Love in Another Language: Collected Poems and Selected Translations

By Dick Davis

In Love in Another Language Dick Davis is shown to be the outstanding formal poet of his generation, a master of rhyme and metre, a poet worthy of keeping company with the best lyric writers in our tradition. His Collected Poems draws on eight previous publications and includes a section of new work. Davis has also established himself as 'the leading translator of Persian literature in our time' (Washington Post) and this volume includes a selection of his celebrated translations. Davis's original poems evoke the experiences of travel and of living in a culture in which one is a stranger, where empathy is at once difficult and necessary. His translations can be read as a record of his attempts at such empathy, in poetic terms, across centuries and cultures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Dec 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781784105082

Dick Davis

Dick Davis was born in Portsmouth, England. He is a professor of Persian at Ohio State University. He has published translations of prose from Italian and poetry and prose from Persian, and six books of his own poetry. His most recent collection, Belonging, was chosen by The Economist as a “Book of the Year” for 2002.

Book preview

Dick Davis

Love in Another Language

COLLECTED POEMS AND SELECTED TRANSLATION

for Afkham

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prefatory Note

IN THE DISTANCE (1975)

The Diver

The Shore

Touring a Past

A Mycenaean Brooch

Scavenging After a Battle

Among Ruins

Byzantine Coin

The Expulsion from Eden

Diana and Actaeon

The Virgin Mary

St George and the Villagers

Childhood

Youth of Telemachus

Families

Reason in his Kingdom

Old Man Seated Before a Landscape

Service

Desire

Love in Another Language

Don Giovanni at the Opera

Irony and Love

The Epic Scholar

North-West Passage

Jesus on the Water

Ikon Angel

The Socratic Traveller

Anchorite

The Novice

Narcissus’ Grove

Living in the World

Littoral

Reading After Opium

Buyer’s Market

Names

SEEING THE WORLD (1980)

Travelling

Desert Stop at Noon

Night on the Long-Distance Coach

The City of Orange Trees

Syncretic and Sectarian

Memories of Cochin

Me, You

Marriage as a Problem of Universals

Don Giovanni

‘Vague, vagrant lives …’

Government in Exile

Metaphor

Climbing

Dawn

Zuleikha Speaks

Simeon

St Christopher

Winter

Withernsea

A Recording of Giuseppe de Luca (1903)

False Light

Opening the Pyramid

Wittgenstein in Galway

An Entry

Philosopher and Metaphysics

Two Epigrams on Victory

Love

To Exorcize Regret

A Perfect Ending

Desire

Phaedra and Hippolytus

Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son

Rembrandt Dying

Leonardo

On a Painting by Guardi

Epitaph

Maximilian Kolbe

THE COVENANT (1984)

Fräulein X

In the Gallery

Portrait Painter

What the Mind Wants

The Jigsaw

Annunciation

Four Visitations

Baucis and Philemon

Semele

Jacob I

Jacob II

St Eustace

Getting There

‘Uxor vivamus …’

To His Wife

Travelling

A Short History of Chess

Off-Shore Current

A Letter to Omar

Exiles

Woman on a Beach

Two East Anglian Poems

With John Constable

Edward FitzGerald

The Tribe of Ben

A Photograph: Tehran, 1920s

Richard Davis

On an Etching by J. S. Cotman

Childhood of a Spy

Near Coltishall

The Ransom

Mariam Darbandi

Reading

My Daughter Sleeping

Auction – Job Lot

A Christmas Poem

Abandoned Churchyards

Hearing a Balkan Dance in England

Translating Hafez

Exile

LARES (1986)

Acedia

6 a.m. Thoughts

‘And who is good? …’

Undine

Middle East 1950s

Ibn Battuta

The Departure of the Myths

Evening

Household Gods

DEVICES AND DESIRES (1989)

Jealousy

Wisdom

With Johnson’s Lives of the Poets

Janet Lewis, Reading Her Poems

To the Muse

Magic

Making a Meal of It

The Sentimental Misanthrope

Made in Heaven

Heresy

Afkham

A KIND OF LOVE (1991)

Lady with a Theorbo

Qatran

Socrates’ Daimon

Fatherhood

‘Outside the snow…’

Three Versions of the Maker

Discipline

Learning a Language

Arghavan

Mohsen: A Gardener in California

On the Iranian Diaspora

TOUCHWOOD (1996)

To ’Eshqi

A Monorhyme for Miscegenation

Given Back, After Illness

After the Angels

Still

Your Children Growing

Comfort

Into Care

Pragmatic Therapy

Touchwood

Anthony 1946 –1966

A Photograph of Two Brothers

The Suicide

Aftershocks

May

Going Home

A Sasanian Palace

Flight

Gold

Mirak

Names

We Should Be So Lucky

Masters

Tenured in the Humanities

New Reader

Art History

Epitaph

Couples

Old Couple

Middle Age

Repentance

Desire

A Tease

A Qasideh for Edgar Bowers on his Seventieth Birthday

In Praise of Auden

Suzanne Doyle’s Poems

A Translator’s Nightmare

Late

Fireflies

BELONGING (2002)

Shadows

A Monorhyme for the Shower

Haydn and Hokusai

Night Thoughts

Iran Twenty Years Ago

To the Persian Poets

Political Asylum

In History

Góngora

A Petrarchan Sonnet

Casanova

Dido

In the Restaurant

Duchy and Shinks

West South West

Teresia Sherley

What

‘A world dies …’

‘Sweet Pleasure …’

Hibernation

No Going Back

Secrets

Out of Time

Aubade

A Se Stesso

‘Live happily’

Guides for the Soul

Games

Victorian

A Mind-Body Problem

Just a Small One, as You Insist

Desire

Farewell to the Mentors

A Bit of Paternity

Kipling’s Kim, Thirty Years On

New at It

Déjà Lu

Growing Up

Old

Small Talk

At the Reception

Checking Out While Checking In

The Business Man’s Special

Et in Arcadia Ego

Overheard in Khajuraho

Just So

A TRICK OF SUNLIGHT (2006)

‘The heart has its abandoned mines …’

Chèvrefeuille

Getting Away

Water

Happiness

Hérédia

The Man from Provins

Before Sleep

The Old Model’s Advice to the New Model

Edgar

Listening

What I Think

The Scholar as a Naughty Boy

Anglais Mort à Santa Barbara

The Sceptic

Driving

‘Do you remember those few hours we spent’

Flying Back

Three Emilys

Turgeniev and Friends

Under $6 a Bottle

‘They are not long, the days of wine and roses …’

Shopping

Chagrin

Pasts

A Visit to Grandmother’s

Can We?

Cythère

Young Scholar

Farsighted

On a Remark of Karl Kraus

‘I lay down in the darkness of my soul’

Preferences

Small Talk

Not-Waking

Imitatio

‘Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to’

Magic

Soteriological

‘Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art’

Author, Translator …

Damnation à la Mode

Finding

There

Acculturation

Spleen

The Phoenix

Dis’s Defence

William McGonagall Welcomes the Initiative for a Greater Role for Faith-Based Education

William Morris

Driving Westward

Are We Going the Same Way?

Emblems

A Mystery Novel

NEW POEMS

A Storm in the Mid-West

The Lighthouse

A Personal Sonnet

To Take Courage in Childhood

Brahms

A Winter’s Tale

The Missing Tale

Translating a Medieval Poem

Wil Mills (1969–2011)

Walking the Dog

The Fall

For my mother-in-law, during her last illness

A Dream

New Development

Darwinian

The Maple Tree

The Introduction

Wine

Admonition for the Seventh Decade

Campanilismo

Later

Keeping a Diary

Euro-trash

Paying for It

The Saving Grace

Going, going …

Reconnoitring

Leaving the Fair

To Vis

A Student Reading Vis and Ramin

Translating Hafez, or Trying To

WWHD?

Words

SELECTED TRANSLATIONS

Note on the Translations

From Farid ud-din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds

The Valley of Poverty and Nothingness

The Moths and the Flame

From Borrowed Ware: Medieval Persian Epigrams

From Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh: the Persian Book of Kings

From Fakhraddin Gorgani’s Vis and Ramin

From Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz

Poems by Hafez

Poems by Jahan Khatun

NOTES ON THE POEMS

INDEX OF TITLES

About the Author

By Dick Davis

Copyright

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Previously uncollected poems have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Hudson Review, New Criterion, The Hopkins Review, The Evansville Review.

PREFATORY NOTE

The previously published poems included here are from six collections (In the Distance, 1975; Seeing the World, 1980; The Covenant, 1984; Touchwood, 1996; Belonging, 2002; A Trick of Sunlight, 2006), two retrospective volumes of Selected Poems (Devices and Desires, 1989; A Kind of Love, 1991), and a chapbook (Lares, 1986). The poems listed under Devices and Desires and A Kind of Love were new poems, at the time, included in these two volumes otherwise selected from previous books. The section entitled New Poems is made up of poems written since the publication of A Trick of Sunlight in 2006.

Like most habitual writers of poetry who live past middle age, I tend to prefer my more recent poems to the earlier ones – readers of course often disagree with poets’ assessments of their own work – and for this reason I have omitted more poems from the earlier volumes than from the more recent ones. Although some of the earlier poems, including a number of those I’ve retained, now seem quite far from me in both their sensibility and the kinds of poems I was trying to make at the time, there is I think a discernible continuity of themes present from the earliest poems to the most recent; if I omitted all the poems to do with love, travel, the mixing of cultures, and the experience of being a stranger, this would be a very slim volume indeed.

I have been involved with Persian literature, particularly but not exclusively its medieval poetry, since I lived in Iran during the 1970s, and the closing section of this book features selections from my books of translations from medieval Persian poetry. My fascination with the great poets of medieval Iran has only deepened and broadened over the years, and I could not imagine a Collected Poems that did not include some indication of this by now essential part of my life.

DICK DAVIS

In the Distance

THE DIVER

for Michaelis Nicoletséas

The blue-cold spasm passes,

And he’s broken in.

Assailed by silence he descends

Lost suddenly

To air and sunburned friends,

And wholly underwater now

He plies his strength against

The element that

Slows all probings to their feint.

Still down, till losing

Light he drifts to the wealthy wreck

And its shade-mariners

Who flit about a fractured deck

That holds old purposes

In darkness. He hesitates, then

Wreathes his body in.

THE SHORE

He feels against his skin

Throughout the night the pulse

Of her unchanging sleep:

Delicately, within

Her grasp and warmth, he rolls

Aside to watch the deep

Thought may not sound: her face

And body are a blur

Of breathing shadow, where,

Beyond that gentle pace,

He may by love infer

The darkness of her hair,

Her covered eyes, the shape

Of hands still touching his,

Her mouth: but nothing more.

If he, by stealth or rape,

Would seize her mind he is

Held helpless at the shore –

Impatient, lost: she goes

Untraced beyond the gleams

Of intellect, control –

He waits, but never knows

What demons or what dreams

Possess her voyaging soul.

TOURING A PAST

The ruins, which are not very remarkable, are situated on an island which is almost impossible to reach …

Hachette Guide to the Middle East, p. 1003

Even from here I see

How stagnant and unused

The brackish waters lie,

As if the bank had oozed

This stream that sluggishly

Reflects the idle sky.

There is no boat to cross

From that ill-favoured shore

To where the clashing reeds

Complete the work of war

Together with the grass,

And nesting birds, and weeds.

I read that now there is

Almost no evidence –

No walls or pottery –

Of what I know were once

The walks and palaces

Love lent to you and me.

A MYCENAEAN BROOCH

… and we

Shall set our feet in peace on lesser isles.

YVOR WINTERS

Peace came back slowly, sealed

In iron, to which there

Is no answer. Wounds healed,

But silence guards Mycenae

Where I beat out useless

Bronze to fend off history.

From our last swords broken

Blades I made my wife this

Brooch, survivor’s token

Of her fathers’ armour –

Though bronze will not protect

And may endanger her.

We shall leave for Ionia:

There islands may exist,

Too small for them, or far.

SCAVENGING AFTER A BATTLE

Cold rimed on the metal,

The slam of the sea on the gravel –

Stone warriors and overturned horses,

He picks his way among corpses.

Diligently he

Severs gold, hacks the stones free

Of their rusting heraldic moulds –

Rubies; sapphires; emeralds.

Colour cupped in his hand; the sea

And the clouds cold grey.

AMONG RUINS

Rest here and fantasize the willing past

That like a lover answers to your mood:

You know her kind deceptions will not last

(And even now they only half delude).

But as nude bodies meet with stolen pride

And in their lust renounce all mental ills –

Leaving sad individual lives outside

The locked room where the animal fulfils

Himself, herself – so in this bright ruin

Sweet history shall tease and beckon you,

And as she moves seem free of ancient sin,

Half-lit, and only partially untrue.

BYZANTINE COIN

How many hands, vicissitudes,

Have worn this gold to the thin ghost

That gleams in the shopkeeper’s palm?

A millennium flickers, eludes

Us, is gone, as we bend engrossed

In blurred words and a surface charm.

THE EXPULSION FROM EDEN

The broad sword goads them and the flame

Drives onward to the gate of shame

That clangs behind them as a curse.

Cast out they pause, confused.

                                                   What was

The meaning of that naked place –

What is the vague cold world they face

Immeasurably random here?

Their slow hands link in silent fear

As to each indistinct horizon

Extend blank vistas of confusion

Where they must go, unsheltered, free,

And by acquired hostility

Wrest sustenance and weak defence

From chaos and indifference.

Distraught affection holds them close

Who have no knowledge but their loss –

They move: their unsure feet descend

To worlds they cannot comprehend.

DIANA AND ACTAEON

He strays from sun to shade

And hears his favourite hound

Cry in some distant glade

That the tired deer is bayed.

At once, almost, the sound

Cannot be placed: he peers

Distractedly around

At unfamiliar ground.

The vagueness that he hears,

The eucalyptus trails,

Chafe at his nascent fears –

This way and that he veers,

Trapped, simple flesh: details

Half-lost between the trees

Cohere, and reason fails.

The goddess stoops, unveils –

Then naked stands, at ease,

Laved by the swirling stream:

Her hair stirs on the breeze,

And as he stares he sees

Her eyes fix his. They gleam

With infinite disdain.

His dogs’ jaws snarl, but seem

Elsewhere – till through the dream

He feels the gash of pain.

THE VIRGIN MARY

All these oppressed her:

                                        light’s

Peremptory pure glare

In summer, and the weak

Pallor of winter air;

Men’s breath against her cheek,

And fruitless unshared nights.

Her strange clothes hung in mute

Annoying folds. She dreamed

Of splendour, undefined.

Naked, her body seemed

The useless withered rind

Of some prodigious fruit …

As if a distant call

Abstracted her, she bore

Her days indifferently,

And waited vaguely for

One slight contingency

That would resolve them all.

ST GEORGE AND THE VILLAGERS

for Clive Wilmer

He laughed to see his life

Thus simplified, the quest

Completed and the rife

Contingencies at rest.

The unequivocal

Entirely evil beast

Reared at his brazen call:

Now sure that at the least

His purpose was not base

Or trivial he smote

With an abandoned grace

The massive coiling throat.

The villagers, the evil

Of whose lives was never

Pure nor whole nor simple,

Watched their deliverer –

Aware that other beasts

Would come, when he had gone

To princesses and feasts

Believing he had won.

CHILDHOOD

for Robert Wells

Imperceptible, at sunrise, the slight

Breeze stirs the dreaming boy, till silently

He edges free from sleep and takes the kite,

Huge on his shoulders like