I'm going to read one more poem to you.
It's a translation I did.
I had the great, amazing, good fortune and privilege
becoming friends with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz,
when Czeslaw was my colleague at the University of California,
Berkeley.
And for a few poems, including this one,
he would give me his prose--
His English was very good, and then I
would try to make a poem out of it.
This poem, eminent literary critics
have said this poem must be a joke or ironic,
or couldn't possibly mean it.
Seamus Heaney alludes to it in his essay on translation.
And for me, it embodies the limitations
of a certain kind of academic literary critic,
that they couldn't believe that this sophisticated, learned
Nobel Prize winning poet begins a poem saying,
human reason is beautiful, must not be true.
Poems become kind of topical for me.
I'll give a couple of plugs.
Alison mentioned the Favorite Poem Project.
The videos at favoritepoem.org, the construction worker
reading Whitman, the Cambodian American kid reading
Langston Hughes, the glass blower reading Frank O'Hara.
Those videos make an important point.
And I'm not superstitious, but it's true
that people who don't go to favoritepoem.org and look
at those videos, they tend to have
terrific amounts of misfortune.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm just saying.
[LAUGHTER]
And in a more personal plug, some of you
may have read my essay in the New Yorker Online,
involving another Milosz poem.
And it was only about four weeks ago that I wrote it.
I already think I was too optimistic.
I said, it's not likely that American liberals and academics
are going to go the way that the Polish people Milosz describes
in The Captive Mind, his book, The Captive Mind.
Anyway, I will now close by reading the poem, "Incantation,"
from the Polish of Czeslaw Milosz.
"Incantation"
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas and language.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
It is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains
by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious,
their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.
Thanks very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Many thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Many, many thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]