Niagara Falls, Or A Walk With Walt Whitman Poem by Edward Mieželaitis

1.

Squeezed, like the words in sonnets, in its frame of banks,
obeying canons, flows the river's epic water,
like the events in ageless poems, like the mast
of the canoe that used to carry Hiawatha,
and like the green tobacco smoke curled by the wind,
that rose in midday quiet from his pipe of peace;
slow as Columbus' Santa Maria once
sailed, swaying, in the medieval breeze.
Then, suddenly, the cliff-edge... Like an army
driven in human streams to fratricidal war,
it drops sheer into the abyss and loudly
the martial trumpets of the Niagara roar.

2.

But now away with harmony,
away with canons -
no pen could stand the rhythm of the water.
Away with rhymes,
they're quite unnecessary here,
for in the noise and tumult of the torrent
they won't reach even the most sensitive of ears.
Here rhymes must be as deafening as thunder
or, at the least, as artillery salvoes,
for here wild water legions are at war.
Away with logic, too,
for here illogicality prevails
and nothing's left of geometric rules.

Force takes the upper hand here.
Brutality comes tearing to the surface,
trampling on weaklings with its feet.
Here dominates a wild erupting mass,
a civil war of water rages here.

Here black and white
and red and yellow water-races mix,
and the democracy of Nature triumphs.
Water and words
are white and black and red and yellow democrats
which break up the whole framework of old canons,
break up eternal and harmonious dictatorships,
creating monumental chaos.

Here you will never hear the shepherd's pipe.
Here drums keep rattling and brass bugles blaze.
But over all this hell hangs in the air
the colourful harmony of the sky -
a rainbow
which crowns the silver head of old Walt Whitman,
the king of chaos, the philosopher and satyr,
while from his snowy beard like crumbs of bread
pour sonorous words:
'And mind a word of the modern -
the word En Masse.'

I tell Walt Whitman:
a single word, like an individual, loses sense,
for it can never win in any battle.
Today the winners will be words en masse -
armies of words, brigades of wordy and legions,
word movements, revolutions and uprisings,
and there will come about a new society of words, words-democrats,
a democratically organised new system.
(I ask you not to mix up different notions:
the great sun of democracy which Whitman sang
is setting on this continent. Today it rises
over the Old World from the continent of socialism.)
This waterfall of words
no longer can be squeezed
into the confines of iambics, dactyls and the rest,
for there are far too many words - entire word-masses,
and to control them other laws and systems are required.
Their rhymes originate from river floodwaters,
from gusts of wind and the low roar of lathes
and thunderpeals.
Their rhythm is asymmetry,
the pulsation of disorder,
which dominate in Nature.
But from this chaos will emerge
an exquisite chaotic harmony.

And words will take their colour from all human races,
from earth, sea-water, grass and steel.
And over the chaotic water-mass of the Niagara
shines the white tousled head of old Walt Whitman,
great Pan of poetry.

3.

I smooth down my poem like a darling-doll;
I twine its pigtails of rhyme,
and let it walk off looking neat and fine,
smoothed down like my own little daughter's poll,
all spick and span - a real darling-doll.

But at times like a young colt it starts to buck,
and all of a sudden it goes astray,
and then the poetry runs amuck,
so that even the great Alexander Blok
couldn't have stopped its unruly play.

Is there sense, though, in squeezing it into tight canons,
into their narrow Procrustean bed,
if metaphors stick out and lines defy scanning,
if the image, sword bared, wants to challenge the canon
to fight until one of them falls down dead?

Should the rhythmic amplitude be so tightened?
Must we always follow the common practice
and spin like other bards - God almighty! -
still continue to spin, by all novelty frightened,
around the iambo-trochaic axis?

Now listen, do rivers resort to iambic?
And are iambics employed by the breeze?
Now listen, does anything through the cosmos ambling
sound even a bit like our earthly iambic
or like our trochee - do tell me, please!

Then why must we narrow the scale of a poem?
Let's give it, our poem, complete liberty.
Yet I smooth it, if need be, my poem: get goin'!
I comb it, all spick and span: now we'll show 'em!
But in fact, poem-dollikins aren't for me!

4.

I've returned to my banks, you'll say...
Yes, I have!
Vortices, waterfall
make up this epoch.

But returning out of a waterfall
isn't the same as returning
to the maximum speed of the Santa Maria,
or to Hiawatha's canoe,
or the curling smoke of his pipe of peace.

Here the return
is like that of a horse leaping out of battle,
all its muscles nervously twitching.
In our case, the return is accompanied by
reminiscences of the waterfall's vortex.

A river, jumping down off a cliff
flows slower, but does not return.
And so we have two hoary poles standing
on opposite sides of the river:
gray-haired, blind Homer
and gray-haired Walt Whitman.

One in his laurel leaves,
the other in leaves of grass -
thus, both in green wreaths,
across the Niagara extending
handy to each other.

Translated by Dorian Rottenberg