Powerful stuff

Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech is full of poetry, metaphor, and allusion. Twice King quotes Scripture.

Amos 5:21-24 is one of the few places in the whole Bible where God is actually said to hate anything. It is nonetheless my favorite passage in the entire Old Testament, the one that I think comes closest to reconciling fire and brimstone with love and mercy. The verse King quotes comes rather unexpectedly in the middle of an angry prophetic tirade:

I hate, I reject your festivals,
Nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer up to me burnt offerings and your grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
And I will not even look at the peace offerings of your fatlings.

Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not even listen to the sound of your harps.

But let justice roll down like waters
And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

King is never angry, but at this point in his speech he is firm, insistent, even stern, and so his use of this verse at the end echoes Amos slightly. It’s an artful touch and a little brilliant.

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Isaiah 40:3-5 says:

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:

And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.

King adopts this as his ultimate dream.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

As King quotes this—there is no sugar-coating this—he teeters on the verge of nonsense. Not only is this prophecy already supposedly fulfilled (in John the Baptist, according to the gospels, all four of which directly quote it), but right after this passage about mountains being leveled, King is about to go into a series of riffs about, well, mountains (“let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire” and so on).

It works anyway, because whatever we think of the gospels, it is manifest that some crooked paths remain that want straightening, and rough places, and all the rest. King’s message is that justice will not be denied. Scripture promises the dream will be fulfilled.

In prose these days, the style is to be plain.

Use common words; be forthright and succinct;

Avoid formality; use active voice:

In short, say what you mean and nothing more.

These rules apply whatever you may write,

To traffic signs and novels just the same.

And in return for hewing to these rules,

The writer gets free rein, a blank white box

In which to dump his brain without a care

For form or structure. Sonnets? Thank you, no,

Though every now and then we condescend

To post a wry haiku on someone's Wall.

We'll count, it's fun and shows how smart we are.

But from restrictions richness sometimes comes,

Or thoughtfulness, or creativity,

Or beauty. Or mere elegance of form,

If all the other virtues of our words

Should come to nothing.

Perhaps we set our words too many tasks?

We have to write so many words each day

Each word must be disposable and cheap,

Like coffee filters (this the most polite

Of several metaphors that spring to mind)?

The style is just a moral cop-out, then,

To make a virtue of our verbal cheapness?

Our age lacks all ambition. When we make

a simple thing, we make it quick and plain,

and if it works, we're pleased. Is that the way?

These explanations miss the mark, I think.

I don't know how it happened. But it's dumb.

Good music isn't formless and austere.

Good writing doesn't have to be that way.

If fail we must then let us fail in ways

No self-respecting writer fails these days

And striving, let us win what gains we might

By doing something hard each time we write.

Sonnets

Once I wrote two lines of what would have been an awesome sonnet.

Shall I compare you to my friend Matt Jones?

You are more lovely and not half so drunk.

In San Francisco, while everyone else was napping, I managed to sneak out to City Lights Books. There I stumbled on Sonnets by Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, translated by Mike Stocks. Translated. Imagine translating sonnets. I opened it up and read one, and it was pretty good, so I bought the book.

I emerged unconvinced that translating sonnets is possible or sane. I don't know what I expected. The translations are real sonnets that rhyme and scan, an amazing technical achievement already, and they have a nice spontaneous feel. Not everything works. Many lines, inevitably, are awkward. The English slang Stocks uses is so different from what I grew up with as to sound inauthentic (a real shame).

Oh but what a pleasure to be introduced to Belli. He wrote these sonnets in Rome in the 1830s. If half of them are as true to life as they feel, it was a city alive with outrageous characters, illicit sex, and poor anger management. The best ones are little candid character sketches, slightly or heavily satirical, of harried mothers, old men, annoyed girlfriends, corrupt priests, and so on. There's one from a furious stutterer. Reading them is like eating cupcakes while falling in love.

I'll post one of the translations that I like, with the warning that this one is atypically clean.

A Very Roman Pastime

The treat that us lot liked the most when small,

the biggest thrill, the real McCoy, the biz,

was finding new-built homes and palaces

and using lumps of coal to trash the walls.

So here we'd doodle numbers, little sums,

and Gordon knots and those of Sollymom,

and there some Lotto stuff; and then move on

to filthy words and pricks and twats and bums.

Or else we'd take a stone or nail or stick

to gouge the plaster out, and draw a pic

so deep we'd hit the bricks and stuff below.

Those were the days all right, my God. Although,

that said, I like to dabble still, it's true...

and when I see a nice white wall, I do.

At the moment, a few more translations are posted on the book's web site.