Hammarskjöld was a reader. (In that, if nothing else, he had something in common with Lumumba.) In the corridors of the UN building, even late at night with the Congo Club, the secretary-general routinely turned the conversation to the arts and letters, not always to the delight of his colleagues, who would much rather listen to him gossip about Jackie Kennedy than endure a lecture on contemporary poetry. For Hammarskjöld, however, the melding was essential, and he made it a priority. Before the Congo crisis, he had been able to set aside two or three hours a day for what he called “serious matters”—namely, literary translation.
As he explained to a French journalist, “I don’t believe that the taste for literature can be reduced to what Americans call a ‘hobby,’ that is to say, to entertainment and relaxation, to a pastime.” He elaborated: “It is an important complement and, for a diplomat, an indispensable one.” Poetry and diplomacy both required a keen sense of the mot juste. More practically, he needed something to pass the time during Security Council sessions while he waited for delegates’ remarks to be translated from languages he already knew.
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