Review, The letters of Basil Bunting, OuP

 

My Review of The Letters of Basil Bunting, selected and edited by Alex Niven, is now up on the Brazen Head. You can read it by clicking on this link.

The Brazen Head

(I started pulling books of the shelf when I was writing the review, checking what I thought I knew, the pile of books became ridiculous, so I neatly arranged them for a photo. The joke's on me.)

Letters of Basil Bunting #3. Pound, Bunting and Persian literature

Bunting’s Persia revisted. 

 

 

Ten years ago, trying to study Bunting’s disagreement with Pound over Bunting’s Persian translations, I had to rely on the available snippets of Bunting’s correspondence. taken out of context, often with ellipsis, I  could only wonder what was hidden by the frequent ellipsis in the quotations.

 

It's a delight to see the letters printed in full here. Niven says of them: 

 

The following two letters to Pound repay close attention, because they contain arguably the most revealing statements about Bunting’s literary development in this part of the correspondence. (p.91)

 

If we leave the bus that goes to Briggflatts, beyond any possible significance they have for Bunting’s literary development, the letters illuminate a problem central to one strand of poetics in the twentieth century. Bunting, Pound, William Carlos Williams et al were minimalists by instinct. But they were touched by the thought that Great Poets Write Long Poems. Disdaining narrative, their problem was how to make a long poem cohere. 

 

One of the many benefits of Niven’s edition is obvious when a quote that was available ten years ago is compared with the letter it’s taken from.

 

It occurred to me a long time ago that this indirect business had gone about as far as it would go without degenerating. Nobody is going to do it better than you for a hell of a long time, and Zuk [the American poet Louis Zukofsky] can only introduce further complications of method that remove it from a possible reader, step by step, until somebody will rise who will… be totally unintelligible. (Bunting qtd. Makin 1992,  p.77. Ellipsis in Makin.)

 

…somebody will rise who will justify the kind of things the academic nincompoops used to say about you, and be totally unintelligible. Hence ‘Chomei’ to reduce it to such simplicity as I could, which thereupon ended the matter so far as I am personally concerned. I can do nothing with it that will satisfy me. It is much better to leave the field to you and perhaps Zuk’s elaborations and try telling a story.

 

This leads to the wretchedly unsuccessful attempt to do a bit of Machiavelli, and consequent considerable thinking. (p.93)

 

Niven’s footnote suggests that the ‘bit of Machiavelli’ hadn’t survived, but ‘How Duke Valentine Contrived’ had been published by Pound two years earlier and ‘wretchedly unsuccessful’ is an apt description.  

 

From the 1930s Bunting was looking for the exit from the inevitable stylistic cul-de-sac, and his instincts, reinforced by reading Persian, was to return narrative to the mix. Pound wanted none of it. Their clash over Bunting’s attempts to translate The Shahnemeh made the problem explicit. 

 

Rather than let the letters speak for themselves, Niven imposes an interpretation on them:

 

Though it would take him another three decades to work through the impulse, one of Bunting’s distinctive contributions to late Modernist poetics (announced tentatively in The Spoils and much more emphatically in Briggflatts) was an embodiment of the sorts of epic, narrative values he advocates in this letter. 

Perhaps fairly, given the emphasis on heroic action in the cantos, Pound took umbrage at Bunting’s suggestion […] (p. 91)

 

‘Perhaps fairly’ misses the point of Bunting’s ‘suggestion’ and is an odd reading of the Cantos.

 

The problem, how to tell a story using the techniques that Bunting admired in ‘poetry’, or how to reconcile modernism and Traditional narrative if you prefer, was not one he solved. The kind of ‘epic, narrative values’ he advocates in these letters are not evident in The Spoils and only occasionally in Briggflatts.  The latter is a poem with narrative passages, and it purports to be an autobiography, but how much could readers learn about Bunting’s life if they only had the poem as evidence? 

 

The test of that thought is whether his criticism of the Cantos in the second of these two letters applies to his own later work. ‘But the literature of the last-how long-has all of it been psychological: people talking or thinking about things they didnt do, or would like to do, or why and why not,’ describes much of The Spoils and some of Briggflatts. In the following quotation replace Sigismundo with Basil, the Encyclopedia Britannica with Burton’s biography, the Cantos and works of E.P with Briggflatts and the comment applies to Bunting’s poem.

 

Sigismundo was presumably an active lad, but the cantos dont relate his activities , they allude to them or show him alluding to them. IF I want to know what Sig did I goter consult the Encycl.Brit whose contributor presumably had found out somewhere not in the works of E.P. (p.95)

 

 

 

Letters of Basil Bunting. edited by Alex Niven

 Excited to finally get my hands on a copy of this. So far very impressed by Niven's editing, not everyone can do footnotes or annotations but so far his have been everything they need to be and nothing more.  

I'm  looking forward to reading several of these letter which i've only seen quoted with the inevitable critical ...

More to follow.

Faber's Long Awaited Basil Bunting the Complete Poems. 1/3

I will return to Joseph Campbell, and the footnote poets.  Chronic illness has a way of interrupting plans. However, one is excited.  

(What follows was meant to be a short expression of excitement, but it got out of hand. There were fascinating rabbit holes which just appeared as I was writing it and since I’m not late for any important dates, I gleefully accepted their invitation.  So this ended up in three parts).

Part one:

Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, even further than last Friday, Faber began advertising a hardback edition of Basil Bunting’s Complete Poems, edited by Don Share.

The current Amazon blurb reads:

This is the first critical edition of the complete poems, and offers an accurate text with variants from all printed sources. Don Share annotates Bunting's often complex and allusive verse, with much illuminating quotation from his prose writings, interviews and correspondence. He also examines Bunting's use of sources (including Persian literature and classical mythology), and explores the Northumbrian roots of Bunting's poetic vocabulary and use of dialect.

I preordered mine in April 2010, and at regular intervals for the past five years I have been receiving updates from Amazon, which politely tell me they are still waiting for the book to be published.  

But now, six years later, there is a publication date of 16^th of June and an estimated delivery date.

One is excited.

Why? That’s a good question. Well, there is dearth of things Bunting so anything new is welcome.

The claim that this is the first ‘critical edition’ is perhaps bending the definitions of the word ‘critical’.  There’s a Complete Poems, published by BloodAxe (1999) and edited by Richard Caddel. It contains a section of  ‘uncollected poems’. It’s a paperback and mine is starting to fall apart. It was falling apart five years ago so a hardback at least promises longevity.

There’s a chance that there remain some poems that are not in Caddel’s edition. Richard Burton published at least one previously unpublished piece in his recent biography, A Strong Song Tows Us (2014). The complete Persian poems, as recently published separately by Don Share, Bunting’s Persia (2013), will hopefully be included. There’s always the possibility of drafts, which could be enlightening to those of us interested in ‘how he did it’. 

But there’s also the danger of dredging up pieces that do the poet’s reputation no favors.  I think there’s a good reason why Eliot turned down some of the Persian translations. And Ode 11 in the First Book of Odes ‘Narciss, my numerous cancellations prefer’ expressed Bunting’s strong opinions on the subject, in response, To a Poet who advised me to preserve/my fragments and false starts.

In Part two, the problem of Annotations.

Julian Stanard. 'Basil Bunting. Writers and their work' (2014). part one

Julian Stanard. Basil Bunting. Writers and their work.

First the Mini book review.

Readers of this Blogg (all two of them) may find some things being repeated.

This is an fine, short introduction to Bunting's work. For a man who was widely regarded as one of his country's leading poets at the time of his death, Bunting is all but invisible today. Books about him are rare.  I think this is only the third full length treatment of the man and his work, and while it won't supersede Peter Makin's Bunting; the shaping of his verse, that book is hard to find and second hand copies are expensive.

One of the reasons Bunting is all but invisible is that his poems are hard to write about.  They either attract a detailed exegesis of all the allusions, which can be overwhelming, or a brief nod to sound and technique that doesn’t take up much page space. Stanard walks the line between the two extremes and manages to give any new reader reasons to read the poems, while still having enough to say to make the book useful to Bunting addicts.

Bunting divided his work into three groups: Sonata's, Odes, Overdrafts. The Sonatas are long poems, his career is almost bookended by two;  Villlon and Briggflatts. But he also wrote excellent short pieces: the Odes. His translations, from what is an impressive range of languages,  he called Overdrafts. In such a short space Stanard obviously has to choose what to discuss, and he chooses to devote more space to the Sonatas and to Chomei at Toyama. Perhaps it's not done in a book like this, but it would be possible to suggest that while the Sonatas, Attis and The Well of Lycopolis are essential reading for Bunting devotees, they fail as poems, thus freeing space because some of the Odes deserve and would benefit from a decent discussion.

The only reservation I have about this book has nothing to do with Stanard or his publisher. But as it will be the most available introduction to Bunting, it's a pity it was written before Stanard could access Richard Burton's excellent new biography: A Strong Song Tows Us (2014), which replaces/updates/makes redundant The Poet as Spy and probably will remain the definitive biography given publishers' lack of interest in Bunting. 

For those interested in Bunting as Translator, Don Share's recent edition of Bunting's Persia (2012) was also probably too late to be included.

Bunting's Persia: Bunting's Firdosi and Davis' Ferdowsi

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?

Bunting's Persia: the disagreement with Pound #2

Reading the furor Pound’s early translations caused it’s easy to be pulled up short by the brutality of  the last paragraph in William Gardner Hale’s review of  Homage to Sextus Propertius in Poetry (Chicago):

If Mr. Pound were a professor of Latin , there would be nothing left for him but suicide. I do not counsel this. But I beg him to lay aside the mask of erudition. And If he must deal with Latin,  I suggest he paraphrase some accurate translation. And then employ some respectable student of the language to save him from the blunders which might still be possible.

And to feel that Professor Hale, had not only overstepped the mark but had missed the point and was wrong. As Michael Alexander (1979) wrote of Pound’s (in)famous version of the Anglo-Saxon “Seafarer”:

It’s easy to imagine the examiner’s report: ’Grasp of language uncertain; identification of individual words in glossary unreliable; understanding of accidence rudimentary. Grammar poor, syntax worse’. (72)

The critical responses to Homage to Sextus Propertius sound like the examiners had taken over the reviews.  But reading it all I’m left wondering which of the two words in “Pound’s translations ‘ is really the target.

Pound was consistently “guilty” of writing in just as vitriolic a manner.  He had preached the gospel of the professional poet and the professional critic “down the public’s gullet”: 

In a country in love with amateurs, in a country where the incompetent have such beautiful manners and personalities so fragile and charming that one cannot bear to injure their feelings by the introduction of a competent criticism, it is well that one man should have a vision of perfection and that he should be sick to the death and disconsolate  because he cannot attain it.”(1914: The Prose Tradition in Verse.)

 So he could not have been surprised when the professionals responded to his arrogant dismissal of their understanding of the Latin poets and, by pointing out his errors, showed conclusively that in their eyes, he was the amateur.  And a poor one at that. Professor Hale,  author of the superbly titled : “The Cum-constructions: their History and Functions” and  “The Art of Reading Latin-How to Teach it” took Pound to task:

Mr Pound is incredibly ignorant of Latin. He has of course a perfect right to be, but not if he translates from it.  The result of his ignorance is that much of what he makes his author say is unintelligible. I select a few out of about three-score errors…(Hale p52)

What the arguments over his translations remind me is that the history of Poetry is not the record of an inexorable Darwinian progression of poetic forms towards a today which you  somehow assume is the best that has been.  In Pound’s version of literary history, Poetry, with its capital P, is something that can be objectively discussed and analyzed, just as the flatness of the earth could be.  For those who believe this version (like Stead in “The New Poetic” or Kenner in “The Pound Era”) the literary battles of the past were fought by heroic forbears whose victories moved the progression onwards. Just as Galileo fought against ignorance to prove the world turns.  Eliot and Pound waged their war against the stultifying conventions of late 19^th century verse and bought poetry kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.   (The metaphors are usually equally physical, martial and heroic.) 

In this version critics like Hale were simply wrong. They stand in for the ultimately ineffectual opponents of a Galileo or a Harvey.

Reading the reviews and articles from the time, however, one is reminded that poems are written by people, and the history of poetry is a history of back stabbing, back scratching, infighting,  an entertaining if grubby record of squabbling for prestige and position. Or as K.K Ruthven put it:

'The Feuds and the factions, the intrigues and the infighting, the machinations of one upmanship, the economic and erotic foundations of reputation mongering, the conspiratorial exclusions, the cult figures and the camp-followers, the groupings and the groupies.'  After detailing the back scratching and log rolling and infighting Ruthven points out that 'The only people short changed by these practices were readers naive enough to believe that criticism is produced by impartial experts". 

-----------

Hale's review is in Poetry Chicago. The quote from Michael Alexander is from "The Poetic Achievement of Ezra pound" and K.K Ruthven's is from "Ezra Pound as Literary critic"

Bunting's Persia. The disagreement with Pound #1

The Background

Bunting told the story of how he had become interested in Persian poetry several times, but the version which interests me is the one recorded by Jonathan Williams in  “Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal”.

I found a book-tattered, incomplete-with a news paper cover on it marked “Oriental Tales”. I bought it, in French. It turned out to be the part of an early 19^th century prose translation of Firdausi, and it was absolutely fascinating. I got into the middle of the story of the education of Zal and the Birth of Rustam-and the story came to an end! It was quite impossible to leave it there , I was desperate to know what happened next. I read it, as far as it went, to Pound and to Dorothy Pound and they were in the same condition. We were yearning to find out, but we could think of no way. The title page was even missing. There seemed nothing to do but learn Persian and Firdausi, so, I undertook that.  (np)

He records and pays tribute to the oldest pull of narrative, the ability of a story to create in the reader the powerful need to know what happens next. His Persian was soon good enough to allow him to begin to translate  Ferdowsi and he encountered an inevitable problem. The Shahnemeh belongs to a tradition that was just as prevalent in Europe as it had been in Persia. Poetry had been the major vehicle for narrative. But the long narrative poem in English had been struggling against the prose novel since the beginning of the19th century and by the 1930s the “lyricization” of poetry was well underway.

The disagreement:

Bunting would remain convinced for the rest of his life that Ferdowsi was one of the world’s great poets but he wasn’t happy with his translations.  He wrote to Pound in 1934:

Hope to send you a lump of Firdusi before long…as to onomatopoeic accompaniment, which is the marvel of the whole thing, alliterations, internal rhymes, contrapuntal arrangement soft stress against ictus against succession of longs , hopeless task for anybody except Homer translating Fidusi or Firdusi translating Homer. (qtd in Makin p76)

But neither was Pound, for a different reason.

Wot I feel about yr/persi[a]ns is tha[t] shucks wot does it ma[t]ter if some nigger knifed a few others. (qtd in Makin p76. Marks in the original)

Or less offensively:

Bunt’s gone off on Persian, but don’t seem to do anything but Firdusi, who he can’t put into English that is of any interest. More fault of subject matter than of anything else in isolation. (qtd in Makin p.119)

Although much of the translations have only been published in 2012, Peter Makin, the only critic to have written book length studies of both Pound and Bunting, had traced the argument though an exchange of letters.

Bunting to Pound:

            the literature of the past-how long-has all of it been psychological; people talking or thinking about things they didnt [sic] do or would like to do, or why and why not. Even in the Cantos you nearly always prefer to show somebody thinking or writing or telling, and the interest is as much or more in the person as in the deed contemplated.

in the same letter he wrote:

It occurred to me a long time ago that this indirect business had gone about as far as it would go without degenerating . Nobody is going to do it better than you for a hell of a long time, and Zuk can only introduce further complications of method that remove it from a possible reader, step by step, until somebody will rise who will… be totally  unintelligible (BB to EP 4^th of January 1936 qtd in Makin p77.  ellipsis in Makin.)

The argument turns on the relative importance in a poem between What (is being said) and How (it is being said). Lyric privileges How: narrative demands What. 

More later.

Reference to the letters are from Peter Makin’s  Bunting: the shaping of his verse Clarendon press, Oxford, 1992.