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assurances belie the actual nature of his accomplishment. Rather than
creating a window through which one can see something of Dante's
movement, Merwin's translation mirrors his own style.
Yet
(in 'amors
calls for a distillation, a more intense experience. For
all its lovely qualities, Merwin's
Purgatorio
is diluted Dante. An unset–
tled quality lingers. Having tasted the forgetful waters of Lethe, Merwin
achieves a kind of self-reflective stylistic quintessence; but having not yet
tasted restorative Eunoe, a depth of meaning remains left out. Just as an
acknowledgment of Pound is missing from Merwin's "Poetry Rising
from the Dead," what is physically there in the poetry of the
Comme–
dia
has not been made fully corporeal in his translation. And just as
Dante shows divided feelings about those neither-damned-nor-saved
souls (among them his tearfully abandoned teacher Virgil) condemned
to Limbo, Merwin himself appears torn between his youthful admira–
tions and the parameters of his mature poetry's self-created orthodoxy.
Mary Maxwell
The Languages of the Classroom
THE SKIN THAT WE SPEAK: THOUGHTS ON LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
IN
THE CLASSROOM. Edited by Lisa Delpit and J oanne Kilgour Dowdy. The
New Press. $24.95.
MOST PEOPLE REMEMBER the Ebonies affair as one of the more ludicrous
episodes of PC revisionism. In December 1996, the Oakland School
Board issued a new curricular policy, officially recognizing "West and
Niger-Congo African Language Systems [Ebonies], and each language as
the predominantly primary language of African-American students."
Teachers were asked to "immediately devise and implement the best pos–
sible academic program for imparting instruction to African-American
students in their primary language." The response was instantaneous.
Op-eds around the country ridiculed the proposal as a crazed specimen
of identity politics. Jesse Jackson and Maya Angelou deplored it, and the
Clinton administration promised to withhold federal funding. Ebonies
jokes were heard on talk shows, and images of teachers lecturing in jive
clogged fax machines. Commentators treated it as sensitivity gone wild,
