Translator Reads Nicaraguan Poetry

Even soldiers can be poets, a translator of Latin-American poetry said yesterday.

David Gullette '62, an English professor at Simmons College presented a public reading of his translation of "Nicaraguan Peasant Poetry from Solentiname," a collection of poems written by an artistic community that went into battle a decade ago in support of the Sandinistas.

Solentiname was a traditional peasant community on an archipelago off the coast of Nicaragua. Poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal, who became Minister of Culture after the Sandinistas came to power, went to Solentiname to teach the peasants to read. A friend of Cardenal also began a poetry workshop, teaching the previously illiterate peasants to write their own poetry, Gullette said.

This idyllic artistic lifestyle ended in 1977 when the residents of Solentiname attacked a Somozan National Guard citadel at San Carlos. Some of the residents died in battle, and the rest scattered.

Many of the poems Gullette read glorify the peasants' revolution, such as one titled "Tyrant, Fear the Poet." Gullette said the peasants also wrote about prison and freedom.

Consider Ethics Now, Chomsky Advises

College is the last time students will have to examine ethical issues independently, said Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor of Linguistics Noam Chomsky at an MIT panel yesterday.

As one of three panelists at a colloquium titled "How to Be Good," the noted linguist told students, "This is the time in your life when you'll be free to consider moral questions. Later in life you're going to be inside institutions and you're going to internalize their values."

Speaking to an overflow crowd of more than 700 at MIT, Chomsky, MIT Professor of Physics Philip Morrison and Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sheila Widnall discussed how MIT should be involved with ethics.

During the question and answer period, students questioned MIT's ethics, citing examples such as the large volume of defense contracts work done at the Institute. Chomsky said the military's purpose was "to maintain U.S. global dominance...at the expense of the Third World," but added that any change in this priority had to come from society, not the university.

Public Schools Get Grant of $170,000

Cambridge public schools received $170,000 this fall in Federal grants for a special program to combat the city's 35 percent high school dropout rate.

The three-year-old program, called "Hooked on School," provides academic and emotional support services to seventh- and eighth-grade students.

The $170,000 federal grant awarded to Cambridge is part of a $23.9 million national grant to lower dropout rates.

"Students in the [seventh and eighth] grades are most at risk to drop out," Director of Elementary Education Francis X. Foley said.

Foley was principal of the Harrington School last year, one of four Cambridge schools that participate in the "Hooked on School" program. The other three are the Fletcher, Peabody and Graham and Parks schools.

"Eventually we hope to involve all 13 elementary schools," said Dr. Leonard Solo, principal of the Graham and Parks Alternative Public School.