Poems read aloud, beautifully The post “Sakura Park” by Rachel Wetzsteon appeared first on The American Scholar.

I grew up observing the Holy Trinity, the literary one: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. Faith told me these were the foundational figures who would sustain us. Reason and a lifetime of reading have confirmed my faith. I think of them as formulating the cultural oxygen that sustains the Western world and beyond – our languages, values and literary forms, and who we are, whether or not we have read them.  My first Dante was John Ciardi’s Inferno, assigned, remarkably, by our English teacher in tenth grade. This was an American public high school in 1967, when things were already falling apart. On our own, several of us read and discussed the other two-thirds of Ciardi’s Divine Comedy. I’ve since read the Dante translations by Longfellow, Christopher Singleton, Robert and Jean Hollander, Clive James and, most devotedly of late, C.H. Sisson’s blank-verse version. In his review of Joseph Luzzi’s Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography, the American poet Andrew Frisardi notes the poem's continued popularity among common readers and translators: “Mr. Luzzi shows what a many-headed and irreducible beast it has always been and continues to be. . . . Dante's poem is many things, but first of all it is a gripping read. It pulls the reader in with its lively language and rhythms.” That has been my experience.   In a post from December 2009, I described my middle son’s first acquaintance with Dante. He’s now twenty-four, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and is visiting Italy with his younger brother for the first time. On Monday in Florence they toured the Dante Museum:      I know from my life and from my son’s that literary interests can enter dormant periods, all the while evolving and storing energy for future returns. About a decade ago I first read Sisson’s translation of The Divine Comedy, published by Carcanet in 1980. As a poem in English, it is the most successful and has become my default-mode Dante. In his introduction, “On Translating Dante,” Sisson writes:   “. . . all literary encounters have a certain unceremoniousness about them. We surround ourselves with books so that we can call up Montaigne, or Eckermann, or Virgil, or Andrew Marvell, as the mood takes us or the drift of our interests at the time suggests. There are scores or hundreds of merely casual encounters, and some of more intimate significance. The latter have their times, and their place in one’s development as a reader or a writer.”   Dante seems eternally housed in our memory and imagination. Think of Lear and the Fool on the heath or the fight between Achilles and Hector.   Frisardi is a translator of Italian poetry, including Dante’s Vita Nova and the first fully annotated translation of his Convivio. In his 2020 poetry collection, The Harvest & the Lamp (Franciscan University Press), Frisardi includes a beautiful Dantean sonnet originally a part of Vita Nova:   “You pilgrims walking by oblivious, Your minds, it seems, on something not at hand, Can you have come from such a distant land— The way you look suggests as much to us— That you’re not weeping, even as you pass Right through the suffering city, like that band Of people who, it seems, don’t understand A thing about the measure of its loss?   “If you’ll just stop, because you want to hear About it all—so says my sighing heart— Your eyes will fill with tears before you leave. For she who blessed the city is nowhere In sight: what words about her we impart Have force enough to make a stranger grieve.”   Frisardi adds a note: “Dante places this sonnet in the penultimate episode of his prosimetrum the Vita Nova, where not long after Beatrice’s death he sees pilgrims passing through Florence on the way to Rome. ‘She who blessed the city’ translates lowercase beatrice, which means she who blesses.’” [Photos by David Kurp.]

Improving the climate is a better goal than trying to fight change.

When my oldest son was about seven and already a movie enthusiast, we drove up to the Crandall Library in Glens Falls, N.Y. to watch Laurel and Hardy movies. I’d seen a notice in the paper. A film collector brought his own projector and a box of 16mm reels and set up in one of the meeting rooms. About a dozen people showed up, most very old or very young. For four hours we watched “County Hospital,” “Big Business,” “Double Whoopee,” “Our Wife,” “The Music Box,” “Way Out West” and other films with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. I’m certain I have never sustained laughter for that long. Of course, laughter has a social component, and I was merely joining my son and the rest of the all-male audience. This is one of my most cherished memories. Josh and I still love Laurel and Hardy.  It seems fitting that Arthur Stanley Jefferson was born on Bloomsday, fourteen years before that joyous event first took place on June 16, 1904. He entered the world in his grandparents’ house in Ulverston, Lancashire. Describing an early photo of the pair, Hugh Kenner refers to their “stares of idiot hopefulness or fathomless exasperation that constituted their public critique of the universe.” Kenner was reviewing The Films of Laurel and Hardy by William K. Everson in the November 14, 1967, issue of The National Review. Kenner, the scholar Modernism, adept of Joyce, Pound and Beckett, continues with the photograph:   “Bathed in the nearly horizontal light of early morning, the boys look fresh: the day is all before them. Creation has sprung forth anew, pianos once more unwrecked, cars undemolished, hats unbattered, suits unrumpled. Ollie lounges against a Ford that looks spry as a grasshopper, his bulk so poised as to seem weightless, feet nonchalantly crossed. Stan’s hands are clasped in ecstasy. They bend toward each other in communion. Soundless laughter convulses them; their closed eyes savor some invisible bit of business . . .”   Kenner carefully evaluates the films, acknowledging that some were dross but others “classic,” flawless” and even “perfect.” “Big Business” (1929) he calls their masterpiece. In it, the boys are door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen. Kenner closes his review:   “Their comedy, more than any other in cinema, theologized, so to speak, the common experience that if you hammer nails you are apt to strike your thumb. The theology, being false, is comic only in being belied: each film upheld it dogmatically; it was all their films that belied it.”   In a November 7, 1967, letter to Kenner, Guy Davenport praises the review and writes:   “A joy; your essay on Stan and Ollie. Arthur Stanley Jefferson. And Oliver Norvell Hardy, of Milledgeville, Ga. (where Flannery O’Connor wrote her novels), descendent of Nelson’s Hardy. One would love to sic a genealogist onto the matter, and come up with a kinship between Tom and Stan Jefferson.”   [The quoted letter can be found in Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (ed. Edward M. Burns, Counterpoint, 2018).]