WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:00.950 align:middle line:90% 00:00:00.950 --> 00:00:03.790 align:middle line:84% I'm going to read one more poem to you. 00:00:03.790 --> 00:00:06.860 align:middle line:90% 00:00:06.860 --> 00:00:11.190 align:middle line:90% It's a translation I did. 00:00:11.190 --> 00:00:15.380 align:middle line:84% I had the great, amazing, good fortune and privilege 00:00:15.380 --> 00:00:19.040 align:middle line:84% becoming friends with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, 00:00:19.040 --> 00:00:24.870 align:middle line:84% when Czeslaw was my colleague at the University of California, 00:00:24.870 --> 00:00:25.880 align:middle line:90% Berkeley. 00:00:25.880 --> 00:00:30.330 align:middle line:84% And for a few poems, including this one, 00:00:30.330 --> 00:00:32.159 align:middle line:90% he would give me his prose-- 00:00:32.159 --> 00:00:34.400 align:middle line:84% His English was very good, and then I 00:00:34.400 --> 00:00:37.580 align:middle line:84% would try to make a poem out of it. 00:00:37.580 --> 00:00:44.120 align:middle line:84% This poem, eminent literary critics 00:00:44.120 --> 00:00:48.470 align:middle line:84% have said this poem must be a joke or ironic, 00:00:48.470 --> 00:00:52.580 align:middle line:90% or couldn't possibly mean it. 00:00:52.580 --> 00:00:57.110 align:middle line:84% Seamus Heaney alludes to it in his essay on translation. 00:00:57.110 --> 00:01:01.190 align:middle line:84% And for me, it embodies the limitations 00:01:01.190 --> 00:01:05.220 align:middle line:84% of a certain kind of academic literary critic, 00:01:05.220 --> 00:01:11.580 align:middle line:84% that they couldn't believe that this sophisticated, learned 00:01:11.580 --> 00:01:16.900 align:middle line:84% Nobel Prize winning poet begins a poem saying, 00:01:16.900 --> 00:01:21.785 align:middle line:84% human reason is beautiful, must not be true. 00:01:21.785 --> 00:01:26.970 align:middle line:90% 00:01:26.970 --> 00:01:29.240 align:middle line:84% Poems become kind of topical for me. 00:01:29.240 --> 00:01:32.160 align:middle line:90% 00:01:32.160 --> 00:01:34.470 align:middle line:90% I'll give a couple of plugs. 00:01:34.470 --> 00:01:38.400 align:middle line:84% Alison mentioned the Favorite Poem Project. 00:01:38.400 --> 00:01:46.530 align:middle line:84% The videos at favoritepoem.org, the construction worker 00:01:46.530 --> 00:01:52.030 align:middle line:84% reading Whitman, the Cambodian American kid reading 00:01:52.030 --> 00:01:58.350 align:middle line:84% Langston Hughes, the glass blower reading Frank O'Hara. 00:01:58.350 --> 00:02:01.090 align:middle line:84% Those videos make an important point. 00:02:01.090 --> 00:02:04.890 align:middle line:84% And I'm not superstitious, but it's true 00:02:04.890 --> 00:02:08.389 align:middle line:84% that people who don't go to favoritepoem.org and look 00:02:08.389 --> 00:02:10.070 align:middle line:84% at those videos, they tend to have 00:02:10.070 --> 00:02:11.555 align:middle line:90% terrific amounts of misfortune. 00:02:11.555 --> 00:02:14.400 align:middle line:90% [LAUGHTER] 00:02:14.400 --> 00:02:16.370 align:middle line:90% 00:02:16.370 --> 00:02:17.880 align:middle line:90% I'm just saying. 00:02:17.880 --> 00:02:20.750 align:middle line:90% [LAUGHTER] 00:02:20.750 --> 00:02:25.670 align:middle line:84% And in a more personal plug, some of you 00:02:25.670 --> 00:02:28.670 align:middle line:84% may have read my essay in the New Yorker Online, 00:02:28.670 --> 00:02:31.590 align:middle line:90% involving another Milosz poem. 00:02:31.590 --> 00:02:35.280 align:middle line:84% And it was only about four weeks ago that I wrote it. 00:02:35.280 --> 00:02:39.200 align:middle line:84% I already think I was too optimistic. 00:02:39.200 --> 00:02:44.330 align:middle line:84% I said, it's not likely that American liberals and academics 00:02:44.330 --> 00:02:49.910 align:middle line:84% are going to go the way that the Polish people Milosz describes 00:02:49.910 --> 00:02:53.160 align:middle line:84% in The Captive Mind, his book, The Captive Mind. 00:02:53.160 --> 00:03:00.950 align:middle line:84% Anyway, I will now close by reading the poem, "Incantation," 00:03:00.950 --> 00:03:05.540 align:middle line:84% from the Polish of Czeslaw Milosz. 00:03:05.540 --> 00:03:08.580 align:middle line:90% "Incantation" 00:03:08.580 --> 00:03:12.270 align:middle line:84% Human reason is beautiful and invincible. 00:03:12.270 --> 00:03:16.810 align:middle line:84% No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, 00:03:16.810 --> 00:03:21.450 align:middle line:84% No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. 00:03:21.450 --> 00:03:26.610 align:middle line:84% It establishes the universal ideas and language. 00:03:26.610 --> 00:03:29.880 align:middle line:84% It establishes the universal ideas in language, 00:03:29.880 --> 00:03:34.230 align:middle line:84% And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice 00:03:34.230 --> 00:03:39.720 align:middle line:84% With capital letters, lie and oppression with small. 00:03:39.720 --> 00:03:44.080 align:middle line:84% It puts what should be above things as they are, 00:03:44.080 --> 00:03:48.450 align:middle line:84% It is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope. 00:03:48.450 --> 00:03:53.890 align:middle line:84% It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master, 00:03:53.890 --> 00:03:58.800 align:middle line:84% Giving us the estate of the world to manage. 00:03:58.800 --> 00:04:02.790 align:middle line:84% It saves austere and transparent phrases 00:04:02.790 --> 00:04:07.230 align:middle line:84% From the filthy discord of tortured words. 00:04:07.230 --> 00:04:11.930 align:middle line:84% It says that everything is new under the sun, 00:04:11.930 --> 00:04:17.570 align:middle line:84% Opens the congealed fist of the past. 00:04:17.570 --> 00:04:22.855 align:middle line:84% Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia 00:04:22.855 --> 00:04:27.300 align:middle line:84% And poetry, her ally in the service of the good. 00:04:27.300 --> 00:04:31.800 align:middle line:84% As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth, 00:04:31.800 --> 00:04:34.250 align:middle line:84% The news was brought to the mountains 00:04:34.250 --> 00:04:36.930 align:middle line:90% by a unicorn and an echo. 00:04:36.930 --> 00:04:39.540 align:middle line:84% Their friendship will be glorious, 00:04:39.540 --> 00:04:42.000 align:middle line:90% their time has no limit. 00:04:42.000 --> 00:04:48.260 align:middle line:84% Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction. 00:04:48.260 --> 00:04:49.560 align:middle line:90% Thanks very much. 00:04:49.560 --> 00:04:52.512 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:04:52.512 --> 00:05:01.370 align:middle line:90% 00:05:01.370 --> 00:05:02.110 align:middle line:90% Many thanks. 00:05:02.110 --> 00:05:03.230 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:05:03.230 --> 00:05:04.330 align:middle line:90% Thank you very much. 00:05:04.330 --> 00:05:05.570 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:05:05.570 --> 00:05:07.020 align:middle line:90% Many, many thanks. 00:05:07.020 --> 00:05:08.570 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:05:08.570 --> 00:05:09.170 align:middle line:90% Thanks. 00:05:09.170 --> 00:05:12.220 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:05:12.220 --> 00:05:14.000 align:middle line:90%