The World Bank & World Literature
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Carlos Rohm, chief executive officer of American operations of HSM Group, welcomed attendees atop the Rainbow Room Monday night at a gala dinner co-hosted by the Wall Street Journal and the Shell Group in connection with HSM’s World Business Forum. Mr. Rohm introduced WSJ editorial page editor Paul Gigot. Mr Gigot interviewed Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense and current president of the World Bank. Mr. Wolfowitz, who took office in June, was unanimously elected by its 24 directors to lead the 184-nation development bank. Mr. Gigot chuckled to the audience, “I believe even with French support.”
Mr. Wolfowitz delivered both gloomy and positive news. Disheartening was his projection that by 2010 there would be more orphans in sub-Saharan Africa than children east of the Mississippi.
He offered some dismal statistics cited in “Doing Business in 2006,” a report co-published this week by the World Bank that estimated opening a new business in Syria would cost “$61,000 in minimum capital – 51 times average annual income. If you were building a warehouse in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the fees for utility hook-up and compliance with building regulations would amount to 87 times average income. And if you ran a business in Guatemala, it would take you 1,459 days to resolve a simple dispute in the courts.”
The report says that Serbia and Montenegro led in making reforms that can generate growth in jobs and companies. Mr. Wolfowitz mentioned positive news such as economic growth in Rwanda and examples of civil society in Bangladesh.
Mr. Gigot asked Mr. Wolfowitz what he would most like during his tenure at the World Bank. He replied that he would like to be able to say there was a turning point for some countries in Africa, and that the “World Bank played a constructive role.”
Mr. Wolfowitz told an amusing anecdote about the challenges of leadership at a multinational public institution such as the World Bank, which employs about 10,000 people, many of whom have advanced degrees. George Schultz, who among other positions had been a dean of Chicago Law School, chief executive officer of Bechtel, and Secretary of State, was once asked about management in the private versus the public sector. Mr. Schultz said that working in the private sector, you have to be careful what you ask for because people will go out and do it. In the public sector, that’s not so much a worry. In academia, you tell people to do something and you get a strange look, “Who the hell are you to give us orders?”
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WORLD IN TRANSLATION A sign on the book table read, “Abenaki, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Chikasaw, Eskimo, Iroquois, Muskogee/Creek, Navajo.” These are among the 53 languages that Stanley and Bebe Barkan have published at Cross-Cultural Communications, a small press based in Merrick, L.I. Begun as an institute at Long Island University’s Brooklyn Center, the press celebrated its 35th anniversary on Sunday with a marathon seven-hour reading at Russian Samovar restaurant, co-hosted by poet and publisher Aleksey Dayen.
Seven hours? Mr. Barkan thinks big: Three and a half decades ago, he called up the ISBN office and asked for 1,000 numbers. So far, he and his wife have published more than 350 titles.
Among the readers were D.H. Melhem, who read a poem “On 94th Street”; translator and poet Gregory Rabassa; Brooklyn-born Arthur Dobrin and wife Lyn, who were in the Peace Corps in Kisii, Kenya; Polish-born poet Adam Szyper; Estelle Gilson, who read her translation of Hebrew poet Gabriel Preil; and George Wallace, the former poet laureate of Suffolk county.
Mr. Barkan read a poem by Raymond Patterson called “Crying Blues,” in which the subject of the poem has no more tears to cry so he went downtown to the “crying bank” and was asked, “Is your credit good?”
A centerpiece of the evening was the reading of Stanley Kunitz’s signature poem “The Layers” in 24 languages. Mr. Barkan said great writing, when translated into many languages, becomes like a gem held to the light, and the facets break down into the rainbow of depths of the human heart and spirit.