Found in Translation

David Ferry can translate poetry from more languages than most of us could ever hope to learn, and his versatility is only surpassed by his virtuosity. Ferry delivered a delightful poetry reading last Friday night at the Sackler Art Museum that featured selections from his new translation of The Epistles of Horace (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Reading both from the new translation and from works previously published, Ferry demonstrated to everyone present why he has long been regarded as one of the best translators of poetry into English.

The Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English Emeritus at Wellesley College, Ferry is an esteemed scholar and poet. Critics have often noted his ability to bring the poetry he is translating—whether an ode of Horace, an eclogue of Virgil or a passage from Gilgamesh—into remarkably fresh and immediate English idiom.

And Ferry certainly does not shy away from some of antiquity’s most challenging verse to translate. Horace’s odes are a case in point. Ferry performed several in his reading; they take full advantage of the great freedom of word order that Latin’s inflectional syntax allows, and form is often inextricably linked to meaning. Nietszche noted that the arrangements of words in the odes resemble the tesserae of a mosaic—a poetic translator’s nightmare!

Somehow, though, both in his translations of the Odes and other work, Ferry manages to convey the poetic gist of the original. Robert Frost famously noted, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” But, as Ferry makes so clear, Frost was only half correct, for poetry functions on two levels. The first is its purely linguistic pleasures—poetry is distillation of language creation, and all of its linguistic uniqueness is lost when it is translated. To whatever extent a poetic translation is linguistically pleasing, it is entirely due to the work of the translator, not the original poet. At the same time, poetry is a distillation of consciousness; most poems also have some sort of message or meaning they are trying to convey. It is much more the translator’s duty to preserve the integrity of this message than to re-imagine it, and many of the translations Ferry read attested to his remarkable success in this regard. One of the odes of Horace Ferry performed, for example, was a lament addressed to Horace’s friend and fellow poet Virgil over the death of their friend, the respected scholar Quintilian. In Latin, the poem has Horace’s characteristic untranslatable syntactic gymnastics; but it is also a gripping dialectic on the nature of loss and mourning. Ferry’s reading preserved the intense emotional experience of the poet, even as Horace’s linguistic virtuosity was transformed by Ferry’s vastly different, more conversational diction.

In addition to selections from the Odes and the Epistles, Ferry also read a passage from his translation of the Sumerian epic Gilgamesh, which tells of a trip to the underworld reminiscent of the Western epic traditions. There was also a special treat for Vergilians in the audience as Ferry read a passage from his yet to be completed and published translation of the Georgics. Ferry premised this selection with the humorous remark that Virgil must have read Paradise Lost, since the Georgics as he reads them constitute in some respects a work about men’s struggling through life by the sweat of their brow, “after the fall.”

Nor did Ferry limit himself to performing only works in translation (though they did form the bulk of the performance). He also read a number of lyrics from his own original poetic oeuvre, including a particularly striking one entitled “The Proselyte,” and a new and deeply moving piece about the death of a former mentor. Ferry did not divide his performance into a translation section and an original works section, but rather switched back and forth. In so doing, Ferry allowed for a better appreciation of the differences and fundamental similarities between the various genres of poems he performed. The last two lines of verse Ferry read (from a Babylonian poem, “Prayer to the Gods of the Night”) were: “Establish the truth in the ritual omen, / In the offered lamb establish the truth.” And indeed, these words, in their haunting beauty and characteristic poignance, marked a fitting close to the evening.