces with different accents, right? Do you have to know that provincial thing before you started with Frost? There are so many aspects of Frost that are almost like clichés. Frost presented himself to his readers as an old guy, you know, living up in the woods, and talking about dead birches, and stuff, who’s supposed to go down to the corner store… That’s a big cliché, that’s an act, a kind of an act, on Frost’s part. It’s a kind of a lie. So you have to know as a translator that there’s also the possibility that the language itself can be postural. You’re with me? PL: Yes. DW: Okay. So here we have Frost, but we don’t have that kind of Yankee wise old-man thing, in terms of the tone of the voice. All we have is, maybe— and I don’t know—all we have is some Italian, which has its various accents. But maybe there’s something faintly—very faintly and not too perceptibly and audibly—accented or tonal, in sentences by Frost, that would not be the feel of a Roman dialect, or a Milanese thing. It’s got to have, somehow, some source that is maybe rural. Now, maybe there’s none of that left in Italy. But there’s got to be some corner that maybe would strike that relationship between Frost’s up in Vermont or New Hampshire as a hermit—that kind of thing, and something you have to find. Okay. Even if you don’t find it, you may have it inside you. You have to get into that. So that you have it. And make it. Matteo Campagnoli: A kind of mood? DW: Mood? No, it’s not so in the mood of nature. Characteristic. Temperament; more temperament than mood. The temperament of Frost, apart from the given picture of Frost as the hermit of New Hampshire. I didn’t want to talk about Frost to begin with but… it’s started, so it’s okay. I’ll give a very subtle example of how even American English, Amer-

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ican, can need translation into English. One of the beginnings of Frost’s poems—the first line of one of Frost’s poems—is a well-known line: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” You know that poem, right? Everybody knows that. Okay. Frost was not experimental. He was traditional. But not in scansion. That’s the big thing. Because if an Englishman reads that sentence, he will read it with the scansion of ten syllables. In other words, he would say: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” [Reads it with a very regular scansion.] That is the English tone to the sentence. The American tone is: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” [Reads it with a very strong caesura in middle position.] So suddenly, the second half, in an American way of sliding, is saying… there’s only one real caesura. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”: you now do that separately [the second half of the sentence]. You see the difference? Or not? You do see it? All: Yes. DW: That’s the American exactness. If you hear Frost read it, he doesn’t slur as much as that, but it would be very different to hear an English poet reading Frost. He would scan it like that. So what you have is a tonal elision that happens in that line, that is American. Hemingway pointed out that Mark Twain was the first real American writer. And the reason is you can read Mark Twain, and the English… there’s no problem with the English, there’s no dialect visible. But tonally, he is the first American writer, according to Hemingway, because he wrote with the tone of American speech. A lot of writers could write… be American and think… in other words, I don’t know if you could call Henry James American in terms of his accent. In fact, he probably would want to move as far away from sounding like an American as he could. In Pound… it is obvious that the American accent is there in Pound. So if you hear Pound, who was in Italy and lived in Italy, and loved Italy, quoting Italian, then he’s absorbing Italian into American. Okay? So his pronunciation would probably be laughable to an Italian, right? because he’s taking in the accent of the language of Italy into the scansion of what he’s writing about. All these enormous problems are there for the translator. But a translator has to have instinct. And instinct can be cultivated. I think a translator can cultivate instinct. You know what I mean by instinct? Instinct for what? What do you think I mean? Patrizia Villani: For the right word in the right way, with the right tone.

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DW: Yeah, that’s taken for granted, that you would do that. That’s a takenfor-granted situation. But more than that. What do I mean? PL: The way it should sound. The rhythm. PV: The reproduction of the atmosphere. MC: To identify with the writer. To try to feel the same. DW: I think you have to be able to say this: you have to be able to say, on reading the thing, ‘This is not an Italian trying to be American’, right? ‘or English’. Because, while translating the rhythm, you don’t want to do that. You stay yourself, but you absorb what you are translating. You absorb it. You don’t try to be academically rigid in terms of the scansion or the vocabulary. Now, in Imitations, what Lowell did as a poet was to take certain poems that he admired—and this stretched from … in the beginning, you know, from François Villon to contemporary poetry, to Montale, for example. I just looked at something, and saw something. I’m going to look at a part… Okay, here’s François Villon in “Ballad for Lost Ladies,” for ladies lost, dead, that is. Lowell calls it “Ballad for the Dead Ladies,” but that’s a little too blunt, for me. The influence here, on Lowell, is quite apart from Villon. He’s saying, ‘I’m going to translate this, or adapt it into the immediate context of almost as if it were written by William Carlos Williams’. You know this poet? You know William Carlos Williams? You know him, okay. The beginning is this: “Dictes moy ou, n’en quel pays….” This is beautiful, right? this is Villon. And I think it may be [pais], right? [referring to the pronunciation] from the Old French. “Dictes moy ou, n’en quel pays, / Est Flora la belle Rommaine, / Archipiades ne Thaïs, / Qui fut sa cousine germaine.” Beautiful! Here’s what Dante Gabriel Rossetti did. Don’t claim anything because he has an Italian name. That doesn’t mean that he was good because he had an Italian name. But he did a marvellous job. He kept the meter. [Rereads Villon’s first four lines.] “Tell me now.…” And here’s what’s going to be brilliant. Now, the rhymes are.… He looks at the script and he’s got: “pays” and “Thaïs.” Fantastic, right?, beautiful: pays, Thaïs. But I don’t think any of you insensitive people realize how beautiful it is, but I’m telling you, it’s very beautiful. [Laughs.] So Rossetti looks at that and he says—he does the thing that people say you can’t do: You can’t take this beauty, you can’t take this melody and make it happen in English. It’s a French poem by Villon. He says: I’ll try it. So he does. Now, he knows… obviously, to every poet the big difficulty is what you are going to do with pays and Thaïs, right? And since you are going to do

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it in English, what you are going to do in English with pays and Thaïs? And what he gets is way is [sic]. So what he writes is: “Tell me now….” The question in the Villon is: ‘Where are all these women, now? Tell me in what country’. “Dictes moy ou, n’en quel pays”: ‘Tell me now in what hidden way is’. That’s beautiful, that is staggering, because now he’s got the rhyme. It’s a half rhyme between Thaïs and ways, so that you can slide into Thaïs or ways. It’s beautiful. And he goes on like that, and the refrain in the poem that everybody knows is: “Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?” This is a beautiful line. This is Villon, right? Literally: ‘But where are the snows of long ago?’ What Rossetti does with that is: “But where are the snows of yester-year?” Wonderful! So you have that magic happen. It’s happening, right? What’s happening is that here there’s a beautiful English poem from a French poem. It can be done. So I don’t believe this nonsense about ‘poetry is that which cannot be translated’. It can be translated into the language of the translator. Okay? Now, what you may say about Rossetti, who is a Victorian, is that the diction, the vocabulary, is a little archaic. In other words, he’s making Villon not a contemporary, because when you say “yester-year,” in the contemporary Victorian poetry, yester-year is a little old-fashioned. And therefore what you might be doing that sounds a little damaging to Villon in translation is to make Villon’s verse archaic and not contemporary. Luca Tomasi: I’m a translator, so I know this problem. The problem is that original works do not get old, whereas the translations get old. DW: That’s what I’m saying, that Rossetti sounds like he’s doing it wrong because he’s making the original work get old. LT: But Villon, too, was using Old French, in a way—archaisms. DW: You mean “d’antan?” LT: “Pays.” DW: Oh, that was maybe the contemporary pronunciation in his day. Maybe pays, Thaïs, perhaps. The touch of archaism, even if it’s there in Villon, may be legitimate—maybe just as legitimate in Rossetti. “The snows of yesteryear” has an echo. That is the great thing about the craft of verse translation. Because when you’re by yourself and you’re tortured with this problem, that’s fun, but it’s torturing. Okay, here’s a point. “But where are the snows of….” Two things have to happen. One is the melody. “Mais ou sont les neiges….” Neiges has a softness, it requires the

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softness of falling snow. That little caesura is the same as neiges. “Caesura”: you have to rest. The modulation permits him to see the archaism of yesteryear in the second part of the caesura. Now, Lowell is saying: well, okay, maybe the Rossetti is too Victorian, too Pre-Raphaelite, too dated, too archaic, whatever. And to do this poem in contemporary diction, maybe the best example of that would be to try and get the rhythm of the melody, the overmelodic, the Swinburnian melody, by reducing it, or doing it, or contracting it into a diction that came out of William Carlos Williams, because of its immediacy. So he does not have that meter. He goes… and Lowell was my very good friend, but this is not going to work. Not for me. “Say in what land, or where / is Flora, the lovely Roman….” None of the Rossetti is there. It’s not there at all. It’s not there. So what you have is a modern up-todate, non-musical version, which, I think, brave as it is, doesn’t work. Not for me. And what he does for the echo of “Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?” is too mild an exclamation: “Oh where is last year’s snow?” So one risk is using archaisms, things that are out of date, maybe; but the worse and more dangerous acquisition is that trying to bring things too much up to date. The opposite charge is to bring it up too close. Up to now, do you have questions? Let’s take a break, for you to ask some. Or if you want me to elucidate anything? Roberta Cimarosti: Yes, I’ve got a question. I’ve got two. Do you think that just reading can be a way of assuming the tone of an author you are reading? DW: Reading a lot? RC: Yes. DW: As a translator? RC: As someone who…. LS: Do you want me to xerox anything, from here? DW: Um… I’m going to do a Montale. Maybe this. Okay, thanks. The question is… what? RC: Can reading be a kind of exercise—not really an exercise, but a way of absorbing a tone that then you realize you have assumed, when writing… DW: You mean reading in another language? A lot of reading in another language? RC: Yes.

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DW: Oh, obviously. Oh, yeah. Sure. I mean, the full responsibility of a translator would be to know his literature. To really know it, you know? As much as possible. Because, I’m not talking… remember, we are not talking about translation, that’s not the idea of the class. It’s not translation, although it may involve that. This is something… that little exchange that might happen between one language and another, right? how that might happen. Not the language, even, not even the vocabulary, but maybe the sensibility of the language. Is that transferable? Or does it have to be that transferable? So in terms of knowing—if you want to translate—in terms of knowing, yes, because the more you know what may be slang, or pompous, or contemporary in one epoch and in the next epoch becomes dated, yes, you have to have that sense. I think you can sometimes have it if you stick with one poet a lot, but I think you’d have to have a few poets whom you would read very thoroughly, even dutifully. Every one of us has not read enough. Every writer has not read enough. So I don’t know Chaucer. I don’t know a lot of poets. You cannot be satisfied with one epoch. That’s the first question. What’s the second one? RC: You said that Frost sounds not true in terms of his romanticism? DW: No. What I’m saying is that there’s a posture assumed by Frost, which is part of his diction, his verse. In other words, ‘I am a woman, I live up in the woods, and I do extra work, and I do that and therefore I’m writing and speaking from that, like a withdrawn, Horatian poet’. In his actual life, he wasn’t that far removed from society. He wasn’t a hermit. Now, the role or mask through which he spoke was that of a hermit. We know the bullshit, but we respect the poet. The mask that he has assumed in terms of…. Frost was not a nice guy. I mean, he was very impatient with other poets, you know? That’s not important, but it certainly relates with certain aspects of his tone. So, I’m saying: here you are, you are Italian, and you have Frost in front of you—this given Frost, the standardized Frost: white hair, wrinkled face, ruddy-looking man, very wise, talking in a particular voice—if you begin with that, then you are going to fall into a terrible trap of trying to make an Italian, an Italian who is Frost. Like a sort of cracker-barrel old man coming out of the bush… what is going to come out is a belief in the mask, right? as opposed to what’s behind. I don’t mean ‘mask’ in a hypocritical way. I mean the mask through which he spoke. Like Yeats, too. Even Eliot, the tone of

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Eliot’s voice, of an Englishman… he’s an American! He was born in St. Louis. That’s what I’m saying: to be specific in terms of tone. If what’s coming out is honest in the best way… because you can have an honest translator and a dishonest poet. It can happen. I think that most times it’s what happens in translation. Most of the translations I have read of Pasternak can make you throw up. The diction in Dickinson may be closer to the Russian of Pasternak. A picture of Pasternak… if you take that image it can affect your translation. It does, because underneath you have the feeling that…. LT: But in a way you have to respect this mask. You have to create a similar mask in your own language. PV: You should reproduce the same thing. DW: Ah, great point! Great point. Should you reproduce the diction of that mask, in Italian? I think… I don’t know D’Annunzio, but from what I have and the little I’ve read of D’Annunzio, the cliché is this martial… Yeats… there’s a lot of Yeats that people might think is fascist, in terms of his attitude, a little crass, but the attitude of the poet on the conflict produced by civic strife—and the poet as the utterer of civic strife…. But Paul Muldoon is very irritated. He says “It’s bullshit!” And he says: “‘Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?’… ‘Certain men’? You don’t know their names? Your poetry is so important that they are just ‘certain men’?” If you hear the Yeats and feel it, it’s magnificent, it’s great rhetoric, but it’s very conceited rhetoric to say that my play sent out certain men instead of saying…. There are other times when he names names and they are great, but in this particular instance Muldoon points out that Yeats gets so swept up by his role as a poet that he sends a conglomerate of people to die because of his verse. Muldoon corrects that. If you had to do that in Italian, you’d have to do it not only as a whole but you’d have to do it also line by line. You don’t save the poet from himself, but that’s an honest response from the translator, to make your translation true, and say: ‘How can you talk such nonsense?’ All right. Was that your second question? RC: There’s a continuation to the second question. I was wondering whether you think the same about Wordsworth. DW: Wordsworth? Yeah; you see, quite apart from thinking about translation, just talking as people who write verse—I don’t like to use the word

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‘poet’—so we write verse, all of us. So that’s what we do. If we’re lucky we write a poem. But you have to subject yourselves to a severe discipline. And if I didn’t that to my own work I don’t know how much of it would be left—right?—on examination. There’s a great poem by Wordsworth called “Tintern Abbey.” Well, you know, his sister was there, too. He wasn’t there alone. Where’s Dorothy? It’s not feminist stuff. Your sister was there with you! Say something! Who was, in fact, a great sister. How much of it would be admirabler, if there was a sister in it. ‘My sister and I went out to Tintern Abbey and…’. I think modern poetry can accommodate that. Poetry does progress, it does do things, it grows. All the Romantic idea of the solitary ‘I’, alone—and not having to face the fact that maybe you have to go to the toilet, and maybe your sister was there—all that is taken in in the modern sensibility, beyond the Romantic idea of the isolated poet alone, and certainly the idea of the isolated man alone, observing nature. And without studying any feminist nonsense, that the woman’s perception was second to his, that he is being who he is—a great poet. His sister was there, but his feeling about Tintern Abbey was something that his sister would appreciate after he’d described it. So it took me a long time to feel about “Tintern Abbey,” however great it is… I’m very disturbed by the fact that he wasn’t alone. Why shouldn’t she be part of that experience? I mean, that’s a great thing about twentieth-century poetry—no, later than that. No, there are other poets—the ancient poets, who would have put that in? I think Ovid would have put his sister in. I think Propertius would have said his sister was there. I think the great Latin poets would have said that, and not excluded themselves from being the isolated sufferer, or the isolated perceiver. Certainly the duality—the thing that happens with twentieth-century poetry is the fact that it carries a simultaneity of things that can be happening at the same time, even though they are contradictory things. Let me do something. What time is it now? Not that it matters, but how much time do we have? About an hour? All: As much time as you want. DW: Any comment that you want to make? PL: I was thinking about Frost and how much one would want to reproduce his mask. I’ve always thought one should reproduce it as far as he wants you to believe in it. The way he presented himself in his poems… he was himself ironic, in a way. So the translator should, I think, push it as far as he pushed

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it, and find the exact technique that parallels his use of the mask, to allow for the same amount of irony, or further readings. DW: All right. I’m talking very specifically to you all. I don’t want to sound cynical, or someone exposing the true nature of a great poet like Frost. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m saying that the danger to you as poet-translators is that you… you have a double responsibility, and the fidelity need not be entirely to the poem in front of you, that you are going to translate. Sometimes you are going to move in a direction that is making—forcing you into… it’s a forced direction. This is a good thing in terms of what Lowell did. There are two things: there’s translation, which is direct; there’s literal translation, which is an academic constriction. Then there’s adaptation, that can happen in terms of a poet translating another poet, trying to do something as closely as possible to the original, the first responsibility being meter—the first being meter. Then he would have got to get rid of rhyme and so on. Dante is generally better translated into English prose than into verse. The best translations of Dante I can think of are Eliot’s prose translations of sections of Dante, which are terrific, and they are prose, and they are not in terza rima. So translations can be a weird thing, in terms of persistence, of keeping to an ideal. One of the examples here is Lowell’s adaptations of Rilke. When I was living in Trinidad, he came with his family to Trinidad. He came up to a beach house we were living in, and he showed me this book, Imitations, and I read it, and I was as usual knocked out by what I was looking at. And then I said: “This Rilke is great.” This is the last thing in the book. And he keeps the shape, roughly, of the Rilke. I read it and one of the things that I told him was that I thought that the Rilke was superb, and especially these two stanzas. And he said: “They’re mine. They’re not Rilke. They’re me.” Fantastic! Because what he did was, he entered the Rilke, translated it; he was provoked, in the continuation of Rilke, to write almost as if Rilke and Lowell were joined. Out of that came two stanzas that are not in the Rilke, which you can see are illegitimate—and any editor, or any certain kind of professor, might scream at you and say ‘You can’t do that! It’s not in the text’, and so forth—which is okay: you need that kind of police, sometimes. But in terms of the validity of the feeling of what was in the Rilke…. What happened is that the Rilke had taken over Lowell. So what he does in here, he invokes here the presence of all these different poets, from Hugo to Pasternak and Montale, and adapts. Most poems are adaptations of other poems. They come from other poems. Most of them. And that doesn’t mean that that’s a limited occupa-

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tion. In the biggest sense, it may mean that there’s only one genius in the world: that is, the poetic genius, which may be in all languages, but which is very small in terms of the volume of its output. In other words, in any given age of the world, there may be seven poets, possibly. That’s terrific, because it cuts down the number of books that one should read. Poetry is sort of… it cleans itself out. I hate to use such diuretic imagery, but it does do that. It does clean itself out. I don’t know, I’m just taking a number. I don’t think poets mind that. I think if I ask any real poet, now, ‘What do you think your output is, I mean in your life’…. Okay, where is the text that… remember what we are doing… I was very fascinated when I saw the level that you are writing at in English. It was quite surprising to me, when I came here one year ago, maybe two years ago, and I saw the translations—not the translations but the original English. I want a balance to be struck between this being simply an experiment that I don’t mind is doomed to fail. It’s okay that it fails, because what comes out of it will be valuable. Even if you arrive at the conclusion of saying ‘This is not working out’, that’s okay, because the process is there. The more I thought about this poem [Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West”], the less I think I can explain or even understand it. Seriously. And I know the poem, and I like it a lot. I have to examine ‘Why do I like it so much?’ Because, when you examine it, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense. But I thought, ‘Let’s look at that’, because I like to be perverse and give you a hard time. Let’s do a stanza at a time. It’s a beautiful poem. [To PL:] You start reading it. PL: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” DW: No. Okay, this is the beat: ‘ta tà ta tà ta tà ta tà’. It may be exaggerated for the Italian scansion, but that’s how you do it. Go very slowly. PL: Trying to scan it? DW: What you should do? If I were a conductor and you were a singer, you should do what I say! PL: Okay. DW: Which is: [beats the scansion on the desktop.] It may sound strange to you but try. “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” PL: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” W: Do it again. Put some meaning in it.

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PL: If I put some meaning in it, it doesn’t scan. DW: Of course! See, here’s what I think we have. Naturally you have Italian melody. Naturally. We… you don’t need to try to change that. It’s something organic, and that’s crucial. I don’t translate that much, but it’s crucial, I think, to the concept of adaptation or translation. The tone, the tone of the poem, right? in terms of the scansion, is in that meter, which is that ‘tà ta tà’…. Now, your temptation is maybe to hurry up. Resist that. That’s for everybody. Speak at that pace. PL: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea. / The water never formed to mind or voice…” DW: Too fast still. Believe me, go slower than you think you should go. Begin again. PL: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” W: Okay, good. A little more mimic of singing. PL: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” DW: Great. That’s getting very good. But it has no singing in it. PL: Can I think… DW: No, don’t think. Just say it. PL: I have to… DW: No, you don’t have to. PL: … hear it. DW: No. No. PL: No? DW: No. Go slowly. PL: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” DW: That’s good. Very good. [To MC:] Now you do it. MC: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” DW: What you don’t have and which I’m trying to force is the caesura after “She sang.” MC: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” DW: Even slower.

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MC: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” DW: No, no. Fight the temptation to be fast. Slow. Boringly slow. MC: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” DW: Okay. This is how Wallace Stevens reads it: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” That’s a melody that has to do with the swaying of the line. Not the swaying of the line in Italian. I don’t know if there is a natural… people claim that the iambic pentameter is natural to English. Is there a line that is a standardized, instinctual line in Italian verse? All: The endecasillabo. DW: Can you give me an example of an endecasillabo line? LS: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” (In the middle of the journey through my life.) DW: I don’t want verse. I want a line, speech. AV: Sono uscito a prendere le sigarette. (I’ve gone out to buy some cigarettes.) LS: Sì, ma dev’essere un endecasillabo. (Okay, but it has to be an endecasillabo.) DW: I know the problem. I know the problem between Italian and English: speed. For us—for me—do you know how fast you speak? But it’s natural. I’m not criticizing. I’m talking of tempo. The thing is tempo. I think of the Spanish, too. Maybe it’s Mediterranean. Maybe Latin was fast. It’s part of the concept of everything, where a caesura would fall, how you would round off, how long you would hang on a word. Because now you are in a totally different kind of metric, of meter, right? And there are a lot of traps in there, the point being that neither one is right. That is the point. Italian is not right and English is not right. But I’m interested in the fact that, if you have to do the meter that is English, you can do it, because you are going to be translating. If you were translating this, you’d have to do the metrical exactness of it. You’d have to have an Italian approximation of what is a common meter, in English, an iambic pentameter, that you say is endecasillabics, right? That’s how many syllables? LS: Eleven. DW: We don’t work with eleven syllables! Eleven syllables?! LS: And we have three stresses.

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DW: We don’t have that. Really? And generally you end in a feminine ending, right? All Italian ends in a feminine ending. So it wouldn’t be: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea,” monosyllable. It would be: ‘da da da da da… mare’, right? With an extra beat, right? Okay. So what we have here is an extra beat. LS: You can end with a stress on the last syllable, and then you have only ten syllables. DW: What I’m trying to do is not to pervert Italian meter. Because one of the problems we have, which is the hell of a problem, is first of all that every line in Dante ends on this thing: [hums the scansion], right? If we do that we get very monotonous in English, and then it also has comic associations, because the ‘extra-’ thing, comic or satiric, is not easy to do in terms of tragic verse—that ‘extra-’ thing. But for you it’s natural for tragic verse, because if you’re doing Verdi or you’re doing Dante, you do with the end. So what do you do about that ‘extra-’ thing? I think the attitude of course is.… Which is the true melody to observe? I think the true melody of your own language is the one to observe. If it’s a conversational thing, because… I hate to keep using Dante, but it’s such a source of examples. It’s very very colloquial in Dante, so it’s not that the syllable we’re talking about, the ending syllable, is classical only. It’s colloquial as well. Am I not correct? It’s equally as colloquial as it is majestic. Same thing. Same thing for the pentameter. When we get into that extra syllable, sustained, then you get something that is more either epistolary—a letter-poem—or satirical, in a sense, because of that ‘extra-’ thing. I’m not saying it can’t be comic. It can’t be serious. But generally… in Chaucer it might be, but that’s antiquated, in terms of scansion. But Byron is italianate in that sense. Don Juan, right? [Mimics the scansion.] That extra, Byronic thing is the extra syllable that you get. Let’s go back. How much approximation of the music, then, can you do? I think you should try to justify the caesuras and the pauses, right? So, you notice you are not even coming to meaning yet. The first thing we’re doing is song, melody, and that’s the first responsibility, I think. So, in terms of scansion, in terms of phrases, let’s put a bar after “She sang.” [To Luana Gazzola:] Now it’s your turn. LG: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea. / The water never formed to mind or voice, / Like a body wholly body….” DW: Okay, follow me: “da dá da dá da dá …” [covers the whole first stanza, then makes everybody do the same together].

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DW: Who said Italians could sing? [General laughter.] DW: I’m kidding, I’m kidding. I know: Verdi! Let’s do it again. [All read the poem together.] PL: It works! DW: Eh? Yeah! What you did, because of your language, and because of whatever rules of scansion in talk or speech that you have, you didn’t get the thing that’s happening in the second line. He knows he has established a pentametrical line, okay? “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” So, what he doesn’t want to do is to do twice ‘di da di da di da di da di da’, right? So, what he does is, either deliberately o instinctually, to stretch it out a little bit and make it faster. It dilates. So it becomes: “The water never formed to mind or voice,” and it’s not too monosyllabic. It could have been, if you were doing the same pattern, but he doesn’t do that. What he does is ‘da da di da di da’…. This is an example of a twentieth-century poet using the regularity of a pentameter trying to make musical variety within the frame of a pentameter, so there’s the extra syllable. Frost does it beautifully all the time. He just shifts where a stress can come. And that is a master’s stroke, the change of caesuras in a poet like Frost, or a poet like Auden, or Hart Crane. Where a caesura is put is the modern verse, not in the experiment of language that is maybe there in another writer. In other words, Frost is a modern, maybe more modern poet than Eliot or Pound, because he takes the form that is given in his own voice and he makes the variation happen in terms of where the caesura comes. This is the same thing that Milton did with English, which is to take the Latin construction, and do it in English—or take the Latin form construction. So that, in Latin, you can put the verb virtually wherever you want— almost—and the noun. You know a little bit of Latin, do you? You don’t know Latin? And you are Italian? You all should do a bit of translation from Latin. What you feel in Milton sometimes is that you are reading an English translation of Latin. “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit…”—that’s a caesura, and you have to stop. “Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste”— that’s a straight pentameter, right? and then the second line “Brought death into the world, and all our woe, / With loss of Eden…”—that is superb orchestration. If you wanted to be modern you could try to put it out in free

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verse. This way. First line: “Of man’s first disobedience”—if you want to be really silly and really modern, you can put it “Of màn’s fìrst disobèdience,” and end it. And do that idiocy. That very often passes for twentieth-century great syllabic verse. You don’t do it, right? Sometimes? Ah ah! Because there’s a big fallacy in the presentation of syllabics—a big fallacy—when sometimes—most of the times—the syllabics want to be pentametrical or want to be in Italian rhythm. Let’s continue this now. I’m going to try an exercise. First of all, I don’t know up to now what the first line means in English. I can only approximate the meaning. What does it mean to say “She sang beyond the genius of the sea”? What do you think it means? PL: She sang beyond the… what I sense can be the expression of the essence of the sea. RC: Nature? DW: The spirit—something—of the sea? MC: The essence… RC: Beyond change, beyond time? DW: Well, we’re certainly not getting one version here. We’re getting different translations of a phrase. What do you think? What’s your name? Luana Gazzola: Luana. Maybe “the genius” means… I don’t know, what the sea represents. DW: Do you think it has anything to do with a horizon? The edge of the sea? Not quite the horizon, but there’s a limit, so she goes beyond the limit of the nature of the sea? What do you think? LT: It has something to do with the rhythm of the sea. PV: Beyond its eternal motion? DW: I’m not giving the right answer. It’s not like Who Wants to be a Millionaire. RC: I think probably she was so mad that she just went beyond the sea— ‘mad’ in the right way—she reaches beyond its changes, she reaches something beyond, somehow. DW: But she’s by the sea, right? So she’s singing by the sea, near the sea? I’m not giving the answers. Up to now what we have is a woman singing by the sea, don’t you think?

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PL: But I think he’s also talking about the quality of her song. DW: Yes, but that’s just the fact: a woman singing by the sea. AV: Possibly her voice is louder than the sea. DW: Louder? Stronger. AV: Stronger, yes. PV: The voice wants to reach something which is beyond. DW: Good point in that, too. Beyond the confines of a woman singing by the sea. She sings beyond that reality of a woman singing by the sea. ‘Genius’ means nature, right? So the nature of the sea is to sing—I’m not giving the answer, I’m just discussing—is to sing beyond what the song of the waves might be. That kind of music, right? And her singing is beyond that. Is that kind of what you think? PV: No, not at all. I think that she wants to go beyond the sea, beyond its sound, beyond its limits, beyond the horizon. DW: Yes, but she did sing. She has sung. He’s making the past tense. She doesn’t want to sing. She was singing and her voice is beyond the genius of the sea. Maybe “genius” means ‘genius’, the intelligence. The word “genius” is a curious word, because between genus and genium and genius… and the quality of the sea or the nature of the sea… RC: I would associate the sea with a woman, so perhaps she sang beyond her own nature. DW: I think that maybe a thing that happens in music when a noun, a note is held in music, all other nouns around it dissolve, don’t exist. The definition, frame, and edge, and definition of things dissolves. In this particular case, I think it may mean: she sang beyond the limitations, the limits of the sea, which may include the horizon. I think the horizon is there in something beyond the horizon, above or beyond the horizon. [Gap in the recording.] First of all, you are absolutely assuming a role, knowing more than I know what it means. You’re saying: I know more than you what it means. You’re saying you really know what it means as the translator. I don’t. But your role is different from mine. You’re saying: ‘This is what it means’, and ‘This is what it means in my language’. This is very authoritative. But you have to have that authoritativeness to be a translator. You must have a conviction of

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your choice. Up to now I would say—and I thought of this poem after I selected it and I’ve never really taught it—if you hear Wallace Stevens read it, it’s beautiful. But I’m asking myself now: ‘What does this beauty mean?’ RC: It’s perhaps the suggestiveness of… DW: I don’t think that. You know what Eliot—no, what Pound said? “Poetry has to be at least as well written as prose.” That’s a great statement. You can’t do the other thing: ‘I’m a poet, this is vague, you won’t get it, but because I’m a poet…’—you know, as opposed to someone writing a sentence. So maybe she was saying she sang next to the wharf [laughs]—something that would be more real. It’s a big fight between the reality of prose and the alleged visionary thing of poetry. And it’s going to get harder. LS: Derek, since you have to start somewhere, here you have one word that you might want to know exactly what it means both in English and in Italian, and since it’s a Latin word, it’s an Italian word, you can take your start from there. Whatever the connotations are—nature, intelligence, genius, whatever—you stick to that mysterious word and then get to all the rest… DW: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s honest. I don’t think that’s valid. I don’t think you should do that, because unless you know from the first line that this is going to be how it is going to be—and this is how it’s going to be: it’s going to get more difficult, more abstruse, and consequently under suspicion, really—I think you have to torment yourself and say: ‘I’ve got to understand this, otherwise I can’t just lie and try to put it down counterfeit’. Particularly in this case: it’s not like a referential word that you look up, like ‘pineapple’, you know, what’s the Italian for pineapple. It’s not the same as: What’s the Italian for ‘genius’? That’s not the answer. And by the way, what’s the Italian for ‘genius’? LS: ‘Genio’. RC: I wouldn’t translate ‘genio’ in Italian. I don’t like the word. LG: It depends on what meaning you give to words. RC: Perhaps I would translate the image behind the line rather than try to stick to the word. LT: However, as a translator I would read further down, where it says: “But it was she and not the sea we heard…” DW: Where?

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LT: At line 14, for instance. As a translator you create the whole thing before you start to translate, of course. DW: Before you translate the word? I guess everybody has a different method. LT: The problem is if we are discussing the impression it makes on the reader, or if we are discussing the technique of the translator. DW: Tell me how many of you would use the word ‘genio’?…. Okay, all of this is good. How much should we approximate the actual sound and vocabulary of the original in terms even of the equivalent of a rhyme, in terms of a vowel from one language to the other? I say, definitely go for that. That is almost your first responsibility—an approximation of the music of the original: what kind of music and what is the meaning of that music…. How many ‘genio’ do we have here? PL: I need a dictionary. DW: Listen, don’t hang on dictionaries. Go by the sound. LT: I would go for a word that has a sibilant in it. DW: The startling word is “genius.” When you hear this, you hear sound. The word that is causing a serious problem is not a word that you can look up in a dictionary and get the answer. Right? First of all, it’s not an accurate lexicon. In a lexicon it would not apply to say ‘genius of the sea’, because it does not mean literally what it says. Obviously, the disadvantage is I don’t know the meaning in Italian. I would go for ‘the closer to the sound of the original’ unless it is unacceptable. What Luca said, that he would go for a sibilant… What is the Italian word for ‘She sang’? PL: ‘Cantava’. DW: What? ‘Cassava’? [All laugh.] LS: ‘Canebat’. MC: ‘Cantava’. DW: How do you know it’s a woman? All: You don’t know. DW: ‘Somebody sang’? All: Yes. DW: Now you need a ‘she’?

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MC: You can also say ‘Lei cantava’. AV: You can also say ‘A woman was singing’, ‘Una donna cantava’. DW: This is a moment when a translator looks at the window and finds it very tempting.… [All laugh again.] I remember working on a translation with Joseph Brodsky and another Russian translator who was very good, and we had been working at the translation for six hours and—excuse me, but I have to say this to tell you the difficulty of translation. And Joseph said, lying on his back: “Fuck you and fuck you and fuck you.” Why don’t you put down your version of the first line? Don’t rush it. And I can tell you your character from your handwriting. Let me see your handwriting. [Looks at PV’s]: “You are irresponsible, and….” [laughs] Can you get—in terms of sound—can you get that same organ tone? Can you get that solemnity in the Italian? That intonation, because, tonally, it’s like an organ. It’s not a flute. It’s not a piccolo. Everyone is going to have a feminine ending, probably, right? Now, in a phrase like “beyond the” there is a temptation to sound a bit ornate. In English, it has an operatic intonation, so I think it’s okay for you to have an intonation in Italian that sounds a bit operatic. AV: I was just thinking of the words. DW: So it’s part of your sensibility to catch that little bit of operatic that is there in the English. It’s pitched on that level. So I’m just telling you. So, this is a draft of the version, right? Everybody knows this is a draft: everybody is entitled to laugh at everybody. I want to see some enemies. PL: “Cantava, al di là dell’essenza del mare.” DW: Again, slower. PL: “Cantava, al di là dell’essenza del mare. L’acqua non formava nella mente o nella voce un corpo vero, sventolante le maniche al vento; ma imitava il moto un grido costante, emetteva sempre un grido che non era nostro e però lo capivamo, inumano, dell’oceano vero.” LT: From the musical point of view, it doesn’t match the original. “Al di là” doesn’t work.

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MC: “Cantava oltre il genio del mare.” DW: This is a great agony. Listen to this. You are Italian. Who does Paola’s line sound like—any Italian poet? No? that you can think of? You know what I’m asking? I’m trying to find out. For me, in English, the line is very beautiful, without my quite understanding fully the meaning of it. You have to say that about your line, in Italian. That your line is hopefully as beautiful as the original. That’s a great responsibility. But the intention has got to be there. If the intention doesn’t work literally, mimetically, completely, then you may as well do an adaptation. If it’s going to mean that the music of it is that “she.” What is ‘she’ in Italian? You don’t put the pronoun first? You never do that? That’s not Italian? It’s not good? MC: Yeah, it’s Italian, but… PV: You wouldn’t say that. PL: It sounds nineteenth-century. DW: You’ve got to know it’s a woman. RC: But I think it can come out of the line. If I say “Cantava oltre il limite del mare,” I see a woman—I don’t know why. Perhaps because the sea is masculine in Italian. [Background noise of people talking.] PL: Sorry, Derek, we were saying you’ve got to know it’s a woman later, in the Italian version. DW: You’ve got to know it later? No, I want to know it in the first line. LS: Then you have to say ‘lei’ – “Lei cantava oltre il genio del mare.” MC: It’s not as beautiful, but it’s okay. PV: Then I’d rather have “Una donna cantava.” PL: I think you should have a period if you chose “Lei cantava.” DW: I think what we are having here is a responsible translation. After having tried, maybe the only thing you can have is “The woman sang.” “Pervigilium Veneris”: “illa cantat, nos tacemus. quando ver venit meum? / quando fiam uti chelidon, ut tacere desinam?” [89–90] That’s fantastic. ‘We are silent, she sings: When does my spring come? / When will I become as a swallow, so that I might cease to be silent?’ That’s a nightingale. So maybe we have to do the same thing. What do we want? If you’re having a hell of a time in trying to get the ‘she’-sound, we know it’s in praise of the woman. So

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maybe we have to abandon that mimic music, and go for something that first of all is very touching in Italian. The touching equivalent of “She sang beyond the genius of the sea,” which really contains… even if you’re not quite sure of what he is saying, it may be the same way you don’t quite know what she is singing. Because what she’s singing cannot be defined in certain terms. And therefore the limitations of genius, the nature of the sea, or the nature of our understanding that the song goes beyond that. Maybe that’s it. Therefore, if the first thing you want to do is to do a line of Italian that has that nostalgic, plaintive song—astonishing song—which may have in it whatever rhymes, internal rhymes—this is going to be corny, but all of poetry is corny in the great sense. ‘A woman is singing by the beach’, right? I’m not saying that naturally the translation of that is musical, but perhaps you have to do that. What do you do about the word ‘genius’, right?, we had that problem from the beginning. And I don’t think it’s necessarily abandonment, because of what you’re telling me: You can’t know it’s a ‘she’. But I think you have to know it’s a woman singing from the first line. You’ve just got to do it. Because ‘Somebody’s singing’, or if you can guess it’s a woman singing, I don’t think it’s enough. Because it’s a praise of the woman’s ability, her talent, her genius as a singer. MC: You can transform the line into something like “I heard her sing”: “La sentii cantare…” DW: It would be nicer if the second part of the line were not so long, to get the mimicry of where the caesura falls. [Walcott makes everybody read out their version and everybody else evaluate it.] ML: “La sentii cantare oltre il genio del mare.” PL: “Cantava, al di là dell’essenza del mare.” MC: “Cantava oltre il genio del mare.” [There are mixed but timid reactions.] DW: No, listen, you are all colleagues. If I brought you a poem you could say: “Listen, it’s no good.” LG: “Cantava oltre il mistero del mare.” LS: “Oltre il genio del mare andava il suo canto.” AV: “Un gorgheggio ben oltre il genio del mare.”

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DW: What?! It sounds like someone drinking a glass of milk. What’s the first word? AV: Gorgheggio. DW: The sound of it is like somebody in hell. First of all, consonantally, it should not be there. It’s a vowelly poem. I don’t like the word, although it may be very accurate. LT: “Un canto di donna sul genio del mare.” PV: “Una donna cantò oltre lo spirito del mare.” DW: It sounds too staccato. AV: It’s prose. It’s not verse. RC: “Una donna cantava oltre il rumore del mare.” LS: The tense is different. MC: The ‘noise’ or ‘sound’ of the sea is too specific. DW: I don’t care what this proves. It proves nothing, really. But it certainly is the process by which you work. Because it just works thoroughly. It’s very brave to write the way Stevens does. To write that first line is brave, because it’s so corny to say ‘She sang besides the sea’. It’s really pathetic, in the sense of the cliché. But he knows that that’s a kind of a cliché and therefore, that’s why “genius.” He’s also saying ‘She sang beyond our usual idea of a woman singing by the sea’. So, given that all poetry—all kind of Romantic, Swinburnian thing like “She sang beyond the genius of the sea”—first of all is already in a standardized cliché rhythm of iambic pentameter…. But all of these in a fine poet like Stevens are attributes. The cliché is an attribute. The use of the image of the cliché, which we take for granted, is an attribute. And he is saying that what she is singing is beyond all attributes—beyond the attribute of the waves making noise, beyond the attribute of an idea of music, of a woman, beyond everything, beyond the identity of everything, beyond the horizon. So, that’s brave. So what I’m saying about this proving nothing or doing anything is: all of that is valuable, because what I hoped, or what I think may have happened is that you have produced more chaos, which is great. So we don’t know where we are, which is terrific—which is where we have to be for us to try to do something. What it would do? Make me look at it hard, because I’m suspicious of the tone of the first stanzas—suspicious, distrustful. Because I think that, not the meaning, but the associative vibrations that are there are a little too de-

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pendent on my reception of what he’s saying without question. So I’m putting the statement, a suspending question, as if they were fiction, and once that fiction is suspended for me, I get suspicious. But it goes on to be clearer. Now, what we should do is read it. I want you to learn, really, by heart, overnight, any part of it that you like. Learn it by heart, for tomorrow. Then I would like you to do, in any rhythm that you think… no, I shouldn’t do that—wait a minute. Continue working on the translation, of the first… if you do more, fine…. 

Creative Writing Seminar, University of Milan second class, 10 July 2001 [We start by reciting the parts of Stevens’s poem that we have learned by heart. I recite mine. Matteo Campagnoli confesses he hasn’t learned any.] MC: I didn’t learn anything by heart, because yesterday I couldn’t do that. DW: You didn’t have time? MC: No, it’s because I need time. Usually it’s something that happens by itself, not something that I force. I read a poem again and again and… DW: Exercise is an exercise of memory. And poetry is memory. Even with somebody else’s poem, exercising memory is fathering creation. PL: You know we—our generation—weren’t taught to learn things by heart. [LG recites her stanza.] DW: Part of the idea of doing that is that the more you recite it, the more you realize how complicated it is. It’s complicated to remember, and it’s complicated to remember in English. But I’m interested in the meaning of what you’re saying, too. Because I’m still not sure that I’m getting the meaning of everything that is in there. That’s good. RC: I haven’t learnt anything. DW: You don’t know it? Tomorrow I want it. My eight lines, that you owe me. All right? Please. AV: I promise I’ll do it for tomorrow.

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DW: What’s your attitude towards learning a poem by memory? You don’t do this normally? In America, it’s the same thing. I give the class where I teach… I make them remember poems by heart. And by the end of it they’re very grateful that they know them. So they learn by heart, they know my Hardy, Auden, Wallace Stevens sometimes. They know them, they can recite them. What it does for you, the first thing that it does for you as poets— which I don’t like to call you, since you didn’t learn anything… [Isabella Zoppi comes in.] LS: Isabella, from Turin. DW: Isabella? [joking] I don’t know any Isabella…. Hi, how are you? IZ: I got lost, but I’m fine, thank you. DW: Okay. When you learn any poem by heart, you save civilization, that’s what you do. Because you are the one carrying it. Therefore, you are the vessel of your craft. And so, if you learn and cherish your craft through memory—which is the weapon that you have…. If you are thrown into prison, you know, that’s what you have, as a defence. And that’s what dictators try to suppress: your thought, your memory. The history of people who have been persecuted—whether it’s Mandelstam, or anyone you may think of—is to preserve the memory of Russian poetry in his head. So, that is the first point that a dictator cannot reach, and that’s what a dictator has a right to destroy first. I can understand a dictator who says: ‘Get rid of all the poets quickly’. Because they would pass the memory on. Also, even if you torture them, they will continue to have that memory. The reason why Brodsky made you learn lines of things by heart was first of all as an incantation, and the fact that you are doing what your craft does, and that your preservation of that memory—not only of your own words but also of the words of others—is your function. You are safe here … but the memory of the poets, the physical memory, is also an act of commemoration of the poet. So, if you learn Hardy by heart, or you learn Montale by heart, you’re preserving something, which is valuable and spiritual. You’re not unusual in the fact that you never had to learn anything by heart, because it’s not part of twentieth-century teaching. But in another context you would have had to do that. If you keep that music in you ear from any language.… I used to learn sections of different languages, some French, or Dante, obviously Shakespeare, and obviously Wordsworth—poets of

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your own language, poets of another language, too. It’s great for you, because it goes into your body, enters your system. The creation, I believe, is the same thing. It is stated that the muses are the daughters of memory. When you write a poem you are commemorating it, you are writing it because you are preserving it as sound. And therefore, what you are aiming at is the hope that you know it as you create it, and maybe the hope that other people will love it and know it accurately, very accurately. So the larger reason for doing it is maybe to get into the habit of realizing that every verse, every line you write, is an act of memory. And its direction—function, direction—is towards memory. It’s the same standard thing that Greeks are describing, that that’s what poetry is. You don’t need even to write it. You can compose it in your head without its being written. Because we have left the idea of composing in our heads before we write or while we write, we get all those various travesties of memory that happen in a lot of show-off, or denial. Because I know that in America people resist the idea of that happening. It sounds like too much work, to go to school and learn something by heart. Okay. [To LT:] Did you have a chance of learning anything? LT: I tried. “She sang beyond the genius of the sea…” DW: Terrific. [To PV:] What did you do? PV: I’ll do it for tomorrow. DW: What other stuff did you do, then? MC: I did the translation. PL: I wrote an adaptation of Stevens’ first stanza. [DW reads it.] DW: By ‘imitation’ I meant something further away from… this is direct competition with the original. I wanted you to do not imitations but translations. Let me hear… I don’t know Italian, so what I’ll be listening to is what I think is an approximation of the song. I’m just listening to a foreign language. So if you did a direct translation, how would you try that? And the rest of you have to say what you think. AV: Shall I read my translation? DW: Yeah. [To all:] Pay attention, and make a couple of notes of what you don’t like. AV: “Cantava più oltre il genio del mare.

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Nell’acqua prendeva alla mente o alla voce Sembianza di corpo intero…” DW: Read it so that I can tell what the endings are. Give me a pause at the end of the verse. AV: “Cantava più oltre il genio del mare. Nell’acqua prendeva alla mente o alla voce sembianza di corpo intero agitando le maniche vuote. Ma il suo movimento mandava un grido continuo, creava un grido costante che non era nostro, anche se capivamo non umano, dell’oceano medesimo.” PL: For me it’s a little too formal, and the sound is not… Stevens’s poem sounds more contemporary. This is too literary. DW: We all know that this is hell, okay? This is hell, and it will cause a natural irritation, mutual irritation on either side, translator’s side and listener’s side. But let’s try and go beyond that, and near a territory that is not absolute, in terms of personal response. DW: First of all, how does it sound tonally in Italian? LG: Solemn. IZ: It sounds musical. It’s like a song. I would take away a word from the first line. One syllable, because it’s too long. DW: Luigi, what do you think? LS: I would change a couple of things here and there, but the general musicality is working. The gerund in Italian doesn’t work, I think. I would change that. RC: In Italian it becomes even more abstract, and I don’t like it. But I think it’s not his translation, it’s the Italian. DW: What do you think, Alessandro? AV: I’m flattered. DW: And if you picked up some of the criticism? AV: I think that Paola is right in saying that Luca’s version is more musical. I absolutely agree. When I read it I thought it was more musical than mine.

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The word genio has different meanings in Italian, that range from the military to the meaning of ‘a very intelligent person’. But I thought that I might keep the latinate origin in this verse. DW: [After a while] Okay, this is getting more and more irritating. I guess that’s part of the whole thing, but it’s getting more irritating. AV: Why? DW: Why? Because I’m getting very irritated with this poem! I used to like it a lot… [All laugh]. Honestly! Because I don’t understand it. And I think it’s deliberately… I think it’s slightly perverse. I don’t mean morally: perverse in its authoritativeness. I don’t know if you think you can understand it better than you did yesterday because you have translated it. Do you think you can? MC: Yes. That’s why I needed to go through the whole poem, and tried to translate it all. I think it’s a difficult poem to understand, so I had to read it all. DW: I don’t think so. The process was not that. The danger of that is you’re going to start to translate from down to bottom before you even progress along the way that the poem proceeds. Your procedure may be more of a counter-poem that may miss the mystery of the poem, if you translate it in advance into a prosaic version, to which you now apply a translation. MC: This is a risk, but this is a particular case, because the poem is difficult to understand for an Italian. DW: We haven’t read the whole poem, I know that, but that’s because I’m stuck on the first stanza. And even if I pushed myself into the second stanza I haven’t solved stanza one. I chose him because I thought it would be a very difficult exercise to do because you have to have the music, and you have to have the meaning. And it’s hard in English. It’s almost impenetrable, to me. The associations are too mysterious, too vague. Where are we now? We’re going to hear more translations, right? Whose? [To PV:] Yours? PV: Yeah. DW: The value of this, though, is that as individual writers—the writer as an individual, you yourself—you can hear things said, something that was inside you in terms of judgement, that may apply to you own weaknesses. We all have terrible weaknesses as verse writers. So what you can hear and you can say, now, is ‘That sounds like me. That sounds like the pompous crap that I

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write when I get excited’. It can be applied negatively, so that you become your own critic. PV: “Cantava oltre lo spirito del mare. L’acqua mai formata…” DW: Okay, you have a problem with speed! This morning and this afternoon I sat in the lobby, and there’s an Italian woman talking—just talking—but the speed of the speech is incredible! For an English ear, both Spanish and Italian go at a rate that nobody talks this fast in English. The reason why I’m asking you to do this is because I want to get an idea of the scansion. So you have to exaggerate the scansion, for me and for everybody else. PV: “Cantava oltre lo spirito del mare. L’acqua mai formata…” DW: If you were saying this a little more exaggerating the music, how would you say it? PV: “Cantava oltre lo spirito del mare. L’acqua mai formata…” DW: Wait wait. That’s too fast, that’s prose. I’m not saying: ‘Intone it’, I’m saying to scan it. Scan it. Try again. PV: “Cantava oltre lo spirito del mare. L’acqua mai formata…” DW: Slower, much much slower… I don’t hear any particular meter. I don’t hear meter. Do it again. PV: “Cantava oltre lo spirito del mare.” DW: That’s better. Do every line like that, with that pace. PV: “Cantava oltre lo spirito del mare. L’acqua mai formata a mente o voce come un corpo tutto corpo fluttuava le maniche già vuote. Eppure il suo moto imitativo costante risuonava causando perenne un grido che non era nostro anche se lo capivamo. Inumano, proprio dell’oceano.” PL: I guess it’s fine. MC: I think there is this repetition in line 5, “constant,” that should be kept.

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DW: The trick in English… the language of the poem, the trickiness, is to do variations on a word. In a way it’s like Gertrude Stein. It’s through the poor vocabulary, right? There’s repetition or orchestration of another word, maybe the word “constant,” and “constantly.” Or “a body wholly body.” What’s the Italian for ‘body’? All: ‘Corpo’. DW: Like a body? All: “Come un corpo.” DW: So now you have alliteration. So what is ‘entirely’, or ‘wholly’, or ‘completely’? All: ‘Tutto’. DW: ‘Completely’? LT: ‘Completamente’, but it’s too long. DW: Let’s get along with this. Like a body…? All: “Come un corpo completamente corpo.” DW: I like that! What does it do, do you think it makes the line too long? PL: I think it’s beautiful! DW: I think it’s terrific. All the s’s… Let’s hang on on this. Maybe like a tourist, like a foreigner, I’m enjoying bad Italian. I might be a little vulgar, or a little corny, or a little touristy, if I like this. LT: No, there’s nothing wrong in itself. It’s good Italian. The problem is you can’t see it in a line. It’s too long for the line. DW: No, no, no! If by the scansion of the line…. What I’m beginning to do is to cheat, I’m lying a little, just a little. If the first part, “like a body wholly body”—that’s a caesura, right? and it sounds beautiful to me because… just the way it sounds. But, again, it could be my not knowing Italian, and finding it beautiful, terrific. The second part of the caesura, “like a body wholly body,” what’s next? All: “fluttering” DW: “fluttering,” okay. You can maybe—and this is a permission I think that is possible—make the caesura happen, right? “like a body wholly body,” which is a long syllabic thing to you. But, in a way, the measure of it… it is not necessarily long, to say “like a body wholly body.” Translate that into

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Italian—the second part of the line, which is beyond the caesura, the word “fluttering.” But I don’t know that in Italian you could have that shift that could go with the present participle, whatever the Italian would be for “fluttering.” And then go to another line. In other words, you could divide it maybe, and it would be “like a body wholly body / fluttering its empty sleeves,” which is not to me a violation so much as an entity, because I’m not sure how it’s going to come off if you do the present participle in Italian. I think it’s going to sound melodramatic if you do the participle. What is “fluttering?” PL: ‘sventolante’. DW: Say the whole line. PL: “Come un corpo completamente corpo, sventolante” MC: It’s always difficult to translate a present participle into Italian. DW: My instinct is that it’s not good—I have no reason to say this, but my instinct is that it’s not good in Italian verse to have a present participle like that, at the end of the line. Can you do this sventolante into the next line? PL: Yes, because you have -mente before and then you have vento. DW: Do we have different words for “fluttering”? Is that bad syntax? AV: Yes. The present participle can’t be used in that way in Italian. You cannot say that. PL: I think you can. AV: Not with an accusative afterwords. DW: It doesn’t have an accusative following? It’s not a verb, it’s an adjective? LT: In this case, we tend to put a gerund instead of a present participle. DW: You see, to me—who have no authority to say this—up to that repetition… it’s perfectly legitimate to use those repetitions in an imitation of what Stevens is doing: “Come un corpo completamente corpo.” To me, that’s fine: that’s absolutely in the spirit of Stevens. What is not in the spirit of Stevens is to make that participle hang like that, without completing a balance. Because what you have in that song is, you only have half a line, unfinished, and what you need is a balance, which would make the line longer. But it doesn’t make the line longer necessarily in terms of the stress of the line. To me, “like a body wholly body” is the same thing in terms of space and measurement as in Italian “come un corpo completamente

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corpo.” That’s still one half of the line. And the next thing would be whatever that participle would do for the next thing. For me, it should go, you should go into… If you say it doesn’t have an object after it, then how would you go into “fluttering its sleeves,” if you’re not going to make it an active verb? AV: I would use a gerund. DW: First of all, do you accept the first half of the line, “like a body wholly body,” in Italian? Do you accept it? Do you like it? All: Yes. LT: It is even more alliterative than the English. DW: Oh, yeah, tonally it’s okay, because there’s a lot of repetition in that way. And if you look you can find a lot of alliteration even in the first line, all those c’s. Okay, now the second part of the line is what we’re talking about. You’re understanding that in terms of scansion I’m permitting to think about all ideas with “corpo completamente corpo”…. You either do it as one line, and the next line has “fluttering its empty sleeves,” or you do it as one line that includes “like a body wholly body fluttering its empty sleeves.” But I think that what’s ugly and sounds unfinished is to do the whole phrase and then leave a separate gerund hanging at the end. Unless you think it has the same effect in English as it has in Italian. PL: I wouldn’t like it. AV: I wouldn’t. RC: I would say “come un corpo completamente corpo che sbatte / le maniche vuote.” LT: I did “Senza prendere forma di voce o pensiero / un corpo davvero l’acqua scuoteva / a maniche vuote.” PL: I like the idea of using “davvero” instead of the repetition of “body.” LG: I like it. IZ: To me it sounds like another poem, a totally different poem. It’s very musical, very beautiful, but it doesn’t sound like what I hear in Stevens. DW: I’ll tell you something. It can be very sad as a writer—which has happened to me in different countries, I’m not being specific—that someone praises a book in translation. Think of what it may be, to put your reputation

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in the hands of a translator. It happened to me with a translation of Pasternak. I looked at it and I said: “I can’t read it, the English is too banal, there’s no proof that the guy is a great poet.” Until I began to work with Joseph. Then I saw the kind of talent that was there, because you began to read it and you immediately saw the quality of Pasternak. So what we are doing, however fussy, can be meaningful. Where were we? Who else has done a translation? LS: I did it now. I tried now. MC: “Cantava oltre il genio del mare. Le acque mai formate in idea o voce come un corpo solo corpo che agita le sue maniche vuote. Eppure questo mimico moto generava un grido continuo di continuo provocava un grido che nostro non era, anche se compreso, disumano, dell’autentico cielo.” DW: Okay, you sound like you were reading a translation. Now, read the poem. MC: [Reads it again, reading a run-on line as one line, without making a pause between the lines.] DW: Why did you read like that? MC: I’m not an actor. DW: No no no no! It’s not the acting. You know where the line stops. That’s your profession, that is your calling, that’s what you came for. And you have to do that. You do it in front of a huge audience. I know what you’re talking about in terms of incantation—how incantation can sound affected. Have you ever given readings? I want a lectern tomorrow. Because when you go off there, regardless of what you think, you are performing. You’re reading: you’re performing. Therefore, what you have to send over is not a conceited thing. It’s just that you are trying to communicate music. Definitely. Try to put it in your reading, even to yourself, that you know that that is the end of the line. I don’t have a problem now, in terms of where the end of the line was, but I had it a while ago, because I thought: “This line is wrong. I wish it could be shorter.” And when you do this, that you go to the end of the line, and then you’re beginning with the next line, then I have an idea of the frame.

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MC: Yeah, but I was saying that it’s not easy in front of other people. It’s hard to concentrate. DW: No no no. Eventually, you’ll have to do this. Start now. MC: [Reads again.] DW: Now you don’t dare to criticize the professor… [All laugh. To LS:] Go ahead. LS: “Il canto andava oltre il genio del mare. L’acqua senza mai forma nella mente o nel suono, come un corpo che è corpo sbatte le maniche vuote e la sua mimica manda una voce costante che genera una voce aliena che si comprende, disumana, ma che è propria del mare.” DW: Okay. The pitch—for everybody—this is absolutely tonal. It goes on a half note. [Mimics a very regular rhythm.] The whole poem is on a half note. That’s a song. It has that ending, that tone. It sounds a little abrupt. It goes into a sort of prosaic argument, which everybody should avoid. I know that in Italian you have a natural antipathy, just as in Spanish, to be over-musical, because you are all vowels. You have a phone-book, and it sounds like Dante. Because you are very vowelly, you have that threat, as poets, and you have to employ consonants as an antipathy to over-vowelled things. In English that same threat is in terms of the tone of the music, so that the opposite of that tone would be something more prosaic. But this is such good music that there is no point pretending that it is not musical. I hate the kind of critical argument that says ‘Oh it’s too musical, it’s not modern’. Okay. I’m not going to read the adaptations, or the imitations, right now. What I’d like to do is not to demonstrate anything. The only reason why we’re reading this is because it is a terrific poem. When an American poet of a certain type makes conscious rhythmical music, the reaction generally is negative. The American accent, the American stress, is more for broken verse than for semantic or columnar verse. The stupidity of that is that that kind of columnar verse is written by poets like Stevens, as well as by Crane, as well as by Frost, and so forth. So what I’m saying is, if I had to make a judgment, personal, about this poem, I would say ‘Can it be beautiful and at the same time irritating?’ I don’t think so. I think it should not be incomprehensible. I don’t think that

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the function of poetry should be to be unreadable or incomprehensible. I think the opposite. The ultimate serenity, the supreme clarity, is by example Dante, more than Shakespeare. In Dante, the phrase becomes so clear that it is like light. And the language is what we may call simple, but it’s a simplicity arrived at, such a worked-out simplicity, very crafted. One of the reasons why I never read enough Faulkner is that I never felt that there could be a language equal in clarity to Hemingway’s, and I think that either you are a Hemingway fan or a Faulkner fan. And I was not, and still am not, a Faulkner fan. I re-read and re-read the same sentences in Hemingway over and over, because I think they are more permanent, for the same reasons I’m talking about. It is not a matter of communicating. It’s more a matter of clarity of spirit as well as language. If I were a Victorian critic—no, earlier than that—if I were Dr Johnson, I would say ‘This is a French poet’. It’s not the genius of an English poet. It’s the genius of a poem that may come from Mallarmé, or some other poet. This is not an English poet. This is a poet with the sensibility of a surrealist poet, or a sensibility based on French painting, or maybe music. It’s just too private to get into, and too exacting, too demanding to be worth the effort of trying to understand it. Because I do not understand it. I don’t know where he’s at. And I did not pick this poem for this reason. I just said, let’s try to do that because its so complex in its music that it would give you a challenge to do something that would come to its meaning. I haven’t. Unless you have, and you can tell me phrase by phrase what the meaning of what is being said is, then I can’t. No? And even if you said you’re Italian and therefore maybe you’re missing something, I don’t think that’s true. I think it’s the diction that is Stevensian. And the argument that would be there would be: You don’t have to understand everything to enjoy this. I don’t believe it. I believe that you understand great things so completely that it is no longer that great thing but something beyond it. There are great passages even in this. When you get to “Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know / Why, when the singing ended and we turned…”—that’s clear. “The sea was not a mask”—okay; maybe she was a mask. “No more was she”! “The song and water were not medleyed sound.” I never said they were. Why are you making me deny something I never said? It seems to me abusive of the reader at the expense of a kind of vanity that I think is dangerous. A lot of Stevens to me is just like that. And because you went through the twin agony of trying to translate this to make sense of it in another language, then I

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think it’s been more clarified that we don’t have a thesis to share. How would you describe that difficulty? PL: To me it’s not so incomprehensible. What I understand satisfies me and allows me to appreciate the poem. I couldn’t tell you phrase by phrase what it means, but I like, for example, the first line. DW: Yes, but it’s based successively on a number of pretended contradictions, okay? pretended anti-statements that are saying ‘No, this is not what you think…’. RC: I don’t think the poet is speaking to me. I have the impression that he’s speaking to someone else. DW: Yes, but how many people exist between the writer and the reader? RC: I just had the impression… he seems to be engaging something different from me. DW: There’s nobody else! There’s only you and Wallace Stevens. Who’s between you and Wallace Stevens? Some genius that can understand his work? PL: I think it’s maybe a play in which he’s trying to engage the reader, to distance the reader from the text. DW: And why is he pretending to use logical syntax when he’s not logical? Why is he making it incomprehensible? I don’t admire the fact that a poet is capable of those convolutions. I don’t like the acrobatics. I don’t like the showing-off. I think it’s a form of showing-off in terms of style, and a form of showing-off is rhetoric. And this happens often with great poets. It happens constantly with Hart Crane. A poet sometimes doesn’t exactly know what he’s saying. I don’t believe in the exercise of some obliquity that is supposed to be high art, and that the reader or spectator has to try to understand. I think it’s the same thing in bad abstract painting. But I won’t go into this now. I’m going to read the poem. Desperately, out of sheer desperation, I would say that the first eight lines of this poem could be compressed by Pound in two lines. “To build the city of Dioce, whose terraces are the colour of stars.” [canto L X X I V ] Knocked out. Right? And a refusal to do anything convoluted. Dantesque, but. Okay. “The Idea of Order at Key West.” The poem begins with a scene bidding to reflection: the scene of a woman walking by the sea on a summer evening and singing… Wow! Okay: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea. / The water never formed to mind or voice / Like a body wholly body fluttering /

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Its empty sleeves.” You see: I don’t get it! Like a body, completely body… fluttering its non-completely body… its empty sleeves. So, let me try and get it. Like a body, completely body. The body would be complete if it really became a soul. Follow? The fullest completion of the body would be something beyond the body, because it would then become empty. So, why was it incomplete when it was a body the first time? Because something has not arrived at a truth about being just a body? And then the completion of it as a body is if it goes beyond the idea of being a body? And that’s why it flutters its empty sleeves, its arms? Is it some kind of wrestling-down, or something? Is that an image of something on a line, somewhere? And what has that got to do with the sound of the woman singing? Okay, these are like associations that happen, but that’s not the emphatic logic that he’s using, because he’s using a determined logic that he himself says that he knows. All right, I’ll finish, okay? [He beautifully reads the entire poem himself.] Here we are. Very nice. Let’s do the Italian adaptations. [To PL:] Did you write an adaptation? PL: In English. DW: Read it. PL: “The slant of sky she traced within her voice was waning. She heard and said the silence of the hour. She was the heir and only author of the world that rose in singing. The sea became her self, which self was never other than her song. A song of solitude, the gait creative of a god whose song made all. We saw her and knew that was her own original world, and sole.” DW: You liked doing this? PL: Yes. DW: And that was an exercise: it was worth doing that, right? PL: Yes. DW: [To RC:] Did you write one? RC: Yes, in English. DW: Read it. [RC reads her adaptation; not clear enough for accurate transcription here.]

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DW: What is the meter, iambic? Take a line, pick any line, it should be the same. RC: “Perhaps you can deduce what power was this.” DW: That’s not a pentameter. Was that your intention, a regular, rigid, iambic, pentameter? When you were writing, did you keep a steady, regular rhythm in mind? RC: Yes. DW: You went after that? That’s what you went for? RC: Yes. DW: I want to know the attitude toward the scansion—like an inquisitor. [Laughs.] When you were composing it, were you going after the rigidity of the scansion, that said ‘This is going to be ten beats every line’, or did you say ‘Well, this is going to be twelve, maybe thirteen—it’s okay’. Which one was your attitude? RC: I tried to keep it regular, but if sometimes it didn’t come out regular, I said ‘Well, if I like it, I’ll leave it’. DW: You can’t do that. RC: I can’t? DW: No, you can’t. That’s what’s great about English verse: that the subtlest deviation can be a shock to the rhythm. In other words, the first thing you do is the rigidity of the meter. If you start with the idea that it will be okay if you vary the meter, then you will be condemned to be burnt in a bonfire. No, I’ll tell you why this is so. That is not your own meter, right? Tell me a line from Dante… AV: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” DW: Tell me another line from Dante. AV: “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare.” DW: What is that meter? AV: Endecasillabo. DW: Okay, here’s why, for the practice of the language that you’re working in—and if you are working on narrative somebody would say that what I’m talking is nonsense. They would say: ‘Forget that old-fashioned crap’. But believe me, like St John the Baptist, I’m talking the truth. You don’t deviate

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from the meter, because if you do that, the world shifts on its axis. That’s a fact. The world shifts on its axis. You know why? Because you are violating your own code, you are blaspheming, you are lying, right? and you are making up things, you are not doing the truth of the technique that you are working in. All right. That may sound severe, but it’s true. I’m saying this for this reason. If you do the reverse, because you know what’s left out, right? the technician in you would be horrified at the fact… or you have to get permission, and probably from God, for you to have extra syllables in a line that should be purely ten. Why? Because of mastery, because of your authority, because of your power, that spiritual power, as corny as that may sound. They don’t believe this in America, and that’s why they write so much boring and conceited verse that’s all about them, in terms of how the free-verse situation happens or the syllabic verse happens. I’ll give you an example of the strength of what can happen in terms of not following a meter. First of all of, you must be observing the rigidity of the structure without deflection. You see, if you had followed that, then you would have had a column, a something that would have a sculptural solidity. You see, a sculptor doesn’t say ‘I’ll just do an arm, and then a little piece of the arm’. That is the cemetery of what you’re doing in sculpture. And verse is sculptural. I’m not talking about an absolute situation, but you will only acquire that freedom if you know the perfection that you are after in terms of the syllabics that you are writing. Maybe it sounds a little too rigid in Italian, but I don’t think so. I think that the invention or the continuation of the terza rima, which is a thing to continue to do in the conditions that you set yourself… why do you set yourself these rules? If you set yourself the rules of terza rima, then you are allowed to write about Paradiso. Then. If you do Paradiso in free verse, it’s not Paradise, because it has no order. It then becomes a personalized version. There is an idea of order, because all the epics are there, but… [incomprehensible] You know, the meter is consistent all the time in the Aeneid, and in Ovid. That’s because the poem creates its own order. And it can happen with lyric. Listen to this and hear what happens at the moment when you don’t do the exact thing and you take it away. I don’t know what will happen in terms of your sensibility to English or whether you will find what I do useful because it is in English, but I think that it can work in Italian as well. [Recites Shelley’s “A Lament”: “O world! O life! O time! / On whose last steps I climb, / Trembling at that where I had stood before; / When will return the glory of your prime? / No more—Oh, never more! // Out of the day and night / A joy has taken flight; /

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Fresh spring, and summer, [and autumn] and winter hoar, / Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight / No more—Oh, never more!”] But he didn’t do that. What he did was, he left out “autumn.” The heart, the music, is there, but he went: ‘Fresh spring and summer and winter hoar fill my sad heart with grief…’. The line could have been ‘Fresh spring and summer, autumn and winter hoar’. That would have been the regular line in terms of the scansion, right? But he did: “Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar.” What is in that line that is missing? “Autumn,” the heartbreak, the thing that hurts, the gasp, the thing that was “fresh spring, and summer,” the pain, the sigh. So that caesura contains the pain of not being able to mention the word “autumn” by the time you get to all that grief. So the grief is not regulated. The grief is abruptly interrupted by the removal of the two syllables in autumn. So I’ll do the two versions. [Reads.] This is by removing two syllables. Now I’ll show you what Whitman does with adding. It’s the elegy for President Lincoln—the assassination of Lincoln; and the funeral. “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d / And the great star early droop’d in the night / I mourn’d and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.” It’s not that. Because the two first lines are pentametrical: “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d / And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night…” It’s beautiful; it’s lovely. And what is great is that he adds extra syllables to that second line, which is: “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d / And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night.…” That’s magnificent. Because it’s those two extra syllables that make you go beyond the regularity of the iambic pentameter. That extends the grief, because when else is the star shining? The repetition of it, which seems excessive, is not excessive, because what it does is, it multiplies the song, by the extra syllables. That’s superb. I’m saying that the rigidity of a column, in the knowledge of Shelley and in the knowledge of Whitman, is to do… The poet who does this superbly, too, is Emily Dickinson. You must read her, absolutely. She does little boxes. She works like a miniaturist. I’ve come to believe she is probably the greatest American poet. Because she does these little squares, and what she’s doing is, she’s using the hymnbook as a model, in terms of the structure. They’re like stanzas. But they are like stanzas because they are part of a hymnbook in terms of their structure. But they are also like boxes, and they are also like the confines of a chapel, or a church, or a room. So that these boxes, these stanzas that she does—one two three four space—represent to me the condition of her faith, the condition of her life—a church, a room—because she was a recluse. But what is

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staggering in her is that you cannot anticipate her rhymes. She uses assonantal, associative rhymes, rather than direct rhymes. Sometimes she does that. So, like the half-rhymes, some of them are predictable. If you are reading her a lot, you can say ‘Oh okay, so she has grass, and I know she’s going to write grace in the third line’. But she might write something entirely different from what your thinking can anticipate even in her half-rhymes. And the greatness of it is: she does it within the form. She does the exact thing of what preceded, but what you see is the variation of the orchestration of what can happen in terms of the form. Look at the Montale. If you think of what the line, of what is being shipped out on the side of a Montale… those gaps that are there are scanned, they are conquered. A gap in Montale’s verse would look like this: it would appear to be short, but it is not a short line. It’s the same line, but something has been carved out of it that is an echo of the same line. In Frost, it happens on the inside of the shape, so that the orchestration of it is a variation of the caesura. See, you have to feel, as another craftsman… you have to look at the craft of a poem, and what you bring as another craftsman is the astonishment of saying ‘Jesus, how did he do that?’ Your real response is the same response as when you see a master in anything do something, and your response is ‘Oh fuck, that’s what it is!’ That’s what the explosion of the confirmation of the joy is, right? Because you don’t get eloquent and say ‘Oh that was a marvellous shock!’ You can get the same response from the shift of the stress in a line of verse, but you can only create that response if you do not believe in modern criticism, modern anything or modern theory or keeping up to date. What has to be there is a severity that you set yourself that must be inviolable. You must get permission, okay? You don’t just do it because it’s ‘okay’. It’s an astonishment based on an idea. Do you want to take a break? a few minutes? [After the break. LT reads his adaptation.] LT: “The wind blew out the candles of the night. The clouds put a black shroud over the moon Leaving her song the master of the scene. And once again ignoring the partition Chanting the mermaid’s chant along the tide She was enchanting us unseen by us Asserting her own word above the ocean.”

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DW: What’s its title? LT: No title. DW: It’s an evocation from the Wallace Stevens…. All right, let me try out something. To know a language really well you have to know what are the clichés in the language. That’s verbal; that’s phrases. But there’s also a cliché of sound. The difficulty is that… you have to ask yourself what you want. You are Italian: is that what you want, to change your identity, as a translator? Of course not. Conrad is fantastic in terms of the complexity and weight of his syntax. But it is an English that comes out of another kind of English, Polish English: it’s a translator’s English. Because Conrad had to go through a process of translation, the English he writes comes out richer, in a sense, because of the Polish. But because he’s trying to sound as English as possible, very often he comes towards clichés, in English. But it is okay, because to him it is rediscovery, in English. He rediscovers the clichés, and he is brave, and has to do it, because he’s coming to it as if they were going to be translated. Something that an Englishman might not have written, Conrad wrote—certain phrases that he may not have written. I know I’m keeping talking about Brodsky a lot, but one of the defences that I have of Brodsky’s English is that he brings to English poetry something that many English poets despise. They would say ‘Well, this is not English’. The same thing may be said of Nabokov. They talk of Nabokov as if he were English; Nabokov was not English. He never pretended to be English, but he wrote some of the most terrific sentences and syntax in English that are there. So what informs his English is his Russian. The fact that he’s Russian makes his imagination and language rich. Joseph said he admired English tremendously. Altough I don’t know Spanish, I think that there are certain translators, particularly in English, of Gabriel García Márquez that are terrific—great English, not translations. That genius has to have to be able to enter the genius of the Spanish imagination through García Márquez. The take of translation on poetry is almost impossible. I’m very happy with some translations from Dante, especially Eliot’s prose translations. Whatever fury you are applying to a translation to get some of the things right, you mustn’t forget—because when you translated you were in anguish to return to your own language—your own language. Because you know your language, you might think it doesn’t involve the same effort of translation. But the easy trick is you can fall into an avoidance of clichés, a very

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strenuous avoidance of clichés. I’m being particular, but [to LT:] read your first line. LT: “The wind blew out the candles of the night.” DW: My response is… MC: There is a kind of cliché, vaguely Romantic. DW: Yeah, because what you have to do, in any language, is to ask dumb questions; like a dumb detective examining metaphors. Okay, there were candles. The stars were like candles. We’ve had that before, but… it’s okay. Then you say who blew out the candles: “The wind.” The wind blew out all the candles? And when were the candles shining? What does it say? LT: “The candles of the night.” DW: Now, it would be really difficult for the wind to blow out the candles of the day! Since there is no point in lighting a candle in the day, right? And since we know that candles shine at night, the furthest the metaphor can go would be to come into a Shakespearean compression and say: “The wind blew out the candles.” Right? The further point would be to say—since we know candles shine at night—that the candles of the night are the stars, right? Then you would go into the real compression, which would be: “The wind blew out the stars.” Who blew out the stars? Somebody blew out the stars, so there’s a personification. If the wind blew out the stars, the wind is standing now in darkness, complete darkness. So now there’s darkness, and the wind is no longer there. That doesn’t happen. Somebody blows out the stars, unless you say that a person appears when the candles are blown out, and that person who’s blown out the candles disappears, too, into the dark. What I’m saying is that any metaphor should be concrete, too. Both sides are real. It’s not a simile, in which you say that something looks like that. You’re not saying: ‘It looked as if the wind were blowing out the stars’. That’s a definite simile. It is an inferior form to metaphor, because it’s not complete. It may be that the wind blew out the candles, but it can’t sustain the examination of the reality of the metaphor, which is to say: “A maid blew out the candles,” right? The wind is a maid who blew out the candles. Therefore the metaphor is: the wind is a metaphor for the maid. But to leave it vague and say “it’s the wind” is an unfinished metaphor, and it’s pathetic, in the terms of pathos, to leave it like that, because it’s half-true. In other words, the left hand says: ‘The metaphor is okay’; the right hand says: ‘It doesn’t exist. It can’t happen’.

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So, if you go back to what you have, a metaphor has to have a prosaic solidity, to be real as prose is real. And that’s what we were talking about in terms of a metaphor’s coherence. Okay, next line, next sentence. LT: “The clouds put a black shroud over the moon.” DW: Something is going on that is undefined, a little ambiguous. MC: It’s quite the same as the first line. LS: Not only. The clouds are the shroud. DW: Now you’re talking about three things, the clouds, the shroud that the clouds carry, and then the object of the moon. But you mustn’t give up, because underneath there’s something that is going to be startling if you pursue what you think you wanted to say. I think that that metaphor has a domestic root. Now, let’s forget about the singing by the sea. Let’s take what you have, even if it’s not located as in the poem. A metaphor can be drawn. You can paint a metaphor; it’s that real. That’s what’s wrong in Surrealism; you can’t paint it. Surrealism does not work in English, because the reality of the nouns changes. Maybe in French, because that’s more sound than reality. Maybe in Italian; certainly in Spanish. The danger of Spanish is that it can associate everything; sounds can become metaphors. Let me give you an example of a metaphor. Once the examining of it is done thoroughly, then you can come up with something which is really powerful and different. If I were translating the action in a metaphor… a metaphor can be filmed. It can be filmed because you can’t translate film, you can’t transubstantiate film. But you can do film by simile. Simile is one after the other. You can do montage with similes. Here is a prose, banal, important thing that Pound said about Flaubert— he said it in Mauberly—he says these lines: “His true Penelope / Was Flaubert.” Why Flaubert? Because of the great exactness of Flaubert’s prose, but also because it involves patience. The patience of shaping something for a poet should be the same idea of le mot juste or the idea of working as hard as Flaubert would to make a sentence. So that the devotion to the craft of poetry is the equivalent of Flaubert’s devotion, the same exactness. The image that is there—in a prosaic, Flaubertian way, or in the Poundian way of saying that poetry should be at least as well written as prose—does not deny your metaphor. If you examine the prosaic reality of what we are talking about, it can be very startling and different. Because what you are describing seems to be a person who would blow out candles and pull a

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shroud over the moon. Since it’s not the moon, because the moon is not real in the context of a person blowing out candles and pulling in shrouds, it may be that that person may be pulling shrouds across the moon, like somebody closing curtains; or it could be that the moon may be a mirror, and that what is done is that the person may shroud a mirror. Now, what you have in the prosaic fiction of what you’re doing in terms of the metaphor that is submerged under the cliché you went for is just more valuable if seen as that banal reality of a maid blowing out candles or pulling a veil, a piece of cloth, across a mirror. Now you’re getting into a dimension that may have different associations, that has to do with something that is being closed, some sorrow happening or some death that may have occurred. All I’m saying is for anyone writing: we only do, too often, just surfaceassociative metaphors. A thing that has a song, and the song that we go for may simply be associative and doesn’t have the depth of the banality of the comparison. Listen to this, how colloquial it is! In Macbeth, either Banquo or Macbeth—the guy looks up and says: “There’s husbandry in heaven” [Act I I , scene i]—husbandry meaning thrift, cheapness, saving money. It’s like a pun; it’s like a joke. They’re cheap up there, they blew out all the candles. That’s a metaphor. That’s fantastic. It’s so casual. The Shakespeare that is writing that now is so terse, so economical. That whereas when he was younger he might have written great things about the stars, and that would have been pentametrical, ‘da dà da dà’… he cuts all that, there’s a caesura, and “There’s husbandry in heaven.” And it’s prose and the feeling that it’s great. It’s great poetry because the character who’s talking is saying: ‘Those guys are great, they’ve blown out the candles’. That’s wonderful. It’s economical and compressed. I think that that thinking is common to any language; that a metaphor, a true metaphor, can translate into anything. What I’m saying is: even if it’s easy for me to say to you ‘Well, that’s a kind of a cliché’, what has to be examined is: did you think in clichés? LT: I was only preoccupied with writing accurate iambics, not worrying about meaning. DW: But you made a metaphor, you see. It applies to Hart Crane, too. And then he goes off and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and all the metaphors are associative, with the same consequence, which is mistaken for power. Underneath there is the basis of a fiction that multiplies itself. I think that despite what you have… I know you’re saying that you were just doing

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it metrically, but what I’m scared of is the fact that it could have been even a little more oblique. It could have started further away from the associative… What time is it? AV: It’s twenty to six. DW: To six?! Okay. [To PV:] Go ahead. PV: “The voice you hear now floats beyond the mind, the borders indistinct, thus reaching farther out than wind and sea and the ordinary forces you expect in nature to meet under the sky. Dimensions slip and change, so does illumination’s floating body, uttering its own precepts and fixing boundaries before a board of unexpected censors. But still the voice, a music re-created by the words is soaring high and far, totally oblivious of those perspectives we are contented with, and makes a world anew dissolving limits imposed by simple habits that mutely follow through. There is your frenzy, then, creation’s rage devouring time and continents and common things but daily sculpting brand-new images of genius, ancestral, immemorial, hereditary as guilt.” DW: This propelled itself into its own language, its own diction, but to me it sounds a bit too clogged. Too packed. Also, it is too protracted, in terms of the beat, the meter. [To the others:] What do you think? PL: I’m too tired to know. LG: I don’t know. IZ: It’s too full. LS: I didn’t really get the whole thing, but the thing that I noticed was the rhythm. RC: I didn’t get it very well, so I can’t really tell, but I think the rhythm is there. AV: The same. I think it works. As far as the rhythm is concerned, it could be called an imitation of Stevens. I cannot say anything about the meaning.

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LT: The rhythm has more variety than the original. What I thought, in trying to write in iambic pentameters, is that you risk making a parody of the thing you’re imitating. You’re too regular if you are too strict. DW: Okay, we’ve got to stop. Try and do me a favour—try to learn as much of it as you can by heart. Tell me what you think this is doing for you. What do you think? I’d like to know what’s happening. PL: It’s making me aware that there is a lot more work I have to do by way of… DW: You are not thinking in English, right? You are not thinking of translation? So what do you think? PL: As a writer or as a translator? DW: Yes, as a writer. What do you think this might have done for you? PL: Given me a heavier task. In terms of the craft… something almost physical, a training of the ear… MC: It makes me aware of lots of things. It’s not only a lot of work. You do things in practice that I have felt. You show practically the way. It’s not just being aware of the difficulty or of how it works. DW: I’m old in the profession, and it doesn’t change. Tomorrow, it’s the same problem. Everybody said that, you know? Chaucer said that: “The life so short, the crafts so long to learn.” This is Chaucer. LG: It makes me aware of how much I have to learn yet, and of how sometimes my reading has been superficial, because things I thought I knew are maybe not so clear. IZ: As far as creative writing is concerned, I’m a songwriter, and so I tend to take musicality for granted, in words. This makes me consider better why words are musical. DW: That’s something that should be practised, that a twentieth-century poet doesn’t do anymore. And the people who do it make a lot of money. All of those rock-stars, some of them try to write poetry, and some of them write very bad and very successful lyrics. So you have lost your job. It’s a competitive business. Because I write theatre, too, I have to write songs. But to write songs is absolutely crucial to me, because of what the values of words are in terms of meter. I worked with composers, and they tell you sometimes: ‘It’s not gonna work’. Because the rigidity of the meter—the bass

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in the song—you can’t mess with that. You don’t screw up the bass, because the bass guy and the bass guitar would kill you. You can work the flourish as you want. So Miles Davis needs somebody to keep that bass going, so he can come back after he’s showed off. And the vowel values that can happen in singing are something that poets would always have to do, because that’s what you would have done anyway, as a job. So, you should go back to it and try to write songs. And try to write songs for composers. I know it sounds pompous and pretentious, but here’s what poetry should be doing, in the twentieth century: writing theatre and writing songs. There’s work in that, as well as in interpretation and translation. There’s a lot of unemployed aspects of genius that could be manifested practically because there should not be that division between the song-writer and the poet. [To RC:] Roberta, go ahead. RC: I feel that most of the time I waste time doing other things…. Plus it’s amazing because these texts are directly related to what I’m doing in my academic work. AV: I’m very interested in craft and technique. I don’t think that I would ever become a poet myself, but I like translating very much, so technique is actually what I need, and I really liked what we were doing. DW: Well, that’s what a poet does … it’s the same thing. You have to understand technically what the person is after. And there are a lot of critics who do not know how verse is written. Critics! I’m talking about major reputations, who don’t know the craft of verse. That’s a reality. LT: It’s the same for me. There is in Italy a general distrust of teaching the technique. Everybody is an artist by birth—just because he’s Italian. PV: Yea, it’s useful, because I know I need to work on technique, to become aware of meter, to feel obliged to work. DW: I’m not asking this because I want to be flattered by you telling me that it’s good for you. And I wanted to know, by the way, is there any direction you would like me to take this in, something you would like to see done? MC: Maybe how you deal with meter when you write. Let’s say that you should write a song, and someone gives you a melody… is this confrontation with meter the most difficult thing? DW: I’m telling you it’s the same thing in art, which you have to avoid. There are people who are telling you now: ‘Don’t bother to draw, as an

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artist. Drawing is out.’ A friend of mine sent his daughter-in-law to London to study art, and they said to her they do not teach painting any more. They teach installations. What am I going to do if I come from the Caribbean and I’m a barbarian, or I’m an underdeveloped person—which is great for me— and somebody told me in London: ‘We don’t teach painting any more. What we do is installations’? I have to write from my ignorance and my distance to say: ‘Well, that’s a bunch of…’. What you need to do as an artist is to learn to draw. You have to. And it’s not different from tennis. There can’t be freeverse tennis, as Frost pointed out. But I feel nice vibrations about this in the class, and I certainly am impressed by the English you write. And I don’t want to feel that I’m doing a dishonest thing in trying to work from the Italian into English at all. I don’t think so. I think what is happening is that all of you have two…. One is self-refining, because it’s working in English, and the most subtlety you get into the fact that you understand good poetry in English, or that you yourselves are trying to write it, is not, again, to try to translate yourselves into the English. I think there’s only one thing, and that’s Italian. And I don’t have, I don’t really have… well, in a sort of a way I am bilingual. But I think you have an advantage. If you confront, for instance, if you are coming into a line you’ve begun thinking, and if you’ve begun thinking of a poem, why is it coming to you in English? That’s a question. I think it’s coming because there’s a temptation that you’re going to have in terms of loving the language so much that you want to do something in it. And I think that’s the reason why Brodsky was bilingual; for the same reason. And I think of all those poets who are writers and who love the language they work in, that is not their own language… Brodsky, Conrad, Nabokov, or anyone else. But to have that is a blessing. To be able to work that way, because one can work with the other, you see. If you say “completely body”: completely is a too prosaic word in English, and wholly has an assonantal association—these are difficulties that you come across that are almost insuperable difficulties. William Gass wrote this terrific book on translating Rilke,4 and he says that the usual translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies is “Every angel is terrible.” Now, if you took terrible in the English sense, it would mean every angel contains terror. But that even has become for him a cliché translation because of the associations with the wrong kind of terror. But he says even if there is a word that has been degraded by use, it could be 4 William Gass, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

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accurate in Rilke to say “Every angel is awesome.” You know the American expression, right? Like ‘It’s cool’? Beyond the cool there’s awesome. But he says it contains the word awe, and that’s why he prefers to use it. So there are so many complications in terms of that, and the more you do them, the more it reflects on the choices that you need in Italian. It’s bound to work on those choices. 

Creative Writing Seminar, University of Milan third class, 11 July 2001 [We read “During Wind and Rain” by Thomas Hardy, one stanza each.] DW: Hardy is a novelist, and I think that the great thing in this is the compression of the fiction in the stanza. A whole arc is described, but the content of it is as if each stanza contained its own little novel, its own experience. I think the title must be from Twelfth Night by Shakespeare: “When that I was and a little tiny boy / With hey-ho, the wind and the rain; / A foolish thing was but a toy, / For the rain it raineth every day. // But when I came to man’s estate, / With hey-ho, the wind and the rain….” [Clown’s song, Act V, Scene I] So that refrain is there. I think it’s an echo of that. “During Wind and Rain.” The design of the poem is… you can see the architecture of it. The last lines, sculpturally speaking, the last lines are the pediment, the base on which the experience rests. To me it’s very much like a column, a columnar structure. The base, the last line is the longest. If you look at a poem by Hardy called “The Convergence of the Twain,” it is like that. I don’t know how many stanzas there are, but there are quite a few. This is the design of the stanza, right? and the last line is very long. But what is also part of the design is the space between the stanzas. And the design to me is that of a floating iceberg, too, and also of a ship travelling, in terms of that concrete imagery, or oral imagery, of the stanza. And someway along halfway of the poem the accident occurs: the iceberg and the Titanic meet and then disaster follows. When it says “And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres”—now, because I have a dirty mind, I think it’s an orgasm. “And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.” It’s like an event that has in it that kind of… now that may just be me, but I think that… MC: Brodsky said that he was the iceberg, and Thomas Hardy was an iceberg, and his wife was the Titanic…

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DW: Okay, Joseph. All right. [All laugh.] But Brodsky had a dirty mind. I know him. Not true. The point about it, though, is the space that exists between the stanzas; and the space, the measurement, the judgement of the space is based on the length of the last line. A stanza, structurally, probably in any language, is… when you finish a stanza, there’s a space. And when do you know when to begin again? I think it depends on the last line. That if you’re going to begin, you know it goes… like in the terza rima, in Shelley’s terza rima, of the “West Wind,” then, you know: “Oh wild West Wind, though breath of Autumn’s being,” and so forth, for another seven lines. When that is finished it’s like half of the last line when you resume. You do the whole stanza, and that’s the end of the line. Virtually, a half of the last line for the echo and space is when you begin to sing, at the end, or to talk, at the end. In terms of the Hardy, you have to leave a long, long thing, before you begin. But it is mimetically imitating the motion of the ship, and of course one is slower than the other. And what he says is: ‘Something is happening on the left-hand side of the meridian of the poem. On the right-hand side the iceberg is building itself before the crash of the two things’. What’s the point of all that? The point of all that is structure, the shape of an ode. You know what an ode is, right? Well, maybe in English the specific shape of an ode… there’s a pastoral ode, which is something that goes like this. And this is from people like Tibullus. Pastor means ‘shepherd’, and the flute is a poem that the shepherd plays to his flock. So that pastoral poetry is based on that. It’s also based on this line. It goes like this: long, and then it goes indented shorter, and long, and then shorter. And mimetically what it is is a concrete, visual imitation, or oral imitation of a flute, of a shepherd’s flute. So pastoral poetry is based on that design, and the ode has that kind of shape to it, and the ode may go on for so long and then have another space, and so on. Keats’s odes are like that in terms of the design. Matthew Arnold’s—the same thing. One of the pictures you see in the first stanza is very pictorial, very precise. What do you see in the first stanza? Just say what you see. MC: What I see in the stanza? DW: If I said ‘Set this up as a movie’? What am I shooting? What do I want to be in the shot? PV: It’s a dark room, and they are singing, and candles are lighting the scene… DW: The same candles we were having yesterday?

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PV: [laughing] Yeah… DW: How many of them? AV: They are four people. DW: This is an entertainment that is a Victorian thing. No T V . People sang popular songs to each other, in a living-room, after dinner or something, and it’s all by candlelight. So they’re singing songs, these four people. And they’re taking parts: treble and tenor, bass for harmony, and one to play… probably—I don’t know what instrument—maybe a cello, maybe a piano—I’m not sure. I would think it’s a string instrument, because of Hardy. Anyway. The point one has to make about Hardy is… wow, this is so complicated; I have to go carefully. Hardy is a novelist. He wrote novels and he also wrote poetry. And in his old age he began to write much more poetry, and he gave up fiction. Okay. But he still… we’ve talked about the cliché a little bit… because he was a traditionalist, he had a sense of the idea of a poem that may have sounded old-fashioned to a lot of people who thought he wasn’t really a poet, including Eliot. But the innovation of Hardy was structural. And therefore perhaps more experimental technically than the poets who were acknowledged to be experimenters of technique. So his idea of a poem was one that was shaped, particularly shaped… now, you have to try to understand this point: what makes for the caesuras in Hardy, the points of rest, comes out of a knowledge of fiction. A solidity of experience of fiction makes that compression happen. This is a man who has written novels. You can see that in certain poets who have practised prose, what they can do. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work the other way round. Because there are terrific prose writers who are not very good poets. It’s true of Norman Mailer, it’s true of Hemingway, and so on. He stays within the tradition, though. He stays within the tradition of the sound of a poem. His inheritors as the people preceding him [sic] are Shelley and Swinburne. If you look at the word “mooning,” which comes from ‘moon’, it’s a fictional word, it’s a word that comes out of fiction. It’s not a word that comes out of a given poetic vocabulary. And good poets, determined to widen the range of their verse, do what Pound said, that verse should be as well written as prose—you can never say that enough. Because verse is forgiven a lot of things. You look at the shape of a poem, and you know that song is going to happen, and you say: ‘Okay, I’m going to start to forgive the song of the poem from the beginning’. From the time it’s there you say: ‘Okay, I’m going to allow it to do things’. As opposed to the other

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thing of immediately being convinced by the poem, the reader says: ‘I’m going to let it happen’. Because you provide the music already, as if you know the music. And sometimes a poem that doesn’t really work simply confirms the music that you are anticipating. Look closely at when Hardy, with the conviction of the fiction behind him now, is visibly a poet or audibly a poet because of “mooning.” Look at the word ‘mooning’—the contemporary meaning of ‘mooning’, if you put on your pants and show your backside, that’s mooning, right? Did you know that? Brando used to do a lot of that. That’s mooning because it has two… round things, okay? So it’s shaped like that. That’s not what it means here. What it means, obviously, is that the candle around each face, the candlelight, is making moons of the human faces. That’s a brave word, because it is a prosaic word, a fictional word. A poet you see who has learned that technique is Lowell. He has that a lot: the prose-sounding word is used rather than the poetic-sounding one. Now, if you look at the word “mooning” it contains faces. Do you see that? So that what the candles do… [end of tape.] The rest of the recording was of very poor quality, which prevented a decent transcription. The class continued with further discussion of the poem by Hardy, and with a comparison between Eugenio Montale’s “L’anguilla” and Robert Lowell’s English version, “The Eel.” Andrea Molesini joined the group in this last part of the seminar. 

Press Conference Brunelleschi Hotel, Conference Room, Milan, 11 July 2001 I here translate the questions that were put in Italian, including the original formulation within brackets. I also give the names of the interviewers I have been able to identify. 1st Interviewer: I wanted to know what kind of development you think you

have gone through from The Bounty to Tiepolo’s Hound, which we hope to see soon in translation. What kind of man have you been representing in your books, from Mappa del nuovo mondo [an anthology of Italian translations of Walcott’s poems] through this last one? (Volevo sapere quale tipo di percorso pensa di avere fatto da The Bounty a Tiepolo’s Hound, che speriamo di vedere presto tradotto in italiano. Quale tipo di uomo ci presenta, nella sua poesia, a partire da Mappa del nuovo mondo fino all’ultimo libro.)

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Derek Walcott: Well, the last book has a subject. It has a kind of plot and the plot deals with the achievement and life of Pissarro—that’s one aspect of the plot. Do you know the book? 1st Interviewer: The last one? Unfortunately not.

DW: So it’s very hard for you to understand absolutely what I’m saying. I’m just saying that that last book has a plot in the sense that it’s a mix of biography and autobiography—the biography is of Camille Pissarro, the painter, and the autobiography is me: my relationship particularly with painting and being in the Caribbean. That’s the last book. The one before that is a collection of poems which is not plotted—it doesn’t have a plot— but again is mainly autobiographical. So, although each one is different, the difference is that in the last one there is a subject, there is a story. The other is not about plots. 1st Interviewer: Do you want to show us a continuity, in Tiepolo’s Hound, be-

tween Pissarro’s life and your life? DW: Well, Pissarro was born in St Thomas, and settled in the Caribbean. He was born in 1830, and his life is about growing up in the Caribbean and then moving to France, to Paris. He painted French landscapes and French cities, but theoretically he was born in the Danish island of St Thomas, so by birth and by some growing up he’s West Indian. I’m not sure he wanted to call himself that, but the reality is that he is, so part of the book deals with what might have happened if he painted the Caribbean instead of Paris. 1st Interviewer: I was wondering whether in Tiepolo you were suggesting that

your artistic ambition has been similar to Pissarro’s, in that your language has aspired to reach a global audience, to have a universal scope and transcend Caribbean specificity. (Volevo sapere se in Tiepolo Lei suggerisce che la Sua aspirazione artistica è stata simile a quella di Pissarro nel senso che il Suo linguaggio poetico si rivolge a un pubblico globale, universale, che trascende la specificità dei Caraibi.) DW: First of all, Pissarro didn’t have any sort of global ambition! He was just a painter in Paris, that’s all. He wasn’t trying to become a great painter universally. But that’s not what you’re saying, though? 1st Interviewer: I was especially asking you whether painting and poetry both

make use of a sort of global language, which can be perceived globally, by everybody.

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(Volevo sapere se Lei pensa che la pittura e la poesia abbiano entrambe una sorta di linguaggio globale.) DW: Obviously, anyone can look at a painting, especially if it’s realistic, and recognize it. In other words, somebody from Fiji, who doesn’t understand even the style of a painting, would understand the content of a painting by Pissarro. But that’s painting, that’s visual. So is there a visual language? Yes, but it’s not a language: it’s visual. But in terms of anything verbal, in terms of literature, that can’t happen, because of different languages. So, if you read a book, naturally, in one language, it’s not like looking at a painting, because that painting does not have language. So, in terms of understanding what’s there, it’s very obvious that painting is immediately understood—generally if it’s realistic—and literature is not, if it’s not your language. Am I going on the right track or not? 1st Interviewer: Yes, but you chose a language that is globally spoken.

DW: All I’m saying is, you have to watch out for words like ‘global’… Luigi Sampietro: I can’t understand what she means by the word ‘“global’… Paola Loreto: She probably means something that can be understood everywhere, that if Derek writes in English, he’ll be understood by a very large group of people. DW: But if you’re saying, if you’re asking if the intention of a poem, for example, is to be global…. No, you don’t mean that? 1st Interviewer. Yes!

DW: No, it can’t be, you cannot have that in mind, because you cannot be immediately translated into all the languages of the world. That’s not what you’re saying. Is that what you are saying? 1st Interviewer: I mean that the feeling is global. The feeling of the human being.

(Voglio dire che il sentimento che c’è nella poesia che è globale. È il sentimento dell’essere umano.) DW: I think the problem here is an understanding of the word ‘global’. I think you mean what other people call ‘universal’, right?, and that’s the problem. In terms of making a distinction—because all of this is pretty obvious to me—the distinction between a painter and a poet, then the intention of the painter… I don’t think the painter is that ambitious as to want to be universal, nor do I think that is the intention of the poet—to want to be universal. But if you’re talking about… the human feeling, the experience of

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looking at or reading a work of art and feeling that everyone who reads it feels the same, and if that’s the intention of the writer or the painter, that everyone who looks at it will feel the same… Yes, but I think it depends on the degree of the ambition, of what the poet or the painter intends to do. And I’m saying that usually what the poet or the painter intends to do is simply one thing: to write a good poem and paint a good painting, and that’s the size of all the ambition that is there, I think, in a painter. So if the question which has eluded me is whether there is a comparison between Pissarro painting a painting and me writing a poem, first of all, that is not the intention of the book. It is not to compare myself to Pissarro, you know, at any point. It is to say that he came from the same area—the same light, the same sea, the same coconut trees, the same black people, and all of that. So one of the questions, there, is what might have happened if he had stayed in St Thomas and painted St Thomas. Would St Thomas then be as important—I don’t mean in terms of power, but in terms of visual power— as, say, an avenue in Paris? And that is a problem that exists. Pissarro had a right to go to France. He had no right, necessarily, to remain in the Caribbean. But the point is that he did paint in the Caribbean, and that is a whole unpainted landscape. And the comparison I make is a difference between Pissarro going to Paris and Gauguin going to the tropics, so that the exchange of crossing is there. And it’s purely a speculative thing, but it is crucial to the West Indian temperament to decide whether one feels as a West Indian artist that it is better to be in Milan than to be in Castries, or whether it is better to be in Paris as opposed to Trinidad. That’s a thing that the West Indian artist has to contemplate all the time. The choice of going away for the sake of his work. I understand your question a little better now, but I think it sounds a little too ambitious on the part of, say, Pissarro, or a poet writing. The intention to be universal is not the intention of the artist—to immediately be universal. All right? Are you satisfied? You really are? 1st Interviewer: Yes, and I apologize…

DW: You don’t have to apologize. That was a good question. It was only put terribly. [Laughs.] 2nd Interviewer: How long does it take you to write? Have there been moments

in your mature life when you have felt that you weren’t able to write? And, secondly, is your writing spontaneous and instinctive, or is it, rather, painful and laborious, requiring a lot of revising?

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(Quali sono i suoi tempi di scrittura e se ci sono stati tempi nella sua vita adulta nei quali non è riuscito a scrivere. Secondo: la sua scrittura è una scrittura di getto, spontanea, o sofferta, che richiede molta rielaborazione?) DW: I’m having a very bad problem now, because I have to do an article that I’m having a very, very hard time to finish. And it’s a little frightening. I don’t think I have writer’s block, I don’t think I’ve ever had writer’s block, but this thing is strange. Maybe it’s because it’s so long, so big a subject. How I write? I used to write very early in the morning. I live in the Caribbean, and to get up at five o’clock and see the sunrise come up in the Caribbean is a terrific experience. But I think I got up to smoke, not to write. And drink coffee, and have a cigarette. That was great. As I stopped smoking, I realized ‘Hey, no need to get up and not going to smoke!’—you know—so I began to get up a little later, probably, although I still get up fairly early. But there was a time when I’d get up, you know, and I wanted to see the sun rise, and the dawn, and feel the day beginning. And it’s great because you would know how beautiful it would be to be near the sea and watch the sun come up. It wasn’t always near the sea, but it’s a great feeling in the morning. In terms of how I write, I never have a problem in terms of things to write, because I write plays, right? which you can always find work for, because it’s such a long process for me to get a play right. Even if you are doing it in verse, it’s a prolonged thing. I guess it’s like writing a novel… it would be the same thing: you have to get up in the morning and do so many words, and so forth. Or a play: you write so many pages of dialogue, or whatever. But I don’t write verse… I don’t try to write a poem a day, or something—which you can’t do, really. Then I do other things. I paint as well. Therefore, between the theatre and the painting—and occasionally, if I’m trying to write… especially when I’m writing a long poem—then there’s work to do. You get up in the morning… the pleasure of a long poem is, you get up in the morning and you know you have to work. The other thing of lyric poetry is, you get too leery about wondering whether you are going to make it today or not. But I’ve never had any reason to dry up, really. 3rd Interviewer: I wanted to know about your relationship with Italian art in

general and with Milanese art in particular. If you know our city from an artistic point of view.

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(Io volevo chiederle del Suo rapporto con l’arte italiana in genere e in particolare con l’arte milanese. Se conosce la nostra città dal punto di vista artistico.) DW: My relationship to or knowledge of Italian art is the same thing that every civilized writer or person has—I don’t mean ‘civilized’ in that pompous, European sense. I just mean somebody who likes art. So I’m not making a comparison of cultures. But naturally you would know Italian art, because you would have read Dante, you would have read contemporary writing, you would have read Montale, or Quasimodo, or whoever. You’d also know Italian painting. So, yes, my acquaintanceship with Italian painting is more than acquaintanceship. It is in many cases a reverence for Italian painting. There are too many great painters from Italy that you can’t not feel indebted to, for the fact that they painted. I don’t know Italy well. I’ve come here just about the third or fourth time, and I’ve been to certain towns. But it’s always too short a visit. I’ve never had the leisure of going around Italy without being busy. So I don’t think I really know Italy. I mean, I’ve been to certain towns. I was just in Parma, and I was just beginning to get the beat of Parma, when I had to go. 3rd Interviewer: And what about Milan, in particular, or all the other towns in

Lombardy—Mantua, for example, or Pavia, or…. (E in modo particolare Milano, o tutte le città della Lombardia, non so, Mantova, Pavia, o…) DW: No, just some very short visits, you know. Luigi [Sampietro] took us to Mantua, and we saw the Mantegnas, and it was a great, great experience and so on. The same kind of experience that most people have coming to Italy, except mine has been very short. In Parma we had a…. I run a company called the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, a theatre company, and we are trying to establish an exchange programme between the Trinidad Theatre and Parma. We spoke to the mayor and also to… [to Luigi Sampietro:] the name of the man in charge in the Verdi festival…? LS: Andrea Gambetta. He’s the assessore in charge of the Verdi festivities… 4th Interviewer: And you would select the artists and the actors?

(Ma lui sceglierebbe gli artisti e i teatranti?) DW: Uh?

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4th Interviewer: Who will choose the young artists? Which is your role in this

exchange between Trinidad and Parma? DW: Well, we’re trying to work out how it would work. In terms of the artists, the beginning idea was that it might be two…. I’m offering one semester of observation to young Italian artists, possibly either playwrights or playwrights and poets. LS: [explaining] This would be in Boston, where he teaches. (Questo a Boston, dove insegna.) DW: And that I’d do because I teach at Boston University. So that would be the beginning. But later, we hope that maybe the Trinidad Theatre Workshop can come over with either, at the beginning, maybe a very short or small play, and then later with a bigger production. So we are trying to establish that exchange between Parma and Trinidad, which is very nice. 4th Interviewer: Are you still painting or not?

DW: Yes. 4th Interviewer: This way of writing that you have in your poems, that is full of

colours, comes from a particular way of… I mean, which is your way of thinking as a poet—do you see things before writing? You hear something? Or do you have something like a film running on in your mind? DW: I think… it’s kind of difficult to answer, because you do—or you try to do—say two things, in some cases three things, if somebody is talking, maybe a character. But let’s say it’s two, and let’s take a specific example of saying that I’m looking at… By the way, I don’t like to talk like this, it sounds too pompous. But anyway, you asked the question, so I’m going to answer. The question you are asking is whether the beginning of a poem comes from sight or from sound. 4th Interviewer: Yes.

DW: And I think that it’s sound. I think it is a phrase. I think it is the same process as music. That there is a phrase that originates out of anywhere or nowhere, and that phrase may not make sense. In other words it may not be ‘one two three four’. It may just be a phrase hanging, and around that something begins to multiply as you begin to write until you find out what it is you’re writing about, in a sense, and that’s a very difficult area, because when it is a real poem there is a kind of semi-trance-like state. I think it is the same with musical composition. That’s possibly how a poem begins.

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Robert Graves said that a poem begins with half a line and then the next line is another half. In other words, you start this way, and not from left to right—that from left to right it’s prose. In prose you know what you’re saying. But in poetry, in verse, the second half of the line can be the beginning of a poem. And the next half continues. This way and then that, and there’s some entity in it. But it need not be—in fact, it usually is not at the beginning of the poem. And there are different types of poetry. There’s a poetry of address, and if somebody says to you: ‘Write a commemorative poem about a duke’, then you start off: “Oh great Duke.” So you know what you are writing about. If somebody asks you to write a poem, then that is the Apollonian request, you know, as opposed to the Dionysian one, which is: it happens explosively. These are the Greek references, and so on. But in terms of colours, the instinct may be more to paint what you look at, rather than to write about what you look at. The instinct may be to paint what you’re looking at, right? In other words, let’s be specific. If I look at this green bottle, I might say ‘I would like to paint this bottle because it looks like Manet’, right? So I’ll paint this, and that’s what I’m doing. On the other hand, if I say in my mind ‘This bottle looks like Manet’, I might start writing that without painting it. But once I am painting it, the knowledge that you have of colour comes into the poem. So, you may say you know exactly what kind of green you are talking about. If you are talking about, you know, a champagne bottle in Manet, then you know exactly what the colour is that you’re using. Follow? So, in one sense, a painting can help the poem tremendously, but it can’t do the other thing. In other words, a poem can’t help the painting. Because how are you going to write what you’re thinking, in paint? 4th Interviewer: And you compose music, too?

DW: I compose music, I dance, I can ski, I swim. Superman! No, no, no. I can play drums. Congas I can play. 4th Interviewer: That’s…

DW: African drums. Congas. 4th Interviewer: Like steel drums?

DW: No… it would be nice to lie and say yes, but I don’t really. 5th Interviewer [Alessandro Vescovi]: May I ask a question about your recognized masters. In Tiepolo’s Hound you talk about many painters, who range from Giotto, I think, to Cézanne, but nothing further than that. You never mention Kandinsky or Paul Klee, or such avant-garde painters…

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DW: I’m not trying to do a catalogue of painters… a hell of a big book… AV: I know that, but maybe you mention those painters that you find more significant. But it seems strange to me that sometimes I could trace some echoes of avant-garde writers in your poetry—some echoes of Joyce or some echo of T.S. Eliot, for instance—who are, in my view, as experimental as Kandinsky or Paul Klee… DW: Not for me. AV: Yes, that’s what I wanted to know. DW: You are really asking me who do I like, what kind of painting I like or why did I leave out that painter. Well, obviously the purpose of the book is not to make a list of painters that I like. The period that is dealt with is the period of the Impressionists, and that’s part of Pissarro’s biography, that he was a great influence, a tremendous influence on all these painters, on Gauguin… on all of them. On Cézanne. Cézanne thought of Pissarro as his master. Now, here I’m saying: ‘Here’s a guy who’s from St Thomas’—and it’s kind of a desperate claim to say that he left the island of St Thomas, he goes to Paris and he becomes a very powerful influence on a painter like Cézanne, and other painters, on Gauguin and all these people. But if you are talking about ‘avant-garde’, and ‘experiment’, and ‘being modern’, then the period that the book is dealing with, these people were adventurous and not necessarily ‘avant-garde’. They didn’t think of themselves, I think, necessarily as ‘avant-garde’—that’s some very recent expression, but certainly ‘experimental’, or ‘controversial’, or whatever you want to use. But if you took Cézanne alone, for me, there’s nobody, however experimental, who’s as powerful as that. Nobody. What he did is so… what he did via Pissarro… I mean, you can take Pissarro… they used to paint together, sometimes they painted on the same canvas. Oh, you know that, okay? So that the influence of Pissarro on Cézanne is acknowledged very much by Cézanne, and therefore, that’s a kind of a West-Indian link. But I don’t want to force it. I’m just saying that Paul Klee… Cézanne contains him. Cézanne contains all these people. And if it’s a matter of taste, of saying if I myself am moved or attracted to certain painters who are famous in contemporary painting, in an inventory of contemporary painting, then there are these painters I just don’t like, that I’m not attracted to. I don’t have that. You can say that I don’t like abstract painting. Generically speaking, I don’t. But if by ‘abstract painting’ one means the corner of a Degas, the surface of a corner of a Degas, yes, that is abstract painting in terms of its texture, and so on.

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And there are certain painters, of course, that I respect and like considerably, but the book doesn’t deal with a kind of cosmology of great painters as you might say the cosmology of great poets or writers would be there in terms of Joyce, and Hemingway, and so on. But I make very strong associations with Hemingway and Cézanne—very strong. And I don’t know anyone who has written prose that has the power of Hemingway’s prose. So, who can I praise? And therefore I haven’t found anyone who has moved me as much as the people that I mention, in terms of Pissarro, or Van Gogh, or Seurat, or Sisley—all these painters. It’s very easy to tell me that I’m frozen in the late-nineteenth century, but I don’t mind that. I always quote a phrase of Joseph Brodsky’s, who says: “We have the nineteenth century. Why do we need the twentieth?” A great statement. PL: I have a question on Tiepolo’s Hound. I think the book contains a religious imagery, which is… DW: Your notes are very, very good, by the way. [My first comment on Tiepolo’s Hound, which I had given him the day before.] PL: Oh, well, thank you. This is a seventh point, anyway, which is not in my notes. I think the book contains a religious imagery which is constant and consistent. Would you agree that it tries to describe religious experience as an attempt to cherish a talent that you have been given and that you feel grateful for? DW: If that’s what the book says? Are you asking me if that’s the intention? PL: Yes. DW: You know, well, not you, but you get a lot of… naturally a book is published and you get critics paying attention to it. Sometimes it’s praised, sometimes it’s dismissed, and sometimes it’s damned, or whatever. You just take that in, but you can’t listen really to critics, because the only people who are really worth listening to are your colleagues—you know, other poets— who will say this is not good, and so on. But, more than that, what is missing is the fact that in the book I say openly how bad some of my paintings are. I mean, that’s a very strong point in the book. What I have is a succession of failures to me, you know? That no matter how I’m not trying to be—heroic or spiritually humble—it’s just that you look at your work and you feel the futility of trying to do something. Now, everybody has that. I mean, Pissarro had it, Van Gogh had it, and I’m not comparing my failure to their failures, which they aren’t, right? But you have that experience. So all I’m saying is

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that what the book looks like is that I am saying: ‘Okay, here are my paintings in a book’, right? Why are they there? They’re there because I do paint. That’s what I do, okay? as well as write, and I think that there is for me a continuing parallel between painting and poetry. And that the pleasure that you get out of painting is a different pleasure from what you get from verse. Because you can paint a painting and ask somebody, or you can see that it’s okay. You can’t tell necessarily with a poem that it’s immediately okay. You can do a painting and you can say: ‘Oh my God! That horse’s leg is terrible!’ But you can’t necessarily do the same thing immediately with the emotion that’s contained in a poem. But the point I’m making is that that’s not what the book is there for. The book is there to show the effort made in trying to paint as well as the effort made in trying to write. In the effort, there’s no difference in the effort. The effort is to try to make something that would succeed in the terms that you were talking about. But the thing that one is grateful for is the fact that you can do both, or that you can try to do both. Plus, of course—and I think that’s a very, very important question in the book, and the question is: ‘Did Pissarro feel—among all those black people, in the landscape that he was in—did he feel that he belonged there?’ Not because of race, but whether he really belonged there. And if he belonged there, was this an anguish for him to go, to leave? I don’t want to paint myself. What I tell people if sometimes they say: “Have you ever painted in New York?” And I say: “I don’t do windows. Too many windows!” You know what I’m saying? [All laugh.] Windows are part of Impressionist painting, because you cannot have a painting of Paris without having God knows how many windows. And they solved a technique of not doing windows like that. They did it by a stroke, right? But the whole thing is based on a concept of how you look at Paris in a particular time. So it’s not really doing strokes. It’s a matter of how you break the light up. In this case it’s the outline of a window—it doesn’t matter, in terms of how you do it, but in terms of the perspective that is still there. You see, up to Pissarro perspective was still taking a part of the reality of a painting with a horizon. What Cézanne did was to go against Gauguin’s concept of a rigid perspective… well, we know all of that, right? I’m saying, therefore, in terms of what I still try to do in painting—and I said it very clearly, I think, in the book—that no matter how hard I try, ultimately it comes out less than it might have been and sometimes tremendously less than it might have been.

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So, I consider that a part of the theme of the book is failure. It’s not triumph; it’s failure. It is the repeated effort of Pissarro, and he went through hell. He painted a lot of pictures and had a very hard time. It was not like ‘Today I’ll do a postcard that will be sold in the Louvre tomorrow’, you know? It was anguish, and I tried to contain that in…. For me, I wasn’t very crazy about Pissarro earlier, but now … the older you get the more you look at the skill of these painters, and the more you are aware of the technical wonder of a painter like Sisley, for instance, whom people consider a minor painter. But in reality, and in a missed and old fashion, you can’t take so much of that really egocentric nonsense that passes for painting. For me. I don’t enjoy Paul Klee, not at all. I don’t like Kandinsky, not at all. I hate Kirchner, and so forth. And I welcome anyone who says ‘You are an idiot. You don’t know what you’re talking about in terms of painting’. I think that the instinct that I may have for that may be more ignorant, perhaps, than saying I don’t like certain poets. But I think you can tell, that you are entitled to say ‘This is a very bad poet’. You are not always sure that ‘This is a very bad painter’. Not always. AV: You wrote that “The pen is my brush,” in Tiepolo’s Hound. Do you feel that when you write you can do things that you would like to paint, but you cannot? DW: No, because you are doing two different things. If you are saying as you write a line ‘I wish I were painting, while I’m writing’, you can stop, and try to paint it! That’s two different things. You want to paint it, or you want to write it. That urges respect, and that’s what you have. I certainly don’t believe that painting is a superior form to poetry. I can’t believe that. I can’t do that. I don’t make the comparison, one from the other. But I know that the debt that great prose or great poems owe to painting in some cases, particularly certain writers who have the chiaroscuro or light and dark—I mean, I remember talking to Lowell and he was saying that what he was trying to do was to make his poems like a Vermeer. I can understand that. And talking to Seamus Heaney, saying I wanted to get the same thing. Now you can’t do light in language? You can’t actually do light, but I think that if inside the poet or the writer there is this desire to have the light that is there in Vermeer, and you want to do that, even if you’re writing a prose line about… not necessarily light as the subject, but the light is inside you, and you want to get that light inside you—then it can illuminate, it can have that quality of light and dark.

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There are many writers who try to do it, and they try to do it deliberately by saying ‘I’m going to make the contrast between light and dark in the work that I’m doing’, but it doesn’t happen. I mean, the total impression that you would get of, say, Ulysses, pictorially, would be of a very large Impressionist painting. Why? Because the light that would be there in Dublin would be the same as if it were there in the light of the streets of Paris as painted by, you know, Sisley, or Pissarro, or by…. So, that’s there, in terms of paint, because of the modern feeling of the cities, the tricks of light that happen. I think that Joyce tries to do that at times in Ulysses. And certainly Hemingway does it repeatedly. In all his short stories there’s this thing of trying to make the light work through the prose. PL: Another thing I saw in Tiepolo’s Hound—and I’m just asking whether you think this is true—is that you try to describe the artist’s Bildung, or growth, as an initiatory rite, with preparatory rituals, and then the apprenticeship, and then the trials, which have something to do with this sense of doubt about one’s own achievements. DW: The man I painted with all my life was Dunstan St Omer, who was a very vigorous painter, and has done frescoes and so forth, in St Lucia, one or two magnificent. Whenever we painted, whenever we went out painting— he’s a Catholic, and whenever he started the painting he would do this [crosses himself]. It’s like the guy playing tennis yesterday, you know. He did it a little too often, because protestants can win tennis matches too, you know. [All laugh.] But Dunstan always crossed himself before he painted. And that ritualistic thing of preparation… I think there is a variety of preparations, but certainly, however momentarily it is before you start, I think it is a votive act beyond yourself. And certainly in the ritual of putting your paints out, selecting the brushes, pouring the oil out, setting up the canvas, that’s very much like, to me, the equivalent of preparing a Mass in a sense. I’m not a Catholic, but it’s the same layout, it’s got the incantatory quality in it. It’s got the preparation. And then, of course, there’s this great terrifying moment, equal, in a way, to when you put the first word down: it’s when you put the first direction of where you drawing is going to… happen. And that happens, and once that surface is scratched by the charcoal or by whatever, then you’ve begun something that is frightening, in a sense. But frightening in a religious sense. It contains something beyond yourself, which is the hope that the work is bigger than you and will be better than you.

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AV: In your earlier works you were invoking a kind of oblivion or amnesia about history. It seems to me that now, in Tiepolo’s Hound, you have almost achieved it. You move through history very easily. You seem to ignore sometimes that there is a chronology, that history exists. At least when you talk about art, you seem to perceive art synchronically. Is that what happens? DW: By art you mean painting? AV: Not only, actually. Yesterday, for instance, you were talking about Shakespeare and Hemingway almost as though they were contemporaries. DW: But they are. This is such a cliché. The voice that you hear in Joyce, for instance, or the voice that you might hear in Shakespeare…. I gave a talk once, in which I was trying to show the influence of Hemingway on Dante, right? Which is to say that there is and there are parts of, particularly, Purgatorio that really have the immediacy of a fiction, right? a contemporary, a modern fiction—of the tone of a modern fiction. And I think that the same thing is true, for instance, in the second half of Henry I V , part 2, when the old men are talking in the garden. That exchange is very much—tonally— very much like Hemingway. So there is no chronology, really, in great art, right? And that’s why to divide, I think even painting, to divide painting chronologically is an error. To teach it in that way is an error as well. If I’ve gotten to the point where I believe that, then history is inconsequential. It’s nothing. Because what you’re talking about is a present tense that exists continually in art. It’s how a writer or another critic or another painter looks at—let me just take a name out of the blue and say Chardin, right? I’ve never seen an original Chardin, but reproduction is great, so the same way that we learn languages through translations, we learn painting through reproductions—the same thing. And the quality of the reproductions is superb. So, I look at a Chardin and now I take away the costume, right? which makes it a period, gives it a period. This is a servant, in whatever date, doing something with a child. I take away the costume, and then I can be looking at Degas, because I see the present, the continuous present tense in Chardin that is there in Degas, and that progresses in that way. It’s not only a matter of representation. I think—and I’m seventy years old, therefore I’m entitled to be irritable with things—I think that the thing that disturbs me most about alleged ‘modern’ painting is that a lot of it is perverse. I think it’s egotistical, and infantile in the idea of trying to shock— not infantile so much as adolescent; that this is the painting of boys. I don’t have the time to believe that it is profound. I don’t have the time to make

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myself a part of it. It’s the same problem I had yesterday with the Wallace Stevens poem, you see. The impatience that I have is that the craft is so hard, you know, I think it’s only people who wanted to show you how difficult it is who do all this nonsense, by making it complicated on purpose, or making you sound like an idiot if you don’t understand it. But I have no more time for that kind of idiocy. And I don’t have any more time for names that are magnified by the market. I think Basquiat was a kid in New York who painted these graffiti. He was taken up by the establishment in New York, who magnified him until he did not know where he was, and he virtually killed himself with drugs. He didn’t commit suicide, but what he did was to make himself a complete drug addict. But that’s great, because if you say ‘Hey, here’s a painting by a young Haitian who became a drug addict and died early’, the value goes up in the painting. If he’s just a big fat Haitian sitting down painting tropical landscapes… there’s no market in that. Follow? You get that sort of reputation. You go into a bookstore and you see a huge volume, of all the works of Basquiat, and that book costs, you know, $80. And that happens in magnification of reputation in the twentieth century by all the machinery that makes those reputations. It’s terrible. It’s hard to avoid it. But I try to avoid it. I don’t care if I think I sound like I’m arrogant, and I think I’m right. Yes, I’m arrogant, and I’m right. That’s my attitude. [Laughs.] Okay, one more question. PL: Another one about your choice of painters in Tiepolo. I think you chose painters, first of all like Pissarro, or Holbein, or Vermeer, or Bosch, who paid a lot of attention to detail and to light, to the treatment of light, and who cared a lot about technique and apprenticeship, especially Pissarro. So, was this your intention? Were you drawn to these painters because you thought they were caring for technique and craftsmanship? DW: No. I think those painters were quoted to illustrate a point, perhaps; maybe at a certain point to illustrate something. And I don’t think that it’s merely detail. You can’t call Van Gogh, for instance, a painter of detail, or even Gauguin a painter of detail. It has something to do with paint, the sensuality or the texture of paint, you know, because every…. Great paintings are incredibly sensual because of the paint, no matter what the subject. I mean, a virtuous Madonna by Leonardo is a sexy piece of work. That’s not the intention, but the sensuality of it, right? It’s sensual. I don’t mean sexy, but it’s certainly sensual. It’s not that the Virgin really, basically, has an extra-

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sexuality or something. But the painting is sensual, of a subject that may be religious. All right? Thank you very much. All: Thank you. 

Reading at the University of Milan Milan, 12 July 2001 Luigi Sampietro: Ladies and Gentlemen, I am pleased—of course I’m actually honoured and excited by the idea of welcoming Mr Derek Walcott, who was made recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. I don’t think I need to introduce him to this audience, but contrary to my habit I should like to spend a few words. I’ll be short, don’t worry.… I don’t mean physically. [audience laughs] I should like to spend a few words to explain how and why he is here with us. This is the fourth time that Mr Walcott visits Italy, and it is the third time that he reads at this university—actually it’s the fourth, but that’s a long story. But I must add that since 1985 he’s been read and known by the students of this university, and that since 1985 we have had an ongoing seminar, sometimes a workshop study-group, which has rotated around the axle of his poetry. I must say that something rare and perhaps magical has happened around that seminar. A number of students who over the years have been part of it have kept in touch with each other, or have got to know each other—sometimes they were people who belonged to almost different generations. I must say that these Walcott acolytes carry a sort of birthmark somewhere in their souls. They are those who have been illuminated by Derek Walcott’s poetry. And I must say that whenever they know that Mr Walcott is around they come to see him from different parts of Italy, Europe, or the world. The whole thing started one day a long time ago when I picked up a book in a bookstore in London. It was the Collected Poems by Derek Walcott. I read it and what I felt—well, it’s not important what I felt, but I thought that the supreme quality of his poetry was in sharp contrast to the fact that he was not known in this country. Better, that there was no bibliography available on him in any library. I thought that this would be a perfect opportunity to start a seminar with the students, dealing with a poet about whom they could use only a limited and unspecific number of clichés, of echoes from essays,

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conferences, books, previous classes, and so forth. In other words, it was a marvellous opportunity to have the students read the actual thing and not comment—as it happens in our schools—on poets’ current tendencies. The result of the direct contact with Mr Walcott’s poetry is an epidemic that is still spreading. The rest is known. We started Caribana, ran out of money, stopped the publication, resumed it, entered the net, etc. But to conclude, I should like to emphasize the fact that Mr Walcott’s work has really affected their lives, our lives, our perception of twentieth-century poetry and art, to the point that some of us, dazzled, have developed the belief that most of the writers who preceded him, even great writers we have been studying for the past many decades, were somehow announcing the coming of his poetry. Ladies and gentlemen, I’m honoured to give the mike to Mr Walcott, who will read from his poetry. Thank you. Derek Walcott: It’s a pleasure to be back here at the University of Milan, to see friends that I know. I’m going to read some of the latest publication in Italy called Prima luce, translated by Andrea Molesini on my left. And from all reports the translation is a fine one, so it is an honour when another poet works on your work and tries to do it as much justice as he can. This is an elegy for Joseph Brodsky. One of the things that sometimes poets joke about is who’s going to write the first elegy: am I going to write yours or are you going to write mine? Well, unfortunately, I’ve written Joseph’s. But a deeper philosophy than the death of a friend who is a poet is the commemoration through poetry of the spirit of that friend, and there are great elegies of friendships that say a lot for the permanent, almost immortal value of poetry in terms of that relationship. The poems were influenced a lot by Joseph’s own sense of the epistolary exchange, and I found it very hard… I had to write about him and Italy, because he loved Italy enormously. His wife is a widow who’s Italian, and he was often here, and he wrote a beautiful book about Venice, in prose, that is a prose poem. So this poem is in four or more sections, and what I’ll do is, I’ll read the English and then Andrea will read the Italian, and you can decide who has the nicer voice afterwards. On the bright road to Rome, beyond Mantua… Sulla chiara strada per Roma, oltre Mantova… Whir of a pigeon’s wings outside a wooden window…

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Frullo d’ali di un piccione fuori dalla finestra di legno… In this landscape of vines and hills you carried a theme… In questo paesaggio di ville e colline hai portato un tema… The foam out on the sparkling strait muttering Montale… La schiuma della cala scintillante che momora Montale… My colonnade of cedars between whose arches the ocean… Tra le arcate del mio colonnato di cedri l’oceano… Now evening after evening after evening… E sera dopo sera dopo sera dopo sera… I’m going to read some sections of a book called Tiepolo’s Hound. I’ll just say a few words before I read the text. The book is chiefly about Camille Pissarro, who was born in the island of St Thomas, and who left St Thomas and went to France to become the painter that we know now. Pissarro was a tremendous influence on the Impressionists. Cézanne thought of him as his master, painted along with him, and so did other painters, such as Gauguin. One of the questions the book asks is what might have happened if Pissarro had remained in St Thomas, an absurd question but an essential one, in a way, to the Caribbean writer, who may be gifted in a particular direction—or the Caribbean artist—and who has to make a choice about remaining and be working at home, or go to a city in Europe or in the States and become a painter. Does that mean that that exile makes him a different artist from what he might have been? Or would it have been to our benefit if he had remained and painted as he did in Paris? And how much of what he knew from the Caribbean light came into his own painting in France? He came from a family of Sephardic Jews, which is an important thing. He had a tutor called Melby. The two of them painted in St Thomas together. But Pissarro had a very, very hard time making a living in Paris. This first section deals with the family in St Thomas walking along on a Sunday, which is not their Sabbath, which is on a Saturday, followed by a black dog, a mongrel. Because of all the work you do, it may be vanity but I think it’s simply a matter of recording, that the pattern of the poem is in couplets with space in between, and it is a simple pattern of ab ab; and of course some of you are interested in this; the rest of you don’t really care what it is. But it’s okay. So that this keeps, stops, keeps, stops. Why do that? For me, unless you have something that is terribly disciplined, you’re not going to work. I think that discipline creates the industry, and the more discipline, the more industrious one becomes.

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Then I come to another section. It’s in the book but I’d like to re-create it perhaps for you so you’ll be a little readier for the events. The first time I went to America I went to the Modern Museum, and I remember turning a corner and seeing a Cézanne and being blown away by the cleanness of the paint. That’s a very important thing technically to a young painter. When we paint when we are young, we don’t clean our brushes. And the advantage, I think, of a master is that he cleans his brushes, because he doesn’t want the paint to just mix, unless he does it deliberately. It’s a very simple, busy exercise for anybody beginning in any craft, including tennis. In other words, put your foot on the edge of the line [scans the phrase clearly]. Don’t think that you’re so hot and avant-garde that you are not going to put your foot on the edge of the line. Do that afterwards, but for the time being please put your foot, etc. And that’s how MacInroe and Sampras became great tennis players. So, that whole idea of the exactness of the discipline that the artist creates for himself is what keeps his work harmonious. But seeing that first painting by Cézanne and realizing the ecstatic feeling I had of looking at the cleanliness of the paint has always remained with me, and this is commemorated here. And then, in another painting, which I have never really found to be the exact one that I think I saw … there was a painting of a dog looking inward…. It was a very large painting. It wasn’t a fresco, because it wasn’t on a wall, so it must have been a canvas, and since I hadn’t been in Italy, I saw it in New York. But what canvas, and where? But this dog was looking inward, and what made me gasp again was a simple piece of mastery, and it was that the inside thigh of the dog was caught in the light, and that light, the light on the flesh on the inside thigh of the dog, was done by one stroke, and it was astonishing that the stroke contained the light that I was trying to describe— and that’s mentioned here as well. So I think that all great art strives for that economy of phrase that can happen in a great poet. Sometimes it happens in drama. Sometimes it goes beyond the eloquent, the exaggerated, the written thing. For instance, when Macduff in Macbeth hears that his children have been killed, the middle and early Shakespeare might have found this a great occasion to write a long speech about the meaning of death and sorrow and so forth, and it would have been great. But now the poet, the dramatic poet, in Shakespeare has learned something that goes beyond that eloquence, that is a concision of pain that is so common in Dante that we take its amazement for granted. And what Macduff says after he hears the news is, he has no children. That’s devastating, because he takes first of all the news in, and then what is de-

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livered back to the hearing—it is not necessarily the hearing of anyone nearby—is simply the prosaic compression of “He has no children.” That’s it. It’s beyond the formative—or the formal, rather—expansiveness of an earlier kind of poetry, the concision of that. And by that I mean that the stroke that was made by the master who painted it by mixing…. You see, if you paint, you get more and more astonished, because what he has to do is not only put down the paint and decide how much white is going to be in that. And how much he can get away with if he needs do the light. That’s okay: it can be done. But it’s when it is done to the point that the paint itself is the light that you really are astonished. And that is what I mean: that can happen so continuously and repeatedly in a very obscure Italian poet named Dante. [Audience laughs.] They stroll on Sundays down Dronningens Street… [reads the first three sections.]

Section X X I I . [sic; actually the first section of ch. X X ] This section deals with a trip to Venice. Over the years the feast’s details grew fainter…

This takes place in my island, St Lucia. There are three dogs in the book. One, of course, is the hound painted by Tiepolo, then this very shrivelledlooking sick dog that was on a beach in St Lucia—a severe contrast to the rich dog of the painting. Then one noon where acacias shade the beach… … the hound was here.

So are the bells. [Bells had been ringing for a while during the reading. Audience laughs.] I’ll tell you why I’m waiting for the bells to stop. Because I would like to pay a tribute—I tried to pay a tribute to a great photographer whose name I have forgotten. Because I saw an exhibition that he had… I don’t know if he’s come to Milan. What’s his name? LS: Sebastião Salgado. DW: A great photographer. His subjects are the forsaken of the world, the people who suffer, and whose suffering we never remember in our daily life

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until we turn on the T V , and then it’s irritating to see some starving child, because it’s too disturbing, so we move on to the football game. But they’re not cruel. The irony of it is that all that suffering is somewhat transferred into a strange beauty by the camera. I’m not a great fan of photography, but looking at what he had done I was very, very moved by the compassion in the camera of this great man. And they asked me to write something for the exhibition, and often if you are asked to do something you may think it’s too forced for it to happen. Sometimes you’re lucky, and it can happen. So I remember writing this continuously, just starting and going on and on until it was finished. But I think that is a tribute to the power of his art that made me voluble. Luigi Sampietro did the translation, which I would like him to read first because I’d like to end in English, since this is my last reading for a little while. Thank you. LS: “Migranti” L’onda della marea dei rifugiati, non un semplice passo di oche selvatiche, gli occhi di carbone nei vagoni merci, le facce smunte, e in particolare lo sguardo fisso dei bambini emaciati, gli enormi fardelli che traversano i ponti, gli assali che cricchiano con un suono di giunture e di ossa, la macchia scura che passa le frontiere sulle carte geografiche e ne dissolve le forme, come succede ai corpi dei morti dentro le fosse di calce, o come fa il pacciame luccicante che si disfa sotto i piedi in autunno nel fango, mentre il fumo di un cipresso segnala Sachenhausen, e quelli che non stanno sopra un treno, che non hanno muli o cavalli, quelli che hanno messo la sedia a dondolo e la macchina per cucire sul carretto a mano perché da tempo le bestie hanno lasciato i loro campi al galoppo per tornare alla mitologia del perdono, alle campane di pietra sui ciottoli della domenica e al cono della guglia del campanile aranciato che buca le nubi sopra i tigli, quelli che appoggiano la mano stanca sulla sponda del carro come sul fianco del mulo, le donne con la faccia di selce e gli zigomi di vetro, con gli occhi velati di ghiaccio che hanno il colore degli stagni dove posano le anitre, e per le quali c’è un solo cielo e una sola stagione nel corso di un anno ed è quando il corvo come un ombrello rotto sbatte le ali, si sono tutti ridotti alla comune e incredibile lingua della memoria, e questa gente che non ha una casa e nemmeno una provincia parla delle fonti limpide e parla delle mele,

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e del suono del latte in estate dentro le zangole piene, e tu da dove vieni, da quale regione, io conosco quel lago e anche le locande, la birra che si beve, e quelle sono le montagne dove riponevo la mia fede, ma adesso sulla carta, che è simile a un mostro, altro non si vede che una rotta che ci porta verso il Nulla, anche se sul retro c’è la veduta di un posto che si chiama la Valle del Perdono, dove il solo governo è quello dell’albero dei pomi e le forze schierate dell’esercito sono gli striscioni di orzo all’interno di umili tenute, e questa è la visione che a poco a poco si restringe dentro le pupille di chi muore e di chi si abbandona in un fosso, rigido e con la fronte che diventa fredda come le pietre che ci hanno bucato le scarpe e grigia come le nuvole che, quando il sole si leva, si trasformano subito in cenere sopra i pioppi e sopra le palme, nell’ingannevole aurora di questo nuovo secolo che è il vostro. DW: “The Migrants” The tidal motion of refugees, not the flight of wild geese… Thank you. Thank you very, very, very much.  [No question-and-answer session followed. Walcott signed books.]

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Schoenberger, Nancy. “An Interview with Nancy Schoenberger,” Threepenny Review (Fall 1983): 16–17. Repr. in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 86–94. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Complete Works, ed. Roger Ingpen & Walter E. Peck (New York: Gordian, 1965). Shusterman, Richard. “Emerson’s Pragmatist Aesthetics,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 207 (1999): 87–99. Sjöberg, Leif. “An Interview with Derek Walcott,” Artes 1 (1983): 23–27. Repr. in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 79–85. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode & Joan Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1997). Terada, Rei. Derek Walcott’s Poetry: American Mimicry (Boston M A : Northeastern U P , 1992). Thieme, John. Derek Walcott (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 1999). Updike, John. “Grandmaster Nabokov” (1963) [review of The Defense], in Updike, Assorted Prose (Greenwich C T : Fawcett, 1969): 248–56. Walcott, Derek. The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory; The Nobel Lecture (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993). ——. Arkansas Testament (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987). ——. The Bounty (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997). ——. “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” (1973), Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 16.1 (February 1974): 3–13. Repr. in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, ed. Hamner, 51–57. ——. Collected Poems, 1948–1984 (1986; London & Boston M A : Faber & Faber, 1992). ——. Conversations with Derek Walcott, ed. William Baer (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 1996). ——. “Derek Walcott on Omeros: An Interview,” Caribana 3 (1992–93): 31–44. ——. Epitaph for the Young: X I I Cantos (Barbados: Advocate, 1949). ——. “A Great Russian Novel,” Sunday Guardian (19 April 1964): 15. ——. “An Interview with Derek Walcott; Conducted by Edward Hirsch,” Contemporary Literature 20.3 (Summer 1979): 279–92. ——. “Interview with Michelle Yeh,” Literary Imagination 4.3 (Fall 2002): 294–302. ——. “The Muse of History,” in Is Massa Day Dead? (1974), ed. Orde Coombs, 1–27. Repr. (1998) in Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays, 36–64. ——. “‘An Object Beyond One’s Own Life’: An Interview with Derek Walcott,” Caribana 2 (1991): 25–36. ——. Odissea: Una versione teatrale, tr. Matteo Campagnoli (Milan: Crocetti, 2006). ——. The Odyssey (London: Faber & Faber; New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1993). ——. Omeros (London: Faber & Faber, 2000). ——. “On Hemingway,” in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays, 107–14. Originally as “Hemingway Now,” North Dakota Quarterly 68.2–3 (Spring–Summer 2001): 6–13.

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——. “Sharing in the Exhilaration: An Interview with Derek Walcott,” intv. Natasha Sajé & George Handley, A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 32.2 (April 2001): 129–42. ——. Tiepolo’s Hound (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000). ——. What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998). Weston, Jessie L. From Ritual to Romance (1920; Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1957). White, J.P. “An Interview with Derek Walcott,” Green Mountains Review 4.1 (Spring– Summer 1990): 14–37. Repr. in Conversations With Derek Walcott, ed. Baer, 151–74. Whitman, Walt. “Preface to Leaves of Grass,” in Whitman, Prose Works 1892: Collect and Other Prose, ed. Floyd Stovall, 2 vols. (New York: New York U P , 1964): 434–58. Wilbur, Richard. “Sumptuous Destitution” (1959), in Wilbur, Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953–1976 (New York & London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976): 3–15. Williamson, George. A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis (1967; London: Thames & Hudson, rev. ed. 1971). Wilson, Eric. “Emerson’s Nature, Paralogy, and the Physics of the Sublime,” Mosaic 33.1 (March 2000): 39–58. Wimsatt, W.K. “Poetry and Christian Thinking” (1948/51), in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954; Lexington: U of Kentucky P , 1967): 267–79. Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler & Karen Green (Ithaca N Y & London: Cornell U P , 1992). Zoppi, Isabella. “Omeros ‘Ομερος: Derek Walcott e il poema epico contemporaneo,” Africa, America, Asia, Australia 18 (1995): 71–94, tr. as “Omeros, Derek Walcott and the Contemporary Epic Poem,” Callaloo 22.2 (1999): 509–28.



Index

Adamic, the, for Walcott 17, 18 Aeneid (Virgil) 175 Alexandrov, Vladimir E. 35, 40 allegory 34, 65, 96, 103, 107 Ammons, A.R. 5 amnesia 19, 49, 201 analogy xvii, 73, 92, 107, 110 Another Life (Walcott) xiii, 10, 11, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 30, 43, 45, 49, 53, 54, 55, 59, 60, 63, 65, 93, 94, 98, 109 anxiety of influence 5 Appel, Alfred, Jr. 34 apprenticeship 14, 62, 69, 75, 76, 78, 79, 103, 105, 106, 109, 121, 201, 203 See also: imitation, master and pupil relationship Aquinas, Thomas 92, 94, 101, 102 Aristotle 103 Arkansas Testament, The (Walcott) 93 Arnold, Matthew 2, 187 Arthurian quest xviii, 18, 52, 59, 61, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 78, 83, 88, 89

Auden, W.H. 131, 151, 161 Augustine, St 8, 9, 103 autobiography xvii, xviii, 24, 27, 28, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54, 56, 57, 63, 66, 84, 86, 88, 90, 94, 97, 131, 190 Bacon, Roger 103 Barbados 30, 112, 113, 130 Basquiat, Jean–Michel 203 Baugh, Edward 18, 43, 44, 45, 54, 55, 98, 211

Beaujour, Elizabeth K. xvi, 32, 33 Beebe, Maurice 102 bel air 115 bèlè 115 Beowulf 122 Berlin, Isaiah 3, 4 Bhabha, Homi K. 33 Bildung xiii, 36, 43, 52, 62, 63, 66, 74, 75, 81, 89, 201 bilingualism xvi, 29, 32, 33, 137, 185 Blake, William 81 Bloom, Harold xv, xvi, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 52, 53

blues 118, 130 Borges, Jorge Luis 28, 44 Bosch, Hieronymus 203 Bounty, The (Walcott) x, xv, 10, 11, 12, 13, 20, 21, 22, 25, 27, 28, 39, 94, 95, 107, 189

Boyd, Brian 40, 41 Brando, Marlon 189 Brodsky, Joseph xvii, 29, 42, 44, 128, 133, 137, 156, 161, 178, 185, 186, 198, 205

Bunyan, John 65 Burnett, Paula 28, 32, 44 caesura 29, 55, 128, 139, 141, 148, 149, 150, 151, 158, 166, 176, 177, 181, 188 Caravaggio 127 “Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?, The” (Walcott) 76 Carlson, Eric W. 8 Casteel, Sarah Phillips 53 Césaire, Aimé 123

220


Cézanne, Paul 76, 105, 106, 123, 124, 126, 134, 135, 196, 197, 199, 206, 207 Chardin, Jean–Baptiste–Siméon 202 Chaucer, Geoffrey 143, 150, 183 cinema and the cinematic xvii, 1, 10, 38, 56, 64 “Circles” (Emerson) 14, 19 circularity xiv, 12, 20, 54, 87 claritas 101, 107 Clark, Kenneth 3 cliché 138, 144, 159, 177, 178, 181, 185, 188, 202 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 4, 8, 79 Conrad, Joseph 178, 185 Convivio (Dante) 96, 97, 100 couplet xiii, 11, 34, 48, 50, 55, 73, 85, 105, 107, 108, 118, 128, 129, 206 Crane, Hart 6, 83, 151, 170, 172, 181 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 144 Dante Alighieri 1, 10, 22, 24, 38, 44, 53, 54, 55, 64, 83, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 109, 122, 126, 127, 128, 140, 146, 149, 150, 161, 170, 174, 178, 194, 202, 207, 208; Convivio 96, 97, 100; De Vulgari Eloquentia 96; Divine Comedy 55, 64, 96, 101, 103, 107; Inferno 83; Paradiso / Paradise 22, 91, 96, 99, 100, 102, 135, 175; Purgatorio 202 Dasenbrock, Reed Way 53 Davis, Miles 183 De Vulgari Eloquentia (Dante) 96 deconstruction xv Defense, The (Nabokov) xvi Degas, Edgar 137, 197, 202 Dewey, John 2, 13, 15 dialect 75, 138, 139 Dickinson, Emily xviii, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 19, 73, 74, 80, 81, 83, 98, 144, 176 Divine Comedy (Dante) 55, 64, 96, 101, 103, 107 drama 29, 68, 207 Duino Elegies (Rilke) 124

Eco, Umberto xviii ecstasy xvi, 17, 60, 72, 78, 102, 207 Eden 17, 67, 68, 151 elation 13, 17, 18, 20, 21, 25, 94, 109, 125 election 52, 61, 66, 79, 86, 106 elegy 7, 120, 176, 205 Eliot, T.S. 23, 24, 29, 64, 67, 68, 69, 71, 122, 143, 146, 151, 154, 178, 188, 196; “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 23, 24, 67: The Waste Land 68, 69, 71 Emerson, Ralph Waldo xv, xvi, xviii, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 29, 32, 36, 38, 39, 40, 47, 56, 59, 60, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 93, 103; “Circles” 14, 19; “Experience” 1, 4, 12; “Fate” 12, 15, 22; “Love” 22, 131; “Merlin” poems 67–68; “Nature” 5, 10, 14, 20, 36, 47, 59, 71, 73; “The OverSoul” 17; “The Poet” 8, 9, 13, 15, 17, 18, 24, 43, 44, 45, 59; “SelfReliance” 2, 16, 20, 31, 32, 39; “Shakespeare; or, the Poet” 24; “Uses of Great Men” 24 émigré writer/artist xv, 27, 30, 46 empathy 5, 9, 49, 50, 79 “Endings” (Walcott) 131 epic xiv, xvii, 28, 29, 41, 44, 45, 54, 55, 63, 71, 91, 101, 103 epiphany 10, 35, 38, 72, 73, 78, 79, 84, 86, 87, 90, 92, 97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104

Epitaph for the Young (Walcott) 43, 53 Escher, M.C. 48 Escher-effect 43, 48, 50, 87, 108 exaltation 17 exile xiii, xv, 27, 33, 46, 47, 48, 78, 97, 106, 107, 206 Existentialism 39 “Experience” (Emerson) 1, 4, 12 exultation 50, 97 Fachinelli, Elvio 72 fancy 8



221

Index

“Far Cry from Africa, A” (Walcott) 32 Farrell, Joseph 44 “Fate” (Emerson) 12, 15, 22 Faulkner, William 71, 171 “Fist, The” (Walcott) 131 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 71 Flaubert, Gustave 180 folklore, in Caribbean literature 112, 114 Fox, George 47 Freud, Sigmund 2 Frost, Robert 5, 48, 77, 137–39, 143, 145, 151, 170, 177, 185 Fumagalli, Maria Cristina 10, 122 Furst, Lillian xvii, xviii, 99 García Márquez, Gabriel 178 Gass, William 185 Gauguin, Paul 106, 126, 192, 197, 199, 203, 206 genre xvii, xviii, 28, 39, 40, 44, 45, 48 geography 17, 18, 32, 50, 86, 108; as aesthetic for Walcott xiii, xiv, 17, 18, 48, 86, 91, 92, 132 Gift, The (Nabokov) 30 Giles, Paul 33 Giotto 196 “Glory Trumpeter, The” (Walcott) 130 Grabes, Herbert 41 grace 7, 21, 52, 61, 66, 79, 84, 88, 89, 176

Graham, Jorie 5 Graves, Robert xvi, 60, 118, 119, 120, 195 Greathead, Robert 103 Guadeloupe 115 Hamner, Robert D. 44, 101 Hardy, Thomas 3, 4, 161, 186–89 Heaney, Seamus 10, 28, 112, 122, 200 Hemingway, Ernest 71, 105, 134, 135, 139, 171, 188, 197, 198, 201, 202 hendecasyllable 149 Henry IV, Part 2 (Shakespeare) 202 hermeneutic circle xiv, 23, 34, 91 hermeneutic imperative (Alexandrov) 35, 36, 85

hexameter xiii, 29, 55, 128 history, Caribbean xiv, 18, 20, 47, 50, 54, 84, 86, 125 Holbein, Hans 203 Homer 28, 29, 53, 71, 128, 132, 133; The Iliad 134; The Odyssey 109, 132, 133, 134

Horace 133 Hosay festival 116 Hughes, Ted 117 Hugo, Victor 146 humanism 4 iambic xiii, 7, 29, 118, 128, 149, 159, 173, 176, 181, 182 “Idea of Order at Key West, The” (Stevens) 5, 6, 79, 147–77 passim identity, personal, irrelevant to art 121, 122

Iliad (Homer) 134 imagination xvii, 1, 4, 8, 10, 11, 15, 17, 20, 38, 52, 60, 65, 66, 70, 76, 87, 98, 99, 134, 178 imitation, as apprenticeship 122 Imitations (Robert Lowell) 136, 140, 146 impersonality 23, 64 Impressionism 25, 27, 46, 48, 77, 82, 84, 93, 126, 197, 199, 200, 206 In a Green Night (Walcott) xvi Inferno (Dante) 83 involution xviii, 33, 34, 57, 75 Ireland 121 island artist xvii, 43, 47, 75, 76, 78, 91, 104, 107, 109 Ismond, Patricia 30 Jamaica 113 James, William 2, 13, 14, 15 Joyce, James 18, 35, 41, 55, 72, 92, 101, 102, 104, 105, 121, 122, 196, 197, 201, 202; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 18, 72, 94, 95, 101, 102, 103, 105; Stephen Hero 101, 102; Ulysses 35, 104, 200, 201

222


Kandinsky, Vassily 196, 200 Kant, Immanuel 9, 39 Keats, John 187 Kierkegaard, Søren 25 King, Bruce 37, 55 Kirchner, Ludwig 200 Klee, Paul 196, 197, 200 Kristeva, Julia 25 Künstlerroman xviii, 18, 43, 46, 51, 63 Lancelot (Robinson) 69–70 landscape, Caribbean 125 language, in the Caribbean 113 Larkin, Philip 124 Latin 11, 114, 119, 145, 149, 151, 154 Leonardo da Vinci 121, 203 Levin, Jonathan 2, 9, 13, 14 “Light of the World, The” (Walcott) 93, 94

light, as metaphor in Dante 102, 103, 135; as metaphor in Edward Arlington Robinson 70; as metaphor in Greathead 103; as metaphor in Walcott xix, 7, 10, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 36, 37, 47, 48, 50, 53, 66, 70–73, 75, 77, 81, 83, 84, 88, 91–98, 100, 103–107, 109, 110, 124, 126, 131, 135, 170, 192, 199–201, 203, 206, 207; in painting 135, 208; inner 3 Lodge, David 41 logocentrism xvi Look at the Harlequins! (Nabokov) 27, 34, 37, 39, 40 Lorca, Federico García 119 “Love” (Emerson) 22, 131 Lowell, James Russell 67, 68, 71, 79, 83; Vision of Sir Launfal 68, 79 Lowell, Robert 6, 68, 136, 140, 141, 142, 146, 189, 200; Imitations 136, 140, 146

Lupack, Alan and Barbara 67, 68, 69, 70 Macbeth (Shakespeare) 181, 207 MacNeice, Louis 122

Mailer, Norman 188 Mallarmé, Stéphane 171 Mandelstam, Osip 161 Manet, Édouard 196 “Map of the New World” (Walcott) 132 Martinique 115 master and pupil relationship x, 24, 65, 76, 85, 151, 177, 197, 206 See also: apprenticeship, imitation Matthiessen, F.O. 2 Mediterranean 97, 132, 133, 149 melody 119–20, 140–41, 147–48, 150, 184

memorizing, of poetry 5 memory, as theme xiii, 14, 21, 35, 37, 38, 47, 51, 54, 65, 66, 71, 72, 75, 78, 83, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 108, 109, 120, 126, 127, 160, 161, 162 Merlin, in Arthurian legend 67, 69, 70 Merlin (Robinson) 69–70; “Merlin” poems (Emerson) 67–68 Merwin, W.S. 123 metaphor xiv, xvii, xviii, xix, 5, 10, 19, 22, 23, 34, 48, 49, 50, 53, 55, 67, 73, 82, 83, 85, 92, 93, 95, 96, 100, 103, 107, 109, 110, 179, 180, 181 meter 6, 11, 118, 119, 120, 129, 136, 140, 142, 146, 147, 149, 150, 165, 173, 174, 175, 181, 182, 183, 184 Midsummer (Walcott) 100 Milton, John 151 mimicry 24, 56, 76, 79, 158 modernism xv, xvii, xviii, 1, 2, 4, 5, 11, 33, 37, 41, 53, 64 Monet, Claude 56, 77 Montale, Eugenio 79, 140, 142, 146, 161, 177, 189, 194, 205 Morandi 123, 124 mulatto aesthetic (Walcott) 43, 46, 49, 85

Muldoon, Paul 144 “Muse of History, The” (Walcott) 19, 20, 24, 46, 53, 54, 65, 75, 99, 110 music and dance, in Caribbean 114, 115 See also bel air, bèlè, tassa, zouk



223

Index

Nabokov, Vladimir xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 1, 3, 4, 25, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 56, 57, 87, 178, 185; The Gift, The 30; Look at the Harlequins! 27, 34, 37, 39, 40; Speak, Memory 37; Transparent Things 57; The Defense, The xvi Nama, Sigrid xiii, 55 narrative xiv, xvii, xviii, 1, 12, 27, 28, 29, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 50, 55, 56, 57, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 75, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 91, 94, 97, 105, 120, 134, 174 “Nature” (Emerson) 5, 10, 14, 20, 36, 47, 59, 71, 73 neoplatonism 59 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2

pentameter xiii, 55, 106, 149, 151, 152, 176, 181, 182 Pinsky, Robert 11, 123 Pissarro, Camille xiii, 11, 25, 26, 27, 28, 38, 40, 46–52, 56, 63, 65, 66, 76–82, 85, 86, 88, 92, 97, 100, 103, 106, 107, 126–29, 189–92, 197–200, 203,

Odysseus 109, 132, 134 Odyssey, The (Homer) 132, 133, 134 Odyssey, The (Walcott) x Oliver, Mary 5 Omeros (Walcott) xiii, 28, 29, 43, 44, 45, 53, 54, 55, 71, 72, 94, 107, 108, 123,

Pound, Ezra 1, 53, 55, 139, 151, 154, 172, 180, 188 Pragmatism xv, xvi, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 13, 15, 39, 56, 74 predestination 52, 61, 65 Pre-Raphaelitism 141 Propertius 145 prosody 64 See also: caesura, hendecasyllable, iambic, melody, meter, pentameter, quatrain, rhyme, rhythm, tempo, terza rima Purgatorio (Dante) 202

206

Platonism 103 poet laureate, status and function of 117 “Poet, The” (Emerson) 8, 9, 13, 15, 17, 18, 24, 43, 44, 45, 59 Pontoise xiii, 11, 78, 97, 129 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce) 18, 72, 94, 95, 101, 102, 103, 105 postcolonialism xv, 33, 46, 53 postmodernism xv, 4, 5, 36, 38, 41, 44, 83

128

otherworld, in Nabokov 35, 40 Otto, Rudolf 74 “Over-Soul, The” (Emerson) 17 Ovid 145, 175 painting 6, 10, 25, 37, 38, 48, 49, 56, 62, 63, 72, 85, 92, 93, 94, 97, 98, 99, 100, 105, 106, 107, 121, 124, 126, 127, 134, 135, 171, 172, 184, 190, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 206, 207, 208 Paradiso / Paradise (Dante) 22, 91, 96, 99, 100, 102, 135, 175 Paris 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 81, 92, 97, 100, 113, 129, 190, 192, 197, 199, 200, 206 Pasternak, Boris 131, 143, 144, 146, 168 pastoral 119, 187 patois 29 Peckham, Morse 24, 25

quatrain 128 Read, Herbert 3 reader response xvii, 85 Renaissance 121 rhyme 12, 118, 128, 140, 146, 155 rhythm 5, 6, 13, 75, 84, 89, 119, 120, 130, 139, 140, 142, 152, 159, 160, 170, 173, 174, 182; in Caribbean music 116; in music and poetry 115 Ricoeur, Paul xviii Rigoletto (Verdi) 130

224


Rilke, Rainer Maria 124, 146, 185; Duino Elegies 124 Rimbaud, Arthur 135 “Road Not Taken, The” (Frost) 48 Robinson, Edward Arlington Merlin, Lancelot, Tristram 69–70, 71 Romantic vision xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 2, 4, 5, 8, 10, 29, 37, 38, 40, 52, 53, 59, 66, 99, 145, 159, 178 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 140, 141, 142 Rubens, Peter Paul 137 Salgado, Sebastião ix, 208 Sampietro, Luigi ix, x, 6, 49, 133, 134, 135, 136, 191, 194, 204, 209 Scholasticism 101, 102, 104 “Schooner Flight, The” (Walcott) 43, 44, 45

“Sea Canes” (Walcott) 131 “Sea-Chantey, A” (Walcott) 130 self-reflexivity xiii, xiv, 33, 34, 39, 56, 83, 90

“Self-Reliance” (Emerson) 2, 16, 20, 31, 32, 39 Seurat, Georges 198 Shakespeare 24, 113, 161, 170, 179, 186; Henry IV, Part 2 202; Macbeth 181, 207; The Tempest 61 “Shakespeare; or, the Poet” (Emerson) 24

Shelley, Percy Bysshe xviii, 7, 175–76, 186, 188 Shusterman, Richard 13 Sisley, Alfred 198, 200 Speak, Memory (Nabokov) 37 spiritual 118, 130 St Lucia 27, 29, 56, 62, 65, 88, 94, 97, 113, 115, 121, 124, 201, 208 St Omer, Dunstan 62, 201 St Thomas 27, 38, 47, 65, 86, 92, 97, 103, 126, 190, 192, 197, 206 “Star” (Walcott) 130 Stein, Gertrude 93, 105, 134, 165 Steiner, George 32 Stephen Hero (Joyce) 101, 102

Stevens, Wallace 2, 5, 6, 12, 74, 79, 106, 147–59, 160–77, 182, 202; “The Idea of Order at Key West,” 5, 79, 147–77 passim; “Sunday Morning” 74 “Sunday Morning” (Stevens) 74 Swinburne, Algernon 142 tassa drumming 116 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 61 tempo 149, 209 Terada, Rei 41 terza rima 128, 146, 175, 186 theatre 29, 112, 113 theatre, Greek 114 Thieme, John 54 Thomas, Dylan 122 Thomism 54, 101, 102, 104 Thoreau, Henry David 6 Tiepolo, Giambattista 11, 97 Tiepolo’s Hound (Walcott) ix, x, xiii, xiv, xviii, xix, 2, 10–13, 18, 20, 23, 25, 27, 34, 36–38, 40, 43–48, 50–57, 61–66, 69–74, 76, 78, 84, 88, 91–100, 103, 105, 107, 108, 126, 189, 190, 196, 198, 200, 201, 206 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth) 144, 145 tradition xvi, 4, 53, 59, 67, 71 “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Eliot) 23, 24, 67 Transcendentalism 2, 5, 6, 36 transcendentalism, German 4 translation 5, 123, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 151– 57, 160, 162–64, 168, 169, 178, 183– 85, 189, 205, 209; Walcott and 122 Transparent Things (Nabokov) 57 traveller, as cultural category xv, xviii, 46, 57, 78 Trinidad 30, 38, 116, 146, 192, 194 Trinidad Theatre Workshop 112, 194, 195

Tristram (Robinson) 69–70 Turner, William 56 Twain, Mark 139 Ulysses (Joyce) 35, 104, 200, 201



225

Index

Updike, John xvi U S A , as place of exile xv, 7, 30, 31, 46, 102

“Uses of Great Men” (Emerson) 24 Van Gogh, Vincent 198, 203 Venice 103, 127, 129, 205, 208 Verlaine, Paul 71 Vermeer, Jan 200, 203 Veronese, Paolo 11, 37, 72, 73, 83, 90, 97, 107, 126, 127 Verrocchio 121 Victorian poetry 141, 171, 187 Villon, François 140, 141 Virgil Aeneid 175 Vision of Sir Launfal (James Russell Lowell) 68, 79 voodoo 112, 114 Waggoner, Hyatt H. 2 Walcott, Derek Another Life xiii, 10, 11, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 30, 43, 45, 49, 53, 54, 55, 59, 60, 63, 65, 93, 94, 98, 109; — Works: The Arkansas Testament 93; The Bounty x, xv, 10, 11, 12, 13, 20, 21, 22, 25, 27, 28, 39, 94, 95, 107, 189; “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?” 76; “Endings 131; Epitaph for the Young 43, 53; “A Far Cry from Africa ” 32; “The Fist” 131; “The Glory Trumpeter” 130; In a Green Night xvi; “The Light of the World” 93, 94; “Map of the New World” 131; Midsummer 100; “The Muse of History” (19, 20, 24, 46, 53, 54, 65, 75, 99, 110; The Odyssey x; Omeros xiii, 28, 29, 43, 44, 45, 53, 54, 55, 71, 72, 94, 107, 108, 123, 128; “The

Schooner Flight” 43, 44, 45; “Sea Canes” 131; “A Sea-Chantey” 130; “Star” 130; Tiepolo’s Hound ix, x, xiii, xiv, xviii, xix, 2, 10–13, 18, 20, 23, 25, 27, 34, 36–38, 40, 43–48, 50–57, 61– 66, 69–74, 76, 78, 84, 88, 91–100, 103, 105, 107, 108, 126, 189, 190, 196, 198, 200, 201, 206 — See also: the Adamic; amnesia; apprenticeship; autobiography; ecstasy; elation; election; empathy; epiphany; Escher-effect; exile; geography; grace; history; island artist; light as metaphor; mimicry; mulatto aesthetic; painting; prosody; Romantic vision; self-reflexivity; tradition; traveller; Trinidad Theatre Workshop; U S A as place of exile; wanderer as cultural category wanderer, as cultural category xiv, xv, xvi, 21, 27 Waste Land, The (Eliot) 68, 69, 71 Western tradition 5, 54, 92 Weston, Jessie L. 68, 89 Whitman, Walt 2, 6, 7, 12, 18, 176 Wilbur, Richard 5, 79, 98 Williams, William Carlos 24, 140, 142 Williamson, George 68, 69 Wilson, Eric 9 Wimsatt, W.K. 102 Wordsworth, William 9, 18, 45, 55, 61, 144, 161; “Tintern Abbey” 144, 145 Yeats, W.B. 121, 122, 143, 144 Zoppi, Isabella 44 zouk 115

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