WS.MERWIN
if you cling to the old usage
do you not cut yourself off
frolll the new speech
but if you rush to the new Ii ps
do you not fade like a sound cut off
do you not dry up like a puddle
is the new tongue to be trusted
what of the relics of your childhood
should you bear in Illind pieces
of dyed cotton and gnawed wood
lint of voices untranslatable stories
summer sunlight on dried paint
whose color continues to fade in the
growing brightness of the whi te afternoon
ferns on the shore of the tr:lIlspareIlt lake
or should you forget them
as you float between ageless languages
and call Ii'olll one to the other who you arc
123
I want to go to another kind of exile, a poem about a person who was
born in Germany in the generation of Ben Jonson and who signed onto a
Dutch vessel; he had a good middle-class education, but was not a learned
man. He was in eftect shanghaied and taken out to the Dutch East Indies,
where the European survival rate if they stayed there even for a really shOtt
time was down in the teens percentage, but he stayed there for the rest of his
life, got out of his uniform, [ would think very sensibly, and lived first on Java
and then on Ambon, but lived to lose almost everything that he valued. His
sense of awe and wonder stayed wi th him al I his life and out of that education
he wrote the first five-volume
nom '!fthe Indies,
first in Latin, and then the first
sL'(-vol ume encyclopedia of the Indies, called
Curiosities of the Indies,
but it was
as learned as you cou ld be. This was two hundred years before Linnaells and
the classifications of the Linnaean system. So he had to describe everything, and
the descri ptions are petfectly wonderful. I mean he rem.inds me of Montaigne.
He's been beautifully translated by E. M . Beekman at Amherst. His name was
Georg Edvard Rumph and, if you know anything about tropical botany, you
come across his name al l the time. The
Flom
that he wrote was lost at sea. The
encyclopedia that he wrote was lost in fire. He rewrote them both and illus–
trated them. He rewrote them the second time in Dutch and they finally
survived. But he lost everything else and finally the sight of his eyes and that's
the title of the poem, "The Blind Seer of Ambon." You must have guessed
that he's a hero of mine, a great figure and a beautiful writer.
