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.

blurb wars revisited: The Sunlit Zone by Lisa Jacobsen

Five Islands press; Advance Information: Exciting new poetry

Let us imagine someone, me, who is doing a PhD on narrative poetry, and is therefore interested to learn that FIP are releasing a “Novel in Verse”. Let us imagine him reading the advance information for this book supplied by the publisher ( I’ve added the quotes I'm discussing to the bottom of this post). What does he learn about the book?

It’s a novel in verse, with narrative sweep and drive and it’s true poetry, with some familiar adjectives stuck on the end (Brilliant, poignant, disconcerting magical and irresistible). And the poet has won some prizes.

How does that give me enough information to decide whether or not I want to read it? (I will, but not because of this advertising.)

What this flier doesn’t say about the book is revelatory about the publishing of Poetry. Apparently telling me this is a "novel in verse" is all I need to know to part with my money.

We are not told the content of the narrative, the style of the narrative nor are we told what type of "verse" is being used. Could you sell a novel by advertising it as a “Novel in Prose” and leaving it there? You’d expect at least a one sentence plot summary?
Surely you’d at least assume the potential reader (me) wants to know what this novel is about ? “Romance holds hands with science and takes to the ocean” is the nearest we get. (Visions of underwater sex reinforced by the cover?).

And what kind of “Novel”. A narrative? What kind of narrative? (conventional: The Monkey’s Mask/ different: For all we Know/”experimental”: Deep Step Come Shining) What kind of verse? Chopped prose, Tennyson on Ecstasy, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry…. as formal as Freddy Neptune?

Why is it that the people who are supposed to be selling this book seem to think these questions are irrelevant to a potential buyer?

And what do they offer instead?

Three generic blurb quotes (see below) and a biography of the poet?

A risk-taking work of rare, imaginative power. What could that possibly mean? It might describe Flann O’Brian’s The Third Policeman or Pound’s Cantos, but we’re getting close to the hundredth anniversary of The Waste Land and there was a risk-taking work of rare, imaginative power. Should I expect something of the class of Deep Step'? The Waste land, Briggflatts, the Anathemata?
What could “risk taking” and “rare imaginative power” possibly mean without some kind of context. And why is "risk taking" admirable? Drug addicts take risks.

As for the narrative drive of the novel with the perfect pitch of true poetry. With no information about the plot or the style of narrative which novel? Ulysses? Murder on the Orient Express? How is "the novel" anymore a meaningful category than "a novel in verse"? What could narrative "drive" or "sweep" mean? War and Peace on Benzedrine?

As for the perfect pitch of true poetry …..answers on a post card please…why is it considered meaningful to use the phrase “true poetry’ on the back of a decent writer's work? it sounds like something one of my grade eights might write about her favourite bit of poetry in Dolly magazine or one of the "comments" posted on Authorsden.com.

So let us assume that the publisher actually wants people to buy the book. The question then is why do they present it in such a way? It may well be the most exciting thing to be published in Australia since The Monkey hit the stands but how would you know from this information?

The quotations below are the three in question. The rest of the flier simply has a paragraph about the author. And if my grumbling makes you curious go buy the book. (-:

The Sunlit Zone is a moving elegy of love and loss, admirable for its
narrative sweep and the family dynamic that drives it. A risk-taking work of
rare, imaginative power.
The Sunlit Zone combines the narrative drive of the novel with the perfect
pitch of true poetry. A darkly futuristic vision shot through with bolts of
light. Brilliant, poignant, disconcerting.
Adrian Hyland, author of Kinglake 350 and Diamond Dove

This novel in verse, at once magical and irresistible, draws us into a vivid
future. In Lisa Jacobson’s telling, the Australian fascination with salt water
and sea change is made over anew. Romance holds hands with science and
takes to the ocean.
Chris Wallace-Crabbe, author of The Domestic Sublime and By Title

Bunting's Persia, edited by Don Share

Bunting's Persia: Translations by Basil Bunting, Edited by Don Share. Flood Editions 2012.


Despite the Blurb's claim that Bunting is widely regarded was one of the most Important British poets of the twentieth century, his reputation still seems a closely guarded secret. Despite the acclaim of critics like Hugh Kenner and Donald Davie, almost thirty years after the man's death there is still no scholarly Collected (the Forthcoming Faber edition is endlessly forthcoming), no decent biography [ 2013 update:  Burton's 'A Strong Song Tows Us' (2013) at least remedies the problem of a decent biography] This , no edited correspondence and full length critical works are few and far between. Bunting was a great poet, the blurb's adjective is unnecessary. I'll take his collected over Eliot's, but unless you have patience, a fair bit of disposable income and access to a good online second hand book search, you're not going to be reading a great deal about him and his work, even in your University library.

So those of us with Bunting Fixations owe people like Don Share and Richard Swigg a debt that should have some kind of adjective in front of it conveying its enormity. I can’t think of one that’s adequate so the noun goes naked. Without their work and enthusiasm there would be little to feed our own.

This book collects Bunting's translations from the Persian, and contains a much needed Glossary and Notes on the Poets. The introduction succinctly gathers what, to a small group of readers, might be the well known story of Bunting's Persia but to those who don't it provides the essential information distilled in one place, where it should be, introducing the poems.

While Bunting was dismissive of criticism and critics, I suspect he would have appreciated the effort that’s gone into making these poems available. Sharp study and long toil were Bunting virtues. The book contains poems that were not included in the Collected, though hints of their existence abound and Don Share deserves more than just the appropriate crate of wine for his efforts in tracking these down.

What I was hoping to find in this book is here: the translation of Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh” which he began and then abandoned. The section published as an ‘uncollected overdraft” called ‘From Faridun’s Sons’ made me read the ‘Shahnameh’ in Dick Davis’ translation. (I am not Bunting, I did not decide I had to learn Persian.) The story of Buntings attempts to translate the whole poem is told by Makin in “The Shaping of Bunting’s verse”, as is Pound’s disparagement of the results and their ensuing argument about poetry. When time allows I want to compare Bunting’s verse with Davis’s prose translation; what gets lost , what is gained by telling the story in verse? And what does it say about that argument Bunting had with Pound about poetry in general.

The book raises two obvious questions: the first is the quality of the poems: first as poems in English and then as translations.
There are few people capable of assessing the latter. Most discussions of Bunting will sooner or later address his approach to translation. One gets the feeling that most English critics feel more at home discussing his treatment of Horace. Latin was, until recently, the common currency of the educated. However there are essays by Persian specialists in both "Man and Poet" and "The Star you Steer By" which are complimentary. In the first, five of Bunting’s translations are assessed almost line by line against their originals, in the second there is a detailed discussion of his translations of Hafiz. The conclusion, that anyone reading Bunting’s translations would go away thinking Hafiz was a poet but Hafiz might not recognise his own poems, needs to be read against Dick Davis’ article “On not translating Hafez[sic]”.

Bunting’s versions proffer one possible way of dealing with the problems that stopped Davis. The latter is quoted on the back of the book, praising the translations.

To answer the question about their standing as poems in English might require the context of that argument with Pound.

The other question, which I'm looking forward to this book illuminating, is what was "Bunting's [version of] Persia." but I suspect that has to be answered by putting these poems back into the context of the rest of his work. The Persian interest carries through from ‘The Spoils’ to “Briggflatts”, where in that most localised of British poems, a Persian story doesn’t seem out of place.

In case you’re intrigued:
Parvin Loloi and Glyn Pursglove 'The Worse for Drink Again': Basil Bunting’s Translations of Hafiz in “The Star you Steer By” and Basil Bunting’s Persian Overdrafts: A commentary in “Basil Bunting Man and Poet”

On Not Translating Hafez by Dick Davis New England Review (1990-)
Vol. 25, No. 1/2, Translation: Double Issue (Winter - Spring, 2004), pp. 310-318 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40244407

Good news

Apparently Bunting's Persia is in the post. Also, my next collection of poems will be published in Australia sometime late this year (2012).
At the moment the first is more exciting.

Books. Banning them and promoting them.

Two conflicting views of reading:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/9140869/Dantes-Divine-Comedy-offensive-and-should-be-banned.html

The classic work should be removed from school curricula, according to Gherush 92, a human rights organisation which acts as a consultant to UN bodies on racism and discrimination.
Dante's epic is "offensive and discriminatory" and has no place in a modern classroom, said Valentina Sereni, the group's president.

I almost admire the resounding illogic:

We do not advocate censorship or the burning of books, but we would like it acknowledged, clearly and unambiguously, that in the Divine Comedy there is racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic content. Art cannot be above criticism," Miss Sereni said.
Schoolchildren and university students who studied the work lacked "the filters" to appreciate its historical context and were being fed a poisonous diet of anti-Semitism and racism, the group said.
It called for the Divine Comedy to be removed from schools and universities or at least have its more offensive sections fully explained.

What is calling for the DC to be removed from schools if not advocate [ing] censorship

And what a sad reflection on the Italian educational system if their university students are not capable of appreciating the Divine Comedy is a historical poem not a contemporary piece of reportage?

The real question is why does nonsense like this get publicity? Is anyone really surprised that a Medieval Catholic thought Islam was a heresy, and homosexuality wrong? And does anyone seriously think that reading Dante is going to convert students to his theology?

When we have removed the last book that might offend someone, what will we read? What book is so pure that it will escape all the groups like this? What is the point of reading only what you supposed to agree with? How is that any kind of freedom?
And how trivial this seems in the face of real racism and its ugly institutionalisation in so many cultures. How easy it is to get publicity by attacking a famous book. Does it raise awareness about racism? Not if the comments at the end of the telegraph article are anything to go by.

On the other hand. over at Jeantette Winterson's site (don't visit if you're easily offended by someone with passionately held convictions. The point is you don't need to agree, but if you disagree you owe it to yourself to think through the grounds of your disagreement.)

Winterson should be declared some kind of spiky international treasure. I've heard her talk about the value of literature but her article on the Reader Organisation http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/journalism_01/journalism_01_item.asp?journalism_01ID=264&journalism_01_Category=The%20Times

contains this:

We were reading Othello out loud with a group who had never read or seen a Shakespeare play. After a few weeks a woman said ‘ I’ll read Iago this week. I know that bastard. I was married to him.’
Jane’s view is that while we are waking up to healthy eating, we imagine that a healthy mind will just happen on its own. ‘Schools give their pupils absolute rubbish to read because they say some piece of pulp is more relevant to the kids’ lives. Can you imagine someone saying ‘Don’t bother with fruit and veg – fast food is more your style.’

In fact that is exactly what the 2008 National Year of Reading final report did say…’is Mills and Boon to be encouraged or is Shakespeare always better?’ P36
Jane Davies knows that Shakespeare is always better. She was brought up in a pub and found literature the hard way. She’s made herself into the person she wishes she’d met when she was growing up. ‘Richness changes the brain… one sentence is not the same as another. We need complexity. The brain grows on what feeds it.’

I know which attitude to reading I'd hang my hat on. The brain grows on what feeds it. Starve it in the name of "not censorship" and based on twenty five years of teaching I guarantee that you will breed the kind of docile stupidity where racism feeds and breeds.

Slán

About ten to four on Saturday
he’d rise to leave, whistling his way
towards the bus stop, cane tapping time
as he rounded the corner, fading.
The ritual involved two silver coins
“for the kids”, left on the mantelpiece,
always like a novel afterthought.

His tidy reticence sometimes unbuttoned
in the smokers fug of family gatherings
venturing out on streams of quiet humour
and gentle verbal lunacy, the way his brothers
had tiptoed in the edges of the sea
before diving under breaking waves.
Masters of digression who defied irrelevance.

Courteous, solid, invisibly familiar.
“Old Men with perfect manners”
Survivors of gaslight, whose father drove
a horse drawn cart. On hand when needed
to help with the necessary, without asking
for praise or credit when the debt was called.
After such a life what memories?
Coming down the steps at Connelly station
The smell and then the noise of Dublin.
He pauses, shakes his head: It was great
the big city, (laughing) anything was big
after Bettystown.

Box Brownie photos
in an old shoe box? The cars date passing decades
as the trousers, hats and hairstyles
move towards the time for his departure.
But this is so untidy. And how he would have hated that.

Peter Brooks' The Enigma of Identity

In Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994) Peter Brooks wrote of “..that desired place where literature and life converge, and where literary criticism becomes the discourse of something anthropologically important-where it teaches us something about the nature of human fiction making, of both the banal everyday kind and the artistic sort” .

It seems like a strikingly old fashioned idea if you’ve been wading through “modern” ‘theoretical’ versions of literary criticism. The idea that literature has something to say about human anything seems dodgy…and yet Brooks’ latest book “The Enigma of Identity” inhabits “that desired place” and does it very convincingly.

His basic premise is that the problem of identity is in some ways the defining characteristic of modernity. On the one hand a deeply personal inward search for self; on the other a self viewed from the outside “as merely the point of intersection of impoverished data”. Identity vs identification, with what Brooks calls The Identity Paradigm as crucially important throughout modern Culture.

Although the book reaches no fixed conclusion other than that, it explores the contours of that paradigm. Brooks writes in a relaxed informal style, which again feels almost old fashioned. A writer with ideas he wants to share. How quaint. Nor do you have to agree with everything he says, or accept everything he claims, but at least in this book, you’re going to understand his argument well enough to feel confident of negotiating your way through it.

Because his basic premise is that identity is something that is created in narration, it is logical that he looks at literary examples. The evidence he uses and the examples he discusses are drawn from fiction, autobiography, law and psychoanalysis. His main sources are Rousseau, Proust and Freud, though along the way he uses Stendhal, Balzac, Conan-Doyle Joyce, Yeats and others. The depth of his critical engagement with Freud’s work provides a ground for the discussion.

But in an odd way, Brooks' treatment invites or suggests a different reading of Freud. Although I suspect he might not agree, it challenges the status of Psychoanalysis as a privileged, non-literary discourse and reinserts Freud and his writing and thinking into what might loosely be described as the humanist tradition. Privilege revoked, Freud becomes another writer, but a far more fascinating provocative writer.

What makes the book so entertaining is its range. Along the way one picks up fascinating bits of information: fingerprinting has been challenged as a reliable source of identification in American courts: narrative theory is inexorably creeping into legal discussions of evidence.

The book is thought provoking and entertaining. And like most good literary discussions an incentive to go back and reread, or read for the first time, some of the authors he uses as examples.