In the early 18th century, a clandestine manuscript surfaced that suggested the world was far older than the mere thousands of years Archbishop James Ussher had calculated using scriptural genealogies. Its anonymous author portrayed himself as a “French missionary” reporting the observations of an “Indian philosopher” regarding “the retreat of the seas, the formation of the Earth, and the origin of humans.” But Parisian philosophes knew that the work, even before it was published as Telliamed in 1748, conveyed the views of its French author, Benoît de Maillet (1656-1738). Maillet observed sediments deposited by the slow retreat of the Mediterranean Sea from the North African coast. By his calculations, nearly two billion years were needed to account for the gradual formation of rock. Still more scandalously, Telliamed insisted that life itself emerged during that process of marine retreat and deposition—even humans descended from infusoria floating in primeval oceans.

The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People

Neil Shubin (Author)

240 pages

$29.21

Neil Shubin’s The Universe Within follows, unknowingly perhaps, the trail first blazed by Maillet—enormous quantities of time, space, matter, and energy gave birth to the world we presently inhabit and make possible our very lives. Like his earlier book, Your Inner Fish, The Universe Within is fundamentally a high-spirited exposition of the search for homologies. Homology, the comparative anatomist Richard Owen explained in 1843, means “the same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function.” In the wake of Darwin, we can say that the bones of a whale’s flipper and the bones of a bat’s wing are homologous because these organisms share a common ancestor in the distant past. In fact, this is the thrust of Your Inner Fish: certain anatomical features of the earliest land vertebrates led to peculiar aspects of our skulls and limbs. In The Universe Within, Shubin extends his homological exercise back to the Big Bang. Certain aspects of the basic forces unveiled within the very first moments led to specific physico-chemical properties that spilled out into stars and galaxies, the Solar System, our Earth-Moon system, and eventually us. The Universe Within begins by presenting the course details of the formation of Earth’s crust, early poisonous atmosphere, magnetic signature and, finally, water. Over the latter chapters, Shubin slows the tempo to focus on our present continental structure, the rise of mammals, Ice Ages, and the appearance of hominids.

The Universe Within succeeds as an energetic, updated popularization of cosmology and paleontology, along the lines of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos or the work of the late Stephen J. Gould. One certainly envisions Shubin reaching back to grasp the baton passed from these titans, but Shubin is not merely parroting their formulas. The Universe Within feels personal, almost a travelogue. This virtue can be a fault, however. Though, like Sagan and Gould, Shubin historically contextualizes how and by whom we came to believe what we now believe, his history of science lacks the philosophical introspection of his predecessors. While fun to read, The Universe Within feels far too settled, conventional.

Little of the scientific information conveyed in The Universe Within is controversial. Still less is truly novel. Three centuries ago, Telliamed questioned not only the conventional knowledge but the socially condoned sources for that knowledge: Maillet went to rocks instead of scriptures. Shubin reports on quarks, dark matter, and DNA—no controversy here. But Telliamed caused such a stir because it went beyond reporting. Maillet knew that cosmologies always implicitly address our own place within that view of nature. In fact, Maillet drew from the cosmology found in Lucretius’ 1st-century BC work De rerum natura. For Lucretius, for Maillet—for Carl Sagan, in fact—there is always a notion that because the universe is a certain way, humans are a certain way and should act accordingly. Shubin’s version of cosmology falls flat here. At most, The Universe Within leaves us with the insight that there is “something almost magical” about us sharing the physico-chemical structure of other living beings using the materials present at the beginning. But what, exactly? Electropop star Moby reminded us a decade ago that “We Are All Made of Stars.” One hopes that after at least three hundred years of observations that humans stand at the end of an exceedingly long chain of physico-chemical events, our scientific experts can go beyond musicians’ platitudes regarding why all this apparent homology matters.

Erik L. Peterson is an assistant professor in the history of science, University of Alabama

Copyright © 2013 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.

It’s fitting that one of America’s greatest translators of poetry should have been inspired by one of the world’s most poetic translations. W. S. Merwin’s father was a Presbyterian minister who had, as Merwin puts it in the forward to his Selected Translations, a merely “rhetorical” interest in language, “a love of the sound of language [ … ] more or less apart from the meaning.” One Saturday, the younger Merwin was listening to his father rehearse his Sunday sermon when he read the following passage in Isaiah from the King James Version of the Bible:

Selected Translations

W.S. Merwin (Translator)

Copper Canyon Press

500 pages

$23.70

In the year that King Uz-ziah died I saw also the Lord sitting
upon a throne high and lifted up and his train filled the
temple.
Above it stood the seraphim; each one had six wings; with
twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his
feet,

“I did not remember,” Merwin writes, “ever having heard language like that, and it rang in my ears.”

That moment would shape Merwin’s life. (One wonders what Merwin would have become had his father loved the doctrine of the Bible as much as its music.) In due course he headed for Princeton, studied writing and Romance languages, and bought copies of Wallace Stevens’ books of poetry at Parnassus Book Shop on Nassaut Street. At nineteen, while visiting a friend in Washington, D.C., Merwin met the enigmatic Ezra Pound in Saint Elizabeths Hospital. Pound told Merwin to “get languages and translate”—in fact, he had already begun to translate at Princeton—and encouraged him in particular to “Get the romancero. Those poems, the oldest ones, are closest to the source. But best of all is the Provencal. Try to get the Provencal. Those troubadours wrote closest to the music.”

As Selected Translations shows, Merwin mostly took Pound’s advice to heart. While there are few poems in Occitan, there are ballads or lyrics from every European language, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Russian, Crow, Turkish, Sanskrit, Urdu, and many others. Some of these poems were translated with the assistance of other translators, and some were adapted from previous translations, but Merwin’s linguistic breadth is no less impressive for that.

Even more impressive, though, is Merwin’s ear. The range of the volume is stunning. It spans fifty years of book-worming and more formal translation projects, guided mostly by Merwin’s whim and judgment. The result is a hodgepodge of some of the best, though often lesser-known lyrics from Liu Ch’e to Federico Garcia Lorca, rendered in vibrant American English. My favorites—but how can I choose?—are his Russian, French, and the occasional Swedish poems. We have this, for example, from Osip Mandlestam:

Your thin shoulders are for turning red under whips,
turning red under whips, and flaming in the raw cold.

Your child’s fingers are for lifting flatirons,
for lifting flatirons, and for knotting cords.

Your tender soles are for walking on broken glass,
walking on broken glass, across bloody sand.

And I’m for burning like a black candle lit for you,
for burning like a black candle that dare not pray.

Or there’s Henri Michaux’s “Repose in Calamity”:

Calamity, my great laborer,
Sit down, Calamity,
Take it easy,
Let’s take it easy for a minute, both of us,
Easy.
You find me, you get the hang of me, you try me out,
I’m the ruin of you.

My big theater, my harbor, my hearth,
My golden cave,
My future, my real mother, my horizon,
In your light, in your great spaces, in your horror,
I let myself go.

Or Lars Noren’s devastating “On Nelly Sachs”:

Toward the end
her eyes grew
younger and younger
as though they had been watching
what can be understood but not said
They weighed almost nothing
and must have been like the rabbit’s
breath in winter after it has been shot

As even this limited and somewhat random selection shows, these are not poems for sensitive souls considering suicide—unless, of course, they are looking to glut melancholy, as Keats suggested. Death, loneliness, exile are the most common topics, though there are a handful of lighter poems.

Merwin’s selections come as no surprise. For him, poetry is a testament of universal human suffering. And it is suffering, coupled with empathy for our fellow wounded, that makes us human, according to Merwin. If poetry and art in general can offer opportunities of catharsis, they can only do so by first reminding us of the pain that constitutes our lives, making a complete purging impossible. The best we can hope for from poetry, in this understanding, is a temporary sense of community. As Merwin writes in the early poem, “The Way to the River,” our sole consolation in life is that “we / Will read it together.”

Like all translators, particularly those of poetry, Merwin has had to deal with the thorny issue of commensurability—the question of what counts as an accurate translation of an original poem, which, of course, may have a sound or a meter irreproducible in the target language, or one that, if reproduced, sounds dead or off. Pound, who was famously free in his translations, told Merwin “to get as close as possible to the original.” For his part, Merwin is a gifted and pragmatic translator. He avoids lifeless, literal translations, but at the same time generally stays as close to the denotative and connotative meaning of the words of the original as possible.

One oddity of the volume is the organization of the poems roughly according to the date of translation or publication (it is unclear which, though it’s probably the former) rather than according to the date of the original composition or source language. This arrangement delights with surprise and variety when one comes across a touching lyric, for example, or a sudden shift in topic or style. But it can be frustrating if one is interested in the poems of a particular tradition. (The Spanish and Chinese poems, for example, are sprinkled across the entire volume.)

Still, taking such idiosyncrasies into account, Merwin’s Selected Translations is one of the best collections of shorter poems from various places and times available today. Few other gatherings are so consistently engaging.

Micah Mattix is assistant professor of literature and review editor of The City at Houston Baptist University. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, First Things, National Review, and other publications.

Copyright © 2013 Books & Culture. Click for reprint information.