WEBVTT

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This is a love of language.

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For all poets, Pound says--

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Ezra Pound-- says that
the poet is the keeper

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of the language of the tribe.

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And yet language
is so imperfect.

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There's a mention in this poem
about the Sumerian tablets,

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which many of you will know
were discovered in Sumeria

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by the thousands--
heaps, mounds of them.

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And the scholars were
excited because it

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was the oldest records we
really have of the past,

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if we could just translate them.

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But for a long time, they
couldn't translate them.

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It's called "The Forgotten
Dialect of the Heart."

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"How astonishing
it is that language

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can almost mean, and frightening
that it does not quite.

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Love, we say, God, we
say, Rome and Michiko,

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we write, and the
words get it wrong.

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We say bread and it means
according to which nation.

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French has no word
for home, and we have

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no word for strict pleasure.

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A people in northern
India is dying out

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because their ancient tongue
has no words for endearment.

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I dream of lost
vocabularies that

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might express some of what
we no longer can express.

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Maybe the Etruscan
texts would finally

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explain why the couples on
their tombs are smiling.

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And maybe not.

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When the thousands of
mysterious Sumerian tablets

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were translated, they seemed
to be business records.

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But what if they
are poems or psalms?

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My joy is the same as 12
Ethiopian goats standing

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silent in the morning light.

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O Lord, thou art slabs of
salt and ingots of copper,

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as grand as ripe barley
lithe under the wind's labor.

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Her breasts are six
white oxen loaded

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with bolts of long-fibered
Egyptian cotton.

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My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey.

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Shiploads of thuya are what my
body wants to say to your body.

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Giraffes are this
desire in the dark.

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Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map.

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What we feel most has no name
but amber, archers, cinnamon,

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horses, and birds."

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