Poetry and translations
David Ferry is well known and regarded in the U.S. for his translations of Gilgamesh, Horace and Virgil. In his original poetry works the poet juxtaposes translations with his own poems in an acknowledgement of influence and tradition. He is supposed to have written with intended elegance, clarity, an avoidance of frills – the Horatian virtues. He has written critically about Wordsworth and always intends to communicate with readers, approaching both translation and original work with a wise passivity, even humility, in pursuit of “the heartbeat easy governance / Of long continued metrical discipline” (‘A Thank-You Note’). This selection draws from his whole oeuvre, including ‘Poem’ (1960) which shows a young poet not wanting to howl or essay a barbaric yawp, but rather stiffly confined to New Formalist and Classical models, to inversion and Romantic lexis.
It was twenty three years before Ferry published his own poems again. ‘In the Garden’ suggests how elegance had now fused with vitality, formal skill with vivid responses to reality. The narrator sits reading Edward Thomas, engaged in “ill-informed staring” and observation nudges the poem forward: “The green of these leaves is almost an absence of green, / And the stalks look like rays of light under water”. Later Ferry poems meander, seem to have little intent on the reader, but brim with details, move like music. He understands the more we attend, whether to language or world, the more we discover we have missed. In ‘That Evening at Dinner’, one of the guests struggles with her “graceless leg, / The thick stocking, the leg brace”. Yet the poem ends by gazing at books on shelves: “Line after line, all of them evenly spaced, / And spaces between the words. You could fall through the spaces.” Here Ferry interpolates lines from Samuel Johnson on “chasms infinitely deep” that lie beneath the surface of things. It is not merely that, as the writer of ‘Old Man’ and ‘The Glory’ must have felt, we do not know these things, but that we do not have the “faculties” to know them.
Ferry alludes to this “something”, elusive partly as the result of the ambivalent gifts of time. ‘Down by the River’ describes a scene's “participial rhythm, // Flowing, enjoying, taking its own sweet time”. The shifting liquidity of water evokes the ineffable, Ferry's real subject. ‘Lake Water’ declares “The plane of the water is like a page on which / Phrases and even sentences are written”. Yet as the poet tries to compose, “The surface of the page is like lake water” and later all is “erased with the changing of the breeze”. These poems are unstable, modern, facing up to the limits of the faulty equipment we are given to understand the world. ‘The Intention of Things’ ponders the idea that “death lives in the intention of things / To have a meaning”.
Ferry's collection, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, won the 2012 National Book Award.
In 2017 his translation of Virgil's Aeneid, published at the age of 93, was reviewed by the academic and poet April Bernard in the New York Review of Books. She considered that, "he has some sort of uncanny connection to the great poet [i.e. Virgil ]", and suggested his translation was superior to those of John Dryden, Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles, because of its combination of vivid precision, metrical force, and cumulative effect. Writing in the TLS, classicist Richard Jenkyns called Ferry's Aeneid "the best modern version...both for its loyalty to the original and for its naturalness in itself."
