From: fehr@ms.uky.edu (Jeff Davis)
Subject: _Thasos and Ohio_
Keywords: Guy Davenport, North Point Press
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 20:17:56 GMT
Organization: University Of Kentucky, Dept. of Math Sciences

I've written about Guy Davenport's stories and essays before, but with
the folding of his longtime publisher, North Point Press, some of
his books have hit the remainder shelf, including his book of collected
poems _Thasos and Ohio_.

The centerpiece of this amazing book are long sections saved from his
earlier collection _Flowers and Leaves_. This is a lyric of the
sort foretold by "Mauberly" -- almost a novel. Pound's methods and
tunes show-up throughout and good chunks of the raw matter seem
to have arrived here via _Cantos_. Some may dismiss this or find
it irritating or merely derivative. You can't please everyone,
but to me it's like the Dumas, pere et fils, had tried their hand
at modernist poetry. A few quotations to show what I mean:

    O say can you see by the dawn's early
    Light peeled birch and folded brier
    And western distance in September blue?
    Either comedy or incomparable love
    Holds our question posed by magic eyes
    In a hung mist and red maple of the mind,
    Imagination's country and blizzard of gold
    And chill Housatonic and the church
    In the wild wood...

    (p. 90)

The long limber lines and permuted quotations are from Charles Ives as
much as from anywhere. I don't have a very good ear but it does sound
a little like "Three Places in New England" to me, and Ives does turn
up later in the poem (37 stanzas of 11 lines each!) in the flesh.
Here are a couple more shorter chunks

     Beyond the virgin blossom, motherleaf, amber berry,
     Leaf transmutes to flame, October Chocura
     in the land of maple, burning rampart in mist

     (p. 100)

                and

      Scrub oak and shale of Carbon County
      Or Mytilene in spring, folded like the lighted dove,
      Light hovers where fire encounters fire,
      Intelligence facing beauty like a comet on a throne


      (p. 101)


Davenport also excels, I think, at translation. Primarily from the
Greek, but he has also tried his hand turning Rilke into American.
Here's are the most famous lines of Sappho done up "normal."

          The moon has set, and the Pleides.
          It is the middle of the night.
          Hour follows hour. I lie alone.

I have to admit to having missed the overtones of this. Previous 
translations of the poem are all pretty much a piece: it looks and 
feels like a haiku. Davenport tosses aside the trot-like reverence 
and winds up with this:

          The moon has gone
          To her Endymion,
          The Pleides
          Their seven lovers please.

          Since Esperos glistened
          And the moon rose red,
          I have listened
          Alone in my bed.

          (p. 39)

I remember once going to his office to talk about the Duino Elegies
with my usual half-baked understanding. I had read the "knowing brutes"
which show up in the standard translation to be something akin to
the Haldemans and Ehrlichmans of the day. Davenport didn't laugh -- as
I imagine some of the more "knowing" of you doing -- and mildly 
criticized the translation for bringing overtones into the work. Here's 
the problematic passage as worked up by Davenport:

           An angel is a fearful thing.
           I keep my loud call in my throat
           and stop the deep dark of my grief.
           Is there any to turn to then?
           Neither angel nor brother, no,
           and all the animals are wise
           to our bewildered stumbling
           in the dark of our signs and myths.
           What do we have? The hillslope tree...

           (p. 58)

In another book (_The Jules Verne Steam Balloon_) which I'd love to
have SciFi readers assay, he turns in a prose rendering of "Archaic
Torso of Apollo" with this conclusion:

--
             Otherwise this stone would stand senseless under the polished
slope of its shoulders, without its wild balance, and would not be as rich
with light as the sky with stars. The world sees you too. You must change
your life.
            (p.115)
--

Gone is the awkward "For there is no place that does not see you" which
might be hunky-dory in German but leaves you (left me) a little dazed
under the indirection of its negatives. I like the "breaking out of
its contours like a star" better than the more prosaic rendering by
Davenport here, but the slippery connections between images which
clog the Norton translation are handled with a directness which
(for me) is welcome. 

Anyway, this isn't much of a review. With North Point Press gone and
the fate of its catalog uncertain, I don't know how you could find
a copy of the book. Poetry has such a tiny shelf life that I just
thought I'd pass along a recommendation like a note in a bottle.
If I hear of any house picking up North Point's catalog, I'll post it.
-- 
Jeff Davis <davis@keats.ca.uky.edu> Repeat after me:
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