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What the Twilight Says: Essays

4.21 of 5 stars 4.21 · rating details · 33 ratings · 3 reviews

The first collection of essays by the Nobel laureate.

Derek Walcott has been publishing essays in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere for more than twenty years. What the Twilight Says collects these pieces to form a volume of remarkable elegance, concision, and brilliance. It includes Walcott's moving and insightful examinations of the paradoxes o...more

Paperback, 256 pages

Published October 25th 1999 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Feb 27, 2011 Magda rated it 4 of 5 stars

The original language dissolves from the exhaustion of distance like fog trying to cross an ocean, but this process of renaming, of finding new metaphors, is the same process that the poet faces every morning of his working day, making his own tools like Crusoe, assembling nouns from necessity, from Felicity, even renaming himself. The stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind. That is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these...more The original language dissolves from the exhaustion of distance like fog trying to cross an ocean, but this process of renaming, of finding new metaphors, is the same process that the poet faces every morning of his working day, making his own tools like Crusoe, assembling nouns from necessity, from Felicity, even renaming himself. The stripped man is driven back to that self-astonishing, elemental force, his mind. That is the basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes, these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs, and they are not decayed but strong. They survived the Middle Passage and the Fatel Rozack, the ship that carried the first indentured Indians from the port of Madras to the cane fields of Felicity, that carried the chained Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic Jew, the Chinese grocer and the Lebanese merchant selling cloth samples on his bicycle.
And here they are, all in a single Caribbean city. Port of Spain, the sum of history. Trollope's "non-people." A downtown babel of shop signs and streets, mongrelized, polyglot, a ferment without a history, like heaven. Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.

We must read as far as the white whale draws us, beyond the tight, calendar hamlets and harbors of New England and its chapels with their harpoon spires, to a wider and more terrifying space, the elemental ocean, beyond provinciality, history, race, beyond America, beyond the sick anti-Semitic provincialities of Pound or the patriotic regionalism of Frost to a realm that only genius can depict. We must follow Moby Dick, the huge ribbed metaphor of the white whale carrying the freight of the republic's sins as the republic perishes in the whirlpool with a sole survivor, Melville-Ishmael, who is, despite Melville's convictions of racial superiority, a poet. Now that other races and other causes in the babel of the republic have been given permission to speak in the very language that ruled and defined them, must everything be revised by the new order? Does Frost's ironic, jocular accent not apply to them? But it does, because the new order would be repeating the old order if it made a policy of exclusion and an aesthetics of revenge.(less)

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Feb 03, 2011 David rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: essays, nobel-laureate

Derek Walcott’s collection of essays What the Twilight Says is an eclectic mixture of reflections on the Caribbean, modern literary giants and an intriguing story set on Martinique. At time the text is dense, almost impenetrable, at other times it is inventive, potent and lyrical. His deep love of the islands shines through all this work and his analysis of the work of his fellow Nobel laureates – Hemingway, Naipaul and Brodsky demonstrates how seriously he takes the business of literature. His...more Derek Walcott’s collection of essays What the Twilight Says is an eclectic mixture of reflections on the Caribbean, modern literary giants and an intriguing story set on Martinique. At time the text is dense, almost impenetrable, at other times it is inventive, potent and lyrical. His deep love of the islands shines through all this work and his analysis of the work of his fellow Nobel laureates – Hemingway, Naipaul and Brodsky demonstrates how seriously he takes the business of literature. His appreciations of Larkin, Hughes, Lowell and Frost are both pithy and tinged with a kind of reluctant admiration which somehow make them more real, more alive, more grounded in their own localities.

The essay entitled The Muse of History is wonderfully provocative and refuses to allow the reader to disengage from the sheer force of Walcott’s uncompromising interpretations of what history is and what purpose it serves. Take this paragraph as an example:

“In the New World servitude to the muse of history had produced a literature of recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves or a literature of remorse written by the descendants of masters. Because this literature serves historical truth, it yellows into polemic or evaporates into pathos. The truly tough aesthetic of the New World neither explains nor forgives history. It refuses to recognise it as a creative or culpable force. This shame and awe of history possess poets of the Third World who think of language as enslavement and who, in a rage for identity, respect only incoherence or nostalgia.”

How do those of us of the Old World, react to these powerful sentiments? With expressions of horror, or with nods of understanding? Or do we not react at all? preferring to pretend with haven’t really understood.

There is little that is genteel in these essays, and yet Walcott’s empathy for island-dwellers and for those who labour with the craft of poetry raises these people to level beyond where we, mere mortals, reside. For those who devote their lives to the ordering of words, to the dark arts of prosody, Walcott is their most fervent admirer. Writing of Brodsky’s Eclogue V: Summer in the essay entitled Magic Industry, Walcott admires Brodsky’s determination “… to hallow by his reverence, the history of his craft, its sacred, tested shapes in various languages, through Virgil as well as Spenser, in ode as well as eclogue, and also in the solid, elaborate architecture of his stanzas.”

There is much to be admired in this collection - the prose, the sentiments, the analyses. There is also sheer delight contained in the only story in the collection, Café Martinique, which seems to tell us as much about the writer of the story as it does about the writer in it. Perhaps fame and its consequent admiration is not always all that it's cracked up to be.
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Jul 09, 2012 Elizabeth Adams rated it 4 of 5 stars

I very much liked Walcott's reflections on fellow poets and writers, particularly the essays on Robert Lowell, Robert Frost, and Joseph Brodsky. The rest of the book held less interest for me.

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About Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott is a Caribbean poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 "for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment."

His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic realism emerging in both South America and Europe at around the time...more

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Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays

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Quotes from What the Twilight Says...

“To set out for rehearsals in that quivering quarter-hour is to engage conclusions, not beginnings, for one walks past the guilded hallucinations of poverty with a corrupt resignation touched by details, as if the destitute, in their orange-tinted back yards, under their dusty trees, or climbing into their favelas, were all natural scene designers and poverty were not a condition but an art. Deprivation is made lyrical, and twilight, with the patience of alchemy, almost transmutes despair into virtue. In the tropics nothing is lovelier than the allotments of the poor, no theater is as vivid, voluble, and cheap.” — 5 people liked it

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