Word: walcott
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...poet Derek Walcott once wrote, "To change your language you must change your life." Translations can change poems (the Aeneid, for example, has an elegant architecture that's hard to rebuild in English), and translations can ruin movies (who wants to see the dubbed version of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?). Shakira is struggling to prove that a person's career can be translated, from one tongue to another, from one country to the next, without changing its essence. After stops in Uruguay, Argentina and the Bahamas, she now resides in Miami, at least for the time being...
...billion passengers aboard Spaceship Earth enter a complex new century, few issues are as fundamental as water. We are falling far short of the most basic humanitarian goals: sufficient and affordable clean water, food and energy for everyone. "I cannot bear to watch the nations cry," wrote Derek Walcott, the Caribbean-born Nobel laureate, whose poetry often reflects his African heritage. With regional disputes over water resources increasing, and people and ecosystems alike facing urgent, immense challenges, business as usual is not a viable option...
...surprised again when, after the usual laudatory introductions, Maxwell was introduced as a resident of Amherst, Massachusetts. After the reading, he told me that he first came to the U.S. in 1987 to study at Boston University with Derek Walcott. “If I hadn’t had a failure of nerve, I would never have gone back. My instincts were telling me to stay,” he said. In the end, he spent 10 more years in London before becoming a semi-permanent U.S. resident...
...example, Walcott portrays Pissarro's choice--to abandon St. Thomas for France and high European culture--in different ways. At one point the poet gives his blessing: "There was no treachery if he turned his back/on the sun that plunges fissures in the fronds/of the feathery immortelles, on a dirt track/with a horse cart for an equestrian bronze." But later Walcott wonders whether Pissarro's Impressionist renderings of French scenery did not involve treachery after all: "Are all the paintings then falsifications/of his real origins, was his island betrayed?/Instead of linden walks and railway stations,/ our palms and windmills...
...eerie moment Walcott imagines himself actually being sketched, a century or so earlier, by Pissarro: "I felt a line enclose my lineaments/and those of other shapes around me too." The poet sees himself, under Pissarro's watchful eye, "keeping my position as a model does/a young slave mixed and newly manumitted." How, Walcott muses, can he be so swayed by the art of Veronese and Tiepolo when people of his color appear in it, if at all, only on the margins, as servants or attendants, Moors holding the leashes of white wolfhounds...