I’ve been comparing
Bunting’s Firdosi with Davis’s Ferdowsi. This is not about ‘accuracy ‘or ‘faithfulness’, just about
differences between the two translations . I don’t read Persian. I like both versions. Davis’ prose is clear and when he breaks
into rhyming couplets he handles them elegantly (Pope and Dryden would be
proud.) But Bunting is obviously the focus of this.
The story so far. (see
previous posts)
1)
We know
that Pound and Bunting disagreed over the results of Bunting’s translations of
the ‘Shanemeh’.
2)
It’s hard to know how much influence Pound’s highly contentious attitudes towards
translation had on BB. It is
possible to infer that they were significant on the following grounds: Bunting
thought Pound’s scandalous Sextus P one of the two great poems of the century. He was not scandalised by Pound’s “mistakes”
but obviously invigorated by them.
His ‘Villon’ contains one magnificent passage that is a translation
of, but in no way a formal equivalence translation, of sections of a Villon poem. His later translations
of Horace and Hafez are noticeably
‘Poundian’.
3)
My subjective experience of reading the
two versions it that while Davis’ reads like a story told about something that
happened a long time ago, Bunting’s feels more like an eyewitness account. Davis’ narrator is a mostly invisible
presence whose comments on the action tend to be ‘religious’ or moral: ‘And you
who murder Kings, who live in fear/Learn from these criminals whose tale you
hear'. Bunting’s sounds like someone who is retelling what he’s seen
and overheard, not a participant but an observer with an opinion, sometimes
impatient, sometimes baffled. The
syntax invokes a speaker, and an oral performance: “ No impression on Tur. Not
gratified. Did not want peace.” Maybe I’ve just listened to too many recordings
of Bunting.
My other experience of reading
is that Bunting’s telling moves more swiftly, sometimes at the expense
of clarity. At times Davis’ clearly wins in the clarity stakes:
DD: ‘Feraydun was told of the envoy’s arrival and had the curtain drawn
back so the horse could enter.’
BB: “Watchful sentinels told the Great King of his coming/ A dignified
Chamberlain bade lift the curtain.” where ‘bade’ seems awkward.
Sometimes Davis’ prose
seems preferable. When the brothers start plotting:
DD: ..The two brothers , one from China and the other from the West, met
together and mingled poison with their honey, discussing how they should act
BB: Fate was stripped
stark. The brothers started/From Rome and China with honeyed poison/met,
discussed policy public and private.
There’s a loss in BB’s “honeyed Poison” compared with “mingled poison
with their honey”
4) Bunting
reduces: he uses three broad techniques I’ll call omission, condensation and
summary and accept they are very vague terms. So roughly if you have fifty
words and cut them to ten, but the ten you’re left with were in the original,
you condense. Summarising is
taking that fifty words and saying what’s in them as briefly as you can.
a.
Omissions…Bunting
cuts when he can, but he doesn’t alter the sequence of events. As in a medieval
English poem like Lawman’s 'Brut',
the messenger is called, the message is given, the messenger rides, is
received, delivers his message and we learn how the message is received. A modern film would simply have the messenger
give the message, in a
medieval text the pattern reveals
the characters of those involved. When Faridun receives his son’s abusive
message, his treatment of the messenger tells us a great deal about him (to his
credit). Character is revealed by
speech and action and by the comparisons such formal patterning allow. One
could assume that part of Bunting’s attraction to this story is the way it fits
with his own poetics of direct presentation.
b.
Condensation.
Not surprisingly Bunting condenses and with the qualification noted above it usually
is an improvement. After all this
was the man who wrote in ‘I Suggest’: “ 6. Cut out every word you dare. 7. Do
it again week later, and again”, who said that what he most learnt from Pound was “How to chop
out the rot”. In Davis the envoy
sees Feraydun’s face: “The envoy saw that Feraydun’s face filled all eyes and
hearts; that he was like a cypress in stature, that his visage was like the
sun’s, and his hair was like white camphor about a red rose; his lips were all
smiles, his gaze was modest and welcoming , kingly words adorned his lips.” In Bunting, “His glance lit on
Faridun’s form and was held/cypress tall, ruddy face, rosy cheek, hair like the
vine/smiling , modest, royally gentle voice” .
c.
Summary.
This is one of the ways I think he gives his narrator his voice.
BB: Iraj saw them and ran to meet them affectionately/received them in
his tent, but their talk/was nothing but Why and Wherefore..
Where the “why and wherefore” both summarises and dismisses the conversation.
5)
Bunting’s
version tends towards specific visual images.
DD: “Let neither wind nor
swirling dust delay your journey as you hasten on your way”
BB: “Dont hang an arse/don’t let your own dust overtake you/nor the wind
either”. The idea of the rider going so fast that his own dust can’t catch him
seems to be an advance on “don’t let dust delay your journey.”
6)
As the
above quote shows, Bunting’s diction tends towards what used to be
euphemistically called “demotic”, and this is another way he gives his narrator
his character. Word choice
suggests Judgement: The bothers are ‘ruffians’, their message is “surly” as does his syntax: “Tur heard. Made no
answer.”
7)
The poem
does not show much evidence of his usual emphasis on sound. His letter to Pound
(see previous posts) showed he knew this, but for a man who was adamant that
poetry was sound there’s not a lot
happening here . At times the terse syntax approaches epigram and ghosts a
memory of Anglo-Saxon: “Fate was stripped Stark”. But some of the lines are so flat it’s possible to see why
Pound was unimpressed. Bunting had already written ‘Villon’ and ‘I am agog for
Foam’. The same man who
wrote the latter and ”Remember imbeciles and wits..etc’’ in ‘Villon’ was now
writing: ”I am going to write with an aching heart/on the off chance it may
bring you home safe and sound/for I have no life but in you”. The absence of
his characteristic sound/rhythm architecture is quite dramatic.
8)
And it’s
not simply a problem of narrative. Compare this to the first two Cantos of Pound’s,
which are narrative, and which
swing and sing. Whatever the
virtues of Bunting’s Ferdowsi, and I obviously think there are many, I think it’s fair to say that judged by
his own standards and previous achievements, Bunting’s translation doesn’t rise to Pound’s challenge that
a translation should work as a modern poem in its own right. Although that leaves the main question begging…how
do you write a narrative poem with
Bunting’s poetics?
