In any case, you find yourselves adrift in the ocean, with pages and pages rustling in every direction, clinging to a raft whose ability to stay afloat you are not so sure of. The alternative, therefore, would be to develop your own taste, to build your own compass, to familiarize yourself, as it were, with particular stars and constellations—dim or bright but always remote. This, however, takes a hell of a lot of time, and you may easily find yourself old and gray, heading for the exit with a lousy volume under your arm. Another alternative—or perhaps just a part of the same—is to rely on hearsay: a friend's advice, a reference caught in a text you happen to like. Although not institutionalized in any fashion (which wouldn't be such a bad idea), this kind of procedure is familiar to all of us from a tender age. Yet this, too, proves to be poor insurance, for the ocean of available literature swells and widens constantly, as this book fair amply testifies: it is yet another tempest in that ocean.
So where is one's terra firma, even though it may be but an uninhabitable island? Where is our good man Friday, let alone a Cheetah?
Before I come up with my suggestion—nay! what I perceive as being the only solution for developing sound taste in literature—I'd like to say a few words about this solution's source, i.e., about my humble self—not because of my personal vanity, but because I believe that the value of an idea is related to the context in which it emerges. Indeed, had I been a publisher, I'd be putting on my books' covers not only their authors' names but also the exact age at which they composed this or that work, in order to enable their readers to decide whether the readers care to reckon with the information or the views contained in a book written by a man so much younger—or, for that matter, so much older—than themselves.
The source of the suggestion to come belongs to the category of people (alas, I can no longer use the term "generation," which implies a certain sense of mass and unity) for whom literature has always been a matter of some hundred names; to the people whose social graces would make Robinson Crusoe or even Tarzan wince; to those who feel awkward at large gatherings, do not dance at parties, tend to find metaphysical excuses for adultery, and are finicky about discussing politics; the people who dislike themselves far more than their detractors do; who still prefer alcohol and tobacco to heroin or marijuana—those who, in W. H. Auden's words, "one will not find on the barricades and who never shoot themselves or their lovers." If such people occasionally find themselves swimming in their blood on the floor of prison cells or speaking from a platform, it is because they rebel against (or, more precisely, object to) not some particular injustice but the order of the world as a whole. They have no illusions about the objectivity of the views they put forth; on the contrary, they insist on their unpardonable subjectivity right from the threshold. They act in this fashion, however, not for the purpose of shielding themselves from possible attack: as a rule, they are fully aware of the vulnerability pertinent to their views and the positions they defend. Yet—taking the stance somewhat opposite to Darwinian—they consider vulnerability the primary trait of living matter. This, I must add, has less to do with masochistic tendencies, nowadays attributed to almost every man of letters, than with their instinctive, often firsthand knowledge that extreme subjectivity, prejudice, and indeed idiosyncrasy are what help art to avoid cliche. And the resistance to cliche is what distinguishes art from life.
Now that you know the background of what I am about to say, I may just as well say it: The way to develop good taste in literature is to read poetry. If you think that I am speaking out of professional partisanship, that I am trying to advance my own guild interests, you are mistaken: I am no union man. The point is that being the supreme form of human locution, poetry is not only the most concise, the most condensed way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation—especially one on paper.
The more one reads poetry, the less tolerant one becomes of any sort of verbosity, be it in political or philosophical discourse, in history, social studies, or the art of fiction. Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction. A child of epitaph and epigram, conceived, it appears, as a shortcut to any conceivable subject matter, poetry is a great disciplinarian to prose. It teaches the latter not only the value of each word but also the mercurial mental patterns of the species, alternatives to linear composition, the knack ofomit- ting the self-evident, emphasis on detail, the technique of anticlimax. Above all, poetry develops in prose that appetite for metaphysics which distinguishes a work of art from mere belles lettres. It must be admitted, however, that in this particular regard, prose has proven to be a rather lazy pupil.
Please, don't get me wrong: I am not trying to debunk prose. The truth of the matter is that poetry simply happens to be older than prose and thus has covered a greater distance. Literature started with poetry, with the song of a nomad that predates the scribblings of a settler. And although I have compared somewhere the difference between poetry and prose to that between the air force and the infantry, the suggestion that I make now has nothing to do with either hierarchy or the anthropological origins of literature. All'I am trying to do is to be practical and spare your eyesight and brain cells a lot of useless printed matter. Poetry, one might say, has been invented for just this purpose—for it is synonymous with economy. \Vhat one should do, therefore, is recapitulate, albeit in miniature, the process that took place in our civilization over the course of two millennia. It is easier than you might think, for the body of poetry is far less voluminous than that of prose. What's more, if you are concerned mainly with contemporary literature, then your job is indeed a piece of cake. All you have to do is arm yourselves for a couple of months with the works of poets in your mother tongue, preferably from the first half of this century. I suppose you'll end up with a dozen rather slim books, and by the end of the summer you will be in great shape.
If your mother tongue is English, I might recommend to you Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop. If the language is German, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, Peter Huchel, and Gottfried Benn. Ifit is Span-
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ish, Antonio Machado, Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Cer- nuda, Rafael Alberti, Juan Ramon Jimenez, and Octavio Paz will do. If the language is Polish—or if you know Polish (which would be to your great advantage, because the most extraordinary poetry of this century is written in that language)—I'd like to mention to you the names of Leopold Staff, Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, and Wisfawa' Szymborska. If it is French, then of course Guillaume Apolli- naire, Jules Supervielle, Pierre Reverdy, Blaise Cendrars, some of Paul Eluard, a bit of Aragon, Victor Segalen, and Henri Michaux. Ifit is Greek, then you should read Constan- tine Cavafy, George Seferis, Yannis Ritsos. If it is Dutch, then it should be Martinus Nijhoff, particularly his stunning "Awater." If it is Portuguese, you should read Fernando Pessoa and perhaps Carlos Drummond de Andrade. If the language is Swedish, read Gunnar Ekelof, Harry Martinson, Tomas Transtromer. If it is Russian, it should be, to say the least, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Vladislav Khodasevich, Velemir Khlebnikov, Nikolai Klyuev. If it is Italian, I don't presume to submit any name to this audience, and if I mention Quasimodo, Saba, Ungaretti, and Montale, it is simply because I have long wanted to acknowledge my personal, private gratitude and debt to these four great poets whose lines influenced my life rather crucially, and I am glad to do so while standing on Italian soil.