Harold Bloom

“The second author worthy of note is Harold Bloom. His importance consists in his unveiling of Whitman’s hermeticism to us.

In his introduction to the volume of Modern Critical Views (1985) on Whitman, he explains to us why it is not easy or simple to understand the poet and his works, especially for a translator who needs or has to work on them, although this problem may affect any one who does that:

[...] No other poet insists so vehemently and so continuously that he will tell us all, and tell us all without artifice, and yet tells us so little, and so cunningly. Except for Dickinson (the only American poet comparable to him in magnitude), there is no other nineteenth-century poet as difficult and hermetic as Whitman; not Blake, not Browning, not Mallarmé. Only an elite can read Whitman, despite the poet’s insistence that he wrote for the people [...] (BLOOM, 1985, p.3)

The problem (and the solution) here rest in what is at the core of Whitman’s personality and works: his contradiction. It is written on the first page of Leaves of Grass, in the first poem of “Inscriptions”, that the poet sings “a simple separate person, / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.” The poet’s purpose is established from the start and every reader of Whitman knows that he prefers to spend his time among uneducated persons than among high class people, and that the most important people for him are the average persons, who are the force that builds the nation and its future, and from whom democracy springs. How could then that the writings of “one of the roughs” can only be understood by “an elite”? It seems to us that only contradiction can explain how a poet who was supposed to belong to the masses became the “center of the American canon” in literature.

It is not our purpose here to advance an explanation on this phenomenon; actually, we intend to do the opposite: to state that it was precisely Bloom’s insights that helped us to understand that we do not and can not comprehend everything in the works and the man to do our work. This is coherent with what we have asserted above, that no single person can grasp the meaning of everything in the life or works of the American bard. Also, it is part of a translator’s job not to explain things that must remain unexplained, or, in other words, our re-creation of the Leaves does not aim at explaining difficult passages; if they are obscure in the original, they will remain obscure in the translation, and we are supposed not to understand everything in terms of significance or interpretation, although we should be able to do it in terms of grammar and lexicality and do our best to render in our vernacular the best text possible. Nevertheless, Bloom insists on this argument in his book The Western Canon (1995, p.248): “[...] It is an unhappy paradox that we have never got Whitman right, because he is a very difficult, immensely subtle poet who is usually at work doing almost the precise opposite of what he asserts himself to be doing.” Paradoxically, Whitman was many times criticized exactly for the fact that his poetry was rude and indecent. When we take everything into account, we must agree again with the poet that he was contradictory and that no one can be termed wrong for having particular views on his poetry.  However, we may note in passing that it is at least curious or ironic that a poet who considered himself not above or below anyone and who despised Romanticism, for the fact that Romanticism cherished aristocracy and did not want to merge with the common people, should have his works understood by an elite, and not the common people.

As we do not intend to raise a discussion on this phenomenon, which Bloom has already addressed in his works, we shall comment now on another idea by Bloom and the other authors in Modern Critical Views. Although Bloom’s main discussion in the introduction is about the “I”, the “real Me” and the “Me myself” (1985, pp.6-7), what is important to us in this text is what he calls “Whitman’s masterpieces”, the “six long or longer poems” that are referred to by him as “elegies”, or “elegies for the ‘real Me’”, which makes him observe that only one of these poems is truly an elegy (“When Lilacs Las in the Dooryard Bloom’d”), and that these poems had a direct influence on many twentieth-century writers, such as Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot (“The Waste Land is ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ rewritten,” according to Bloom), Hemingway, and Hart Crane. The six longer poems mentioned by him are: “The Sleepers,” “Song of Myself,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” By the way, Bloom’s article in the volume of Modern Critical Views, “Whitman’s Image of Voice: To the Tally of My Soul” (1985, pp.127-42), is mainly about the Lincoln elegy, in which he discusses the meaning of the term “tally”, and its manifold meanings.

Mentioning Bloom’s preference for these poems does not mean that we agree with him. Actually, what he gave us was a parameter to analyze the poems, and to see that there are other long poems as great as the ones cited above, such as “Starting from Paumanok,” “Salut au Monde,” “Song of the Open Road,” and “Passage to India”. All these poems have been re-created by us. Except for “Song of Myself”, included in our Master’s thesis, all the other poems are part of our present work. However, there are still other great poems, such as “Proud Music of the Storm,” “Prayer of Columbus,” “To Think of Time” and “There Was a Child Went Forth”, which will be left for future work, not to mention the other poems and books which have been already re-created by now.”