Len, one of my projects, though the Lord knows when
I'll get around to it, is to do an edition of Kipling's
selected poems. (My friend and tennis partner here,
Tom Pinney, is one of the two or three leading Kipling
scholars, and I think I can talk him into doing it with
me, and I think Modern Library might want to publish it.)
He's a wonderful poet, and it's only stupid modern
prejudice on the part of people who haven't really read
much of him that obscures his worth. I remember seeing
Levine speak scornfully of him last year, but he was
just showing his ignorance. It's no accident that Frost
and Robinson and Hardy and Borges and Auden &c &c all
thought Kipling a great poet. And his politics were
complicated; it's wrong to call him an imperialist and
racist and let it go at that. (A lot of people look down
their noses at him for the famous line in "Recessional"
about "lesser breeds without the Law," assuming he's
talking about Indians or Africans, but he doesn't mean
them at all, he means the GERMANS, who committed so many
atrocities and killed his son.)
And I think I remembering your remarking about how much
the ballad meant to Frost and Hardy and Auden and Borges
and so on, and it would be a good subject for someone
to write a book about. Thom Gunn wrote a very fine essay
about Hardy and the ballads.
Christopher, here is that tanka in proper verse, as Dick
Barnes and I rendered it:
Not to have been killed
As have others of my kin
On a battlefield.
To be, in the empty night,
The one tallying syllables.
Some of the others in the series are also good, like the
one just before that:
How sad the rain is,
Coming down over marble,
Sad to become dirt,
Sad that it can never be
Man's days, or sleep, or the dawn.
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