And this last poem, "What He Thought."
We're all by ourselves let me tell you, and then the Italians
they had assembled these newsmen and flowers and photographers
and all this stuff.
And then big questions started coming
at us, universal questions, philosophical questions.
Like, what does the American phrase flat drink mean.
It turned out that they were all translating
contemporary American novels, so their main interest
was the little phrases that they didn't know.
So they would ask us these questions like cheap date.
What does cheap date mean they asked
us whereupon we felt very proud of ourselves.
I mean, we're in Italy, and they are asking us
what cheap date means.
And so we start to get really--
start to give big grand answers, and the more
we talk the more we realize that among us,
the Americans, there was quite a difference of definition
between the women and the men.
That the women tended to see it as a kind of kindness done
by women that you didn't order much or something,
but the emphasis was a little more toward that side.
Whereas for the men it had more to do
with the distance from the dining room
to the hotel or something.
I don't know.
I mean, it was like a whole different set of terms.
So then we suddenly realized it was more
about another kind of translation.
We really needed translators in the home.
It wasn't abroad that was our trouble.
I didn't speak.
And I mean, there were a lot of linguistic hilarities having--
I mean, if more Americans knew the languages
of the lands they went to these things wouldn't happen.
But like I was telling the people today in Phoenix
that Bob Hatfield, who was one of the people on that trip,
was really good at designing a sentence in English
for simultaneous translation.
He knew in advance there was going
to be a simultaneous translator there,
so he designed the phrases of his sentence in such a way.
I mean, this is all extemporaneous it seems such
that the first phrase would be admirable and memorable,
and the guy could say it and he could pause.
I mean I could never pause.
I would forget the rest of my life if I paused.
But he would pause, the guy would say it,
then the second phrase would come.
It would seem even more admirable.
It would build on the first phrase.
The guy would translate it, and then the third and culminating
phrase would come.
And people would gasp, and it would be the right phrase
to have at the end of the sentence.
And everything would be memorable,
and I would have these, sort of, limp phrases dangling off
at the end.
Because I had to stop.
The guy started talking when I was talking.
And then I realized they were asking questions of the men.
They started to ask the big questions,
but they asked them all of the men like those questions
about history and the future and the state
of art and all those things.
And the men answered.
They were handily disposing of the questions,
and then the journalist turned to me and he said
and what do you think of feminism.
Yeah.
And I said and I thought, OK, now I can do this the way
I have to.
Because of the extraordinary sacrifices
made by decades of women before me who fought,
who gave their lifeblood, who gave up everything in order
that it might be true, I don't have
to worry too much about feminism.
And then I heard the guy the translator say--
and I knew enough Italian to know
that he was saying she doesn't care about feminism.
Well, I knew this was going to go out on the wire services
all over Italy, so much for design.
My advice is learn your Italian.
"What He Thought" is dedicated to a guy, Fabbio Doplicher,
to whom I owe the story of the poem entirely,
and who deserves much credit.
I was-- I was too much of a coward to say this to him.
My form of making my apologies for underestimating him
is to have written the poem and put
his name by way of dedication.
Someday he'll know.
"What He Thought."
We were supposed to do a job in Italy,
and full of our feeling for ourselves--
our sense of being poets from America--
we went from Rome to Fano, met the mayor,
mulled a couple of matters over.
How to say cheap date, they asked us, how to say flat drink.
Among Italian literati, we could recognize our counterparts,
the academic, the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen, and the glib.
And there was one administrator, the conservative in suit
of regulation gray, who, like a good tour
guide, with measured pace and uninflected tone,
narrated sites and histories the hired van hauled us past.
Of all, he was most politic and least poetic so it seems.
Our last few days in Rome, when all but three
of the new world birds had flown,
I found a book of poems this unprepossessing one had written.
It was there in the pensione room, a room he'd recommended,
where it must have been abandoned by the German visitor.
Was there a bus of them to whom he had inscribed and dated
it a month before?
I couldn't read Italian either, so I put the book back
into the wardrobe's dark.
We last Americans were due to leave tomorrow.
For our parting evening then, our host
chose something in a family restaurant,
and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed,
till sensible it was our last big chance
to be poetic, make our mark,
one of us asked: what's poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables and market place
of Campo de Fiori or the statue there?
Because I was the glib one, I identified the answer instantly.
I didn't have to think.
The truth is both.
It's both, I blurted out.
But that was easy.
That was easy to say.
What followed taught me something about difficulties.
For our underestimated host spoke out all of a sudden
with a rising passion, and he said
the statue represents Giordano Bruno brought
to be burned in the public square because of his offense
against the authority, which was to say the church.
His crime was his belief.
The universe does not revolve around the human being.
God is no fixed point or central government,
but rather is poured in waves through all things.
All things move.
If God is not the soul itself, he
is the soul of the soul of the world, such was his heresy.
The day they brought him forth to die they feared
he might incite the crowd.
The man was famous for his eloquence.
So his captors placed upon his face
an iron mask in which he could not speak.
That is how they burned him.
That is how he died without a word in front of everyone.
And poetry-- we'd all put down our forks by now to listen
to the man in gray--
he went on softly, poetry is what he thought but did not say.
[APPLAUSE]