I met Auden only a few times, and although I wanted to, I was a little afraid of talking to him. I regret this now very much. I find it sad that the young students and poets I have met in the past four years usually seem to know only a few of his anthology pieces, rarely read him at all, and apparently never for pleasure. One reason for this may be that Auden, the most brilliant of imitators himself, has been, or was, so much imitated that his style, his details and vocabulary, the whole atmosphere of his poetry, seems overfamiliar, old hat. But when I was in college, and all through the thirties and forties, I and all my friends who were interested in poetry read him constantly. We hurried to see his latest poem or book, and either wrote as much like him as possible, or tried hard not to. His then leftist politics, his ominous landscape, his intimations of betrayed loves, war on its way, disasters and death, matched exactly the mood of our late-depression and post-depression youth. We admired his apparent toughness, his sexual courage — actually more honest than Ginsberg’s, say, is now, while still giving expression to technically dazzling poetry. Even the most hermetic early poems gave us the feeling that here was someone who knew—about psychology, geology, birds, love, the evils of capitalism — what have you? They colored our air and made us feel tough, ready, and in the know, too.
I almost always agree with Auden critically, except when he gets bogged down in his categories (and except that I haven’t yet been able to read Tolkien), and I admire almost all his poems except the later preachy ones. I’d like to quote some characteristic lines:
Doom is darker and deeper than any sea-dingle.
*
Easily my dear, you move, easily your head,
And easily as through the leaves of a photograph album I’m led
Through the night’s delights and the day’s impressions,
Past the tall tenements and the trees in the wood,
Though sombre the sixteen skies of Europe
And the Danube flood.
*
We made all possible preparations,
Drew up a list of firms,
Constantly revised our calculations
And allotted the farms …
*
For to be held for friend
By an undeveloped mind
To be joke for children is
Death’s happiness
Whose anecdotes betray
His favorite color as blue
Colour of distant bells
And boys’ overalls.
*
Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse’s flowers will not last;
Nurses to the graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.
*
From SPAIN, 1937
Many have heard it on the remote peninsulas,
On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fisherman’s islands,
In the corrupt heart of the city;
Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower.
They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes; they came to present their lives.
*
From REFUGEE BLUES
Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in;
But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, they weren’t German Jews.
Went down to the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.
Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.
These verses and many, many more of Auden’s have been part of my mind for years — I could say, part of my life.
1974
TRANSLATIONS
From The Diary of “Helena Morley”
… Thank God Carnival is over. I can’t say that it was very pleasant, because grandma beat me, something she never does.
It’s my fate that everyone who loves me makes my life miserable. The only people who have any authority over my cousins are their fathers. Oh! If only it were like that with me! My father is the person who annoys me least of all. If it hadn’t been for grandma’s and Aunt Madge’s interfering I’d have gone to the masquerade ball at the theatre. Since the age of seven I’ve dreamed of being twelve so that I could go to the ball. And now I’m almost thirteen and I’m beaten for not going!
Aunt Quequeta was the one who made me want to go to the ball, telling me about what they used to do in her day. A friend of hers put on a masquerade costume, disguised her voice, and flirted with her father all evening until he fell madly in love with her and the next day instead of coming in to lunch he kept walking around in the garden with his head hanging down, thinking of the masked woman. Another friend of hers let her husband go to the ball first and she went later, masked, flirted with him, and he fell madly in love with her, to such a degree that he kept sighing the whole evening.
My aunts still have the hoop skirts they used to wear. How I wish they still wore them! They don’t wear anything like that now, but I’d like to go like that even so.
It was my cousin Glorinha who gave me such a swelled head that I thought I could go. I asked mama and she said, “If your grandmother will let you I’ll let you.” I asked grandma, “Grandma, mama will let me go. Will you let me go to the ball with Glorinha?” she said, “I certainly will not!” I stamped my foot hard and I ran and threw myself on her bed, angry. She came in and took off her slipper and hit me twice, saying, “That’ll give you something to cry about!” I thrashed my legs around but I didn’t get up.
But it was worth it because today I got the material for a dress and a silver two milreis piece.
* * *
… Knowing that I and my sister have that failing of laughing at everything, how did papa have the courage to send a guest to our house the way he did? You can’t imagine what our life has been like with this man in the house! Papa has been in Parauna for a week. He went to see a mine that a Frenchman wants to buy and asked papa if he’d go to see if it’s worth it. There papa’s the guest of this man he sent us. But you wouldn’t believe it if I told you what his visit has been like.
We have a little Negro girl, Cesarina, very funny, who makes us laugh all the time at the things she says and does. On the day this man arrived something happened to us that couldn’t possibly happen in any other house; there were only two tallow candles in the house. When mama discovered it there weren’t any stores open. But these candles aren’t any good; they don’t last at all. One was used up before I’d even finished my lessons. Mama had the other one put in the guest room. In our house we only use kerosene in the kitchen and even the kitchen lamp was dry. When my candle came to an end I still had lessons to do, there was nothing else to do but send Cesarina to the guest room, to see if he’d gone to sleep. If he had, she was supposed to steal the candle without waking him up! She went and came back laughing so hard at finding the man still awake that she could only speak to us by making signs.
She held her hands up in the air and made spectacles with her fingers, meaning that the man had his eyes open. She made this sign and all the time she was having such a fit of the giggles that she couldn’t speak.
We are idiots about laughing. We began that night and even now we can’t look at our guest without a fit of giggling. We just have to see the man and then we remember Cesarina’s spectacles and simply burst. Mama, coitada, doesn’t know what excuse to give the man. She’s said everything except that she has two lunatics in the house.