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Cohen discusses the use of the Digital Archive for translating Whitman’s works. Since one of our tasks is to do a translation, I decided to review this article (http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00165.html). Cohen focuses on Whitman’s poem Eidólons and the problems with translations. He refers to Jerome McGann’s work Radiant Textuality views on translation and his emphasis on the use of the Digital Archive.
Main point of the article is that there is a transgenic deformation of works which were not first created for the digital era. The influence of this digital era on Whitman’s poems is the gist of the article. Moreover, the advantages and flaws of the tool. The deformance tool TokenX is greatly discussed by the author. There are obvious problems with translating into foreign languages which use special characters.
Cohen poses a crucial question at the beginning of his article:
What should be the nature and end of our mediation?
Cohen, Matt. “Transgenic Deformation: Literary Translation and the Digital Archive.” Walt Whitman Archive. Web. 2 October 2009.
This book started as an updating of Gay Wilson Allen’s Walt Whitman Abroad (1955), but it turned into a project trying to capture the ongoing poetic dialogue with Whitman around the world for more than a century, a kind of resistant “talking back” to Whitman by other cultures. We are presented by a tapestry of a wide array of international responses which reveals the way democratic ideals, democratic attitudes, and democratic institutions are perceived around the world, showing how his views of democracy are being reconfigured by every culture he enters, from British Isles, Russia, France and Belgium, Germany, Spain and Latin America to former Yugoslavia, and so many other countries. Hence the book shows how various cultures have reconstructed Whitman in order to make him fit their native patterns and how the act of translation has altered his poetry and made it conform in ways it otherwise would not to the traditions and tones of the receiving nation, and also how his writing undertakes a different kind of cultural work than it performs in the United States.
Walt Whitman&the World gives us not only an overview of political responses to Whitman’s poetry but also an overview of aesthetic and religious responses, thus Franz Kafka found him “among the greatest formal innovators in the modern lyric”, and many Indian writers heard ancient Hindu voices at the hearth of Whitman’s poetry in Whitman’s ability to reconcile contradictions and to resist the valorisation of soul over body.
Additionally we are given an insight into the influence of reading Whitman in other cultural context on “the rather provincial understanding of Whitman held by many American readers and writers, who tend still to view him only in an American context and who tend to be oblivious to the variety of ways that Whitman has been constructed for the purposes and needs of other cultures.”
The fact Whitman „has appealed to so many people in so many places in so many ways“ and „that everyone seems to find in his poetry what she or he wants and needs“ is beautifully explained in what Jorge Luis Borges said on Whitman:
„He wrote his rhapsodies in the role of an imaginary self, formed partly of himself, partly of each of his readers.“
Josip, Dragan, Bojana, Elma, Indira, Sanja, and Neda showing off their new bookmarks (courtesy of Elma).
…that’s right, Walt Whitman has made the headlines in Serbia! Test your knowledge of Cyrillic while learning a little bit about what we’re doing over here:
And what does Walt say about all this free publicity?
You whoever you are!
You daughter or son of England!
You of the mighty Slavic tribes and empires! you Russ in Russia!
You dim-descended, black, divine-soul’d African, large, fine-headed,
nobly-form’d, superbly destin’d, on equal terms with me!
You Norwegian! Swede! Dane! Icelander! you Prussian!
You Spaniard of Spain! you Portuguese!
You Frenchwoman and Frenchman of France!
You Belge! you liberty-lover of the Netherlands! (you stock whence I
myself have descended;)
You sturdy Austrian! you Lombard! Hun! Bohemian! farmer of Styria!
You neighbor of the Danube!..
All you continentals of Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, indifferent
of place!
All you on the numberless islands of the archipelagoes of the sea!
And you of centuries hence when you listen to me!
And you each and everywhere whom I specify not, but include just the same!
Health to you! good will to you all, from me and America sent!
Each of us inevitable,
Each of us limitless–each of us with his or her right upon the earth,
Each of us allow’d the eternal purports of the earth,
Each of us here as divinely as any is here.
–from “Salut Au Monde”
Karen, Sanja, Neda, Josip, Bojana, Elma, and Indira standing up for Walt in the Faculty of Philosophy, Room 35.
“The American Experience : Walt Whitman” is a program about Walt Whitman’s life and his literary work. It consists of eleven video clips that represent each of important periods in the life of this great poet. The introduction is very exciting. The video starts with the reading of his lines, love scene by the river and with pictures of the crucial moments in the American history. This very beginning easily catches one’s attention and holds it until the end. Whitman scholars, writers, novelists, poets and historians speak about his life and his work. The story develops from his early childhood to his death-bed.
The pictures of the XIX century New York are vivid and while watching them, one could hear in the back Whitman’s thoughts : how he perceived dirty streets, crowd and the spirit of the city. Getting to know his life in New York, it is easier to understand his vision of unity and how “Leaves of Grass” were brought to light.
Emotional readings throughout this video together with nature imagery raise tension and make a spectator emotionally involved. I find very touching the end of “Desperate to Connect”, the part where Whitman’s spirit embraces the XXI century passengers of Brooklyn Ferry. Whitman is represented as a poet of all times. Another video that I liked very much is “A Call for Affection “. During listening the reading of lines from “ When I Heard at the Close of the Day” I was fascinated by Whitman’s pure emotions and passion that burned inside of him. It is a wonder how Whitman has a power to involve a reader into his poems. Every atom belonging to him as good belongs to us.
This video program is a fascinating addition to other means of studying Whitman’s poetry. Apart from reading his poems and critics, it is a useful perspective on his work. I would even recommend this program to people who haven’t heard about the poet, because it is a great start for the future Whitmaniacs.
Walt Whitman’s America by David S. Reynolds is trying to reconstruct the life and times of, as it states, “one of America’s most representative poets”. Furthermore it gives a wider historical background to his life and writings. But Walt Whitman’s poems do not fall into one single historical category. Not even in a double or a triple one for that matter. As Whitman himself stated, he had a deep interest in all that surrounds a writer, his age, land, environment, all the contexts that are influential in any possible way. For that reason this book explores his influences, early works, the politics and the social crisis of that time, the eroticism in his poetry as well as science, religion and the visual arts which all had a great effect on him. All in all, David S. Reynolds wanted to express his love for Whitman’s poetry by recreating his life and works in a historical context putting the focus of this book on the great love of a poet for his country.
On the 150th anniversary of publishing the third edition of “Leaves of Grass”, facsimile edition has been published. The covers of the book remind Whitmaniacs how it looked like so many years ago. Instead of looking up for the old texts on the internet, readers can have this old-new edition in their hands. Whitman’s 1860 edition was a kind of attempt to awake the American nation before the Civil War. He was like a prophet in this turbulent period and his third edition was aimed to be a new Bible for the American nation, a “national salvation”. As he added 146 poems to the 32 from the second edition, the thickness of the book made it look like a religious tome. The way he divided the book into clusters and numbered poems in the third edition, is similar to that in the Bible. Jason Stacy, assistant professor of history at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and Whitman scholar, gives a historical and social frame of Whitman’s third edition in the introduction. He is not much concentrated on the literary value of the 1860 “Leaves” but gives a reader a new dimension of interpreting the book. Politics, outbreak of the war, Whitman’s beliefs and perception of the world, theology, the evolutionary theories and phrenology are intermingled in this edition.
Jason Stacy explains that Whitman used religious language because it is a powerful mean to shape public opinion. What I find very interesting in this edition is dating of it : “Year 85 of the States“. Instead of Christ’s birth, July 4, 1776 is set as an important date in historical chronology. Whitman introduced the 1860 “Leaves of Grass” with a new poem “Proto-Leaf” which promised a new religion : “Free, fresh, savage … I strike up for a new world“. In this introduction, Stacy gives a more complete explanation of the terms “amativeness” and “adhesiveness” incorporated in the clusters “Enfans d’Adam” and “Calamus”. “Amativeness” is not just a glorification of heterosexual sex but also the promulgation of the republic. The final result of “amativeness” is healthy next generation, while the final result of “adhesiveness” is love of society, love that maintains unity and egalitarian affection. So, neither “adhesivness” was just an attraction between men but something deeper. Another thing which attracted my attention is that Whitman changed portrayal of slaves in this edition. Slavery was less central theme comparing to the 1855 edition. In “Chants Democratic” he writes : “ In Tennessee and Kentucky, slaves busy in the coalings, at the forge, by the furnace-blaze, or at the corn-shucking; …” These words about slaves were not typical for Whitman and a bit disappointing for me, when I read this passage.
I would recommend not just this edition of “Leaves of Grass” to all Whitmaniacs but also, other editions because each “was formed from a particular set of circumstances in the poet’s life and times”. I really like the design of it : drawings and curvings around the clusters. Also, the letters in an old-fashioned style transcend me to the XIX century. One of the options for Whitmaniacs looking for this edition is internet but also, do not miss to feel it in your hands, smell it and turn the pages instead of clicking on the computer mouse.
Even though well in the 21st century, most of us are used to the good old-fashioned research; read and read and read. The high quality documentaries (both, production-wise and content-wise) like this one are a good reminder that, in the era of mass media, we have more access to the all sorts of data than ever before. The PBS documentary “The American Experience: Walt Whitman” is a great opportunity to access very easily a great deal of information concerning one of America’s best poets ever.
The documentary follows the life of a man who made so much difference not only to the nation he devoted himself to, but to the poetry in general. Through nine sections of this documentary we can follow the development from a sensitive, young Long Island boy to the magnificent and astonishing “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul “. This development has been presented as a process with a numerous factors which influenced it heavily, from the New York City with all its specificities and issues like slavery to the disasters like the Civil War. How influence of these, combined and intertwined, gave rise to an astonishing new philosophy on which the Leaves of Grass and created the “Good Gray Poet” is explained here in an easy and appealing way. The whole story throughout the documentary is backed up by a very powerful reading of Whitman’s poetry. The seas of information aside, these readings, in my opinion, are as valuable as they are moving. The reason is that they show that the poetry of Walt Whitman is basically composed to be read out loud. That Whitman had the idea of poetry as something that one not only enjoys in the privacy of his or her room (and heart) ,but shares by public reading is important information, because it brings us to the way he composed his poems. If we combine it with the information that he was equally concerned with how his poems looked printed on the page, it becomes clear that, while doing our projects, we must bear in mind that the language of the poems was chosen not only having the meaning in mind but also the “sound” and the “look” of it.
And finally, the documentaries like this are a good example, as I have already mentioned, that information today are available via many media, and that there is an abundance of material, well presented and “well packed”, waiting for us to use it.
This, fourth chapter of Folsom’s and Price’s article was particularly interesting to me, and I believe it will be more than helpful. It not only concentrates on the very edition and the very cluster we are interested in, but it also provides a great deal of information about the circumstances that (might have) influenced Whitman right about the time he was working on the 1860 edition of Leaves. Knowing the cultural situation and as many factors as we can about all the factors that lead to the publication of such poetry as the “Calamus” cluster or the “ Enfans d’Adam” cluster o the 1860 edition will help us understand better the texts themselves and the impact they have been having ever since.
To begin with, Folsom and Price discussed the prominent people – artists and radical thinkers that Whitman had met and with whom Whitman established, in some cases, lifelong friendships. These were writers, like Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, or visual artists like Henry Kirke Brown, Elihu Vedder, Gabriel Harris, or women’s rights activists like Abby Price, Sarah Tyndale, Sara Payson Willis. All these people influenced his poetry one way or another, directly or indirectly.
Even though this cultural framework of Whitman’s 1860 collection is one of the main focal points of the chapter, Folsom and Price deal with the poetry itself as well. They also address the theme of homoeroticism, emphasizing the difficulty Whitman must have experienced while trying to express something that did not even have a name in a language lacked the expressions whit which to express it. As the authors claim, at the time Whitman was writing the Live Oak, with Moss, there was no such a concept which would combine the spiritual love and a physical love between two men. The existing vocabulary (and the state of mind of the people) made a clear cut distinction between these two. Consequently, Whitman almost had to re-invent meanings of words and phrases to fit the emotions and experiences he felt the need to express.
Another very important issue that Folsom and Price deal with here is the ‘direction’ of poetry. Many consider the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass the most inward directed or the most intimate, the inward instead of outward turning at the very brink of the war, but the authors proceed to make appoint that the poems of the 1860 edition have political significance as well and that Whitman is really, through the concepts of love and comradeship try to bring the divided nation together.
All in all, this article is a very interesting reading, apart from being highly informative. It can, if nothing else, provide some useful insight into the general situation in America and in Walt Whitman during the creation of the wonderful Leaves of Grass.
An outline of Whitman’s work which opens a new perspective to his work, drawing our attention to the whole range of Whitman’s bookmaking activities and revealing how those skills influenced his work, but also how those mere physical objects may tell us something about his work, life and his times. He put a tremendous effort in making his book because he believed that the book had a power to speak to its readers in different ways. The physicality of his book was as much important as the human body was to him. He wanted us, while holding his book, to feel it, smell it, and touch it with our naked hands in the same way we would feel, smell and touch a body. Well aware that either the content or the physicality of his book might not speak to its readers immediately, he said he would be waiting for us in his books and “on” his books.
The book covers all the major points in each of editions of Leaves of Grass. So, we are presented with the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855), for which he designed the cover, chose the binding and set some of the type himself. With such an innovative and unusual design, Whitman tried to send a message that “the American poetry would have to be essentially different from any poetry written previously—it would have to look different, sound different, and deal with different subject matter if it was to guide the development of a radical new American democracy.” Not only the content of the book, but also the book as a physical object was perceived as “unusual in size, ornamentation, and design”. “The book itself is a hundred times more curious. It is like no other book that ever was written.” “Everything about the external arrangement of this book is odd and out of the way.” Almost all the reviewers commented on the absence of the author’s name and the odd frontispiece engraving. “The man is the true impersonation of his book—rough, uncouth, vulgar.” Charles Eliot Norton, in his Putnam’s Monthly review, summed up the feeling of many when he described it as “this gross yet elevated, this superficial yet profound, this preposterous yet somehow fascinating book.”
It was followed by the second edition of Leaves of Grass (1856) which “demonstrates Whitman’s changing attitudes toward his book and toward the goals he had for his work.” He wanted working people carry his “pocket-size” edition poetry and read it during breaks.
The third edition of Leaves of Grass (1860) came with 146 new poems, the first edition of Leaves published by a true publisher, Thayer and Eldridge. Many of the previous poems had undergone extensive revision. This is the first time “Calamus” poems appear, a cluster devoted to male-male affection, along with “Enfans d’Adam,” later renamed “Children of Adam,” a group of poems dealing with male-female attraction. Once again we witness an interaction between the physicality of the book (Whitman redesigned his title page to turn the very letters of “Leaves of Grass” into sperm, adding the distinctive tails that had become familiar in medical textbooks of the time) and its content (a lot of controversial sexual spermatic images, representing Whitman’s words “as the seeds for new ideas, a new nation, a new conception of democracy, but his words would need to penetrate readers and fertilize their imaginations”).
The same intention is preserved with Drum-Taps (1865) and Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865–66), a collection of war poems, where the title’s letters, formed out of broken limbs and branches, are visually alluding to the reconstruction the nation would be going through as it tried to form a union again out of the shattered fragments of the war. As if the title page indicates he is making his poetry out of “the debris and debris of all dead soldiers” and “the staffs all splinter’d and broken.”
Furthermore, we are given all the crucial facts regarding the fourth edition of Leaves of Grass (1867), the least studied and impressive one and the most difficult to find, the first British edition of Poems by Walt Whitman (1868), published by John Camden Hotten and edited by the British critic William Michael Rossetti, the fifth edition of Leaves (1871) what he called “my new & improved edition,” and his Passage to India (1871), the “Supplementary Volume” to be dedicated to giving voice to “Democratic Nationality” and the sixth edition of Leaves of Grass (1881), where Whitman totally rearranged his poems and clustered them in new arrangements.
There are also presentations of his other works like Democratic Vistas, Two Rivulets and Specimen Days & Collect, Memoranda During the War, November Boughs, Complete Poems & Prose.
Whitman’s own bookmaking ceased with the final edition, known as the “Deathbed Edition” (1891-92), created just before Whitman died, and considered to be the authoritative edition of Leaves of Grass. He wrote “L. of G. at last complete—after 33 y’rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old”.
We are given a handful of beautiful and useful images showing Whitman progress and develop not only as a bookmaker but also as a poet and as a man. We have come to realise all the greatness of his legacy, his books speaking for years and years after his death, executing that very mission he had in mind when writing his poetry and making his books of an ongoing process of realisation and self-realisation. As Ed Folsom brilliantly describes:
“Bookmakers, like all readers of Whitman, have continued to make Whitman over in various guises, to create new Walt Whitmans—a Whitman who speaks particularly to the gay community, an ecological Whitman whose work resonates with the green movement, a socialist Whitman dedicated to a poetry of the working-class, a patriotic Whitman who celebrates America, a Whitman who speaks in an open and unaffected way to children, a Whitman who speaks across language and culture to Spanish and German and Arabic and Chinese readers. There are as many Whitmans as there are readers, and the nature of his project was to leave it to us to define him, to do the work that would make his poetry come alive for us, speak to us not just from his past but from our present. “
Here we have a sort of the duel (which is here a nice way to say a fight) of two professors who had a difference of opinions concerning one sequence of twelve poems that Whitman wrote in the period between 1856 – 1859 and which he entitled Live Oak, with Moss (or Live Oak with Moss). The sequence was never published, but the poems were revised, shuffled and dispersed among the Calamus poems and published in 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. On this both, Helms and Parker agreed. But then starts the juicy part.
Since helms was the first of the two to deal with the Live Oak sequence (around 1992), his opinions were repudiated by Parker several years later. Parker pointed out some of the weak spots in Helms’s article and at some points, attacked rather fiercely Helms’s interpretation of the poems. In the light of these accusations, Alan Helms made a sort of a comment where he tried to explain himself and defend his position on the matter of the Live Oak with Moss sequence of poems. On the accusation that he chose the ‘wrong’ version of the poems he answered that he chose the version the poet himself found fit for printing and that the 1860 version of the twelve poems in question is no less valid that the ‘original’ version of the 1859 notebook. Then he goes on to enumerate all the mistakes Hershel Parker made concerning this and many other issues.
Professor Parker responded to this comment of Professor Helms by reaffirming his own attitude toward the Live Oak, with Moss and by making remarks about the orthography and punctuation of professor Helms. However, at the end of his reply to Helms, Parker notes something quite right and quite useful for us – that ‘study of “Live Oak, with Moss” and of the origins and revisions of “Calamus” (and “Children of Adam”) has hardly begun.’
In addition to this useful insight, there are a few more things that this duel can teach us; firstly that we need to be very meticulous while researching because we do not want to risk stating something that is vague, incomplete, ambiguous or, worst of all, wrong. Also, that we must be aware that our interpretation will depend on the source text – in case of Whitman it is not certain that two versions of the same poem will have completely the same meaning. One period can make all the difference in the world when it comes to Whitman’s poetry. Finally, the fact that his poetry leaves enough space for ever new readings should inspire us to be original and bald when writing our own projects.
