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The Bridge
Oh la lluvia a las siete Y la paga a las once. Sonriendo mantén al jefe lejos, Mary (¿qué vas a hacer?). Pasaron Ya las siete y las once, Y yo sigo esperándote. ¡Oh, Mary, ojos azules y pañuelo burdeos, Mi Mary de los sábados! ¡Campanillas del carro De golosinas! ¡Palomas a millones, Y Prince Street en primavera, Donde brillan los higos Junto a las ostras! ¡Oh, Mary que te asomas desde el silo, Suelta tu trenza de oro! En pleno mediodía De mayo las violetas Se esparcen en cornisas de narcisos. Reinan en Bleecker bandas de trileros, Con crin de poni las peonías Y en las ventanas ¡Allá arriba, en la torre de latón, resplandece, Oh, Mary catedral, resplandece! “Virginia”, Hart Crane.
76 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1930
About the author
Hart Crane
39 books158 followersHart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio. His father, Clarence, was a successful Ohio businessman who had made his fortune in the candy business with chocolate bars. He originally held the patent for the Life Saver, but sold his interest to another businessman just before the candy became popular. Crane’s mother and father were constantly fighting, and early in April, 1917, they divorced. It was shortly thereafter that Hart dropped out of high school and headed to New York City. Between 1917 and 1924 he moved back and forth between New York and Cleveland, working as an advertising copywriter and a worker in his father’s factory. From Crane's letters, it appears that New York was where he felt most at home, and much of his poetry is set there.
Crane was gay. As a boy, he had been seduced by an older man. He associated his sexuality with his vocation as a poet. Raised in the Christian Science tradition of his mother, he never ceased to view himself as a social pariah. However, as poems such as "Repose of Rivers" make clear, he felt that this sense of alienation was necessary in order for him to attain the visionary insight that formed the basis for his poetic work.
Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings (1926), his first volume, ratified and strengthened. White Buildings contains many of Crane’s best lyrics, including "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," and a powerful sequence of erotic poems called "Voyages," written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant mariner.
"Faustus and Helen" was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet modernity with something more than despair. Crane identified T. S. Eliot with that kind of despair, and while he acknowledged the greatness of The Waste Land, he also said it was "so damned dead," an impasse, and a refusal to see "certain spiritual events and possibilities." Crane’s self-appointed work would be to bring those spiritual events and possibilities to poetic life, and so create "a mystical synthesis of America." This ambition would finally issue in The Bridge (1930), where the Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem’s central symbol and its poetic starting point.
The Bridge received poor reviews by and large, but worse was Crane’s own sense of his work's failure. It was during the late '20s, while he was finishing The Bridge, that his drinking, always a problem, became notably worse.
While on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Mexico in 1931-32, his drinking continued while he suffered from bouts of alternating depression and elation. His only heterosexual relationship - with Peggy Cowley, the soon to be ex-wife of his friend Malcolm Cowley, who joined Crane in the south when the Cowleys agreed to divorce - began here, and "The Broken Tower," one of his last published poems, emerges from that affair. Crane still felt himself a failure, though, in part because he recommenced homosexual activity in spite of his relationship with Cowley. Just before noon on 27 April 1932, while onboard the steamship SS Orizaba heading back to New York from Mexico - right after he was beaten for making sexual advances to a male crew member, which may have appeared to confirm his idea that one could not be happy as a homosexual - he committed suicide by jumping into the Gulf of Mexico. Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed Crane's intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed "Goodbye, everybody!" before throwing himself overboard.
His body was never recovered. A marker on his father's tombstone in Garrettsville includes the inscription, "Harold Hart Crane 1899-1932 LOST AT SEA".
Crane was gay. As a boy, he had been seduced by an older man. He associated his sexuality with his vocation as a poet. Raised in the Christian Science tradition of his mother, he never ceased to view himself as a social pariah. However, as poems such as "Repose of Rivers" make clear, he felt that this sense of alienation was necessary in order for him to attain the visionary insight that formed the basis for his poetic work.
Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings (1926), his first volume, ratified and strengthened. White Buildings contains many of Crane’s best lyrics, including "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," and a powerful sequence of erotic poems called "Voyages," written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant mariner.
"Faustus and Helen" was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet modernity with something more than despair. Crane identified T. S. Eliot with that kind of despair, and while he acknowledged the greatness of The Waste Land, he also said it was "so damned dead," an impasse, and a refusal to see "certain spiritual events and possibilities." Crane’s self-appointed work would be to bring those spiritual events and possibilities to poetic life, and so create "a mystical synthesis of America." This ambition would finally issue in The Bridge (1930), where the Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem’s central symbol and its poetic starting point.
The Bridge received poor reviews by and large, but worse was Crane’s own sense of his work's failure. It was during the late '20s, while he was finishing The Bridge, that his drinking, always a problem, became notably worse.
While on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Mexico in 1931-32, his drinking continued while he suffered from bouts of alternating depression and elation. His only heterosexual relationship - with Peggy Cowley, the soon to be ex-wife of his friend Malcolm Cowley, who joined Crane in the south when the Cowleys agreed to divorce - began here, and "The Broken Tower," one of his last published poems, emerges from that affair. Crane still felt himself a failure, though, in part because he recommenced homosexual activity in spite of his relationship with Cowley. Just before noon on 27 April 1932, while onboard the steamship SS Orizaba heading back to New York from Mexico - right after he was beaten for making sexual advances to a male crew member, which may have appeared to confirm his idea that one could not be happy as a homosexual - he committed suicide by jumping into the Gulf of Mexico. Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed Crane's intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed "Goodbye, everybody!" before throwing himself overboard.
His body was never recovered. A marker on his father's tombstone in Garrettsville includes the inscription, "Harold Hart Crane 1899-1932 LOST AT SEA".
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April 10, 2023
A Visionary American Poem
I have been reading the Library of America's newly-published edition of Hart Crane's (1899- 1932) complete poems. The LOA edition includes as well over 400 of Crane's letters to his family, friends, and associates. The LOA compilation of Hart Crane's writings made me want to turn again, specifically to his masterpiece, "The Bridge". I have owned the paperback edition of "The Bridge", reviewed here, for many years. It has the advantage over the LOA edition in being less bulky and in including two thoughtful introductions to help approach this difficult poem. The first introduction is by Crane's friend, the poet and critic Waldo Frank. Frank's article dates from 1932, and it is critical of "The Bridge". The second review is by Thomas Vogler. It dates from the 1970s, when this paperback was first published, and attempts to answer some of Frank's objections to the poem. The reader will need to respond to the poem for himself or herself. But I find both Frank's and Vogler's reviews suggestive and illuminating.
Crane first conceived the project of a long poem on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1923. He worked on it fitfully for six years completing in in 1929. The poem was published in 1930. Crane received financial assistance from the philanthropist Otto Kahn (1867 -- 1934) to allow him to work on "The Bridge". We are forever in Kahn's debt. Crane's work on the poem was hindered by the complexity of its themes and by severe excesses in his personal life. But Crane persevered and was able to realize his project. Crane committed suicide in 1932. A difficult and still controversial work, the Bridge has won an important place in American literature. More than that, it has long won a place in my heart.
Hart Crane wrote "The Bridge" as an answer to the pessimism and despair of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land." Crane wanted to create a vision of hope for modern life and a secular myth for the United States. He tried to do so by using the magnificent Brooklyn Bridge, engineered by Washington Roebling, as a symbol. By coincidence, Crane lived for some years in a small room in Brooklyn Heights from which he could see the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling had also lived in this same room.
In Crane's poem, the Brooklyn Bridge is a symbol of power and industrialization and of the promise it offers to modern life. But it is infinitely more. The arch of the bridge, in Crane's mythology, stretches backwards in time to the discovery of America, and further. The Bridge also stretches in space to encompass the continent in its entirety, the West, and, particularly the Mississippi River. The Brooklyn Bridge becomes, in Crane's myth, a transcendent symbol in which distinctions of time and place are obliterated in a mystic vision of self and of the United States. The myth of the poem is also highly personal, as the poet tries to come to terms with his life. In the journey of the poem, the poet leaves his lover in bed in the morning to cross the bridge. He visits a bar at the foot of the bridge and has a conversation and a drink with an old sailor before he returns home late in the evening on the subway. The poet's reflections encompass, through meditation on the Brooklyn Bridge, Columbus, Pocahontas, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, the machine age, and the poet's own life and attempt to overcome what he describes in the "Quaker Hill" section of "The Bridge" as "the curse of sundered parentage."
Crane's poem begins with a magnificent introduction "To Brooklyn Bridge" in which he announces his theme to "And of the curveship lend a myth to God." The poem closes with the mystic vision of "Atlantis", the first section of the work Crane composed in which he tries to bring his difficult vision to unity in what he describes as a "Swift peal of secular light, intrinsic Myth". Cranes's metaphorical Bridge exists in "Everpresence, beyond time,/Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star/ that bleeds infinity/ ...", as the Bridge "Whispers antiphonal in azure swing." As Crane develops his theme, the mythical Bridge is a call to transcendence, hope and reflection and to human love and the brotherhood of man.
The poem is written in varied styles and passages of beautiful blank verse alternate with colloquial passages and with passages that illustrate the depressed, debased character of modern life that Eliot described in "The Waste Land." Crane tried valiantly to overcome these negative elements in his poem. Crane's own vision included dark, despairing moments, expressed in the "Quaker Hill" and "The Tunnel" sections of "The Bridge" which the final vision of "Atlantis" struggles to incorporate.
Some of the sections of the "The Bridge", particularly "Indiana" and "Quaker Hill" were composed in haste as Crane struggled to complete his poem and are frequently regarded as weak links in the work's grand scheme. Some sections of "The Bridge" lack the immediacy and the sheer verbal beauty of Crane's earlier poems in the collection "White Buildings."
For all its difficulties and its mixed success, The Bridge never ceases to inspire me. It is a difficult and hard-won vision of the mythic, the secular, and the personal promise of American life. It was a noble effort. I urge readers of this review to explore Hart Crane's American poem, "The Bridge".
Robin Friedman
I have been reading the Library of America's newly-published edition of Hart Crane's (1899- 1932) complete poems. The LOA edition includes as well over 400 of Crane's letters to his family, friends, and associates. The LOA compilation of Hart Crane's writings made me want to turn again, specifically to his masterpiece, "The Bridge". I have owned the paperback edition of "The Bridge", reviewed here, for many years. It has the advantage over the LOA edition in being less bulky and in including two thoughtful introductions to help approach this difficult poem. The first introduction is by Crane's friend, the poet and critic Waldo Frank. Frank's article dates from 1932, and it is critical of "The Bridge". The second review is by Thomas Vogler. It dates from the 1970s, when this paperback was first published, and attempts to answer some of Frank's objections to the poem. The reader will need to respond to the poem for himself or herself. But I find both Frank's and Vogler's reviews suggestive and illuminating.
Crane first conceived the project of a long poem on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1923. He worked on it fitfully for six years completing in in 1929. The poem was published in 1930. Crane received financial assistance from the philanthropist Otto Kahn (1867 -- 1934) to allow him to work on "The Bridge". We are forever in Kahn's debt. Crane's work on the poem was hindered by the complexity of its themes and by severe excesses in his personal life. But Crane persevered and was able to realize his project. Crane committed suicide in 1932. A difficult and still controversial work, the Bridge has won an important place in American literature. More than that, it has long won a place in my heart.
Hart Crane wrote "The Bridge" as an answer to the pessimism and despair of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land." Crane wanted to create a vision of hope for modern life and a secular myth for the United States. He tried to do so by using the magnificent Brooklyn Bridge, engineered by Washington Roebling, as a symbol. By coincidence, Crane lived for some years in a small room in Brooklyn Heights from which he could see the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling had also lived in this same room.
In Crane's poem, the Brooklyn Bridge is a symbol of power and industrialization and of the promise it offers to modern life. But it is infinitely more. The arch of the bridge, in Crane's mythology, stretches backwards in time to the discovery of America, and further. The Bridge also stretches in space to encompass the continent in its entirety, the West, and, particularly the Mississippi River. The Brooklyn Bridge becomes, in Crane's myth, a transcendent symbol in which distinctions of time and place are obliterated in a mystic vision of self and of the United States. The myth of the poem is also highly personal, as the poet tries to come to terms with his life. In the journey of the poem, the poet leaves his lover in bed in the morning to cross the bridge. He visits a bar at the foot of the bridge and has a conversation and a drink with an old sailor before he returns home late in the evening on the subway. The poet's reflections encompass, through meditation on the Brooklyn Bridge, Columbus, Pocahontas, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, the machine age, and the poet's own life and attempt to overcome what he describes in the "Quaker Hill" section of "The Bridge" as "the curse of sundered parentage."
Crane's poem begins with a magnificent introduction "To Brooklyn Bridge" in which he announces his theme to "And of the curveship lend a myth to God." The poem closes with the mystic vision of "Atlantis", the first section of the work Crane composed in which he tries to bring his difficult vision to unity in what he describes as a "Swift peal of secular light, intrinsic Myth". Cranes's metaphorical Bridge exists in "Everpresence, beyond time,/Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star/ that bleeds infinity/ ...", as the Bridge "Whispers antiphonal in azure swing." As Crane develops his theme, the mythical Bridge is a call to transcendence, hope and reflection and to human love and the brotherhood of man.
The poem is written in varied styles and passages of beautiful blank verse alternate with colloquial passages and with passages that illustrate the depressed, debased character of modern life that Eliot described in "The Waste Land." Crane tried valiantly to overcome these negative elements in his poem. Crane's own vision included dark, despairing moments, expressed in the "Quaker Hill" and "The Tunnel" sections of "The Bridge" which the final vision of "Atlantis" struggles to incorporate.
Some of the sections of the "The Bridge", particularly "Indiana" and "Quaker Hill" were composed in haste as Crane struggled to complete his poem and are frequently regarded as weak links in the work's grand scheme. Some sections of "The Bridge" lack the immediacy and the sheer verbal beauty of Crane's earlier poems in the collection "White Buildings."
For all its difficulties and its mixed success, The Bridge never ceases to inspire me. It is a difficult and hard-won vision of the mythic, the secular, and the personal promise of American life. It was a noble effort. I urge readers of this review to explore Hart Crane's American poem, "The Bridge".
Robin Friedman
May 11, 2018
The Bridge (1930) is a long poem seven years in the making. It was written under several varieties of duress, alcoholism and despair chief among them, by a poet who would, within two years of his masterpiece's composition, take his own life at the age of 32. All the more remarkable, then, that it was a brief epic intended as an affirmation—a rebuttal to T. S. Eliot's epoch-making 1922 poem, The Waste Land, which adumbrated the modernist's sense of his times as an "immense panorama of futility and anarchy" ("Ulysses, Order, and Myth"). Crane was a follower of Whitman and Emerson, a latter-day Transcendentalist, and wished to write a poem that would be "a mystical synthesis of 'America.'"
In a review of Crane's 1926 volume, White Buildings, I noted the difficulties of reading this poet: it is not so much, as with Eliot or Pound or Joyce, a matter of recondite allusion as it is his commitment to a high style combining Elizabethan grandeur with modernist abstraction. Crane's words seem to live a life of their own, decoupled not only from easily understood reference (as in, say, Gertrude Stein), but also sometimes from conventions of grammar or usage. This is no less true of The Bridge than of White Buildings, and I will confess before a begin a commentary that there are a number of lines and passages I do not claim to understand. I am confident, though, that Crane intended his work as much to be experienced as a roiling verbal sea as he did for it to be decrypted—he was a Late Romantic, meaning to move us, to entrance us, to overwhelm us, more than to involve us in linguistic puzzles. In any case, even a first reading is enough for a reader to get the drift (the "sea drift," Whitman might have said) of The Bridge.
The epic begins with a proem, "To Brooklyn Bridge," announcing the topic, tone, and theme. Crane imagines the eponymous structure, with its suspension wires like an instrument's strings, as an Aeolian harp, that celebrated trope of the Romantics. Coleridge and Shelley saw a likeness between the poet's service as a medium making ambient spiritual forces articulate, and the Aeolian harp's transformation of the wind into eerie music.[1] The proem concludes by advising the bridge to "lend a myth to God"—in other words, and contra Eliot & Co., modernity is not a declension from an older spiritual wholeness, but a force capable of making its own spirit and forms of worship.
The first section, "Ave Maria," is a fierce dramatic monologue spoken by Christopher Columbus on his return voyage, lauding God and the Virgin for guiding him to "Cathay" (i.e., China, the intended destination), before sounding blasphemously like Dante's and Tennyson's Ulysses: "still one shore beyond desire!"
The next division is named for Pocahontas, "Powhatan's Daughter," and offers a morning montage, from the poet's waking with his lover, allegorically both the titular Algonquin princess and America itself, in "The Harbor Dawn" ("a forest shudders in your hair") to a brilliant scene of Rip van Winkle walking modern New York streets:
The next division is "Cutty Sark," a tribute to Melville wherein the speaker encounters an old salt in South Street Seaport speakeasy: "Murmurs of Leviathan he spoke, / and rum was Plato in our heads…" Another great American writer appears in the next division—my favorite and perhaps the most intricately organized; in "Cape Hatteras," the speaker both encounters Walt Whitman and recounts the history of aviation, both the man and the science undergoing the same transformation from hope and promise (Song of Myself, the Wright Brothers) to violence, death, and despair (Whitman as wound dresser, aviation as Great War death from the air). Crane's verse in this section goes from daring Futurism—
"Three Songs" gives three glimpses into different aspects of American life and desire, most notably a garish poem set in a burlesque theater ("Yet, to the empty trapeze of your flesh, / O Magdalene, each comes back to die alone"), and "Quaker Hill" provides an Eliotic (even unfortunately anti-Semitic) elegy over the decay from Quaker to commercial values in American life: "This was the Promised Land," the speaker laments, before noting an "ancient" table purchased at a cut rate by "Powitzky" at "Adams' auction."
Penultimately is "The Tunnel," a Homeric/Virgilian/Dantean subway katabasis where the poet, who had earlier soared with Whitman, now travels underground with Poe:
Whitman's greater accessibility is obvious: while his use of language was original in its context, it does not depend on extensive allusion. Similarly, while the earlier poet makes creative use of lexis and syntax, he rarely becomes so abstract as to be incomprehensible, as Crane's does. Whitman is simply easier to read. Moreover, Whitman was writing in the nineteenth century, when it was still possible to take progress for granted, to see technological change as portending new wonders, to imagine that atrocities like slavery—often Gothicized by nineteenth-century American liberal writers (both white and black) as a feudal or even Catholic remainder—would be trampled in the march of progress and left in the dust. A progressive case in the aftermath of the Great War is less immediately creditable.
Eliot's greater distinction is more of a mystery, except for the cynical explanation that he and his cohort (especially the impresario Pound) were much better publicists than Crane. For one thing, The Waste Land alludes to texts and ideas far more obscure, then and now, than anything in The Bridge: Eliot sends us, often in multiple languages, to Frazier's anthropology, minor Jacobean drama, and ancient Sanskrit scriptures, while Crane's primary allusions are to historical figures and classic writers that every American high-schooler knows: Columbus, Pocahontas, and the Wright Brothers; Poe, Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman. Moreover, doesn't Crane's ultimate celebration of American possibility and progressive modernity fit in better with our civic religion, our incorrigible patriotism?
But perhaps these last two points are actually the problem: Eliot's greater obscurity—which he both called attention to and partially helped to dispel when he annotated his own poem—is appealing to readers who want to feel as if they are being let in on a great secret. (This was in part, if I may be so crass, half the sales pitch of modernism.) Eliot's seemingly greater difficulty is less trouble to decode—a matter of looking up references and translations, most of them provided by the poet himself—whereas Crane's verbal surface, allusions aside, is often unintelligible no matter what research you do, which make you feel less intelligent as a reader.
Politically, Eliot's conservative lament over the ruins of modernity allows him perceptions of social damage that even—or especially—the left accepts today: consider his prescient depiction in "The Fire Sermon" of a female typist being date-raped by a clerk, the scene witnessed and narrated by a mythically non-binary seer mourning the wounds inflicted by gender. Crane, by contrast, and despite his own stigmatized queerness and the poem's homoerotic subtext, strikes the old poetic pose, going back to Dante and Petrarch and the Troubadours, of a male speaker and agent seeking consummation with a mute, abstract bride, a quest object as inert as its vulvic counterpart, the Holy Grail. The reactionary Eliot is here the true feminist and postmodernist, while the progressive Crane masculinizes and medievalizes.[3]
Even taking into account all of the above, The Bridge is magnificent. More than magnificent, it might even be exemplary. Shelley, in his "Defence of Poetry," tasks modern poets not with turning their backs on the rapid changes in a scientific and industrial or post-industrial culture but with aestheticizing these dizzying shifts so that the imagination, fully as much as the reasoning faculty, may have access to them:
______________________
[1] This, by the way, is what "Romantic genius" means—the poet as receptive vessel, not as commanding—still less a swaggering—intelligence. Most of today's attacks on "Romantic genius" are assailing a straw man.
[2] The sexual politics of the poem are mixed—or maybe even deliberately split along exoteric-esoteric lines. For the hoi polloi Crane provides a poetic speaker seeking union with the bridge as holy bride and moreover traversing an American landscape feminized since the English Renaissance poetry of Donne and Drayton ("whose is the flesh our feet have moved upon?"); but for the insider, the poet's wanderings are a mythologized cruising near waterfronts and in speakeasies, a testament to occulted queer living.
[3] Perhaps a parable for the present: literary attempts to be politically up-to-the-minute, to be "on the right side of history," not only fail to guarantee literary quality but cannot even promise permanent political value according to progressive standards themselves.
In a review of Crane's 1926 volume, White Buildings, I noted the difficulties of reading this poet: it is not so much, as with Eliot or Pound or Joyce, a matter of recondite allusion as it is his commitment to a high style combining Elizabethan grandeur with modernist abstraction. Crane's words seem to live a life of their own, decoupled not only from easily understood reference (as in, say, Gertrude Stein), but also sometimes from conventions of grammar or usage. This is no less true of The Bridge than of White Buildings, and I will confess before a begin a commentary that there are a number of lines and passages I do not claim to understand. I am confident, though, that Crane intended his work as much to be experienced as a roiling verbal sea as he did for it to be decrypted—he was a Late Romantic, meaning to move us, to entrance us, to overwhelm us, more than to involve us in linguistic puzzles. In any case, even a first reading is enough for a reader to get the drift (the "sea drift," Whitman might have said) of The Bridge.
The epic begins with a proem, "To Brooklyn Bridge," announcing the topic, tone, and theme. Crane imagines the eponymous structure, with its suspension wires like an instrument's strings, as an Aeolian harp, that celebrated trope of the Romantics. Coleridge and Shelley saw a likeness between the poet's service as a medium making ambient spiritual forces articulate, and the Aeolian harp's transformation of the wind into eerie music.[1] The proem concludes by advising the bridge to "lend a myth to God"—in other words, and contra Eliot & Co., modernity is not a declension from an older spiritual wholeness, but a force capable of making its own spirit and forms of worship.
The first section, "Ave Maria," is a fierce dramatic monologue spoken by Christopher Columbus on his return voyage, lauding God and the Virgin for guiding him to "Cathay" (i.e., China, the intended destination), before sounding blasphemously like Dante's and Tennyson's Ulysses: "still one shore beyond desire!"
The next division is named for Pocahontas, "Powhatan's Daughter," and offers a morning montage, from the poet's waking with his lover, allegorically both the titular Algonquin princess and America itself, in "The Harbor Dawn" ("a forest shudders in your hair") to a brilliant scene of Rip van Winkle walking modern New York streets:
And Rip forgot the office hours,Next we follow "The River" and the laboring or lumpen life of America's "ancient men—wifeless or runaway / Hobo-trekkers that forever search / An empire wilderness of freight and rails." The section next envisions the poet's (to me obscure) participation in a Native American dance and fusion of a Pocahontas-like figure with the "eternal feminine" for which America stands[2]:
and he forgot the pay;
Van Winkle sweeps a tenement
way down on Avenue A,—
High unto Labrador the sun strikes freeNote that all these juxtapositions serve Crane to achieve his "synthesis" as different cultural elements come together: Catholic and Protestant Christianity, Native American culture, and Romantic literature. Finally, the division ends with "Indiana," a pioneer woman's moving monologue—generally judged mawkish and extraneous by critics for whom modern poetry is not supposed to tell a coherent story or share a legible emotion—to her peregrine son: "oh, I shall always wait / You Larry, traveller— / stranger, / son, / —my friend—"
Her speechless dream of snow, and stirred again,
She is the torrent and the singing tree;
And she is virgin to the last of men…
The next division is "Cutty Sark," a tribute to Melville wherein the speaker encounters an old salt in South Street Seaport speakeasy: "Murmurs of Leviathan he spoke, / and rum was Plato in our heads…" Another great American writer appears in the next division—my favorite and perhaps the most intricately organized; in "Cape Hatteras," the speaker both encounters Walt Whitman and recounts the history of aviation, both the man and the science undergoing the same transformation from hope and promise (Song of Myself, the Wright Brothers) to violence, death, and despair (Whitman as wound dresser, aviation as Great War death from the air). Crane's verse in this section goes from daring Futurism—
Thine eyes bicarbonated white by speed, O Skygak, see—to moving tribute: "yes, Walt, / Afoot again, and onward without halt,— / Not soon, nor suddenly,—no, never let go / My hand / in yours, / Walt Whitman— / so—"
How from thy path above the levin's lance
Thou sowest doom thou has nor time nor chance
To reckon—as thy stilly eyes partake
What alcohol of space…!
"Three Songs" gives three glimpses into different aspects of American life and desire, most notably a garish poem set in a burlesque theater ("Yet, to the empty trapeze of your flesh, / O Magdalene, each comes back to die alone"), and "Quaker Hill" provides an Eliotic (even unfortunately anti-Semitic) elegy over the decay from Quaker to commercial values in American life: "This was the Promised Land," the speaker laments, before noting an "ancient" table purchased at a cut rate by "Powitzky" at "Adams' auction."
Penultimately is "The Tunnel," a Homeric/Virgilian/Dantean subway katabasis where the poet, who had earlier soared with Whitman, now travels underground with Poe:
And why do I often meet your visage here,Here the demographic and social shifts in American urban life are hymned, a new myth of fecundity, as Crane looks upon, let us say, my great-grandmother with a kindlier eye than Eliot (or Pound or James or Lovecraft or etc.) ever did:
Your eyes like agate lanterns—on and on
Below the toothpaste and the dandruff ads?
—And did their riding eyes right through your side,
And did their eyes like unwashed platters ride?
And Death, aloft,—gigantically down
Probing through you—toward me, O evermore!
And when they dragged your retching flesh,
Your trembling hands that night through Baltimore—
That last night on the ballot rounds, did you,
Shaking, did you deny the ticket, Poe?
And does the Daemon take you home, also,Finally, the whole poem ends with "Atlantis," reprising the theme of bridge as Aeolian harp, giving voice to all America:
Wop washerwoman, with the bandaged hair?
After the corridors are swept, the cuspidors—
The gaunt sky-barracks cleanly now, and bare,
O Genoese, do you bring mother eyes and hands
Back home to children and to golden hair?
And through that cordage, threading with its callThe Bridge has never had the prestige of either its admired precursor, Whitman's Song of Myself, or its polemical target, Eliot's Waste Land. Consider two data points: 1. Whitman's and Eliot's poems are printed whole in the canon-defining Norton Anthology textbook, while Crane's is present only in brief excerpts; 2. a fully annotated scholarly edition of The Bridge was only published in the current decade, over eighty years after the poem's first appearance.
One arc synoptic of all tides below—
Their labyrinthine mouths of history
Pouring reply as though all ships at sea
Complighted in one vibrant breath made cry,—
“Make thy love sure—to weave whose song we ply!”
—From black embankments, moveless soundings hailed,
So seven oceans answer from their dream.
Whitman's greater accessibility is obvious: while his use of language was original in its context, it does not depend on extensive allusion. Similarly, while the earlier poet makes creative use of lexis and syntax, he rarely becomes so abstract as to be incomprehensible, as Crane's does. Whitman is simply easier to read. Moreover, Whitman was writing in the nineteenth century, when it was still possible to take progress for granted, to see technological change as portending new wonders, to imagine that atrocities like slavery—often Gothicized by nineteenth-century American liberal writers (both white and black) as a feudal or even Catholic remainder—would be trampled in the march of progress and left in the dust. A progressive case in the aftermath of the Great War is less immediately creditable.
Eliot's greater distinction is more of a mystery, except for the cynical explanation that he and his cohort (especially the impresario Pound) were much better publicists than Crane. For one thing, The Waste Land alludes to texts and ideas far more obscure, then and now, than anything in The Bridge: Eliot sends us, often in multiple languages, to Frazier's anthropology, minor Jacobean drama, and ancient Sanskrit scriptures, while Crane's primary allusions are to historical figures and classic writers that every American high-schooler knows: Columbus, Pocahontas, and the Wright Brothers; Poe, Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman. Moreover, doesn't Crane's ultimate celebration of American possibility and progressive modernity fit in better with our civic religion, our incorrigible patriotism?
But perhaps these last two points are actually the problem: Eliot's greater obscurity—which he both called attention to and partially helped to dispel when he annotated his own poem—is appealing to readers who want to feel as if they are being let in on a great secret. (This was in part, if I may be so crass, half the sales pitch of modernism.) Eliot's seemingly greater difficulty is less trouble to decode—a matter of looking up references and translations, most of them provided by the poet himself—whereas Crane's verbal surface, allusions aside, is often unintelligible no matter what research you do, which make you feel less intelligent as a reader.
Politically, Eliot's conservative lament over the ruins of modernity allows him perceptions of social damage that even—or especially—the left accepts today: consider his prescient depiction in "The Fire Sermon" of a female typist being date-raped by a clerk, the scene witnessed and narrated by a mythically non-binary seer mourning the wounds inflicted by gender. Crane, by contrast, and despite his own stigmatized queerness and the poem's homoerotic subtext, strikes the old poetic pose, going back to Dante and Petrarch and the Troubadours, of a male speaker and agent seeking consummation with a mute, abstract bride, a quest object as inert as its vulvic counterpart, the Holy Grail. The reactionary Eliot is here the true feminist and postmodernist, while the progressive Crane masculinizes and medievalizes.[3]
Even taking into account all of the above, The Bridge is magnificent. More than magnificent, it might even be exemplary. Shelley, in his "Defence of Poetry," tasks modern poets not with turning their backs on the rapid changes in a scientific and industrial or post-industrial culture but with aestheticizing these dizzying shifts so that the imagination, fully as much as the reasoning faculty, may have access to them:
We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest.This is what Crane tries to do by articulating the "intrinsic Myth" that the Brooklyn Bridge is. He was writing, moreover, in the 1920s, which was in some spiritual sense the first decade of the twentieth century. As we approach our own century's first decade—and these last few years are the first years that have felt like "the future" to me, something radically different both for worse and for better from the years in which I grew up—we could do worse than to emulate Hart Crane.
______________________
[1] This, by the way, is what "Romantic genius" means—the poet as receptive vessel, not as commanding—still less a swaggering—intelligence. Most of today's attacks on "Romantic genius" are assailing a straw man.
[2] The sexual politics of the poem are mixed—or maybe even deliberately split along exoteric-esoteric lines. For the hoi polloi Crane provides a poetic speaker seeking union with the bridge as holy bride and moreover traversing an American landscape feminized since the English Renaissance poetry of Donne and Drayton ("whose is the flesh our feet have moved upon?"); but for the insider, the poet's wanderings are a mythologized cruising near waterfronts and in speakeasies, a testament to occulted queer living.
[3] Perhaps a parable for the present: literary attempts to be politically up-to-the-minute, to be "on the right side of history," not only fail to guarantee literary quality but cannot even promise permanent political value according to progressive standards themselves.
August 16, 2019
TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE -
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty
Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
Till elevators drop us from our day...
I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some fashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;
And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,-
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!
Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.
Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip.tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.
And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.
O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,-
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path - condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty
Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
Till elevators drop us from our day...
I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some fashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;
And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,-
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!
Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.
Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip.tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.
And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.
O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,-
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path - condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
January 22, 2024
As if smoke were swirling through the yellow chestnut glade.
August 5, 2021
Roll over Thomas Stearns Eliot, my dear, for there is another contender to the throne for 'greatest modernist poet' (of the 20th Century).
This work is simply......sublime. So intricately exquisite both in its language and its inter-relatedness, references, the welding of mythology and reality, the 'bridges' between the past and the present and possibly to the future, the underlying hidden lingual and sublingual and sometimes bilingual puns throughout the whole work (another type of 'bridge' in the work), not to mention the searingly beautiful poesy that is a constant throughout. And I could go on forever lauding this work, but I won't.
If you have ANY interest in reading a great work of modernist poetry, then go no further - THIS is IT.
Sure, you can have your Waste Land and eat it too but if you want to experience something approaching the divine, then I recommend this book most wholeheartedly.
As for the annotations in this edition, while they are not what I would call 'exhaustive' or 'exhausting' by any means, they are most certainly adequate.
I'm giving 5 stars for Hart Crane and this beautiful work of art, which really ranks up there as highly as anything in the Louvre or the London Museum. 4 stars for the annotations because there were a few parts where annotations were missing (just to cite 2 examples off the top of my head, obvious references to William Carlos Williams and Pound that were not mentioned and references to scenes from the New Testament such as the boys shooting craps obviously referring to the soldiers gambling over Christ's clothes etc.)..... However, these are minor gripes and do not spoil the reader's enjoyment.
The Bridge is a vast epic-poem of magnificent splendour, depth and beauty - now with this annotation edition (hopefully updated and expanded in future), you can now take the breath-taking plunge along with Crane and see what poetry is really capable of as a veritable art form in its own right.
Possibly my favourite work of poetry.....of all time, the only work that comes close, in my mind, is Bob Kaufman's The Ancient Rain.
The Bridge is simply.....and....unforgettably......marvelous.
Thank you Hart Crane - you may be gone but as long as there are people in the world interested in poetry, your work most certainly will live on......Salud!
This work is simply......sublime. So intricately exquisite both in its language and its inter-relatedness, references, the welding of mythology and reality, the 'bridges' between the past and the present and possibly to the future, the underlying hidden lingual and sublingual and sometimes bilingual puns throughout the whole work (another type of 'bridge' in the work), not to mention the searingly beautiful poesy that is a constant throughout. And I could go on forever lauding this work, but I won't.
If you have ANY interest in reading a great work of modernist poetry, then go no further - THIS is IT.
Sure, you can have your Waste Land and eat it too but if you want to experience something approaching the divine, then I recommend this book most wholeheartedly.
As for the annotations in this edition, while they are not what I would call 'exhaustive' or 'exhausting' by any means, they are most certainly adequate.
I'm giving 5 stars for Hart Crane and this beautiful work of art, which really ranks up there as highly as anything in the Louvre or the London Museum. 4 stars for the annotations because there were a few parts where annotations were missing (just to cite 2 examples off the top of my head, obvious references to William Carlos Williams and Pound that were not mentioned and references to scenes from the New Testament such as the boys shooting craps obviously referring to the soldiers gambling over Christ's clothes etc.)..... However, these are minor gripes and do not spoil the reader's enjoyment.
The Bridge is a vast epic-poem of magnificent splendour, depth and beauty - now with this annotation edition (hopefully updated and expanded in future), you can now take the breath-taking plunge along with Crane and see what poetry is really capable of as a veritable art form in its own right.
Possibly my favourite work of poetry.....of all time, the only work that comes close, in my mind, is Bob Kaufman's The Ancient Rain.
The Bridge is simply.....and....unforgettably......marvelous.
Thank you Hart Crane - you may be gone but as long as there are people in the world interested in poetry, your work most certainly will live on......Salud!
August 8, 2023
Que surpresa tão extraordinária. Julguei que Hart Crane iria colar-se a Walt Whitman, mas não. Whitman é quase só descritivo, próximo de uma apologia da vida redentora. Crane tem mais pathos, joga com a dimensão do tempo e da escatologia. Desce aos infernos com Dante e termina com a suavidade de uma presença eterna, na qual parece desaguar a sua própria morte (aliás, atirou-se mesmo às águas). Se pensarmos que viveu somente 33 anos (a mítica idade de Cristo), este livro ainda nos parecerá mais extraordinário. Há versos aqui que não têm preço.
May 17, 2018
I read the annotated version, which is a must. But now I know in order to fully understand the poem, I need to read Ovid, Dante, Virgil, Blake, Shelly, Whitman (at least "Leaves of Grass" and "Song of Myself"), Eliot's "The Waste Land", Plato's "Symposium", Ulysses, Paradise Lost, the complete autobiography of Isadora Duncan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, some Edgar Allen Poe, some Baudelaire, specifically "The Albatross", and then go back to this. No.. not really. But consider that a plug for the annotated version.
March 4, 2020
Crane's answer to T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland. It's quite a read, skillful but not wholly enjoyable.
January 29, 2011
I read this a few years ago and remembered exactly none of it. That's usually a bad sign, either for the poet in question or the reader in question. I'll leave that to wiser heads.
However, this poem is close to incomprehensible, but also wildly cool at points, though no less incomprehensible for it. I would say Crane is about one fourth Whitman and three fourths Eliot, but the least approachable versions of each.
O caught like pennies beneath soot and steam,
Kiss of our agony thou gatherest;
Condensed, thou takest all-- shrill ganglia
Impassioned with some song we fail to keep.
And yet, like Lazarus, to feel the slope,
The sod and billow breaking,-- lifting ground,
--A sound of waters bending astride the sky
Unceasing with some Word that will not die...!
If you're feeling brave, read this guy. Then, um, tell me what he means.
However, this poem is close to incomprehensible, but also wildly cool at points, though no less incomprehensible for it. I would say Crane is about one fourth Whitman and three fourths Eliot, but the least approachable versions of each.
O caught like pennies beneath soot and steam,
Kiss of our agony thou gatherest;
Condensed, thou takest all-- shrill ganglia
Impassioned with some song we fail to keep.
And yet, like Lazarus, to feel the slope,
The sod and billow breaking,-- lifting ground,
--A sound of waters bending astride the sky
Unceasing with some Word that will not die...!
If you're feeling brave, read this guy. Then, um, tell me what he means.
June 11, 2015
Swift peal of secular light, intrinsic Myth
Whose fell unshadow is death’s utter wound,—
O River-throated—iridescently upborne
Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins;
With white escarpments swinging into light,
Sustained in tears the cities are endowed
And justified conclamant with ripe fields
Revolving through their harvests in sweet torment.
Añado que esta edición en texto bilingüe publicada en Pre-textos me resultó particularmente lograda :)
Whose fell unshadow is death’s utter wound,—
O River-throated—iridescently upborne
Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins;
With white escarpments swinging into light,
Sustained in tears the cities are endowed
And justified conclamant with ripe fields
Revolving through their harvests in sweet torment.
Añado que esta edición en texto bilingüe publicada en Pre-textos me resultó particularmente lograda :)
June 29, 2013
This collection contains some of the most incredible poetry this side of Whitman.
December 13, 2019
Crane’s views of America and modernity draw on romanticism’s worst tropes - mysticism, unity, progressivism, nationalism.
November 14, 2022
Nos últimos anos, tem havido um crescimento invulgar na publicação de traduções de poesia, com incidência na área do modernismo anglo-americano. Várias circunstâncias favorecem e justificam este desenvolvimento. Por um lado, o ensino superior tem vindo a fornecer a mão-de-obra necessária, ao diplomar cada vez mais tradutores. Por outro, o copyright de muitos autores modernistas expirou já, ou está em vias disso, tornando-se livre a sua publicação. Finalmente, há um público leitor feito de estudantes, académicos e licenciados na área anglo-americana, para além de amantes da poesia em geral.
Dentre as editoras que tomaram a seu cargo esta tarefa de tradução, destacam-se duas, quer pelo volume de lançamentos, quer pela qualidade: a Assírio & Alvim e a Relógio d'Água. A primeira, nas suas coleções Documenta Poética e Gato Maltês trouxe-nos Whitman, Auden, Blake, Pound, Eliot, Cummings, entre outros. A segunda oferece um leque de autores mais comedido, mas não menos interessante: Lawrence, Pound, e, mais recentemente, The Bridge/A Ponte de Hart Crane, pela mão de Maria de Lourdes Guimarães, com uma introdução de Laureano Silveira (Lisboa: Relógio de Água, 1995).
Randolph Quirk afirmou que traduzir poesia é sempre uma aventura, um risco e um trabalho de complexidade. Já por isso, o atrevimento de Guimarães merece um aplauso. Na especificidade de Crane, o bardo que cantou a América modernista e tratou esteticamente os mitos da nação, diversos obstáculos e complexidades podem ser encontrados, e também nessa área Guimarães se revelou afoita.
No que respeita à língua, a curta extensão das palavras e certas expressões idiomáticas podem originar algumas dificuldades. O inglês é um idioma em que os vocábulos são vulgarmente monossilábicos ou dissilábicos. Assim, a sua tradução na nossa língua, em boa parte trissilábica, ocasiona versos mais extensos e consequentemente obriga o tradutor a procurar novos ritmos para as frases — aquilo que João Almeida Flor, no prefácio da sua tradução A Canção de Amor de J. Alfred Prufrock, designa por “uma ordem de construção musical”.
Ao nível do sentido: as ambivalências sexuais; a plurissignificação de termos, com uma face muitas vezes ligada à economia; as referências culturais à mitologia ameríndia ou outras e a vocábulos do mundo financeiro e comercial (por exemplo, marcas de produtos) obrigam a um trabalho de pesquisa para compreender o texto como um organismo no espaço e no tempo.
Intertextualmente: a quantidade de alusões e citações que Crane faz de outros escritores do cânone norte-americano, com particular destaque para Whitman, Poe e Dickinson, suscitariam processo semelhante na língua de chegada: o que é, naturalmente impossível.
Quanto à forma, é notória a complexidade em traduzir Crane, sobretudo na sonoridade e nos inúmeros jogos de palavras, como Paul Giles evidenciou no seu estudo de The Bridge. A semelhança fónica, por exemplo, no verso inicial, entre “How many dawns” e “Harmony dawns” é intraduzível.
É credível pensar que Maria de Lourdes Guimarães tenha experimentado todas estas dificuldades, e venceu-as com algum talento e experiência, pelo que, em termos gerais, a sua tradução emerge como positiva: a leitura agrada, o texto não parece forçado ritmicamente, os poemas soam bem e não causam prurido a um leitor menos conhecedor de Crane.
Porém, um problema revelou-se menos bem resolvido por esta tradutora. A tarefa de traduzir implica uma boa e fundamentada interpretação — Próspero Saíz afirma que aqui reside a essência e a inevitabilidade desta tarefa. Assim, um tradutor deve recorrer à bibliografia disponível, informando-se sobre tudo quanto possa vir a ser útil no trabalho de descodificação: vida e obra do autor; recensões ao texto; reflexões sobre a obra, etc.
Contudo, a tradução de Guimarães carece de algum trabalho de exegese preparatório. Um erro evidente ocorre em “Indiana”: neste poema, o sujeito poético é uma mãe pioneira que relata um episódio marcante na sua migração, mas Guimarães apresenta-nos uma voz ora masculina, ora feminina a contar a história: “Fiz-te parar — eu, repentinamente o mais arrojado / (...) / Ainda aqui estou, velha, como se fosse quase de pedra”. Outro erro de interpretação ocorre no poema “Southern Cross”. Guimarães intitula-o de “A Cruz do Sul”. Obviamente, não identifica o título com a constelação invocada por Crane — o Cruzeiro do Sul. Sem este dado, o poema pode tornar-se confuso para o leitor. Ainda a propósito de títulos, devo referir que a tradução de “National Winter Garden” por “Jardim Público de Inverno” pode originar problemas. Na realidade, o National Winter Garden não era um espaço verde mas um bar, como esclarece Giles. Por outro lado, a palavra “nacional” (em vez de “público”) é importante aqui, porque o poema se constitui como uma crítica à nação, à América de Crane.
Um outro fator negativo diz respeito à adequação do texto traduzido ao registo do texto original. Na realidade, ao longo do poema “Atlantis” perde-se algum do tom grandiloquente da linguagem que Crane aí aplica.
Por vezes, na tradução de Guimarães, ocorre um desaproveitamento de oportunidades. Se o poema está impregnado de mitos — e aqui reside a sua singularidade —, a tradução deve também recorrer a vocábulos pertencentes ao campo semântico do espiritual. Só assim a perda do sentido que ocorre necessariamente numa tradução poderá ser compensada.
Darei apenas três exemplos. No poema “To Brooklyn Bridge”, o termo “elevator” é traduzido por Guimarães como “elevador”. Obviamente, perdem-se as conotações míticas, pelo que seria preferível utilizar o termo “ascensor”, recordando “ascese” ou “ascensão” e vincando assim a interseção entre o plano horizontal (humano) e o vertical (divino). Outro caso: Guimarães faz corresponder “madrugadas” à palavra “dawns”. De novo, um desaproveitamento conotativo. O vocábulo “auroras” era mais correto, por remeter para a deusa Aurora, reforçando a componente divina. Ainda nesta linha, a imagem “beading thy path” seria mais significativamente traduzida por “rosário de contas no teu caminho” (lembrando o terço) do que por “ornando o teu caminho”. Em suma, teria sido importante trazer para a língua de chegada todas as ambivalências de significado possíveis, para assim manter a fecundidade literária, a “réepression” ou “déverbalisation”.
Parece-me importante referir ainda um outro aspeto. Guimarães preocupa-se demasiado em respeitar a sintaxe de Crane. O autor recorre com frequência a inversões e anástrofes para conseguir a rima e a cadência — nomeadamente, no poema “Cape Hatteras”. Não existindo rima na tradução, seria desnecessário sujeitar o texto às mesmas contorções. No entanto, Guimarães não teve em conta o princípio da naturalidade, e “Cabo Hatteras” emerge como esteticamente pouco agradável, porque submetido a demasiadas anástrofes e hipérbatos. Teria sido uma excelente oportunidade para optar por uma tradução mais livre, seguindo o conselho de Octávio Paz: desviar-se do texto original para o traçar com mais precisão.
No entanto, um balanço final da tradução de Maria de Lourdes Guimarães não poderá deixar de ser positivo. Apesar de algumas falhas, a tradutora fez um bom trabalho, nem demasiado literal, nem excessivamente livre, obtendo um texto de chegada agradável, e fazendo justiça a um autor que só nos últimos trinta anos recebeu a necessária atenção.
João de Mancelos
Dentre as editoras que tomaram a seu cargo esta tarefa de tradução, destacam-se duas, quer pelo volume de lançamentos, quer pela qualidade: a Assírio & Alvim e a Relógio d'Água. A primeira, nas suas coleções Documenta Poética e Gato Maltês trouxe-nos Whitman, Auden, Blake, Pound, Eliot, Cummings, entre outros. A segunda oferece um leque de autores mais comedido, mas não menos interessante: Lawrence, Pound, e, mais recentemente, The Bridge/A Ponte de Hart Crane, pela mão de Maria de Lourdes Guimarães, com uma introdução de Laureano Silveira (Lisboa: Relógio de Água, 1995).
Randolph Quirk afirmou que traduzir poesia é sempre uma aventura, um risco e um trabalho de complexidade. Já por isso, o atrevimento de Guimarães merece um aplauso. Na especificidade de Crane, o bardo que cantou a América modernista e tratou esteticamente os mitos da nação, diversos obstáculos e complexidades podem ser encontrados, e também nessa área Guimarães se revelou afoita.
No que respeita à língua, a curta extensão das palavras e certas expressões idiomáticas podem originar algumas dificuldades. O inglês é um idioma em que os vocábulos são vulgarmente monossilábicos ou dissilábicos. Assim, a sua tradução na nossa língua, em boa parte trissilábica, ocasiona versos mais extensos e consequentemente obriga o tradutor a procurar novos ritmos para as frases — aquilo que João Almeida Flor, no prefácio da sua tradução A Canção de Amor de J. Alfred Prufrock, designa por “uma ordem de construção musical”.
Ao nível do sentido: as ambivalências sexuais; a plurissignificação de termos, com uma face muitas vezes ligada à economia; as referências culturais à mitologia ameríndia ou outras e a vocábulos do mundo financeiro e comercial (por exemplo, marcas de produtos) obrigam a um trabalho de pesquisa para compreender o texto como um organismo no espaço e no tempo.
Intertextualmente: a quantidade de alusões e citações que Crane faz de outros escritores do cânone norte-americano, com particular destaque para Whitman, Poe e Dickinson, suscitariam processo semelhante na língua de chegada: o que é, naturalmente impossível.
Quanto à forma, é notória a complexidade em traduzir Crane, sobretudo na sonoridade e nos inúmeros jogos de palavras, como Paul Giles evidenciou no seu estudo de The Bridge. A semelhança fónica, por exemplo, no verso inicial, entre “How many dawns” e “Harmony dawns” é intraduzível.
É credível pensar que Maria de Lourdes Guimarães tenha experimentado todas estas dificuldades, e venceu-as com algum talento e experiência, pelo que, em termos gerais, a sua tradução emerge como positiva: a leitura agrada, o texto não parece forçado ritmicamente, os poemas soam bem e não causam prurido a um leitor menos conhecedor de Crane.
Porém, um problema revelou-se menos bem resolvido por esta tradutora. A tarefa de traduzir implica uma boa e fundamentada interpretação — Próspero Saíz afirma que aqui reside a essência e a inevitabilidade desta tarefa. Assim, um tradutor deve recorrer à bibliografia disponível, informando-se sobre tudo quanto possa vir a ser útil no trabalho de descodificação: vida e obra do autor; recensões ao texto; reflexões sobre a obra, etc.
Contudo, a tradução de Guimarães carece de algum trabalho de exegese preparatório. Um erro evidente ocorre em “Indiana”: neste poema, o sujeito poético é uma mãe pioneira que relata um episódio marcante na sua migração, mas Guimarães apresenta-nos uma voz ora masculina, ora feminina a contar a história: “Fiz-te parar — eu, repentinamente o mais arrojado / (...) / Ainda aqui estou, velha, como se fosse quase de pedra”. Outro erro de interpretação ocorre no poema “Southern Cross”. Guimarães intitula-o de “A Cruz do Sul”. Obviamente, não identifica o título com a constelação invocada por Crane — o Cruzeiro do Sul. Sem este dado, o poema pode tornar-se confuso para o leitor. Ainda a propósito de títulos, devo referir que a tradução de “National Winter Garden” por “Jardim Público de Inverno” pode originar problemas. Na realidade, o National Winter Garden não era um espaço verde mas um bar, como esclarece Giles. Por outro lado, a palavra “nacional” (em vez de “público”) é importante aqui, porque o poema se constitui como uma crítica à nação, à América de Crane.
Um outro fator negativo diz respeito à adequação do texto traduzido ao registo do texto original. Na realidade, ao longo do poema “Atlantis” perde-se algum do tom grandiloquente da linguagem que Crane aí aplica.
Por vezes, na tradução de Guimarães, ocorre um desaproveitamento de oportunidades. Se o poema está impregnado de mitos — e aqui reside a sua singularidade —, a tradução deve também recorrer a vocábulos pertencentes ao campo semântico do espiritual. Só assim a perda do sentido que ocorre necessariamente numa tradução poderá ser compensada.
Darei apenas três exemplos. No poema “To Brooklyn Bridge”, o termo “elevator” é traduzido por Guimarães como “elevador”. Obviamente, perdem-se as conotações míticas, pelo que seria preferível utilizar o termo “ascensor”, recordando “ascese” ou “ascensão” e vincando assim a interseção entre o plano horizontal (humano) e o vertical (divino). Outro caso: Guimarães faz corresponder “madrugadas” à palavra “dawns”. De novo, um desaproveitamento conotativo. O vocábulo “auroras” era mais correto, por remeter para a deusa Aurora, reforçando a componente divina. Ainda nesta linha, a imagem “beading thy path” seria mais significativamente traduzida por “rosário de contas no teu caminho” (lembrando o terço) do que por “ornando o teu caminho”. Em suma, teria sido importante trazer para a língua de chegada todas as ambivalências de significado possíveis, para assim manter a fecundidade literária, a “réepression” ou “déverbalisation”.
Parece-me importante referir ainda um outro aspeto. Guimarães preocupa-se demasiado em respeitar a sintaxe de Crane. O autor recorre com frequência a inversões e anástrofes para conseguir a rima e a cadência — nomeadamente, no poema “Cape Hatteras”. Não existindo rima na tradução, seria desnecessário sujeitar o texto às mesmas contorções. No entanto, Guimarães não teve em conta o princípio da naturalidade, e “Cabo Hatteras” emerge como esteticamente pouco agradável, porque submetido a demasiadas anástrofes e hipérbatos. Teria sido uma excelente oportunidade para optar por uma tradução mais livre, seguindo o conselho de Octávio Paz: desviar-se do texto original para o traçar com mais precisão.
No entanto, um balanço final da tradução de Maria de Lourdes Guimarães não poderá deixar de ser positivo. Apesar de algumas falhas, a tradutora fez um bom trabalho, nem demasiado literal, nem excessivamente livre, obtendo um texto de chegada agradável, e fazendo justiça a um autor que só nos últimos trinta anos recebeu a necessária atenção.
João de Mancelos
August 6, 2016
I listen to a lot of pop radio on my pizza delivery job and lately there's a number one song they play be New Direction all of the time called 'The Story of my Life," and the lyric goes 'when I die, those words will be written my stone," and it got me to thinking to what would be written on mine, and I've never much thought of anything, but there is one stanza of poetry that stands out for me above all others and it is from "The Bridge," one of the most complex and ambitious poems I've ever read, kind of like Brian Wilson's "Smiley Smile" project that wanted to sum up America like a Norman Rockwell painting gone psychedelic, but in "The Bridge" Hart Crane was trying to define a great transition in America from the Mayflower and the Indians, to the building of the Brooklyn Bridge (and how prophetic given Brooklyn's rise as the literary captial of America), but unlike "Smiley Smile" this was released and I'm not sure if many people read it, or not, but its impact will be felt throughout American literature. Crane is another one of those great artistst that suicided himself in his thirties and didn't leave behind much, but just enough that was ambitioius enough, to mark him as a great man in American letters to be studied as long as there are English Departments, for better or worse, though I'd like it if everyone read Hart Crane, because he really changed my life, and showed me what poetry could be, because he did more than just conceive of a poem, he conceived of an idea about America, the only poem for an American writer, unless you are Didion and specify the inquiry to your home state. I reamember Crane writing a letter about how much he loved Thomas Wolfe, a great fiction writer breaking through in the Twenties when Crane was writing, and a really poetic autobiographical one who it took hundreds of pages to express the infinite, and I really think Crane was trying to condense that for time immemorial, and show that a poem could hold as much weight as "Ulysses" by Joyce, or "Look Homeward Angel," by Thomas Wolfe, even though those tomes took about 600 pages to get their point across, and this is an amazing ambition. I'd argue that Crane pulled it off in his own roundabout way, though the poem is not perfect, and plays with so many forms, and changing harmonies that it gets confusing, but at the same time all of the different forms blending almost gives it a 'mash-up' feel so popular today, and also shows Crane's sheer virtuosity as a poet taking craft seriously, and the ideas of stanza. In many ways, Crane ia pure poet, more than any other, because he took the rules seriously, the structure and form, and adhered to it to a point and then broke free, but he wrote beautifully in form giving the piece an almost sustained grace, so that when he broke free, like in the stanza I want on my stone, though I'm not going to have one, it has a liberating feel like watching a kickoff returned for a touchdown. I'm going to quote two stanzas because those are the ones that stay with me and give me a rush like only Crane can, a real literary high.
Behind
My father's cannery works I used to see
Rail-Squatters ranged in nomad raillery,
The ancient men - wifeless or runaway
Hobo-trekkers that forever search
an empire wilderness of freight and rails.
Each seemed a child, like me, on a loose perch,
Holding to childhood like some termless play.
John, Jake, or Charley, hopping the slow freight
- Memphis to Tallahassee- riding the rods,
Blind fists of nothing, humpty-dumpty clods.
That is my favorite stanza ever, and I can say that without a doubt, that Crane's influence is all over me, and especially his idea that to understand America was worthy of a novel whatever the form was a great acheivment and he spoke up for the poem over the novel, a very brave thing to do. I don't think there is a cult around Crane like there is Didion, so my live for him is a little personal, and I guess that means as a critic it's my duty to speak up for him a little more, because he doesn't have much of a voice in the public forum, and even I read him voluntarily at U.C.S.C., not for a class, but I incorporated "The Bridge" into a poem about the America's written by a Carribean, but was much more direct historically, since "The Bridge" is out of all chronological order and almost feels like a dream. I can only say that you really feel the ambition in this poem with many parts, and many poems within poems, so to call it a poem like, say, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," wouldn't really be fair to "The Bridge," because it's much more stylistically developed than that, for better or worse, and doesn't hold to one voice like Ginsberg, who is off and running right off the bat, "I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked...." "The Bridge" dips in and out of so many voices it's dizzying like watching a mad ballet but perhaps less quotable than "Howl," except for my favorite stanza of all time, and God does it feel good to say that. Amen..
Behind
My father's cannery works I used to see
Rail-Squatters ranged in nomad raillery,
The ancient men - wifeless or runaway
Hobo-trekkers that forever search
an empire wilderness of freight and rails.
Each seemed a child, like me, on a loose perch,
Holding to childhood like some termless play.
John, Jake, or Charley, hopping the slow freight
- Memphis to Tallahassee- riding the rods,
Blind fists of nothing, humpty-dumpty clods.
That is my favorite stanza ever, and I can say that without a doubt, that Crane's influence is all over me, and especially his idea that to understand America was worthy of a novel whatever the form was a great acheivment and he spoke up for the poem over the novel, a very brave thing to do. I don't think there is a cult around Crane like there is Didion, so my live for him is a little personal, and I guess that means as a critic it's my duty to speak up for him a little more, because he doesn't have much of a voice in the public forum, and even I read him voluntarily at U.C.S.C., not for a class, but I incorporated "The Bridge" into a poem about the America's written by a Carribean, but was much more direct historically, since "The Bridge" is out of all chronological order and almost feels like a dream. I can only say that you really feel the ambition in this poem with many parts, and many poems within poems, so to call it a poem like, say, Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," wouldn't really be fair to "The Bridge," because it's much more stylistically developed than that, for better or worse, and doesn't hold to one voice like Ginsberg, who is off and running right off the bat, "I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked...." "The Bridge" dips in and out of so many voices it's dizzying like watching a mad ballet but perhaps less quotable than "Howl," except for my favorite stanza of all time, and God does it feel good to say that. Amen..
August 9, 2014
Like Whitman, Crane focuses not only on the present day but seeks to connect it with the future/all human experience, and Crane’s work is obviously meant to be a “bridge” to the past of American history/mythology as well.
Crane includes many elements of America’s mythic history, as most/all myths are archetypal, and therefore automatically connect to universal human knowledge and experience. The inclusion of Columbus (one of the least deserving mythic American “heroes”) may suggest that his journey itself was an attempt to bridge the oceans/cultures. I utterly detest Columbus and his ridiculous, bogus “legacy” as it is still related in too many history books, so I have a hard time separating modern, revisionist views from any other portrayal. The whole inclusion of Pocahontas and the troubling symbolism already present in her myth before the poem (the symbolic bride, the virgin land to conquer/culture to appropriate, etc., etc.) was also difficult to view as anything but evidence of how ridiculous our American legends (which we too often confuse with actual history) are. Other mythic elements include allusions to Rip Van Winkle (and its obvious past-future theme) and the history of the American West, possibly the most mythologized aspect of American history. Of course as the railroad/telegraph wires/etc. “bridge” the land, the ugly history behind Westward Expansion and the dark realities of forced cultural/religious assimilation are the real repeated threads from human history.
The role of the river throughout sections of The Bridge was interesting, and I think one possible interpretation might be that Crane lets the river function as a symbol of the steady flow of (past/present/future) human lives and stories. Just as the river flows endlessly to the sea (which could represent something greater like death, or the large, roaring expanse of shared human history) the human stories all ultimately become a part of that greater collective. Or maybe that’s a stretch. :)
Some sections of Hart’s poem (like “Of that great bridge, our myth, where of I sing” and “bind us throbbing with one voice”) reminded me of the epic convention of invoking the muse of poetry to help tell a great tale (“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story…”), and as well as a muse of sorts, Crane looks to Whitman as a poet capable of capturing the beauty of all elements of human experience, not just the spirit of adventure and passion, but universal grief, like the tragedy of war. His discussion of Whitman in “Cape Hatteras” (which seems very hopeful) is especially interesting when viewed next to his reference to Poe in “The Tunnel,” off the lofty bridge, down in the subway bowels of the city. I interpreted it as Poe representing the darkest elements of the poet’s nature, those that can drag them down from the heights or poetic hope for the future and legacy. That would make Poe and Whitman Crane’s two self-assigned poet “fathers,” representing light and dark, or the vitality of life/ eternity and death.
Crane includes many elements of America’s mythic history, as most/all myths are archetypal, and therefore automatically connect to universal human knowledge and experience. The inclusion of Columbus (one of the least deserving mythic American “heroes”) may suggest that his journey itself was an attempt to bridge the oceans/cultures. I utterly detest Columbus and his ridiculous, bogus “legacy” as it is still related in too many history books, so I have a hard time separating modern, revisionist views from any other portrayal. The whole inclusion of Pocahontas and the troubling symbolism already present in her myth before the poem (the symbolic bride, the virgin land to conquer/culture to appropriate, etc., etc.) was also difficult to view as anything but evidence of how ridiculous our American legends (which we too often confuse with actual history) are. Other mythic elements include allusions to Rip Van Winkle (and its obvious past-future theme) and the history of the American West, possibly the most mythologized aspect of American history. Of course as the railroad/telegraph wires/etc. “bridge” the land, the ugly history behind Westward Expansion and the dark realities of forced cultural/religious assimilation are the real repeated threads from human history.
The role of the river throughout sections of The Bridge was interesting, and I think one possible interpretation might be that Crane lets the river function as a symbol of the steady flow of (past/present/future) human lives and stories. Just as the river flows endlessly to the sea (which could represent something greater like death, or the large, roaring expanse of shared human history) the human stories all ultimately become a part of that greater collective. Or maybe that’s a stretch. :)
Some sections of Hart’s poem (like “Of that great bridge, our myth, where of I sing” and “bind us throbbing with one voice”) reminded me of the epic convention of invoking the muse of poetry to help tell a great tale (“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story…”), and as well as a muse of sorts, Crane looks to Whitman as a poet capable of capturing the beauty of all elements of human experience, not just the spirit of adventure and passion, but universal grief, like the tragedy of war. His discussion of Whitman in “Cape Hatteras” (which seems very hopeful) is especially interesting when viewed next to his reference to Poe in “The Tunnel,” off the lofty bridge, down in the subway bowels of the city. I interpreted it as Poe representing the darkest elements of the poet’s nature, those that can drag them down from the heights or poetic hope for the future and legacy. That would make Poe and Whitman Crane’s two self-assigned poet “fathers,” representing light and dark, or the vitality of life/ eternity and death.
September 24, 2022
The Waste Land, but American and gay and shite.
It seems cruel to say, but Hart Crane is one of those forgotten artists who's regarded about as well as he should be. Not all lost stones are gems.
Poetry can and should be difficult, and good poetry is also about using familiar words in expected ways, verbing nouns and so forth. But even lines whose precise meaning is initially unclear should still suggest something, refer to something, create ripples in the mind. Eliot's poetry, even at its most obscure, does this. Crane's doesn't, ever. '...while legs waken salads in the brain' is what I'd say was happening to me whilst reading this, if I had a flippity-fuck of a clue what it meant. This is like poetry generated by an AI, just random strings of words that bear no discernable relation to each other, that create no resonances, much less recognition. In Eliot's poetry every line, even those on the surface innocent of intertextuality, bears the weight of a whole decaying civilisation, Crane's poetry is weighed down by overt references that paradoxically carry no weight whatsoever. It is light and empty as air, and moreover, unlike the Modernists' work, and despite it's forced optimisn and naive progressivism, is unable even to escape the already ossified poetic forms if past centuries. Visionless of image, uninspired of phrase, requently and pointlessly archaic, devoid of any discernable mythos or message, there mere abstract exercises of an urban rich-boy dilletante.
I'm mystified by descriptions of this as a homoerotic text. Crane's personal (and problematic, not least for himself, as his eventual end proved. And is there not an irony, and a lesson, in how the forced-optimism of the progressive Crane ended in suicide, while arch-reactionary Eliot, the great poet of pessimism, enjoyed a long and happy life with his [second] wife?) sexuality aside, the only eroticism that I've been able to detect in any of his poetry that I've read so far has been tritely hetero. And I am by no means un-tuned-in to these things.
Though, who knows. The first time (the first many times), I read TWL, I didn't like it because I didn't get it. But it grew on me. It disclosed itself to me by increments. It's unlikely, but maybe this one will too. Though I doubt it. Above all things, poetry should sound nice. It should be enjoyable, or at least interesting, to read, or to listen to. This simply doesn't, and isn't. It fails at poetry's most basic task. Nothing more to say, really.
It seems cruel to say, but Hart Crane is one of those forgotten artists who's regarded about as well as he should be. Not all lost stones are gems.
Poetry can and should be difficult, and good poetry is also about using familiar words in expected ways, verbing nouns and so forth. But even lines whose precise meaning is initially unclear should still suggest something, refer to something, create ripples in the mind. Eliot's poetry, even at its most obscure, does this. Crane's doesn't, ever. '...while legs waken salads in the brain' is what I'd say was happening to me whilst reading this, if I had a flippity-fuck of a clue what it meant. This is like poetry generated by an AI, just random strings of words that bear no discernable relation to each other, that create no resonances, much less recognition. In Eliot's poetry every line, even those on the surface innocent of intertextuality, bears the weight of a whole decaying civilisation, Crane's poetry is weighed down by overt references that paradoxically carry no weight whatsoever. It is light and empty as air, and moreover, unlike the Modernists' work, and despite it's forced optimisn and naive progressivism, is unable even to escape the already ossified poetic forms if past centuries. Visionless of image, uninspired of phrase, requently and pointlessly archaic, devoid of any discernable mythos or message, there mere abstract exercises of an urban rich-boy dilletante.
I'm mystified by descriptions of this as a homoerotic text. Crane's personal (and problematic, not least for himself, as his eventual end proved. And is there not an irony, and a lesson, in how the forced-optimism of the progressive Crane ended in suicide, while arch-reactionary Eliot, the great poet of pessimism, enjoyed a long and happy life with his [second] wife?) sexuality aside, the only eroticism that I've been able to detect in any of his poetry that I've read so far has been tritely hetero. And I am by no means un-tuned-in to these things.
Though, who knows. The first time (the first many times), I read TWL, I didn't like it because I didn't get it. But it grew on me. It disclosed itself to me by increments. It's unlikely, but maybe this one will too. Though I doubt it. Above all things, poetry should sound nice. It should be enjoyable, or at least interesting, to read, or to listen to. This simply doesn't, and isn't. It fails at poetry's most basic task. Nothing more to say, really.
January 1, 2024
I'm not convinced. Several other reviews rated this highly and said it was a response to The Wasteland, but if it is that, it's a rather incompetent response. The Wasteland, pretentious and allusive as it is, at least is CLEAR in its allusions, clear in its complications; The Bridge is comparatively hazy, confused, random, whereas The Wasteland proves its author's competencies. The Bridge obfuscates any competency of its author. The poem, being mostly rhymed, somehow makes it more dated, more conservative than Eliot, while simultaneously being less beautiful, far less memorable. Several of those reviews claimed this was an affirmation, but it's an affirmation of nothing. At least Eliot had the balls to convert to Christianity, to realize the emptiness and dead-endedness of the modern experiment. Crane chose to stay with modernism, and he ended up killing himself. Eliot escaped modernism and lived to old age. That should tell you all you need to know about the clash of worldviews.
The two introductions to this poem brought up a deadly problem: how to deal with the American Civil War, which in some ways paved the road for the devastation of WWI. Crane abjectly ignored that. The worst part was Part IV wherein Crane followed this line of thought: "Machine-Power > Airplanes > Weapons of War > Airplanes could totally carry weapons of war > Machines are our Gods!" I couldn't detect any clear aversion to this terrifying train of thought, nor could I detect any escape. Crane decided to just kinda... glorify it? ("Toward endless terminals, Easters of speeding light-- / Vast Engines outward veering with seraphic grace / On clarion cylinders..." sounds more like 'Deus EST Machina' than anything.) That poem contains one of the few slightly sustained (half a page) instances of actual modernist poetry, and it was among the better parts of the poem. Too bad he abandons it in favor of his stilted, talentless rhyming.
And that's the thing I stylistically had the hardest time with. I'm fine with rhyming, but only so long as the author is talented enough to lull you into the rhythm so that you forget it's rhyming. Unfortunately, this is extremely hard to do, and only Shakespeare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and a few others can consistently do it. Crane's rhymes feel more random than intentional, and the poem's sense suffers immensely because of it.
And the introductions destroyed all my faith in the poem. Apparently, Crane wrote the last part first (by far the best part, at least poetically, but the ideas are hazy), then constructed an ad-hoc edifice around it, a bunch of scaffolding to prop up this image of a bridge in his head. And overall, it doesn't really work. The start is the best of the non-ending chapters, and you get a sense of the immensity of Columbus' journey, the bridging of two continents, two civilizations, two time periods (modern and premodern). The problem with Crane's mythology, however, is the problem with all secular mythologies: it's not believable, and it doesn't last. In the short time between the poem's writing and now (less than a hundred years), Columbus, the introductory invocation of the poem, is now apparently the evilest creature to have sailed the seas, apparently bringing only pain, suffering, and hardship to untold millions around the globe. So, too bad for that, try again Crane. Your new god already got cancelled.
Additionally, the sense I got of the immensity of the distances "bridged" did not come from the poem per se, but from my musings on the themes of the poem. And this is the other half of the problem: it's not believable. In Crane's case, there's just not enough there. The Bible, simple as its stories are, is so unbreakable and durable because its stories have people doing things that you can easily picture in your head. For much of The Bridge, you're left wondering what to imagine in your head. You don't know where you are. At least with Joyce's Ulysses, when you're confused, you can listen to the rhythm of the language, and you at the very least know you're somewhere in Dublin. The Bridge, because it is attempting to span disparate places/times/civilizations/mythologies, jumps around, sometimes inhabiting a quasi-mystical parody of premodernism/Native Americans, sometimes treating objects as women.
And that's the thing, I'm not impressed by anything in this poem. The language is largely lackluster, the sentiments are vague and unsatisfying, and the datedness doesn't even teach me anything interesting. At least with "dated" things in the Bible or Shakespeare or Eliot, I have something to grab onto, some paradox/challenge to wrestle with; this, by contrast, feels like so much of a void. The introduction tried desperately to salvage this lack of a clear answer, lack of a mythology, as some sort of innovation, stating that:
Crane's myth must, of course, not be confused with the myth as we find it in Homer or the Bible or the Nibelungen. The Bridge is not a particularized being to be popularly sung: it is a conceptual symbol to be used. And the fact that this symbol begins as a man-constructed thing is of the essence of its truth for our instrumental age.
The problem with instruments, with technology, is that it contains within itself no morality of how to use said instruments. In other words, no instructions are inherent with the instrument, and this is a problem! As we witnessed in the World Wars, technology advanced most quickly in the efforts to kill as many humans as possible. Thus the half-assed faith in "instruments" (technology) and our ability to use them is naive at best, catastrophically genocidal at worst.
The bridge is an interesting metaphor, but I can't help but feel it was chronically under-explored in the poem. He looked at it from various angles or ignored it altogether, but he refused to show anyone crossing it! This is a glaring omission, as if the author understood that the bridge was a bridge to nowhere, that secularism was not a two-way street but rather a parasitic heresy diverging from traditional culture and theology, something derivative and not generative. Ironically, rather than starting with the ending and trying to build to the beginning (like you might in a real bridge), Crane should have built out boldly in a new direction until he hit a new shore (like Columbus!), stating something, anything positive, rather than this mere instrumental wandering.
Really, that should be the main takeaway, the main image: not the bridge, the manmade structure, but rather the disenfranchised hoboes riding the rails elicitly, that type of the wandering Jew, who, like the real Jews, never know if they'll be deemed unworthy of existing and threatened with eradication. For THAT is the real result of such floppy non-mythology. Contrary to what secularists want to be the case, what really preserves life is the old myths, not new ones; rather than being unbelievable, they remain the only convincing inheritance we have. If only us moderns and post-moderns could have the humility, or even just the childlike simplicity, to return, to turn back before we walk off the edge of the bridge, jump off the boat, and kill ourselves, our civilization.
The two introductions to this poem brought up a deadly problem: how to deal with the American Civil War, which in some ways paved the road for the devastation of WWI. Crane abjectly ignored that. The worst part was Part IV wherein Crane followed this line of thought: "Machine-Power > Airplanes > Weapons of War > Airplanes could totally carry weapons of war > Machines are our Gods!" I couldn't detect any clear aversion to this terrifying train of thought, nor could I detect any escape. Crane decided to just kinda... glorify it? ("Toward endless terminals, Easters of speeding light-- / Vast Engines outward veering with seraphic grace / On clarion cylinders..." sounds more like 'Deus EST Machina' than anything.) That poem contains one of the few slightly sustained (half a page) instances of actual modernist poetry, and it was among the better parts of the poem. Too bad he abandons it in favor of his stilted, talentless rhyming.
And that's the thing I stylistically had the hardest time with. I'm fine with rhyming, but only so long as the author is talented enough to lull you into the rhythm so that you forget it's rhyming. Unfortunately, this is extremely hard to do, and only Shakespeare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and a few others can consistently do it. Crane's rhymes feel more random than intentional, and the poem's sense suffers immensely because of it.
And the introductions destroyed all my faith in the poem. Apparently, Crane wrote the last part first (by far the best part, at least poetically, but the ideas are hazy), then constructed an ad-hoc edifice around it, a bunch of scaffolding to prop up this image of a bridge in his head. And overall, it doesn't really work. The start is the best of the non-ending chapters, and you get a sense of the immensity of Columbus' journey, the bridging of two continents, two civilizations, two time periods (modern and premodern). The problem with Crane's mythology, however, is the problem with all secular mythologies: it's not believable, and it doesn't last. In the short time between the poem's writing and now (less than a hundred years), Columbus, the introductory invocation of the poem, is now apparently the evilest creature to have sailed the seas, apparently bringing only pain, suffering, and hardship to untold millions around the globe. So, too bad for that, try again Crane. Your new god already got cancelled.
Additionally, the sense I got of the immensity of the distances "bridged" did not come from the poem per se, but from my musings on the themes of the poem. And this is the other half of the problem: it's not believable. In Crane's case, there's just not enough there. The Bible, simple as its stories are, is so unbreakable and durable because its stories have people doing things that you can easily picture in your head. For much of The Bridge, you're left wondering what to imagine in your head. You don't know where you are. At least with Joyce's Ulysses, when you're confused, you can listen to the rhythm of the language, and you at the very least know you're somewhere in Dublin. The Bridge, because it is attempting to span disparate places/times/civilizations/mythologies, jumps around, sometimes inhabiting a quasi-mystical parody of premodernism/Native Americans, sometimes treating objects as women.
And that's the thing, I'm not impressed by anything in this poem. The language is largely lackluster, the sentiments are vague and unsatisfying, and the datedness doesn't even teach me anything interesting. At least with "dated" things in the Bible or Shakespeare or Eliot, I have something to grab onto, some paradox/challenge to wrestle with; this, by contrast, feels like so much of a void. The introduction tried desperately to salvage this lack of a clear answer, lack of a mythology, as some sort of innovation, stating that:
Crane's myth must, of course, not be confused with the myth as we find it in Homer or the Bible or the Nibelungen. The Bridge is not a particularized being to be popularly sung: it is a conceptual symbol to be used. And the fact that this symbol begins as a man-constructed thing is of the essence of its truth for our instrumental age.
The problem with instruments, with technology, is that it contains within itself no morality of how to use said instruments. In other words, no instructions are inherent with the instrument, and this is a problem! As we witnessed in the World Wars, technology advanced most quickly in the efforts to kill as many humans as possible. Thus the half-assed faith in "instruments" (technology) and our ability to use them is naive at best, catastrophically genocidal at worst.
The bridge is an interesting metaphor, but I can't help but feel it was chronically under-explored in the poem. He looked at it from various angles or ignored it altogether, but he refused to show anyone crossing it! This is a glaring omission, as if the author understood that the bridge was a bridge to nowhere, that secularism was not a two-way street but rather a parasitic heresy diverging from traditional culture and theology, something derivative and not generative. Ironically, rather than starting with the ending and trying to build to the beginning (like you might in a real bridge), Crane should have built out boldly in a new direction until he hit a new shore (like Columbus!), stating something, anything positive, rather than this mere instrumental wandering.
Really, that should be the main takeaway, the main image: not the bridge, the manmade structure, but rather the disenfranchised hoboes riding the rails elicitly, that type of the wandering Jew, who, like the real Jews, never know if they'll be deemed unworthy of existing and threatened with eradication. For THAT is the real result of such floppy non-mythology. Contrary to what secularists want to be the case, what really preserves life is the old myths, not new ones; rather than being unbelievable, they remain the only convincing inheritance we have. If only us moderns and post-moderns could have the humility, or even just the childlike simplicity, to return, to turn back before we walk off the edge of the bridge, jump off the boat, and kill ourselves, our civilization.
November 6, 2021
And from above, thin squeaks of radio static,
The captured fume of space foams in our ears--
What whisperings of far watches on the main
Relapsing into silence, while time clears
Our lenses, lifts a focus, resurrects
A periscope to glimpse what joys or pain
Our eyes can share or answer--then deflects
Us, shunting to a labyrinth submersed
Where each sees only his dim past reversed...
from "Cape Hatteras"
From my college days, Hart Crane and his work was always on the periphery and never the focus of any professor or survey course. I tried reading the The Bridge in my early 20s and gave up in bewilderment and frustration. I could read Eliot, Stevens, even some Pound. But Crane's poetry? No. It's dense, it's abstract, it follows "the logic of metaphors," foregoing literal meanings at times in favor of emotional resonances. I'm more patient now, no longer taking obfuscation as a personal affront. More importantly, I have read Walt Whitman--which, memo to idiot past-self, is necessary prior to tackling Crane's work.
The poetry is difficult at points; there are whole passages I still don't understand. But, with multiple, close, slow readings, the verse begins to yield--exceptional lines, phenomenal imagery, fascinating connections. The effort, in effect, is worth the yield.
From gulfs unfolding, terrible of drums,
Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage, tensely spare--
Bridge, lifting night to cycloramic crest
Of deepest day--O Choir, translating time
Into what multitudinous Verbs the suns
And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast
In myriad syllables,--Psalm of Cathay!
O Love, thy white, pervasive Paradigm...!
from "Atlantis"
The captured fume of space foams in our ears--
What whisperings of far watches on the main
Relapsing into silence, while time clears
Our lenses, lifts a focus, resurrects
A periscope to glimpse what joys or pain
Our eyes can share or answer--then deflects
Us, shunting to a labyrinth submersed
Where each sees only his dim past reversed...
from "Cape Hatteras"
From my college days, Hart Crane and his work was always on the periphery and never the focus of any professor or survey course. I tried reading the The Bridge in my early 20s and gave up in bewilderment and frustration. I could read Eliot, Stevens, even some Pound. But Crane's poetry? No. It's dense, it's abstract, it follows "the logic of metaphors," foregoing literal meanings at times in favor of emotional resonances. I'm more patient now, no longer taking obfuscation as a personal affront. More importantly, I have read Walt Whitman--which, memo to idiot past-self, is necessary prior to tackling Crane's work.
The poetry is difficult at points; there are whole passages I still don't understand. But, with multiple, close, slow readings, the verse begins to yield--exceptional lines, phenomenal imagery, fascinating connections. The effort, in effect, is worth the yield.
From gulfs unfolding, terrible of drums,
Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage, tensely spare--
Bridge, lifting night to cycloramic crest
Of deepest day--O Choir, translating time
Into what multitudinous Verbs the suns
And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast
In myriad syllables,--Psalm of Cathay!
O Love, thy white, pervasive Paradigm...!
from "Atlantis"
October 6, 2015
Hart Crane, como poeta americano, descende directamente de Walt Whitman e Emily Dickinson (parece que também descende de Ezra Pound mas não conheço, por enquanto, para o confirmar).
The Bridge está publicado, em português, numa edição bilingue da Relógio d'Água (entre outras, julgo). A tradução de Maria Guimarães sacrifica algum significado directo, abrindo a porta a uma interpretação pessoal do poema, por parte da tradutora. Nem sempre perfeito, este método permite conservar (dentro do possível) a lírica original. Deste modo, ao ler o poema em inglês, apenas necessitei de verificar o significado de algumas palavras na página ao lado (algumas das quais sacrificadas ao sentido do poema).
Tendo vivido a sua juventude nos anos 20 do século passado, Hart Crane absorveu todo a dinâmica modernista americana, se bem que com menos entusiasmo que Walt e (bem) mais entusiasmo que Emily.
Tal como nos seus antecessores, não fica preso à métrica nem à rima (ainda que se aproxime desta foneticamente). O poema deve ser lido com fluidez, pois a imagem que Crane pinta surge ao longo da estrofe, não estando presa ao final de cada verso. Na temática encontramos a sensualidade duma Pocahontas a par do ruído e cheiros duma Nova Iorque ligada através do subway e de publicidade em néon. Um pedaço de argila pode estar conectado, metaforicamente, à filosofia de Platão.
The Bridge está publicado, em português, numa edição bilingue da Relógio d'Água (entre outras, julgo). A tradução de Maria Guimarães sacrifica algum significado directo, abrindo a porta a uma interpretação pessoal do poema, por parte da tradutora. Nem sempre perfeito, este método permite conservar (dentro do possível) a lírica original. Deste modo, ao ler o poema em inglês, apenas necessitei de verificar o significado de algumas palavras na página ao lado (algumas das quais sacrificadas ao sentido do poema).
Tendo vivido a sua juventude nos anos 20 do século passado, Hart Crane absorveu todo a dinâmica modernista americana, se bem que com menos entusiasmo que Walt e (bem) mais entusiasmo que Emily.
Tal como nos seus antecessores, não fica preso à métrica nem à rima (ainda que se aproxime desta foneticamente). O poema deve ser lido com fluidez, pois a imagem que Crane pinta surge ao longo da estrofe, não estando presa ao final de cada verso. Na temática encontramos a sensualidade duma Pocahontas a par do ruído e cheiros duma Nova Iorque ligada através do subway e de publicidade em néon. Um pedaço de argila pode estar conectado, metaforicamente, à filosofia de Platão.
November 9, 2017
Here Hart Crane’s epic and totally unreadable poem is annotated with copious footnotes in a font size so tiny it is almost impossible to read them on a bumpy municipal bus which is where I do most of my reading. If you can read them, they do throw some light on the material although many of the notes are pure conjecture (“perhaps by this he is referring to T.S. Eliot’s coffee spoons in the Wasteland”). Most interesting are the direct conversational quotes of Crane himself, which reveal him to be deeply obsessed with the importance of his work, a pedestal high enough that the fall from it may have led to his suicide. But anyhow, the poem itself has far fewer words than the annotations, and after I was done with the whole thing I went back and read it by itself, which took only one bus ride home and rollicked along with a crazy beatnik rhythm that echoed the wheels on the pavement and left me giddy with a dancer’s pleasure, even though I still couldn’t tell you what the poem was actually about.
October 29, 2008
I wish these stars could be as bright as those chords between the Brooklyn Bridge in the final poem, "Atlantis." This is a passage, and this time through the book I truly felt the Whitman ebullience, and sensibility. I absolutely love the long passage through the first half of the book that finally ends in "Indiana" looking at a "homeless squaw." How is it that has a greater glory than a field with fifty American flags flying?
July 13, 2010
The Bridge gets left out of the discussion of "The Modernist Long Poem" sometimes but it shouldn't. WCW thought poems should be machines but he was no machinist. Hart Crane worked in a factory, he understood machines, mechanization, reproducibility more innately than WCW, Pound, etc...& it shows here--his engines shot thru w/spirit, candy, American flags, David Berman, "Candy Jail" etc.
July 9, 2015
I love poetry, but I struggle with some of them. This one just went over my head. Read it for class and I can't wait to discuss it to see if it makes it clearer for me. Some of the poems I did enjoy in this collection, such as The Dance. But as a whole, I just didn't get it.
October 8, 2015
A challenging, flawed but thrilling long poem. Weakened by obscurity at some points and sentimentality at others, when this long poem does hit its elegiac heights it's like nothing else. A deeply felt modernist masterpiece in the tradition of Whitman.
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September 26, 2017Maybe it was the charming marginalia from Megan in my second-hand copy of the long-form poem that saved this one for me in the end.... New episode up at BowieBookClub.com
October 19, 2007
This poem does not come easy. But what a feeling when you manage to break off a chunk.
Read
September 26, 2008One of my most favorite things.
June 3, 2012
I don't know from poetry, so take this with a grain of salt, but I thought it was lovely. And it made me strongly suspect it might've helped inspire Winter's Tale, one of my favorite novels.
March 19, 2012
Our nation's best worst poet, whose logic is difficult to follow--but lover, pariah or prophet, Crane is one to find optimism in. Yes, please.
March 6, 2016
Phenomenal! Hart Crane's poetry feels like a distinct link between Walt Whitman and the Beats. Powerful work that is very deep in the American vein.
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