Gardner quotes the line
"Candida quod nigra corpora pelle geris,"
giving it an interpretation disparaging to Williams' racial self-respect. With more understanding of the poet's surroundings it may be taken rather to express the poet's desire to be marked as distinct from the then condition of those who represented his race round him, namely slaves.
The following lines especially deserve praise for the height in emotion and manliness to which they ascend:
Pollenti stabilita manu, Deus almus, eandem
Omnigenis animam, nil prohibente dedit.
Ipsa coloris egens virtus, prudentia; honesto
Nullus inest animo, nullus in arte color.
Mr. Chinook's rendering conveys some of their stirring force, but they deserve a better translation, and one reason for giving the whole poem here is the hope that it may elicit another translation from some one entering more feelingly and with equal lingual knowledge into the poet's conception.
T. H. MacDermot
Redeam,
Kingston,
Jamaica, B. W. I.
Footnotes:
[210] The writer of the following article, though not of the race to serve which this Journal specially exists, offers a contribution to its pages because of the deep and sympathetic interest he has long taken in the African race, and because of his belief in its future. He would also interest readers of the Journal in his native island, Jamaica, where, although the creation still bears marks of human imperfection and incompleteness, a community has been brought into being in which the racial elements, in such fierce and embittered antagonism elsewhere, are gradually, but surely, blending into a whole of common citizenship. T.H. MacDermot, Editor of the Jamaica Times, Ltd.