Translating "Poets to Come": An Introduction

In May of 2011, a group of translators and scholars from six different countries met in Iowa City to discuss Whitman in translation. Sponsored by the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at The University of Iowa, the Obermann Humanities Seminar ("Walt Whitman International: Translation and the Digital Archive") set out to explore how translations of Whitman's work could most effectively become a key component of the online Walt Whitman Archive. The Archive had already begun to make translations of Whitman's work available on the site, but we wanted to investigate ways that translation itself could become a useful tool in understanding Whitman's poetry.

We all know that the act of translation is, by definition, an act of interpretation, since to move a poem from one language into another requires an endless series of interpretive acts: continually choosing one word or phrase in the host language from among many possibilities, each with a different connotation and often a different denotation; making formal decisions about what features of meter, rhythm, alliteration, assonance, consonance can be transferred from English to the host language; deciding whether Whitman's various puns, metaphors, homonyms can effectively be carried over into the host language; parsing and imitating Whitman's often idiosyncratic syntax and trying to match the syntax to idiomatic usages in the host language; choosing how Whitman's incessant pronouns (especially his ubiquitous "you") can be rendered in languages that require the translator to decide on formal or informal versions, singular or plural versions (while realizing that in English the pronoun can remain ambiguous and promiscuous, attaching itself to one's most intimate lover or to a whole world of strangers); trying to render Whitman's extraordinary range of diction—from highly formal and learned usages to idiomatic, colloquial, and common words and phrases—into languages that do not share the same tonal range for the same set of words. These and many other translational and hermeneutic acts are evident to bilingual readers whenever they read a translation and set it next to the original.

What the Obermann Center seminar decided to do, though, was to take a next step, and to gather all known translations of specific Whitman poems in five different languages (French, German, Italian, Polish, and Spanish) and then study those translations together, asking ourselves what these multiple attempts to translate the same poem might tell us not only about the interpretive act that all translation inevitably is, but also about the original poem itself. Multiple translations of the same poem indicate many things about the original, especially when we discover the particular places where translators disagree, where they make very different choices. Those places in the translations inevitably point to places in the original where there are ambiguities or multiple resonances that might not be discerned by a native reader. Examining the differences in multiple translations, in other words, makes us better, closer readers of the original text and helps us identify key images and words that we might initially miss. Such an examination also reveals just how distinctive each translation is as an interpretation of the original poem. Reading several translations of the same poem is to be exposed to several unique readings of the original, and those readings—like any provocative interpretation—help us form our own reading.

The participants in the Obermann seminar gathered all the translations of six different short Whitman poems, but we started the seminar by discussing "Poets to Come," and we never left it. Everyone knows this little Whitman poem. Starting in the 1881 (sixth) edition of Leaves of Grass, it joined two other short poems ("To You" and "Thou Reader") to form the conclusion to the "Inscriptions" cluster that opened the book. The poem has become one of Whitman's most familiar, calling on the poets, orators, singers, and musicians who would succeed Whitman to "arouse" and "justify" him by creating the imaginative works that would "prove and define" what Whitman began: POETS to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for, But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than  
  before known, Arouse! for you must justify me. I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the  
  darkness. I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a  
  casual look upon you and then averts his face, Leaving it to you to prove and define it, Expecting the main things from you. It is no surprise, then, that this poem would often be translated, because, though it does not directly address translators, they can nonetheless hear themselves invoked by Whitman here as he calls on a wide variety of artists to "justify" him and carry him and his message into the future. What better way to do this than to translate him into other languages, thus opening his work up to countless readers who previously had not had access to Whitman's poems? It is no wonder translators are attracted to the poem.

The poem is addressed in its opening line to future poets, orators, singers, and musicians, but the address is divided into two exclamatory calls—one to poets, and one to the other groups. One question the translations raise is whether the first exclamatory call, to poets, is expanded by the second exclamatory phrase or whether that second phrase simply specifies who is to be included in the first phrase. Are the orators, singers, and musicians subsets of "poets" or different from them? Are the "poets" the "sayers of words" (as Whitman calls them in "Song of the Rolling Earth") who speak those words in various ways—in speech, poem, song, chant—or are the "poets" the primary group who will lead the other artists—the orators, singers, and musicians—in doing the imaginative work of the future?

Line three shifts the address to "you," and the pronoun presumably includes the groups mentioned in the first line, who are now cast as "a new brood." "Brood" is a surprising word choice here, and it creates problems for translators, since its meaning in English is ambiguous. The 1844 Webster's defines the noun form of the word as "progeny" or "offspring" but notes that, when referring to humans, the word is "generally used in contempt." Its more positive meaning refers to "young birds hatched at once; as a brood of chickens, or of ducks." It also means "species generated; that which is bred." And, of course, the word carries connotations in English of its verbal form—to sit on, or warm, eggs to prepare them for hatching, or, as applied to human behavior, to "remain a long time in anxiety or solicitous thought." There is the sense, perhaps, that Whitman is brooding about the future, while the poets of the future also brood about him, becoming the "new brood," anxious about creating something "greater than before known." There may also be a suggestion of Whitman himself as the brooding hen, secretly hatching the future. As he once told Edward Carpenter: "There is something in my nature furtive like an old hen! You see a hen wandering up and down a hedgerow, looking apparently quite unconcerned, but presently she finds a concealed spot, and furtively lays an egg, and comes away as though nothing had happened! That is how I felt in writing 'Leaves of Grass.'"

As the address to "you" continues in the poem, translators must decide whether the "you" in the final three lines is the same "you" as appears in line three, or whether in fact the poem has gradually shifted its focus of address from the multiple poets of the future to the one person in the future who can actively "justify" the poet and "answer what I am for"—that person being the current reader of the poem, whoever is encountering this poem in the present moment. Translators in the five languages we examined have to make their decision evident in the pronoun form they choose: singular or plural, formal or informal; they cannot use the same word, as Whitman does, but rather must strip it of the ambiguity that Whitman allows it to maintain in English.

Whitman also introduces the odd concept that "you must justify me." How do we, Whitman's readers and writers of the future, justify him? The 1844 Webster's indicates that the word has several possible meanings—"to judge rightly of," "to prove or show to be just," "to vindicate as right," or, in a theological sense, "to pardon and clear from guilt." In the printing terminology that Whitman was so familiar with, "justify" means "to agree; to suit; to conform exactly; to form an even surface or true line with something else," as a justified left margin forms a straight vertical line. Right after Whitman makes the claim that "you must justify me," we see the "I" of the poem repeated in a three-line anaphora, to form a left-margin justification from which the pronoun of self-identity performs a series of acts—writing, advancing, wheeling, hurrying back, and turning "a casual look" upon the "you"—before turning the poem over to the "you," disappearing into the darkness, averting his face, and concluding the poem with a final "you," justified right.

And what about that act of wheeling? How do we describe what that means in terms of the action the "I" is taking in the poem? Is the image simply one of a pivot, a turn, a quick turning, a turning on an axis? In the 1844 Webster's, the verb means only "to turn on an axis," "to turn; to move round," or "to roll forward." But clearly the wheeling in this poem involves a sudden turning and averting and retreating to the darkness of the past, leaving only the few "indicative words" on the page in front of us as the sole evidence that the poet was here and that he thought of us, gave us a glance, looked to us for justification. "Wheeling," as it turns out, is a difficult concept to translate, in part because it is a difficult concept to capture and define in English.

Whitman's use of the verbal form of 'wheel,' which suggests a spatial as well as a temporal turning toward the past, further complicates the translator's already formidable challenge. Is the image of wheeling one of cyclic progression or sudden regression? What is the "darkness" he hurries back to? Is that darkness the illusion of lack of light created by the cycles of time that have separated us from the poet's lit present that has now become for us the darkened past? If so, there is a kind of magic in his momentary advancing, for the words he puts on the page in his present become the trace of his identity that now persist in our present and that tie us to him, allow him to advance out of that darkness and to glance momentarily at us before he recedes back into it, leaving us in our present (his future) aroused by an identity now dead and in the past. The poem becomes, as it so often does in Whitman's work, the ferry between the poet's present (our past) and the poet's future (our present) and back again.

As the participants in the Obermann Center identified more and more places in the multiple translations of the poem that created interpretive difficulties, we began to look at Whitman's earlier versions of "Poets to Come," since the poem had its origins in the 1860 Leaves of Grass. In the 1860 Leaves, the poem seems to draw its origins from two poems. Whitman includes in this edition of Leaves a cluster of poems called "Chants Democratic and Native American," which opens with a long poem called "Apostroph," which is indeed a long series of exclamatory addresses, beginning with "O mater! O fils! / O brood continental!" What would become the "new brood, native, athletic, continental" is already invoked (and here given a generic mother and father). Among the catalog of addressees in the poem are "O race of the future! O women!," "O bards!," and, at the conclusion: O centuries, centuries yet ahead! O voices of greater orators! I pause—I listen for you! O you States! Cities! defiant of all outside authority! I spring at once into  
  your arms! you I most love! O you grand Presidentiads! I wait for you! New History! New Heroes! I project you! Visions of poets! only you really last! O sweep on! sweep on! O Death! O you striding there! O I cannot yet! O heights! O infinitely too swift and dizzy yet! O purged lumine! you threaten me more than I can stand! O present! I return while yet I may to you! O poets to come, I depend upon you! Here, then, are the bards, orators, and poets of the future, not only called to but projected ("I project you!"). Here, too, is the poet calling to "poets to come" and telling them "I depend upon you!," as he himself "returns" to his present, leaving the future to us. If we are not ultimately there in that future to encounter Whitman, he literally has nothing to depend on; he has no future at all if we do not catch his glance (or give his poem a glance). Whitman's odd coinage here—"apostroph"—draws attention to the etymology of the word: the Greek apostrophos, literally "to turn away," "to avert." Whitman would have found that etymology in his Webster's, along with the definition of "a turning away from the real auditory, and addressing an absent or imaginary one." It derives from the Greek oratorical practice of averting attention from the intended audience in order to pause and shift the address to an imagined, absent, or dead person. Whitman expands the imagined subjects of his "apostroph" to include the yet unborn.

So, later in the "Chants Democratic" cluster, when the original version of "Poets to Come" appears as "Chants Democratic 14," it opens with an apostrophe to people who are not yet born and thus are not part of the audience the poet can actually address: POETS to come! Not to-day is to justify me, and Democracy, and  
  what we are for, But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental,  
  greater than before known, You must justify me. Indeed, if it were not for you, what would I be? What is the little I have done, except to arouse you? I depend on being realized, long hence, where the  
  broad fat prairies spread, and thence to Oregon  
  and California inclusive, I expect that the Texan and the Arizonian, ages  
  hence, will understand me, I expect that the future Carolinian and Georgian will  
  understand me and love me, I expect that Kanadians, a hundred, and perhaps  
  many hundred years from now, in winter, in the  
  splendor of the snow and woods, or on the icy  
  lakes, will take me with them, and permanently  
  enjoy themselves with me. Of to-day I know I am momentary, untouched—I  
  am the bard of the future, I but write one or two indicative words for the future, I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry  
  back in the darkness. I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully  
  stopping, turns a casual look upon you, and then  
  averts his face, Leaving it to you to prove and define it, Expecting the main things from you. In this first version of the poem, we get a wealth of details that would be excised from the final version. The Obermann Seminar participants were struck by the fact that the 1860 version of the poem had never been translated into any of the languages we were examining. We were struck too by the revealing admission of the fifth and sixth lines: "Indeed, if it were not for you, what would I be? / What is the little I have done, except to arouse you?" This intimacy of tone, with an erotic tinge to "arouse," made us hear in the more commanding "Arouse! for you must justify me" of the final version some of the erotic connotations of arousal evident in the first version. The term "continental" is much more defined in the first version of the poem, as the poet specifies Western and Southern states and territories as part of the breeding grounds of the poets of the future. Because he goes on to suggest that Canada, too, will play a part in his realization, the future he addresses extends beyond national boundaries. This catalog of where he expects to be "realized" and "understood" and "loved" and "enjoyed" also makes clear that he is addressing future readers as well as future poets, making the "you" much more malleable than it may appear in the final version. That he addresses the future is clear, though, and we can feel Whitman playing with the etymology of "apostrophe" as he ends his poem by pausing, turning, and averting his face. He imagines an absent audience that will fill the present when he himself is absent, and he invites the "you's" of that audience to issue their own apostrophes back to him: the tradition of apostrophe, after all, involves addressing the dead. The dead and the living, or the living and the yet unborn, can only meet in the brief "indicative words" of the poem that mediates the past and the future in the always present possibility of reading.

The poem underwent significant revisions in the 1867 edition, where it appeared as "Leaves of Grass 4" and where it comes close to its final form, but where it loses much of its specific detail and abandons "arousal" altogether: POETS to come! Not to-day is to justify me, and Democracy, and what  
  we are for; But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental,  
  greater than before known, You must justify me. I but write one or two indicative words for the  
  future, I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry back  
  in the darkness. I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully  
  stopping, turns a casual look upon you, and  
  then averts his face, Leaving it to you to prove and define it, Expecting the main things from you. In the 1872 edition of Leaves, the poem appears again, this time as part of "The Answerer" group, and it takes on its final title and nearly arrives at its final form. In this version, arousal has reappeared, and is in fact doubled, once again suggesting an erotic element to the relationship between the poet and his future readers, as if his poetry must not only wake up but sexually charge the readers and writers of the future, to generate the democratic poetry that is to come. Whitman, after all, is writing the poetry of arousal, calling on the bodies of the future poets (unbodied at the time Whitman lived in his body) to be aroused to respond to the words of a poet whose now departed body left a few "indicative words for the future"—which is to say for our present: POETS TO COME. POETS to come! orators, singers, musicians to come! Not to-day is to justify me, and answer what I am  
  for; But you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental,  
  greater than before known, Arouse! Arouse—for you must justify me—you must  
  answer. I myself but write one or two indicative words for the  
  future, I but advance a moment, only to wheel and hurry back  
  in the darkness. I am a man who, sauntering along, without fully stop- 
  ping, turns a casual look upon you, and then  
  averts his face, Leaving it to you to prove and define it, Expecting the main things from you.

There has been very little critical commentary on "Poets to Come," which seems to have struck many critics over the years as simple and clear and thus in need of no analysis. Nonetheless, some critics have briefly commented on it from Whitman's time to the present, suggesting multiple ways to hear Whitman's call. What follows are a few samples of this evolving critical commentary.

Available on this part of the Whitman Archive, then, are all the known translations of "Poets to Come" in French, German, Italian, Polish, and Spanish. Accompanying these translations are analyses by scholar/translators Eric Athenot, Walter Gruenzweig, Vanessa Steinroetter, Marina Camboni, Marta Skwara, and Matt Cohen, each offering background on the various translators and commentary on the illuminating differences between the translations.