REELY'S POETRY BLOG

Today is Independence Day in the Dominican Republic. Let’s read a poem that I just think is awesome by the Dominican poet, Pedro Mir. It don’t speak Spanish myself (but I did add the link to the original Spanish below). However, as you will see, the poet himself wholeheartedly praised this English translation of his poem by Jonathan Cohen:

The Countersong to Walt Whitman

a son of the Caribbean,
Antillean to be exact.
The raw product of a simple
Puerto Rican girl
and a Cuban worker,
born precisely, and poor,
on Quisqueyan soil.
Overflowing with voices,
full of eyes
wide open throughout the islands,
I have come to speak to Walt Whitman,
a kosmos,
of Manhattan the son.
People will ask,
Who are you?
I understand.
Nobody had better ask me
who Walt Whitman is.
I would go sob on his white beard.
And yet,
I am going to say again who Walt Whitman is,
a kosmos,
of Manhattan the son.

continue here

Links:
Contracanto a Walt Whitman
The Colonial Zone-DR – tons of information about the Dominican Republic with great Carnivale photos
Pedro Mir and His Countersong by Jean Franco

Sarah Helen Whitman, as you may know, was engaged to marry Edgar Allan Poe in the year before he died. I’m not going to go into her biographical information. You can find that out readily enough on Wikipedia, and there is also a link on our poem page, The Portrait, to a more in-depth account of the courtship, engagement and break-up of the unreliable Mr. Poe and the ether-sniffing Mrs. Whitman. It was a very short-lived engagement and in the following year — the year he died — Poe was even romancing another woman.

Sarah Helen Whitman wrote The Portrait to Edgar Allen Poe many years after his death. During those years, she often defended him against criticism and slander.

Wouldn’t it be all so romantic and tidy to say that after his death, Mrs. Whitman deeply regretted not marrying him? Maybe, but I get the feeling she simply felt he deserved better posthumous treatment than he was getting. Whether you like the poem or not, I hope you agree that her last stanza proved prophetic indeed:
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