Poet's Choice

Slave traders who ransacked Yoruba villages in West Africa solely for labor missed out on the tribe's magnificent artistic tradition, in which a poet or singer could rank with a great hunter. Yoruba artists fed the people's spirits and kept channels to the capricious gods flowing.

The Yoruba's chain of "talking drums" carried news vast distances, and here, in a poem called "Death," the weight of grief gathers through incantatory repetition:

I cannot carry it.

I cannot carry it.

If I could carry it,

I would carry it . . .

In Heather McHugh's Broken English, I found Ulli Beier's translations of these ancient songs succinctly moving. The arresting turns in "Memory" lucidly capture both the nature of consciousness and how the stories we inherit shape us:

Whatever I am taught,

let me remember it.

When the big fish comes out of the water

we can see the bottom of the pond.

When the big toad comes out of the water