 It is my distinct pleasure to introduce today's keynote speaker. Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Brilliant Water and Watch, Fire, for which he received the Laban Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. He's also published translations of Alec de Bellac, de Bellac's Anxious Moments and The City and the Child, several edited volumes, among them the Forgotten Language, Contemporary Poets and Nature, and From the Faraway Nearby, Georgia O'Keeffe as Icon. And I would add to that a compilation called The New Symposium, Poets and Writers on What We Hold in Common. I saw that one down in the bookstore. I know it's there. Also, five books of nonfiction, The Grass of Another Country, A Journey Through the World of Soccer, The Old Bridge, The Third Balkan War, and The Age of the Refugee. Only the Nails Remain Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God Journey to the Holy Mountain, and The Tree of the Doves Ceremony Expedition War. His work has been translated into 25 languages. His journalism appears in many publications, and his awards include a knighthood in arts and letters from the French government. He has held the William H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross and now directs the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He serves on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO. He has conducted cultural diplomacy missions in over 30 countries for the U.S. State Department, and in April 2012, President Obama appointed Merrill to the National Council on the Humanities. Among the translated works or co-translations he's done, I saw two more, one by actually both co-translated with Won Chung Kim. These are collections of Korean poetry, also down in the book exhibit area. As some of you know, I left the University of Iowa in a couple years ago, and I told those of you who asked that the hardest thing about the move was leaving my friends behind, and I would put Chris Merrill at the top of that list, imagine, generous, warm collaborator, supportive, and resourceful, with a wide variety of professional experience, administrative savvy, deep commitment to the arts and humanities in an international context. A connector began to get a very short, small picture, a portion of a picture of the sort of person Christopher Merrill is. Jean Parcertre has a line somewhere in which he, in trying to tell us that we always make decisions, even though we might be thinking that we're not making decisions, says that when you ask advice of somebody you know, you're already getting a decision that you kind of knew you were going to get. The advice is conditioned by the person, and you are making that decision as you ask that person. In the occasional, maybe not so occasional instances when I would hear the inevitable no from Administrator X, Y, or Z in response to our always reasonable requests for a new initiative, something new and exciting, some way to make something happen, I was and continue to be comforted and heartened by the inevitable, yes, let's do it, that I knew and I know I would always get from Chris. This is a trait to be valued, this is an invaluable trait and it's a fundamental aspect of his character. He can also recognize a seven syllable line of verse if you read it to him aloud, which is another pretty impressive trait. I am thrilled that he is able to join us this morning and I ask you to join me in welcoming Christopher Merrill. Thank you Russell, it was a grievous moment when we lost Russell at the University of Iowa and it also had for us financial repercussions. At my first meeting of the National Council on the Humanities we had a dinner that night and I met Russell's soon to be colleague at Indiana who looked at me and he said, you know we just gave a lot of money to your soon to depart friend, Russell Valentino. And I was already so ticked off that our university could not find a way to keep him and then I thought, and now it's costing us a lot of money. So this is, it's nice to travel to Milwaukee to see my friend and to see all of you. I've written a piece called From the Last Days of the Interregnum Notes on Politics and Translation. And I'm gonna leave it open for questions at the end if you have so desire. A Russian friend told me this story. One day she received a call from an oligarch's assistant asking her to translate Jay Winick's The Great Upheaval, America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788 to 1800. A lengthy work of history published in 2007. How long will it take? The assistant asked. Three months, my friend replied. Anyone who tells you it can be done faster is lying. The assistant called back the next day offering to triple her fee if she could complete it in a month. She agreed reluctantly and assembled a team of six translators who worked day and night to produce a version on time. 10 copies were printed, one for the oligarch, the rest for his friends, which a lawmaker from the Duma presented at a party. And my friend reports that the oligarch, quote, found it difficult to read due to the versatile and exuberant character of the language. For even if he knew some English, he would certainly be overpowered by Mr. Winick's literary escapades for which we are all terribly thankful. Long live Shakespearean vocabulary, the bread and butter of translators, close quote. There is much to unpack here regarding the relationship between translation and politics, starting with the oligarch's desire to commission his own private translation of the text. Why the great upheaval? If you wanna understand the beginning of the 21st century, Walter Isaacson writes, you have to come to grips with the end of the 18th century. In one amazing decade filled with revolutions and a Middle East holy war, democracy and idealism as well as authoritarianism took root, close quote. Winick explores the pivotal events of the time, the birth of the American Republic, the French Revolution and the terror, the expansion of the Russian Empire, not in isolation but as a tissue of connections which dramatically altered the course of civilization. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Danton and Robespierre, Catherine the Great and Potemkin, Lafayette and Napoleon, their decisions had international repercussions. Here lie not only the seeds of contemporary conflicts but also lessons which Winick argues, nations and leaders ignore at their peril. Presumably this is what caught the attention of an oligarch alert to the shifting political winds of the post-Soviet order. Understanding Russia's role both in the age of revolution and in the birth of the modern world might instruct him about his next steps, enhance his portfolio and perhaps spare him the fate of those who earn the displeasure of Vladimir Putin. That the book bewildered him reminds us that history's acts and actors are often oblivious to the meaning of their gestures. Winick possesses many virtues as a writer, solid research knowledge of several languages, a gift for narrative but none more vital than his ability to discern connections between disparate events. This common poetic attribute, beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella in the words of the Count de L'Autrement, acquires additional force when applied to works of history. Call it a global perspective, which in my view is essential to the art of literary translation. This is not to say that a successful translation depends upon the ability to synthesize separate strands of information, incident and idea, linking personalities and places far removed from one another in the historian's manner, only to suggest that awareness of the big picture can tune one's ear to deeper political and cultural currents, which in the course of time may reveal new layers levels of meaning. Whatever it is that draws a translator to seek an equivalent music for one foreign text instead of another, Goethe's elective affinities, what W.S. Merwin calls a certain vibrancy, a hunch, a publishing contract, may be shaped by familiarity with the larger issues of the day. This is why a translator must be conversant well with, well, everything. How to cultivate such a sensibility? What is its relationship to the work at hand? These are questions I propose to discuss here in the last days of the interregnum. The great upheaval highlights in passing the role of translation in the circulation of ideas for good or ill. Pamphlets translated on the fly crossed one border after another, spreading radical ideas and revolutionary ferment, cathering the great's naka's instruction, a compendium of laws and ideas freely adapted from Montesquieu and other enlightenment thinkers, proclaiming the equality of all men and abjuring capital punishment and torture, was translated into every European language, which makes sadder yet, Winick's point that as she aged into a sclerotic autocrat terrified of the excesses of the French Revolution, she abandoned the ideals of her youth. The connections that Winick explores between the political figures of the day were indeed reinforced by translation. In a year rich in anniversaries, 100 years from the commencement of World War I, 70 after the D-Day invasion, 50 from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, none is more salient than the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down. Some foreign policy analysts now refer to the period between the events in the fall of 1989 and Russia's annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine as an interregnum in the sense that the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci used it to describe the 1930s, quote, a time without trajectory or a time outside of time. In his prison notebooks, Gramsci wrote, quote, the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, close quote, which may bring to mind the political dysfunction in Washington, the intractable conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and a host of other problems ranging from the ongoing worldwide economic crisis to climate change. But the birth throws of the new order are everywhere on display. Russian irredentism fall out from the Arab Spring, ISIL's advances in Syria and Iraq, rising tensions in the South China Sea, the Korean Peninsula and Kashmir, all suggest that the interregnum may be approaching its end. It is a common place to hear people quote from the second coming Yates's masterpiece composed in 1920 in the wake of World War I. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned, the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. I've been thinking about that a lot in the wake of the elections last week, especially since I come from Iowa where we just elected a senator made famous by her desire to castrate pigs. The one advantage to the election being over is that when I go to a YouTube video now, I don't have to see Joni Ernst. These lines are often invoked during political crises because they embody and enduring truth about the human condition. Those who listen to their better angels may be no match for those who are determined to leave a mark on history. Thus Vladimir Putin who as a young KGB officer stationed in Dresden witnessed the chaotic end of the Soviet order commemorated Sunday's anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down by sending two convoys into Eastern Ukraine towing grad multiple launch rocket systems and how it serves. Add to this combustible mix the complicated negotiations over Iran's nuclear program, the continuing violence in the zone of uncertainty extending from Afghanistan to the Atlantic and the looming sense that the borders drawn up in the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 designed to establish a peaceful order in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire may soon shift and it is not difficult to imagine that great change is afoot. What the next international order will be is anybody's guess. You may remember the 1997 film The Peacemaker which stars George Clooney and Nicole Kidman. The premise, a rogue Russian general steals 10 nuclear devices on their way to being decommissioned and it falls to our heroes to stop the detonation of a bomb at a treaty signing ceremony at the United Nations. There is a moment in Vienna where Clooney and Kidman steal a file containing information about the rented truck transporting the bombs to Iran. Driving their getaway car is an old Russian friend of Clooney's, a spy like himself who when confronted by a mafia hit squad assumes that a bribe will solve the problems. But he is shot dead and after a wild car race through the streets of the capital Clooney and Kidman recover in a hotel room. He hangs his head in his hands. You don't kill a Dimitri Verdekov, he says. There are certain rules. Killing him isn't useful. Is it ever Kidman asks in one of the sappier moments of the film? Good question. What happens when someone like Vladimir Putin rewrites the rules? Borders change, a passenger plane is shot out of the sky. People are killed or wounded or become refugees such as the state of things on this anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down. Poets are ever attentive to the seismic tremors that signal tectonic shifts in their private lives and the cultures they inhabit, some of which will figure in these remarks about the relationship between politics and translation. I began to translate at a moment of personal crisis in the late 1980s after leaving academia to become the caretaker of an estate in northern New Mexico. Unsurprisingly, I began with two books born of upheaval. Raleen Tir Travot by André Breton, Rene Char, and Paul Eloire, and Breton's last work, Constellation, a series of prose poems based on gouaches made by Juan Miro during World War I. Raleen Tir Travot dates from a six-day driving tour of southern France that Breton, Chao, and Eloire made in the summer of 1926 at the height of the surrealist movement when the game's chance operations and directed dreaming of an adventurous circle of poets and artists seemed to ignite discovery after discovery. Here is how Chao described the work. Unlike pages that always turn in the direction of the reader's eyes, the glance cast backward precisely in the wake of someone should systematically beget a bad impression at the starting point, not at the end. Then poetry immobilized, tired of playing dead enters the age of disguises, but cunning burns like straw. In turn, little bundles of kindling hastily put together but strong and malleable watch the open sky for the apparition of smoke to see if they're working. Collaboration, silence, his criticism dissolves hesitation. In the mind, narrow as space, the elbows have no room. The hands are even, the horizon is vertical and under everything. That's where you hear words liberated from suffering. Everything's free. Ralentitravo appealed to me because of its collaborative nature, an impulse that inspired two of my recent projects, seven poets, four days, one book. A poem created to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the International Writing Program. And after the fact, scripts and post-scripts, a conversation in prose poetry that Marvin Bell and I wrote over the last three years. Constellation, Breton's last poetic work, published in 1959, when he was all but alone, having expelled, outlived, or been deserted by many of his friends, is a hymn to the possibility of change, even in the darkest circumstances. This was a crucial lesson in my literary apprenticeship when I was trying to find a productive relationship between politics and poetics, which for the surrealists were inextricably intertwined. The movement had arisen from the ashes of World War I, when the legacies of trench warfare, chemical weapons, and wanton destruction marked every line of artistic inquiry. And Breton's reflections on the poet's role in the social contract resonated for me after a childhood inflected by, informed by the political upheaval of the 1960s and adolescence devoted to the writings of Kurt Vonnegut and a graduate seminar with the Russian poet Joseph Brotsky at Columbia. In the fall of 1980, Brotsky introduced me to the poems of Konstantin Kavafi, Zbigniew Herbert, and Czesław Miłosz. I also began an internship at the Freedom to Write Committee of the American Pen Center, where my first task was to prepare a dossier on censorship in either Poland or France. This was a fraught moment in Polish history with the rise of solidarity and the imposition of martial law, and the prospect of researching a turning point in the Cold War thrilled me. Here was a chance to apply what I was gleaning through the lens of Brotsky's meditations on the connections between poetry and politics in class, he memorialized the developments in Poland with his customary wit, announcing, for example, that the Soviets had invented a new holiday, Thanksgiving. What did this mean for writers? Now I would learn. Alas, Penn's executive committee decided that the issue of censorship in France was more pressing than what was happening in Poland. I was given to understand that Michel Foucault had some influence on the decision. Hence, three days a week, I trooped the library in Allianz Francaise to photocopy articles from Le Monde, Le Figaro, and other newspapers on economic censorship, political cowardice, and the ban on screenings of the sorrow and the pity, the documentary film about the collaboration between the Vichy government and Nazi Germany. At the end of the semester, I gave up the internship, having come to appreciate what Brotsky praised in the work of W. H. Auden, the code of conscience that distinguishes great poets in every language. My code of conscience remained in poet, but reading the work of Kavafi, Miwosch, and Herbert helped me to frame my understanding of the poet's role in society. Herbert's report from a besieged city, which dates from the period of martial law, had a decisive effect on my thinking. Here is the title poem in the translation of John and Bogdana Carpenter. Too old to carry arms and fight like the others, they graciously gave me the inferior role of chronicler. I record, I don't know for whom, the history of the siege. I am supposed to be exact, but I don't know when the invasion began. 200 years ago in December, in September, perhaps yesterday at dawn, everyone here suffers from a loss of the sense of time. All we have left is the place, the attachment to the place. We still rule over the ruins of temples, specters of gardens and houses. If we lose the ruins, nothing will be left. I write as I can in the rhythm of interminable weeks. Monday, empty storehouses, a rat became the unit of currency. Tuesday, the mayor murdered by unknown assailants. Wednesday, negotiations for a ceasefire, the enemy has imprisoned our messengers. Thursday, after a stormy meeting, the majority of voices rejected the motions of the spice merchants for unconditional surrender. Friday, the beginning of the plague. Saturday, our invincible defender, NN, committed suicide. Sunday, no more water. We drove back an attack at the eastern gate called the Gate of the Alliance. All of this is monotonous, I know, it can't move anyone. I avoid any commentary. I keep a tight hold on my emotions. I write about the facts. Only they, it seems, are appreciated in foreign markets. Yet with a certain pride, I would like to inform the world that thanks to the war, we have raised a new species of children. Our children don't like fairy tales. They play at killing, awake, and asleep. They dream of soup, of bread, and bones, just like dogs and cats. In the evening, I like to wander near the outposts of the city, along the frontier of our uncertain freedom. I look at the swarms of soldiers below their lights. I listen to the noise of drums, barbarian shrieks. Truly it is inconceivable the city is still defending itself. The siege has lasted a long time. The enemies must take turns. Nothing unites them except the desire for our extermination. Goss, the Tartar, Swedes, troops of the emperor, regiments of the transfiguration. Who can count them? The colors of their banners change, like the forests on the horizon, from delicate birds yellow in spring, through green, through red, to winter's black. And so in the evening, released from facts, I can think about distant ancient matters. For example, our friends beyond the sea. I know they sincerely sympathize. They send us flower, lard, sacks of comfort and good advice. They don't even know their fathers betrayed us, our former allies at the time of the second apocalypse. Their sons are blameless. They deserve our gratitude. Therefore we are grateful. They have not experienced a siege as long as eternity. Those struck by misfortune are always alone. The defenders of the Dalai Lama, the Kurds, the Afghan mountaineers. Now as I write these words, the advocates of conciliation have won the upper hand over the party of the inflexible. A normal hesitation of moods, fate still hangs in the balance. Cemetery's grow larger. The number of defenders is smaller. Yet the defense continues. It will continue to the end. And if the city falls, but a single man escapes, he will carry the city with himself on the roads of exile. He will be the city. We look in the face of hunger, the face of fire, face of death. Worst of all, the face of betrayal. And only our dreams have not been humiliated. And as I read that, I realize how absolutely contemporary the poem feels. In due course, I found myself reporting from the besieged capital of Bosnia Herzegovina, Sarajevo, where I can find my scribal duties to prose, believing that only Bosnians had the right to address in poetry the daily horror of life in a city without gas, electricity, or water, surrounded by Serbian gunners with the penchant for targeting innocent men, women, and children. This was a failure of nerve on my part. I know that now. But at the time I thought it best to record in the clearest prose I could muster an intimate history of that siege, the textures of cosmopolitanism transformed outwardly into a medieval state. My literary model was the Polish writer Richard Kaposzinski, the intrepid chronicler of wars and revolutions, whose book about the Soviet Union, Imperium, translated by Klarogal Glouzjuska. I carried everywhere. This book is written polyphonically, he explains in the preface, meaning that the characters, places, and themes that thread their way through its pages might reappear several times in different years and context. However, in contrast to the principles of polyphony, the whole does not end with a higher and definitive synthesis. But on the contrary, it disintegrates and falls apart. And the reason for this is that in the course of my writing, the theme fell apart. Namely, the great Soviet superpower. I took these words to heart in the writing of only the nails remain, scenes from the Balkan Wars. The fact is that I was wracked with guilt, because I could leave the war zone and write in tranquility back in this country. For the poet, Farita Dorakovic, who had lost her flat and library to a Serbian shell, I fell into the habit of typing out poems that I was reading by Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Auden, and sending them to her via satellite fax. She translated some into Bosnian to publish in Oslo, Virginia, the daily newspaper that appeared throughout the siege, even when it contained little more than death notices. For one visit, I clipped Czesław Miłosz's copry from the New Yorker, which she rendered into her language in no time at all, insisting that it was more important to her and her fellow citizens, even then the Nobel laureates powerful poem for Sarajevo. Thus I witnessed the difference that a single poem can make in someone's life. Miłosz writes, cut to fe, cut to fe to ta vie, voices call in various languages gathered in your wandering through two continents. What did you do with your life? What did you do? I have heard these voices repeatedly during my 25 years of reporting from a broad, often from war zones and undertaking cultural diplomacy missions to places of strategic interest to the United States. In the interregnum, that is, between the end of the Cold War and whatever is unfolding now, what the foreign policy analyst Richard Hass calls the unraveling, which accelerated with the events of 9-11. How to catch its essence? The Polish Nobel laureate Wysława Szymborska's photograph from September 11th, translated by Claire Kavanaugh and Stanisław Wyrączak, is a primer on the poet's obligation to the victims of that tragedy, and this is how the poem goes. They jumped from the burning floors, one, two, a few more, higher, lower. The photograph halted them in life, and now keeps them above the earth, toward the earth. Each is still complete, with a particular face and blood well hidden. There's enough time for hair to come loose, for keys and coins to fall from pockets. There's still within the air's reach, within the compass of places that have just now opened. I can do only two things for them. Describe this flight and not add a last line. This flight, this falling is, of course, our collective fate, a faithful translation of which is what we demand of anyone seeking to account for our time here below. In the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq Daniel Weissbord invited a number of translators to collaborate on a special Iraqi issue of modern poetry and translation. I was sent Hussein Qadin's literal versions of eight poems by Buland al-Hadri, occurred born in northern Iraq in 1926, who grew up in Baghdad and went into exile in 1976 and died in London in 1996 at the age of 70. He was a member of the Free Verse Movement, a modernizer of Arabic poetry, like Dostoevsky. He was granted a reprieve from a death sentence just minutes before he was to be executed. And one hears in his work a range of voices testifying to the complications of the human condition. His last book, Passages to Exile, was published the week before he died. Here is our translation from behind the closed door, which might be read as a message from the afterlife. The room is dark, as you know it, in a captive country, in a forsaken time, as I know it, a closed panel, a memory searching for a closed door, for the lips of a wound closed in the darkness, the red stain on the slayer's knife, sometimes in the blood of the slain, the screen, this captive country, this deserted country, a wonderful dream that consumes our steps, our blood, a thing that was ours, a thing that inquires about us, within us. But we, oh my homeland, you the slayer, you the slain, from what future shall we glance at our past? From what distance in a closed panel, in a closed door, shall we seek to know your face in our future? And you are the slayer, the slain is here and there, blood avenging itself on us, within us. As it happens, within the start of shock and awe, within weeks of the start of shock and awe, I was invited to give an after dinner address on the subject of war to at a conference of medical deans in Chicago. Accordingly, I read a section from Only the Nails Remains, scenes from the Balkan Wars, and some of our translations of Alhidery's poems. When I returned to my table, a kidney specialist from Columbia University leaned forward and said, Buland was my cousin. We are all in this together. The Libyan poet and doctor, Ashura Twebe, had a family obligation on the day that several of his friends were arrested for taking part in a literary festival and sentenced to long prison terms. Three decades later, at a cafe in Tripoli, in the twilight of Colonel Momar Gaddafi's reign of terror, Ashura told me that he marveled daily at his luck. Had he gone to that reading, he would not have been able to finish medical school, raise a family, or write the poems that earned him international renown, including a prophetic work, a flute that voices the spirit's moan in the body's lament, finished not long before the beginning of the Arab Spring, which is by turns a surrealist fable, a meditation on the departed, and a series of sketches of an escape route from Gaddafi's nightmarish regime. The final stanza, translated from the Arabic by Rashida Plenty. Who made you, excuse me, who made you a wild animal with the lion's body and an ant eater's head? You can set down a fox head and raise the scales in the arc of empty space. You can see the transformation of the perplexed from the narrow hole of wisdom. You can hear with your heart the whimper of those wandering to their hermitages at night with their eyes closed. You can share thirst's journey with the hoopy. You can measure the air with two unbalanced wraps of a foot. You can steal a guileless look at the woman bathing in the horseshoe of the evening. You can dance with the torch bearers in the desert of speech. You can rise from the ashes or not rise. Ashur's luck held during the revolution, the last six months of which he spent evading capture by Gaddafi's forces. His village was known for its anti-government sentiments. And two days after Tripoli fell to the rebels, when internet service was finally restored, we talked via Skype. Do you remember what I told you last summer when you came to Libya, he asked? Gaddafi hates the Libyan people. Some months later, Ashur learned that his name had been on a list of Libyans slated for arrest and execution as part of the celebration marking the 40th anniversary of Gaddafi's coup d'etat. Fortunately for Ashur and 6,000 others on the list, the dictator was caught and killed a week before the roundup could take place. Ashur devoted his professional life to treating cancer. And he is no less adept in his poems of diagnosing what ails the body politic. You can see the transformation of the perplexity rights from the narrow hole of wisdom, which seems to me to be a good definition of literature. I crave such wisdom, which, however, did not spare my friend the consequences of Libya's post-revolutionary mayhem. Militiamen burned his house to the ground, kidnapped his neighbors, killed several men in his village and sent him and his family into hiding where they had been preparing to go into exile, joining the exodus of millions of people from the region and other conflicted parts of the world. For this is a time of migration, another sign that great change is at hand. I was in Tehran this summer when President Obama ordered airstrikes on ISIS, a decision that prompted an Iranian political analyst to tell me that America had a habit of shooting itself in both feet repeatedly. He regarded this latest incursion in the region which some in the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs surely welcomed as another example of Western hubris, which would succeed only in pushing Iran closer to Russia and China. He himself was on his way to Beijing to give a series of lectures, and he predicted that in 50 years, the relationship between Iran and China would shape the course of history. Good luck with that, I told him, recognizing in his peevishness the disappointment of a spurned friend. For he had been educated in the United States, and it was clear to me that if a deal was reached with Iran over its nuclear programs, he would be among the first to arrange a lecture tour of American universities. Be prepared to hear from him in the next couple of weeks. Two months later, when the protest started in Hong Kong, I was two hours away in the city of Guangzhou conducting a cultural diplomacy mission, which the Chinese authorities saw fit to cancel, ostensibly because one member of our delegation, which included a blind poet, a composer and a choreographer was on the so-called blacklist, an unlikely scenario in the opinion of the senior American diplomat, who delivered a dimarsh to a local government official, calling this the low point in his 35 years of working in China. Why the authorities regarded our workshops in creative writing, dance and musical composition with artists, high school and university students and members of the disabled community as a threat remains a mystery. Tempted to pack our bags and fly home, we decided instead to improvise a program within the U.S. Consulate, eventually bringing together over 100 courageous individuals to create and perform new poems, dances and songs, a repost if you will, to officials afraid of their own people. I mention this because at the APEC conference in Beijing this week, journalists highlighted the sometimes awkward and surely always difficult meetings between Obama, Putin and Xi Jinping. The American strategic pivot toward Asia, designed to counter Russia's rising power, reflects not only the realignment of the international order, but technological and social change on a grand scale. And it has an analog in translation, what Merwin calls this unfinishable art. He admits that quote, there is no such thing as the final translation of a poem, only the original is unique and absolute. It essentially cannot exist in other words. And one part of the impossibility of translating any poem is the fact that what we want the translation to be is exactly what it never can be, the original. Yet the impossibility of the whole enterprise is part of the potential, the perennial temptation to try again, close quote. Craftsmen worship Prometheus, the thief of fire and translators are ever angling to kindle in their own language what burns brightest in the original. What remains unfinished then in an interconnected world in which images and ideas, currencies and crises move at the speed of light is the painstaking work of delivering into the target language the news that stays news, poetry and fiction from China, Iran and Russia, not to mention all the other languages living and dead. How else will we grasp the dreams and desires, the hopes and fears of our fellow humans? During the war in Bosnia, Charles Sinek argued that if you want to know the true history of the 20th century, read the poets. The same holds for this century. Three years ago at the request of the State Department, which in the absence of diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran, built a virtual embassy, I conceived a project to provide Iranians with the window onto American literature. Whitman Web, a year long exploration of Song of Myself, one of the founding documents in our poetic tradition. My colleague Ed Folson, who co-founded the Whitman archive and I wrote translations, commentaries and questions for each of the 52 sections, which the Iranian American poet, Shole Volpe, and Mohsen Imadi, an Iranian poet living in Mexico, translated into Farsi. Shole recorded their version of the poem to compliment English and Arabic recordings, and then we added translations into 15 other languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Russian and Ukrainian. In the course of the project, we discovered that the standard Russian translation, which dates from the 1920s, is missing 19 sections, speaking of politics and translation. And so we commissioned a new and complete Russian version of Song of Myself, mindful of Whitman's confession in the final section of the poem, quote, the spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me. He complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yop over the roofs of the world, close quote. Yet Song of Myself lives in dozens of languages and we were pleasantly surprised and gratified to learn that Whitman Webb was never blocked in Iran, Russia or China. There are other ways to influence public opinion besides military and economic means. Which brings me to Gentian Ciccioli, an Albanian poet who was born and raised during the dictatorship of Enver Hoja. He knew from an early age that he wanted to write poetry. He also knew that studying literature at the University of Tirana was a fool's errand. So he entered the faculty of botany, imagining that the strictures of the writer's union did not apply to the flora of his country. And one day in the library, he discovered to his astonishment a copy of Leaves of Grass shelled with other botany texts. The only one left in Albania, all the others having been burned. He said his heart was pounding as he read the opening lines. I celebrate myself and sing myself and what I assume you shall assume for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. More so when he realized that the librarian was watching him. He assumed he would be arrested. But it was the librarian who had saved the book from destruction, cataloging it with other botanical texts. And so he allowed Gentian to lock himself in his office during his lunch break and read to his heart's content. Over the course of two weeks, Gentian copied the book out by hand. This is the part I love. His mother typed it up for him at night after night. And then he translated it into Albanian, which set him on his way to becoming a poet. By the time we met, he was translating T.S. Eliot's four quartets. And in the spirit of a line from the poem, which for London literati arrived like a godsend during the German Blitz of the city, in my end is my beginning, let me conclude with another story from my Russian friend. In April between the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine, we met in Moscow for dinner. And in the course of a conversation about her country's newfound exuberance over the prospect of reversing history, she remembered something her hairdresser had said. Putin's military daring had filled her with such pride that her breasts grew two sizes. How to translate that, I said. My friends laughed or filled the air. Thank you very much. Chug, chug, chug. We have about 15 minutes. So if you have questions, I can walk around. My name is Faiza Sultan. I'm your Facebook friend. I am from the northern part of Kurdistan. And thank you so much for mentioning Blant Haidery's poems and mentioning the cases of Kurds, which was my theme yesterday last night. I sang a Kurdish song. I think as poets and translators, we have another world. We can create a virtual world that we are all connected on the basis of humanity and the politics that is a game played by politicians which is dividing all the nations can be away from nations that are hoping for peace. Hoping for peace. And you are an ambassador for all the nations. Just listening to your speech, you mentioned more than one, and you mentioned examples of poets. Ashur Teribi, he's my friend, my Facebook friend, too. But a dear friend, I was just telling him that his poem has been read. This update about his, he lost his home, he lost his library, his books were burned. That was done by the extremists who entered his village. And he's displaced now in another village. And this is what poets are in these kinds of places are facing. And they are still surviving by writing poems. And that's what gives them strength. Thank you again. Thank you for beautiful talk. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions or comments from anybody? Susan? Thank you so much, Christopher. It was just really fascinating talk and inspiring. And I'm asking you a question that in a way might not even be fair to ask, but if you can't answer it, nobody can, I think. So here we go. My favorite kind of question. Yes. So there seems to be something about poetry and the sort of careful, quiet, internalizing quest of the poet to capture something of shared experience that is also outward reaching at the same time. And you've cited so many cases of poets that are providing hope, providing a sense of truth and international community through their work. And my question is, does poetry do this? Have you also encountered poets who are representing points of view that would make you unhappy, make you turn away, make you feel that they're standing for something that is not beneficial to humanity? Or is it really that poetry is sort of pushing those who practice it and love it into this good place that we're talking about? Well, poets are no different than other human beings. And as you said that I was remembering the night that I met the infamous Bosnian poet Radovan Karatech who orchestrated the siege of Sarajevo. We met in the lobby of the Hotel Intercontinental in Belgrade and a British journalist introduced me to him as a fellow poet. And, you know, the poet I mentioned in the Bosnian poet I mentioned, Ferita Derakovich told me once that he was also a psychiatrist and she went to see him before the war because she was losing her hair. And in large part because of anxiety over the prospect of civil war. And she said to me that Karatech was a good psychiatrist. He cured me of losing the hair and then he began the war. So, you know, I mean, there are, and I know we know from the example of Yugoslavia that there were many writers who were writing really on behalf of the extremists. Charlie Simick has that wonderful line. He says that we all know that sooner or later our tribe asks us to assent to murder. And he holds that up against what he calls the oldest values of civilization which is the individual lyric voice. And in my experience those poets who are most interested in preserving that individual voice against the machinations of their tribe are the most interesting ones of all. Think of that poem that I quoted of Zbigny of Herbert. You know, we have kind of a dim memory of martial law for those of us who are old enough. And I was really in it all the time. But when I read that poem, even as I was reading it today, I was thinking, oh my God, he really caught something absolutely individual, his individual experience of it which he's too old to man the barricades, too old to carry a gun. So his obligation at such a moment is to record for posterity the dimensions of that siege. And you'll notice that there's that moment where he goes, you know, maybe began 200 years ago or last Monday because these are an enduring feature of human life. And it falls to the poet to try to capture that. Not on behalf of any ideology because, you know, we all know in a poem that the political material is usually what begins to, as Brotsky said, begins to stink first, you know, because it rots. But somehow or other catching the structure or the mechanism of the way that people behave at such moments has the hope of lasting. Are there other questions or comments? Any other hands? I've been asked to remind you that the registration area closes at noon today. And there are a few lost and found items there like scarves and gloves. You might need them when you leave. And they have a few program booklets left for those of you who registered late on site. First come first serve, they'll have a few of those for you. I want y'all to thank Christopher Merrill with me. Thank you.