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Gallup Poll of the unemployed. The question was asked: "What do you
blame for the present unemployment in this country?" One out of five of
those queried-the only group of any size to agree on an answer-replied:
"Machines taking the place of men." As the Luddites tried to stop the
industrial revolution by smashing the machines, so the present crisis of
capitalism seems to the American masses to be the impersonal product of
machine technology. The people in this book look on economic depres·
sion as a natural disaster, like a flood or a hurricane, and they no more
think of opposing their wills to it than Fan Flanigan, the riverbank squat–
ter, thinks of rebelling against the periodical floods that drive her out of
her shack. "Oh, I tell you I've see that old river come up. And the gov'ment
never sent us no notice of what the water was going to do. We jest set and
see it come up. See it and know what we's in for. When it begins to git in
the houses, we take and move everything up on the bank across the railroad
tracks, and we camp there all on top of each other." So capitalist crisis
washes over these people's homes, and so, too, they endure it.
The New Deal seems to be the only Way Out these people see. "We
don't have anything, no furniture, no car, nothin'. All five of us eat, sleep,
and do everything else in one room.•.. Sure I'm for this Administration.
I'm with Roosevelt right up to the hilt." This faith in Franklin D. imd his
smile is the most tragic aspect of this tragic book.
DWIGHT
MACDONALD
A
GREAT POEM. IN ENGLISH
DUINO ELEGIES. By Rainer Maria Rilke. Translated by/. B. Leishman
and
Stephen Spender. W. W. Norton
&
Co.
$2.00.
The present translation is the third and the best which has been made
of Rilke's most important work.
J.
B. Leishman's previous translations of
Rilke have been faithful, but composed in a barbarous un-English.
Stephen Spender, who is responsible for a miraculous translation of one
of Rilke's short poems,
Orpfteus. Eurydice. Hermes.,
has helped very much
to mitigate these defects, and has added a sense for rhythm and diction
which were hopelessly lacking in
J.
B.
Leishman's previous work. The
mitigation remains incomplete, however, and Mr. Leishman's insensitivity
to the idiom of English persists chiefly in the vocabulary: "Have you ·so
fully remembranced", "shining-most" (where "most luminous" would have
been adequate), "stormily-rapturous", "quietened", "promiseful", "cheer–
struck", "neat-quitting", and other like usages are frequent. The result is
not a great English poem, but, given the German text also and a useful
commentary, we do get a great poem, made available in English for every–
one who has a little German. The perfect translator for Rilke would
be
a
poet who could draw upon a Wordsworthian style, with all its directness,
