Princeton Classics don funks Ferry

Were you there, in your in-box
yesterday afternoon, as the
weekend Book Review from The
Times dropped in for tea? It
was a convenience not to be at
a window when the hyper-link
opened upon a classic monkish
defenestration, of David Ferry's
radiant Aeneid. It brought to 
mind the Great Purges of the
1930s, or Lawrence Stone's be-
ing "smote, hip and thigh," in
the English Historical Review
by Trevor-Roper, heretofore a
benchmark of defrocking inde-
cency in the guise of punctilio.

That this thrilling "trumpet
blast," not to be more Puritan-
ical in its appreciation than 
it is in conception, should 
have emerged from the Classics 
department at one's own alma 
mater, is proof of the pres-
tige of the underlying text,
albeit an irresistible incite-
ment to expose a critic's am-
bition. Who can doubt, that
Princeton's Professor Fagles,
himself an auto-didact in
the language under discussion,
is rolling in his grave, over
the allegations steeping from 
a putrefaction of pettiness,
a self-contradictory brew of 
academic bile:

The book is justified only by
the curse of trendy topicality.
Zounds, it contains no glossary!
It contains no essay on the
literary tradition, no refer-
ence to its historical setting.
It is not a term paper! Worse
than that, it isn't a raw leap
of re-imagining, in the unlic-
ensed vein of Logue and Pound!
It's no romp of heroic couplets
from 17th Century English,
either! I even counted errors!
How dare his publisher fail
this innocent, when already he 
is tainted by enviable esteem
in my profession, and distin-
guished by more modesty, po-
etry, and empathy than I?

We recall this critic's seat

as a setting for learning to

play fair. His review of the

new Aeneid overlooks how en-

tire swaths of the text have

been ignored in the literary

tradition of its translation,

and quite routinely recomposed

in the best of it. His silence

on these realities mirrors a

shocking omission of "flaws"

in everything he praises in

this review. This behavior is

beneath the earnestness of un-

dergraduates, and stains the

place they learn to love it.

Denis Feeney

Review of David Ferry's

  translation of The Aeneid

The New York Times

December 5, 2017

Suppose it were Friday cxliii: If you do not come this day

               Morning and the snow might fall forever.
               I keep busy. I watch the yellow dogs
               chase creeping cars filled with Indians
               on their way to the tribal office.
               Grateful trees tickle the busy underside
               of our snow-fat sky. My mind is right,
               I think, and you will come today
               for sure, this day when the snow falls.

               From my window, I see bundled Doris Horseman,
               black in the blowing snow, her raving son,
               Horace, too busy counting flakes to hide his face.
               He doesn't know. He kicks my dog        
               and glares at me, too dumb to thank the men
               who keep him on relief and his mama drunk.

               My radio reminds me that Hawaii calls

               every afternoon at two. Moose Jaw is overcast,

               twelve below and blowing. Some people . . .

               Listen: if you do not come this day, today

               of all days, there is another time

               when breeze is tropic and riffs the green sap

               forever up these crooked cottonwoods. Sometimes,

               you know, the snow never falls forever.

We marvel now, to be shacked up

with a Party devoted to humili-

ation as the destiny of human-

ity - or, at least that portion

under its grasping governance:

marginalized as vulgar, in-

effectual, superstitious, cap-

tious, and cruel in the eyes

of the world, and subordinate

to exploitive layers of incor-

porated priests, mediating be-

tween ourselves and authority.

They set their face against

time, and anything that endures.

It is remarkable, David Ferry

wrote in his preface to Virgil's

Georgics, how the triumphs and

sufferings of the creatures other

than man are fully meaningful 

and substantiated in themselves;

they're never merely background

for, not merely metaphors for, 

the story of men. The dignity of

what they are is never exploited

as pathetic fallacy; there is no

condescension toward those others

who share our fallen world with us.

In the Classics we situate our

endeavors in a context of vastly

less illusion than our Parties

condition us to crave, but this

conduit is not content, it is

method: the eyesight of poetry.

This is why, after any reflection

in the world of Virgil, one turns

seamlessly effortlessly to the

poetry of the American, James Welch.

In this wonderful week, when an Am-

erican President stripped protec-

tions of preservation from a great

natural monument, and hurled the

ancient peoples of Palestine into

a vastly more volatile conflict

than international accords have

ever condoned, it is apposite to

see the trees, the dogs, the snow

invoked, not as background for re-

volting violations of promises. As 

very real sharers of our condition.

James Welch

Riding the Earthboy 40

  Going to Remake This World

op. cit.

Penguin, 2004©

i  Edward Dimsdale

   1999

Some kind of kinship: the Virgilian prefaces of David Ferry

             I will be gone from here and sing my songs

             In the forest wilderness where the wild beasts are,
             And carve in letters on the little trees
             The story of my love, and as the trees
             Will grow the letters too will grow, to cry
             In a louder voice of my love.

A friend of mine, living in Brooklyn

and awaiting at any minute the birth

of his first child, wrote to me of a 

scheme to recite from The Aeneid dur-

ing the interrupted nights he expects

from the nursery. Widely and learnedly

traveled as he and his wife are, it

seemed to me that some of the harbors

in that poem might be deferred for a

child's later contemplation, but that

the same poet could serve in the pas-

toral mode of his earlier writings.

I sense that it is next to impossible

to discuss the positively immortal

beauty of Virgil's poetry in our in-

teresting culture, without sounding 

a little arch. But this is not true

of everyone, and it is probably least

true of one man, who could say this,

in a preface to The Aeneid from one 

of the finest houses in publishing:

I love the way that opening line in

the Latin ends with "almam" . .

Aurora interea miseris mortalibus almam

Aurora rose, spreading her pitying light

In Fagles, this is "the light that gives

men life." In Ruden, it is similar, "nur-

turing." In Fitzgerald, it is "kindly."

Sadly, every single one of these associa-

tions is not what Virgil had in mind at

this moment of spectacular mourning. Yet

each of these translations is commendable

for its industry, learning, and modesty.

I live with these exemplary translations

in grateful companionship, but this poet

has not shaken the soul of our "living"

language, to be forsaken to immortality.

One thinks of a new child and her father in

the nursery late at night, as the least neg-

eligible of all respondents in communication.

The corresponding burden, although light,

is urgent, as heard in Rossetti's carol.

If I were a wise man, I would do my part.

But there is wisdom, and there is more. 

In this preface, and in the two he wrote

for Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics, David

Ferry has quietly promulgated a manifesto

on translation which every reader will wel-

come in many ways - on meter, on vocabulary,

on literary structure. The problem, more to

be relished than ignored, is how arduous

the choices are, how infinitely demanding

of the inherent gifts of poetry, itself,

in both voices in translation's dialogue:

The effort is to achieve a representation, 

in the lines as they move forward, line 

by line, telling the tale, some kind of

kinship not only to the sense of the Lat-

in but also to the expressive complexit-

its of implicated discernment and emotion

in the lines. 

In so many ways, the poetry of Virgil

projects that protection and libera-

tion through form which bear the

least dissonance with the greatest

love. I cite David Ferry's translation

of these lines from Gallus' song in the

Tenth Eclogue, as some evidence for the

ardor living in the Latin for the Eng-

lish listener, to respond to disbelief 

that it can be done. This is no tour de

force, merely of linguistics. It is con-

duct of the highest moral liveliness,

by which, I should think, we are all

awakened. And so one goes on, singing,

in the very weather of one's own time -

          But I think it is not out of order for me to say

          that "completing" this translation of the work of

          such a great poet means a great deal to me person-

          ally, since I have previously translated his Ec-

          logues and his Georgics, and I am in love with his

          voice as I hear it in all these poems,

          telling how it is with all created beings, the very

          leaves on the trees, the very rooted plants, the

          beasts in the fields, the shepherds trying to keep

          their world together with song replying to song re-

          plying to song,

          the bees in their vulnerable hives, doing their

          work, the soldiers doing their work of killing and

          dying, the falling cities, and the kings and fathers,

          and their sons, and Dido, and Palinurus, and Deipho-

          bus, and Mezentius the disrespecter of gods, and the

          mortal son of Venus, the creature Aeneas, carrying

          his household gods to build a city, heroic and vul-

          nerable, himself subject to monstrous rage, himself

          not always unconfused. All of them, all of us, crea-

          tures, created beings, heroic and vulnerable, and

          Virgil's voice telling it as it is, in his truth-

          telling pitying voice.

David Ferry

The Eclogues of Virgil

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999©

The Georgics of Virgil

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005©

Virgil

  The Aeneid

University of Chicago Press, 2017©

Photography, here

Actaeon

                 Yes, happiness, believe it or not,

                 that most mysterious because most

                 evanescent of conditions.. The hap-

                 piness I speak of has nothing to do

                 with nature's fang and claw, but is

                 exclusive to humankind, a by-product

                 of evolution, a consolation prize for

                 us poor winded runners in the human

                 race. It is a force whose action is

                 so delicate and so fleeting we hard-

                 ly feel it operating in us before it

                 has become a thing of the past. Yet

                 it burns in us, and we burn in it,

                 unconsumed. I cannot be now as I was

                 then - I may recall but not experi-

                 ence again the bliss of those days -

                 yet I must not be led by embarrass-

                 ment and sorrow and pain to deny what

                 I felt then, no matter how shaming or

                 deluded it may seem to me now. I held

                 her to me, this suddenly familiar

                 stranger, and felt her heart beating

                 and listened to the rustle of her

                 breathing and thought I had come at

                 last to my true place, the place

                 where, still and at the same time

                 profoundly stirred, feverish yet 

                 preternaturally calm, I would at last
                 be who I was.

                 
                Here she is, the moving mirror in
                which I surprised myself, poor gog-
                gle-eyed Actaeon, my traitorous
                hounds already sniffing suspiciously
                at my heels.. She is the goddess of
                movement and transformations. And I,
                I am bowed down before her, abject
                and entranced, my forehead pressed 
                to the cold stone of the temple floor.



















John Banville
Athena
  A Novel
Alfred A. Knopf, 1995©