The Hastings Room Reading Series
presents
D a v i d F e r r y
The
February 2000 issue of The New Criterion includes a poem by Rachel Hadas with
the tile “Reading David Ferry’s poems.”
The tribute heralds a special year for Mr. Ferry, seeing the publication
of his translation of Virgil’s Eclogues.
That year he would also win the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of
American Poets and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize from the Library
of Congress for his book Of No Country I
Know published the previous year.
The opening of Rachel Hadas’s poem evokes,
very appropriately, the classical image for poetic speech, recalling Pindar,
Horace and Virgil, of a fountain or spring, the excellence of water for is
clarity and fluency. Hadas wries,
The words run clear like water in
these poems.
The fluency feels generous and easy,
naturally eloquent, carrying in its
current
grains of incident and meditation.
Many tiny facets briefly flash
before they are carried downstream…
W.S. Merwin has noted similar
qualities for David’s poetry, the “assured quiet tone” that conveys
“complexities of feeling with unfailing proportion and grace.”
Lines, such as the opening to the poem
“That Now Are Wild and Do Not Remember”—“Where did you go to, when you went
away”; or, like these from “The Crippled Girl, The Rose”—
It was as if a flower bloomed… and
The rose reserves the sweetness that it yields
strike us as blossoms
themselves of the old poets Ferry as an educator and translator has much lived
with. They are “poetic” lines, which locate Ferry with the likes of W.B. Yeats,
W.H. Auden, James Merrill, Richard Wilbur and John Hollander, the 20th
and 21st Century practitioners not just of the English line but of
its sensibility and sense of mild ironies and enduring graces. So from the evidence of his original poetry, it is
not difficult for readers to trace David back to the crime of his translations.
In the July/August 2001 Poetry magazine, then editor Christian
Wiman made revealing remarks about David’s poetry, in honor of presenting the
poet with that year’s prestigious Ruth Lily Poetry Prize. Wiman noted, “David
Ferry’s poetry has little in common with the current style.” “We live in a
time,” says Wiman, “of obvious, even aggressive assertions of style… the
eccentric is prized.” Yet, Wiman continues, “willed eccentricity is doomed from the start; it’s only the
unconscious strangeness, the style formed and deformed by necessity, that’s
compelling.” “Wise passivity” is another noted quality of David’s, much in line
with Rachel Hadas’s perceptions of his poetry as “generous and easy,/naturally
eloquent…”
While David carries on the identity of a
cultural inheritance, as though it were genetic, one of his recurring themes
involves a recusant awareness of this fact, creating a strange sense of
paradox, magnificently expressed in the opening lines of his poem “Ellery
Street,” a direct critique of the “eloquence” of poetry (or “the songs we
sing”), the lines themselves caught red-handed with eloquence:
How much too eloquent are the songs
we sing:
nothing will tell how beautiful is
the body…
In light of a tendency in the
poetry to hold in on glimpses of the body that are not so beautiful—scarred
legs, trembling hands—this line “nothing will tell how beautiful is the body”
at once is a statement of potential irony about our perceptions of beauty, and
also a sort of infrared beaming through the faculties of language itself. The
signs are all potentially misleading; the appearance of things and our words
for them are inadequate for the joy and love others bring us.
In his introduction to Ferry’s most recent
book, Ellery Street, published by the
Grolier Established Poets Series, editor Ifeanyi Menkiti speaks beyond the
technical and tonal expertise, to the poet’s psychological exploration of and
“way of managing the breakdown of our powers and affections, so that all is not
lost.” This is insightful. In his own passive and ever humble manner, Ferry
bears a solemn courage in confronting certain breakdowns, as in his beautiful
epigrammatic poem “In Eden” :
You lie in our bed as if an orchard
were over us.
You are what’s fallen from the fatal
boughs.
Where will we go when they send us
away from here?
Here again the paradox: the
poetry of anti-poetry. Most commonly a poet of the first two lines of “In Eden”
is going to try to reassure this gasp of astonishment at approaching sleep with
some image to reassure us of our successful “translation,” perhaps as a
constellation amid the stars. Yet it is the moment before such a poetic stroke,
the feeling of sinking and sinking without knowing, that Ferry chooses to make
vivid in the poem. It’s spoke plainly enough – “Where will we go…” – yet in its
context is perhaps every bit as striking as the image of Achilles dragging
Hector’s lifeless cadaver around the walls of Troy. The simple question of
bewilderment and Homer’s image each ask: What do we do with this wonder of our
humanity?
A moment ago, we mentioned Christian
Wiman’s comments about “unconscious strangeness” and the pressure of necessity
on form. These harken back to the qualities of Ferry’s breakthrough work to national
recognition with his version of the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh in 1992. It is one of the
oldest literary works in Western Literature, originally composed in cuneiform,
at the same time as the oldest parts of the Bible. As William L. Moran wrote,
Ferry’s epic “is not a translation of a Sumerian original. It is, rather, a
highly selective and creative adaptation and transformation of what we find in
the earlier works.” Those works included linear translations incapable of
imaginative unity. While other freer adaptations made critical departures from
the contextual probabilities of the original.
Richard Poirier noted, “The poetic
splendor and sublimity of David Ferry’s Gilgamesh
is entirely of his own making… his great poem is no more indebted to earlier
versions of its story than is anything of Shakespeare’s to North’s Plutarch.”
A large part of this accomplishment lies
in the establishing and sustaining of a large narrative voice capable of
dramatic emotion, such as the fear of the people for their ruler, Gilgamesh,
who is supposed to be their protector.
There was no withstanding the aura
or power of the Wild
Ox Gilgamesh. Neither the father’s
son
nor the wife of the noble; neither
the mother’s daughter
nor the warrior’s bride was safe.
The old men said:
“Is this the shepherd of the people?
Is this
The wise shepherd, protector of the
people?”
The gods of heaven listened to their
complaint.
“Aruru is the maker of this king.
Neither the father’s son nor the
wife of the noble
is safe in Uruk; neither the
mother’s daughter
nor the warrior’s bride is safe. The
old men say:
“Is this the shepherd of the people?
Is this
the wise shepherd, protector of the
people?
There is no withstanding the desire
of the Wild Ox.”
Interrupted
by neither textual fragmentation nor fanciful detours, Ferry’s version traces
the problem of the hero-king’s unbearable rule—tyranny—to his humanization
through friendship and grief with mysterious encounters in the spirit world.
The visitations convincingly remind Gilgamesh of his humanity and its frailty,
his need for compassion to deal with other humans. The way Ferry has worked out
the theme, with great attention for a neutral yet compassionate voice, line for
line over 90 pages, attests to the marvel of this poem. Its “unconscious
strangeness” ranges dizzily in the mind with affirmation of our ever elusive,
uncanny albeit wholly human experience with death. Its ability to speak to us
in this way accounts for the story’s long preservation. It challenges the
undeniable authority of everything “present,” like a photo of the earth from
the moon.
