Reading Whitman: My 15 Minutes of Fame

 

Walt Whitman

I promised that some day I would describe the time I read Walt Whitman’s “Oh Captain, My Captain” to the people of Slovenia.  The occasion was the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II.  As today is the anniversary of D-Day, it seems a good time to tell the story

The May 8, 1995 celebration had an elaborate program planned, one that was to culminate in poetry.  Six people from allied countries stood atop scaffolding 20 feet high under gigantic letters spelling out (as I recall) ZMAGA, the Slovene word for victory.  We were all fitted up in suits (the only handmade suit I have ever owned) and given poems to read from our home countries.

I’ll get to the readings in a moment, but let me first describe what we saw going on around us.   We were in Republic Square, which is surrounded by a number of semi-tall buildings.  On the top of each building was a former Miss Slovenia with a ceremonial hunting horn.  On the steps of the Parliament building were opera singers and the Slovene Philharmonic.  In the course of the ceremony, World War II partisans and concentration camp survivors marched into square. Slovenia’s famous white Lippizaner stallions were trotted out,  jets flew overhead, and Alpinist mountain climbers (for which Slovenia is also famed) scaled all the surrounding buildings.  It was quite a show.

But poetry, to my delight, was the culminating event.  A Russian read a Vladimir Mayakovsky poem, a Brit read Shakespeare’s “Once more into the breach, dear friends” speech from Henry V, a French woman read Paul Eluard’s “Liberte” (here’s a translation), a Spaniard read a poem by anti-fascist martyr Garcia Lorca, and I read Whitman.  To conclude the readings and the celebration as a whole, a high school girl read a Slovene poem, perhaps by Slovenia’s national poet France Prešeren.  The poem pointed to a new future, which was no doubt on everyone’s mind.  After all, Slovenia had broken free from Yugoslavia only four years earlier.

There were some interesting back stories.  The French woman was actually French Canadian (her French seemed to be why they chose her).  The Brit was Scottish and talked about how imperialistic Henry V’s speech seemed from a Scottish point of view.  (The play actually makes jokes at the expense of the non-English countries that make up Great Britain.)  The women grumbled about the unattractive suits that had been made for them. (The men fared much better there.)

“Oh Captain, My Captain” was chosen (so it was explained to me) because President Jimmy Carter sent the poem to Yugoslavia after President Tito died. Whatever the reason, I found it a good choice because of the way it acknowledges the cost of the war, even as it celebrates the victory. The bells can ring and the people exult now that the ship is “anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done.”  Yet on the deck my captain lies.

Maybe the poem was chosen to commemorate the staggeringly high number of Yugoslavs who died during World War II.  I believe that the percentage—1.7 million casualities or 1 in 8—was worse even than what the Soviet Union suffered (1 in 10).

I may have been overdramatic in the way I read it (or lip synched it since we had prerecorded our readings).  One of my students complained so perhaps I should have toned it down, the Slovenes being far less demonstrative than, say, their former countrymen the Serbs.  Then again, it’s hard to soft pedal “fallen cold and dead.”

So I had my 15 minutes of fame.  For two weeks afterwards strangers would come up to me on the bus or stop me on the sidewalk and tell me they had seen me on television.  I, meanwhile, had as vivid a demonstration as I could have desired of the vital importance of poetry.

For the really big moments in life, turn to verse.

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