Ferry’s “That Evening at Dinner,” surely one of the great dinner-party poems in English, ends-or almost does-with a long quotation from Dr. “Originality,” for a poet like Ferry, is impossible where, exactly, are our origins? Language precedes us, literature precedes us, our own emotions and experiences, insofar as literature delivers them, precede us. His books are full of marvellous translations, and many of his best poems crest at important points with quotations-long, verbatim quotations-from great authors. Ferry’s translation work suggests the massive haystack within which any one poet finds the needle of his original voice. Twenty-three years passed between the publication of his first book, “On the Way to the Island,” and his second, “Strangers.” He shares with Elizabeth Bishop a humility that is not a quirk of temperament so much as an acknowledgment of the cosmos, which is, after all, much bigger than any poet’s biggest, most barbaric yawp. How can anyone achieve such majesty when talking about bees and husbandry? He is now at work on the Aeneid, actuarial tables be damned.īecause Ferry has translated the works of others so well and so prolifically, and because he works comparatively slowly, his original poems risk being overlooked. (Odes, I.26)įerry’s translations of Virgil are astonishing, and the best of them are Virgil’s Georgics, “the best poem by the best poet,” in Dryden’s estimation. I can remember reading these lines of Horace-of Ferry’s Horace-with amazement at their simple, unprepossessing ecstasy:īecause the muses favor me and love me, As far as I’m concerned let the wild winds carry All sadness and trepidation far away. How strange to have the American vernacular put back in our mouths by this roundabout method.
No American poet has translated better the greatest classical authors Ferry’s translations of Horace are among the predominant texts in contemporary American poetry, teaching American poets (I’m one of them) the Horatian tones-the modesty, civility, and gossip the swift, fly-by urbanity-that went missing from much of the best American poetry of the seventies and eighties. He carries us to places we can’t possibly visit, from the Mesopotamia of Gilgamesh to Horace and Virgil’s Rome. Poetry carries us to odd places, almost like the prank, allegedly popular a few years ago, in which somebody steals your garden gnome and sends you postcards of it from points spanning the globe-the Blarney Stone, the Pont-Neuf.ĭavid Ferry, who, at the age of eighty-eight, has just won the National Book Award for poetry, is a special kind of thief. One reason people’s aversion to poetry sometimes passes over into strong annoyance, or even resentment, is that poems steal our very language out from under us and return it malformed, misshapen, hardly recognizable. The lyre was invented, the Greeks tell us, by Hermes, who then gave the instrument to Apollo as compensation for stealing cattle.
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