YUGOSLAV REPORT
123
men; the good West Indian writers, he says, are all in London. And, that
question aside (for the difficulty may be just our insularity and igno–
rance) , it still remains true that the
kinds
of things European writers can
say
to
African and Asian writers must
be
vaguer, less concretely about
literature, than those European, American and Latin American writers
can say
to
each other. As the artistic assumptions shared by PEN mem–
bers are diluted even further by stepped-up internationalization, there
is the danger that discourse at the congresses will sink into Basic Esperan–
to, with the same words meaning different things to everyone there.
This is a problem that won't be solved, say, by having more regional
congresses. PEN has to find a way to remain reliably and respectably
literary-to become that far more so than it is-if it is also to play, on
a still wider stage, its half-quixotic, half-eminently practical "political"
role. But the problem is not, I think, insoluble. A strong start on it could
be
made by pruning some of the dead branches and twigs among the
individual PEN members, and by encouraging local centers to set stand–
ards for admission beyond that of mere appearance in print. As the ex–
tremely promising inauguration of the
tables Tondes
at the Bled congress
indicates, some such search for a more aristocratic constitution of PEN
is already underway.
Susan Sontag
saDDhU:
Poems and fragments
Translated, with an Introduction, by Guy Davenport
Sappho sang of Eros and Aphrodite, of graceful youths with
bronzed bodies and flowing hair. She sang of trees and flowers
and love in an age of gold.
In
Guy
Davenport's unique trans–
lations the elegance and supple grace of Sappho's lyrics are
re-created for the modern reader.
" ... there is real distinction
in
the writing and a refreshing free–
dom from the self-conscious tone, vacillating between preten–
tiousness and archness, which spoils most attempts to do
Sappho."
-Richmond Lattimore
"Sharp, bright, above all essentially
strange,
these versions con–
vince us for the first time in English that Sappho's voice comes
from a world piercingly unlike our own, but with so articulate
an identity that we recognize it
in
the least fragment."
-HughKenner
128 pages illustrated $3.95
III
The University 01 MiChigan Press
Ann
Arbor
